Calm Quotes

“On a grand scale, this explains why grandparents typically have a calmer approach to bringing up children than parents do. The grandparents have a more accurate grasp of how normal – and therefore less alarming – many problems are. Their calm is based on two key bits of knowledge. They know that whatever is done, one’s children will turn out very far from perfect – and therefore the intensely agitating worry that one might be making a mistake is usually a bit misplaced. But they also grasp that even when things go a bit wrong, children will generally cope well enough. Their sense of danger and their sense of hope have both been made more accurate by experience. History encourages the less panicky sides of ourselves.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Politeness does not prevent a person from feeling angry or upset or hurt. What it does is delay the expression of the feeling. Manners counteract the rush to judgement. They allow a few moments for more information to emerge, for the ire to reduce slightly before doing anything decisive. The delay built into politeness allows you time to determine the true facts. It provides space to understand the issue behind the anger. If you knew more, you might not be so irate.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“To suggest that someone requires a hug is to say something potentially, but only potentially, demeaning. It’s suggesting that they are, at least for the moment, rather like a child. They have the same kinds of emotional needs that we come to think of as essentially childlike. To need a hug is to admit that one is incapable of coping on one’s own, that one requires protection, guidance, the help of someone wiser and more capable, that one needs to have one’s troubles and anxieties reinterpreted by a more mature mind. It is to say, in shorthand, ‘I am at the moment like a child and I need someone else to be, for a while, like a parent.’ Yet even if we don’t usually like to admit it, there are in fact many times when we should be able to revert to a childlike position. There are moments of adult life when one seems petulant, scared, shy and sure that everything suddenly feels totally unfair. One’s ability to look after oneself is terribly depleted. At such times, to get ourselves back together, we need someone else to take the burden from us. We require the equivalent of what the parent does for the child. We are in need of someone to pat us on the head, to put us to bed early, tuck us in and hold us tight.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Politeness provides a way where you can back down with dignity. In nature there is only ever one reason you cede the high ground – you are acknowledging defeat. You are bowing before a superior power. But under the rules of politeness, you let the other person off not because you are a weakling, a coward or a failure, but because you value calm over chaos. Politeness makes it easier to apologise, because apologising isn’t just an act of pure submission. Politeness is founded on a major insight into human nature and a big positive thesis about what civilisation is and why we need it. It’s a view that was advanced particularly by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. Hobbes was acutely conscious that our normal, unrestrained instincts are far from being wholly nice. We may be quite inclined by nature to damage or destroy our rivals; to take advantage of those who are weaker than us; to grab more than our fair share of anything good if we can; to humiliate those who we feel are in some way alien; to revenge ourselves on anyone we feel has upset or disappointed us and to enforce our opinions and beliefs on others if we can. These are natural inclinations, Hobbes argues; therefore, we positively require a set of constraining conventions that artificially induce better ways of dealing with other people. Politeness is not mere decoration. It is directed at dealing with a major human problem: we need manners to restrain the beast inside.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Christianity opens up vital space in our imaginations by making a distinction between two kinds of poverty: what it terms voluntary poverty on the one hand and involuntary poverty on the other. We are at this point in history so deeply fixated on the idea that poverty must always be involuntary and therefore the result of a lack of talent and indigence, we can’t even imagine that it might be the result of an intelligent and skilled person’s free choice based on a rational evaluation of costs and benefits. It might sincerely be possible for someone to decide not to take the better-paid job, not to publish another book, not to seek high office – and to do so not because they had no chance, but because – having surveyed the externalities involved – they chose not to fight for them.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“And yet, when we examine matters closely, busy lives turn out to have certain strikingly high incidental costs that we are nevertheless collectively committed to ignoring. Visible success brings us up against the envy and competitiveness of strangers.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“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, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“We’ve got a model for how to do this – though it comes in a slightly unfortunate guise. Religions have often ensured that their followers would meet with the Sublime on a weekly basis, in a cathedral or church somewhere not very far from where they lived. They constructed buildings specifically designed to awe the congregation. But they didn’t just hope that people would drop by. They put a date in the diary, every week. If you lived in the Vienna suburb of Wieden, for instance, you’d go to the Karlskirche at 11.00am every Sunday and be confronted with the Sublime. This beneficial psychological service is in reality distinct from the specifically religious convictions that orchestrated it. But the decline of organised religious faith in many parts of the world has inadvertently also taken away this collective commitment to regularly reactivating our sense of the Sublime.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“The Cistercian monks built simple and harmonious buildings out of the local limestone, with plain colours and few ornaments. The plans involved regular repetitions: the doors, windows and roof vaults wouldn’t vary much, so that the eye would easily find points of reference. Everything felt solid and enduring. Our natural human frailty was to contrast with the immemorial tone of the masonry. The monks were particularly keen on cloisters: covered walkways opening onto a quiet central square around which one could take de-stressing walks even on a rainy afternoon. The abbey at Cîteaux was just one of thousands built with similar intentions over a period of hundreds of years. It’s not an accident that architecture that sets out to create a contemplative and serene atmosphere can easily get labelled ‘monastic’, though in truth there’s nothing inherently religious or Christian about the pursuit of calm. The longing for serenity is a continuing, widespread human need, although the overtly religious background to abbeys and monasteries has an unfortunate association: making calm places erroneously seem as if they were inherently connected to a belief in Jesus. We need to rediscover the search for calm as a fundamental ambition of all architecture, not least for the buildings of our own harried times.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“We largely persist in modelling our sense of what other people are like – and of what might be going on in their heads – on our experience of ourselves. We find it remarkably difficult to imagine clearly and calmly that others might not be very much like us at all. Others have different skills, different weaknesses, different motives and fears. It is as if the human brain did not evolve with the need to address this particular problem. And it may have been that for most of the time that human beings have existed it has been sufficient – for individual and group survival – to operate with a very limited interest in how people might differ from us in terms of how their minds work. In the office, other people are out of our control – and yet we need their assistance in performing delicate, complicated tasks. When we are doing things ourselves, we don’t actually give ourselves clear instructions. If”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“When we give up on teaching (and, therefore, on those we need to teach), we tend to manoeuvre around the objects of our despair. We tell them their work is OK, but silently redo it with other colleagues. We set up secret side groups. It’s meant to be a collaboration between twenty equals. But we go out and hire two external consultants. It sounds Machiavellian – but it’s merely the outcome of a very nervous personality with low faith in others and in the chances of working through problems. In their personal lives, such types might be married but seek a lover: for they have areas of disappointment and anger they have never found ways of discussing – and it seemed better to steer around the conflict and take a lover to soak up some of the disappointment.”
― The School of Life, Calm

“We may own the wealth of continents, but it has been ten years at least since we last had the chance to do nothing for a day.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“What’s not always so clear in our minds is that the process of acquiring money has a range of built-in psychological opportunity costs that we too easily ignore. We pay for our wealth with broken nights, fractious relationships, distant family ties – at times, with life itself. We should look not only at the money we have accumulated, but also at the calm that we have forfeited while doing so.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“We should spare ourselves the burden of loneliness. We are far from the only ones with this problem. Everyone is more anxious than they are inclined to tell us. Even the tycoon and the couple in love are suffering. We’ve collectively failed to admit to ourselves what we are truly like.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Although we’ve made vast scientific progress since Kant’s time, we haven’t properly explored the potential of space as a source of wisdom, as opposed to a puzzle for astrophysicists to unpick.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“In contact with certain pieces of music, our hearts – musical boxes of their own – start to follow the slower rhythms of voices and instruments; guided by the music, one’s breathing grows more even and placid. We don’t have to be persuaded of anything: the effects occur at a physical level first and they in turn influence the character of our thoughts.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“But opposed to this, we find a neo-Catholic approach that holds that there are indeed intimate and deep reasons to care about what things look like: that we need to have the right sort of streets, train stations, libraries, kitchens and clothes in order to be the right sort of people. Independent of any religious preoccupation, modern secular neo-Catholics continue to see visual art and design as important routes to inner contentment.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“We’re reluctant to say that we might suffer from visual chaos. It can easily come across as unduly fussy or a touch pretentious. That’s why, at a political level, the pursuit of calm design, in cities or the countryside, is never a priority. The idea that our mental health depends on serene environments has got very little traction: that’s why we have a lot of bright neon signs and ugly towers all around us.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Impatience is not so much frustration at things taking a long time in any absolute sense, but the feeling that they are taking longer than they should. Sometimes this may truly be the case. But often the problem is not so much in the time ‘things’ take as in our assumptions about how long they are supposed to take. And we bring this tight time frame to bear primarily out of ignorance. It is because we don’t fully understand the nature of a task that we do not budget accurately for how long it should take.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“The universal plight – pretty much – is a sad one. We will almost certainly die with much of our potential undeveloped. Much of what you could have done will remain unexplored. And you may well go to the grave with parts of yourself pleading for recognition, or carrying a sense of failure that there was so much you didn’t manage to do. But this isn’t really a cause for shame. It ought to be one of the most basic things we recognise about each other: a common fate we face. It’s very sad. But it is not sad uniquely to any one person. It’s a strangely consoling tragic idea that imagination always, inevitably, outstrips the potential. Everyone is unfulfilled, and that’s just a consequence of the odd way our minds have evolved.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Politeness is not mere decoration. It is directed at dealing with a major human problem: we need manners to restrain the beast inside.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Politeness provides a way where you can back down with dignity. In nature there is only ever one reason you cede the high ground – you are acknowledging defeat. You are bowing before a superior power. But under the rules of politeness, you let the other person off not because you are a weakling, a coward or a failure, but because you value calm over chaos. Politeness makes it easier to apologise, because apologising isn’t just an act of pure submission.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“So politeness doesn’t so much deny what one is genuinely feeling as provide a greater opportunity to discover one’s emotions more accurately.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Our heads are large, cavernous spaces; they contain the voices of all the people we have ever known. We should learn to mute the unhelpful ones and focus on the voices we really need to guide us through the thickets.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Part of becoming a good teacher means altering how we speak to ourselves – and then, in turn, others.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Whatever the subject matter, the core requirements for this tend to be the same, the first and foremost among them being that the ‘student’ should not be scared. We rarely learn very well when we have been humiliated or belittled, are insulted and threatened.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“We need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry and sadness in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive. We need to aim compassion in an unexpected place: at those who annoy us most.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“Part of the reason why we jump so readily to dark conclusions and see plots to insult and harm us is a rather poignant psychological phenomenon: self-hatred. The less we like ourselves, the more we appear in our own eyes as really rather plausible targets for mockery and harm.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“The best route to a so-called ‘good’ sex life is to honour the idea that great sex will almost certainly be the occasional ecstatic exception in a life otherwise filled with compromise and frustrated desire.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

“The only people we can think of as satisfying are those we don’t yet know very well.”
― The School of Life, Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury