On Being Nice Quotes

“Everyone loves being praised, but to be praised inaccurately is its own kind of insult.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“There is no point punching back. We must – as the old prophets always told us – learn to look upon our enemies with sorrow, pity and, when we can manage it, a forgiving kind of love.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“A person who feels at ease with themselves can have no need to distress others. We don’t have the energy to be cruel unless, and until, we are in inner torment.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“It is you, who has no need to belittle, who is in fact the larger, steelier, more forceful party; you – who feels so defenceless – who is actually in power.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“This is what we should actually think – a truth as basic as it is inviolable: other people have been nasty because they are in pain. The only reason they have hurt us is because they are – somewhere deep inside – hurting themselves. They have been catty and derogatory and foul because they are not well. However outwardly confident they may look, however virile and robust they may appear, their actions are all the evidence we need that they cannot be in a good place. No one solid would ever need to do this. The thought is empowering because nastiness so readily humiliates and reduces us.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“That there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing is one of the great lessons of art. Many of the most satisfying art works don’t feature exalted or rare elements; they are about the ordinary looked at in a special way, with unusual sincerity and openness to unvarnished experience.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“We need to aim compassion in an unexpected place: at those who annoy us most.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“The genuinely charitable person gives generously from a sense that they too will stand in need of charity. Not right now, not over this, but in some other area. They know that self-righteousness is merely the result of a faulty memory, an inability to hold in mind – at moments when one is truly good and totally in the right – how often one has been deeply and definitively in the wrong.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“There is nothing more sterile than a demand that life be constantly exciting.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“However much we are committed to success, for long portions of our lives we are intensely vulnerable creatures wholly at the mercy of the gentleness of others. We are only ever able to be successful because other people – usually our mothers – have given up a good share of their lives to being nice to us.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“The theory goes like this: every strength that an individual has brings with it a weakness of which it is an inherent part. It is impossible to have strengths without weaknesses. Every virtue has an associated weakness. Not all the virtues can belong together in a single person.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“We are currently uncomfortable around the idea of a good person not succeeding. We’d rather say that they weren’t good than embrace a far more disturbing and less well-publicised thought: that the world is very unfair. But without the idea of tragedy, we make existence for everyone far crueller and more judgemental than it need be.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“Meritocracies turn failure from a misfortune into an unbudgeable verdict on one’s nature.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice

“We must reconcile ourselves to the risk of not making friends to stand any chance of actually making any.”
― The School of Life, On Being Nice