Top 80 The School of Life Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness.”

— The School of Life

52. “Forgiveness The wise are comparably realistic about other people. They recognize the extraordinary pressure everyone is under to pursue their own ambitions, defend their own interests, and seek their own pleasures. It can make others appear extremely mean and purposefully evil, but this would be to overpersonalize the issue. The wise know that most hurt is not intentional but a by-product of the constant collision of blind competing egos in a world of scarce resources.”

— The School of Life

53. “Romantic love is a dangerous illusion.”

— The School of Life

54. “As a result, there’s an unexpected outcome: the good child is heading for problems in adult life, typically to do with excessive compliance, rigidity, lack of creativity and an unbearably harsh conscience that might spur on suicidal thoughts. Meanwhile, the naughty child is on the way to healthy maturity, which comprises spontaneity, resilience, a tolerance of failure and a sense of self-acceptance.”

— The School of Life

55. “The Art of a Relationship Living in a city is an art, not a science. Choosing to live in a city is choosing to enter into a relationship with it. And, like any human relationship, the relationship you have with your city is one that requires nurturing, constant practice and work.”

— The School of Life

56. “We mostly encounter the edited versions of other people. While we are continually exposed to the unedited version of ourselves. The unfair comparison means we inevitably feel much weirder than we really are.”

— The School of Life

57. “One compensating satisfaction is realising you can only say such things to someone you are actually very close to. The capacity to be horrible to your partner is a strange – but genuine – feature of love.”

— The School of Life

58. “We stand to remember that we surrendered our freedom for very sound reasons, because we realised that we had found someone who was – in the end – about as good as any decent human can ever be expected to be. We are often unhappy, of course, but that is a universal law, not a unique curse.”

— The School of Life

59. “The most necessary tool for thinking is also the simplest: the notebook. We need a notebook because we can’t contain what is important within the bandwidth of active memory. We can’t keep in view what is significant within our amnesiac, misty, temperamental consciousness. The paper has to function as a secondary memory to pool us together; it will end up knowing more of who we are than we can ourselves actively bring to mind in the moment.”

— The School of Life

60. “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

— The School of Life

61. “However initially persuasive this thesis feels, it fails to diagnose what empathy truly involves. The way properly to enter the mind of another person is not to forget about oneself entirely; rather, it is to use one’s knowledge of oneself to penetrate the consciousness of another. The best way to unearth the secrets of complete strangers is to look honestly into our own hearts.”

— The School of Life

62. “Effective thinking isn’t about ‘working hard’ in any brute or rote sense; it is about learning to spot, defend, nurture and grow our fleeting, tentative periods of insight.”

— The School of Life

63. “We may go through a succession of failed relationships that leave us confused and hurt. But these experiences don’t have to be dismissed as meaningless. The wandering and the exploration may be intimately connected to our eventual development and growth. We needed the career crisis to understand our working identities; we had to fail at love to fathom our hearts. We cannot get anywhere important in one go. We must forgive ourselves the horrors of our first drafts.”

— The School of Life

64. “In the choice between being loved and being honest, most of us choose the former. But.”

— The School of Life

65. “The road to calmer relationships therefore isn’t necessarily about removing points of contention. It’s rather about assuming that they are going to happen and that they will inevitably require quite a lot of time and thought to address.”

— The School of Life

66. “In a concerted bid never to look foolish, we don’t venture very far from our lair; and thereby – from time to time, at least – miss out on the best opportunities of our lives.”

— The School of Life

67. “They have a job that sounds unimpressive, but their interests are very broad and they might be the ideal person to go round an antiques market with.”

— The School of Life

68. “Furthermore, what fundamentally distinguishes adulthood from childhood is that the adult has access to a great many more sources of hope than the child.”

— The School of Life

69. “The moral is clear. If we seek others, we should stay at home; if we wish to alleviate loneliness, we should turn down invitations; if we want company, we would be better off communing with dead writers and poets than hunting for solace at large gatherings.”

— The School of Life

70. “The wise are realistic about social relations, in particular about how difficult it is to change people’s minds and have an effect on their lives.”

— The School of Life

71. “It makes no sense, and is a form of twisted narcissism, to imagine that our era has any kind of monopoly on idiocy and disaster.”

— The School of Life

72. “Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us.”

— The School of Life

73. “An affair is a destructive and inarticulate response to a feeling of disappointment.”

— The School of Life

74. “The central solution to all this trouble is to normalise a new and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how healthy and mature it is to be fragile and in repeated need of reassurance – and at the same time, how difficult it is to reveal one’s vulnerable dependence.”

— The School of Life

75. “It is sad enough when two people dislike each other. It is even sadder when two people fail to connect because both parties defensively but falsely guess that the other doesn’t like them – and yet, out of low self-worth, takes no risk to alter the situation. We should stop worrying quite so much whether or not people like us, and make that far more interesting and socially useful move: concentrate on showing that we like them.”

— The School of Life

76. “Hope reliably triumphs over experience. It’s always very tempting to console ourselves with an apparently very reasonable thought: the reason it didn’t work out this time was not that the expectations were too high, but that we directed them onto the wrong person. We.”

— The School of Life

77. “Why is financial inequality a problem? There are two very different answers. One kind of harm is material: not being able to get a decent house, quality health care, a proper education, and a hopeful future for one’s children. But there is also a psychological reason why inequality proves so problematic: because poverty is intricately bound up with humiliation. The.”

— The School of Life

78. “Our society is eloquent on the advantages of money; it pays desperately little attention to the advantages of bypassing certain opportunities to make it, especially in terms of the calm that might be gained.”

— The School of Life

79. “Our romantic impulses are continually renewed. We blame everything but our hopes.”

— The School of Life

80. “Choosing a person to marry is just a matter of deciding what particular kind of suffering we would like to commit ourselves to.”

— The School of Life

81. “The solution is not to encourage ever more people to become famous, but to put greater efforts into encouraging a higher level of politeness and consideration for everyone, in families and communities, in workplaces, in politics, in the media, at all income levels, especially modest ones. A healthy society will give up on the understandable but erroneous belief that fame might guarantee that truly valuable goal: the kindness of strangers.”

— The School of Life

82. “A daily period of philosophical meditation does not so much dissolve problems as create an occasion during which the mind can order and understand itself. Fears, resentments, and hopes become easier to name; we grow less scared of the contents of our own minds – and less resentful, calmer, and clearer about our direction. We start, in faltering steps, to know ourselves slightly better.”

— The School of Life

83. “We keep away from ourselves because so much of what we could discover threatens to be agony.”

— The School of Life

84. “Art can do the opposite of glamorising the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we’re forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need.”

— The School of Life

85. “We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help to return us to a viable mean.”

— The School of Life

86. “We have begun to know someone properly whenever they have started substantially to disappoint us.”

— The School of Life

87. “Great authors turn vagueness into clarity.”

— The School of Life

88. “These good narrators accept that lives can be meaningful even when they involve a lot of failure and humiliation. Mistakes are not dead ends; they are sources of information that can be exploited and put to work as guides to more effective subsequent action.”

— The School of Life

89. “Surrounded on all sides by lesser or greater varieties of coldness, we will at last know that, in the arms of one extraordinary, patient and kindly being worthy of infinite gratitude, we truly matter.”

— The School of Life