Small Pleasures Quotes

“We have begun to know someone properly whenever they have started substantially to disappoint us.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“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, Small Pleasures

“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, Small Pleasures

“Worldly success is the consolation prize for those unhappy driven souls who have redirected their early humiliation and sense that they weren’t good enough into ‘achievements’ – which will never make up for the unconditional love they will deep down always crave in vain.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“What we learn is how important modesty of ambition is. It’s where we see how love can be so beneficially detached from expectation and from reciprocation. The grandmother never hopes to be understood by the child. It is enough to spend a nice day, without doing much: we saw a pony, had some milk, played a game of cards, tried doing a painting of a flower. Quite soon, the 6-year-old will start to think this is a ridiculous day. And it may take six decades before they relearn that it is the purpose and meaning of life.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“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, Small Pleasures

“They [fish] seems so alien. But - in a universe composed almost entirely of gas and rock circulating in the endless nothingness of space - we are their cousins, with whom we briefly cohabit the surface zones of earth. In the recent history of the cosmos, we shered common ancestors, whose progeny became diversely the octopus, the sea bream or evolved gradually into solicitors, psychotherapists and graphic designers.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“With small pleasures it’s the opposite. We’re more likely to lose touch with them. They easily get crowded out. We actively need to build up their presence in our lives.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Dark humour at first appears like the enemy of the mature self; it keeps on asking us to find the least admirable parts of human nature entertaining. But its pleasure lies in its kindness: dark humour is inviting us to compassion for ourselves and for others; it teaches the generous, tender idea that the more disturbed parts of our minds are manageable and are, in fact, central to the noblest ideal: that of being able to love others as they truly are.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“It’s tempting to get annoyed because people don’t automatically know what we’re capable of. But we can actually come to respect when they wait for evidence of that.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Death reorganises our priorities; it changes our scale of assessment”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Without quite stating it plainly to ourselves, we hope that we too will be appreciated as this jumper is; that someone will feel about us this way and not only forgive us our frayed, misshapen bodies and characters – but will come to love us precisely for these things.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Children’s art provides an opportunity to start to get to know our own needs. They are, in their own way, political demands, compact manifestos for some of the things we urgently need a little more of in the anxious, compromised conditions of contemporary adult life.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Once we are used to being undressed around someone, the wonder that they’ve allowed us into their lives is liable to get lost and taken for granted. We might end up watching TV naked after a shower, with no one caring to note how special our unclothed selves still really are. The game of keeping one’s clothes on tries to keep the interest of nakedness alive for a little longer by drawing attention to the privileges of permission. The game symbolises a poignant desire fully to savour the beauty of being, at last, allowed…”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“To crush well is to realise that the lovely person we sketch in our heads is our creation: a creation that says more about us than about them. But what it says about us is important. The crush gives us access to our own ideals. We may not really be getting to know another person properly, but we are growing our insight into who we really are.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“The cure for infatuation is to get to know the object of one’s desire better. Soon their inevitable defects will be revealed.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Rather than imagining that they might feel guilt, people who have hurt us, in fact, typically start to hate us – for reminding them of their own meanness.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“When we resolve one major anxiety, we imagine that we will be satisfied and calm will descend. But all we’re really ever doing is freeing up space for an even more poisonous and aggressive worry to spring forth, as it always will. Life can only ever be a process of replacing one anxiety with another.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“The point of staring out of a window is, paradoxically, not to find out what is going on outside. It is, rather, an exercise in discovering the contents of our own minds.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“In the kitchen, there are a few last remains of yesterday. The argument you had last night feels far away. Why did it matter? Dawn is the world’s reminder to let yesterday go. When everyone else is asleep, the house feels like it is just yours. You can remember why you like it.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“When the world seems bountiful, material accumulation looks less impressive.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“The daytime-office you is a misleading picture of what you’re like. This insomnia is a gift, and this lonely plastic hotel is its precious, unexpected, generous guardian.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Given how much we value friendship, it’s strange that we’re not so focused on one of its central pleasures: being listened to. Few of us know how to do it, not because we are evil, but because no one has taught us how and – a related point – no one has listened to us. So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others, but reluctant to hear them.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“She may be the only person who simply wants you to be happy. She’s good at being cosy. It’s nice to snuggle up to her while she reads to you. She embodies a species of wisdom: the knowledge that achievement is in the long run overrated, that simply being comfortable sitting next to another person watching a gardening programme on television, or carefully watering a potted geranium in the company of a small person, can be deeply important.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“One of the big tasks of civilisation is to teach us how to better enjoy life. The Romantic assumption is that we know intuitively and all we need is greater freedom to follow our instincts. The Classical picture is that a pleasant life is, in fact, a deliberate accomplishment. It’s a rational achievement that builds on the careful examination of experience and involves deliberate strategies to guide us more reliably to the things that truly please us.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“The stars matter in our lives because they offer a consoling encounter with grandeur, because they invite a helpful perspective on the brevity and littleness of human existence. Why don’t we make more of this natural resource and plug ourselves more frequently into the Milky Way and renew this helpful pleasure?”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“A small island is not just a place on the map; it’s a psychological destination, a model of simplifying your life and making do with what is immediately to hand. You may not even have to take a plane or a boat to get there.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“We easily forget how much love is connected to being able to look after something. We turn inwards and become what is called selfish when the social problems feel too vast and intractable and our own efforts start to look puny and pointless. The great metropolitan centres are too big to love. They constantly force us to admit that we are nothing. The small island is so pleasing because it raises the vision of another kind of world, in which public effort and generosity feel logical and productive. The gap between tidying one’s bedroom and tidying the little world of the island is not so daunting.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“Listening deserves discovery as one of the keys to a good society.”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures

“we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen,”
― The School of Life, Small Pleasures