Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

by Oliver Burkeman

‘There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.’ – ANNIE DILLARD

‘The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.’ – C. S. LEWIS

‘[There is a] strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about … The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering time and space completely, and of being the singular human being that one is.’ – MARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ

‘To treat life as a pilgrimage to a future and better existence is to disown its present value.’ – W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

‘A perfectly kept house is the sign of a misspent life.’ – MARY RANDOLPH CARTER

‘The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.’ – G. W. F. HEGEL

‘In all the edifice of thought, I have found no category on which to rest my head.’ – E. M. CIORAN

‘Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.’ – SAMUEL BUTLER

‘It was said of Rabbi Simcha Bunim that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha’olam – “For my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote: V’anokhi afar v’aefer – “I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.’ – TOBA SPITZER

‘There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.’ – JORGE LUIS BORGES