What They Forgot to Teach You at School Quotes

“We can never properly be secure, because so long as we are alive, we will be alert to danger and in some way at risk. The only people with full security are the dead; the only people who can be truly at peace are under the ground; cemeteries are the only definitively calm places around.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“We tend to fantasise about freedom in terms of not having to work or of being able to take off on long trips. If we dig into its core, though, freedom really means no longer being beholden to the expectations of others. We may, quite freely, work very hard or stay at home during the holidays. The decisive factor is our willingness to disappoint, to upset or to disconcert others in doing so.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“It is sensible enough to try to live longer lives, but we are working with a false notion of what ‘long’ really means. We might live to be a thousand years old and still complain that it had all rushed by too fast. We should be aiming to lead lives that feel long because we have managed to imbue them with the right sort of open-hearted appreciation and unsnobbish receptivity, the kind that five-year-olds know naturally how to bring to bear.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“As we’ve realised, the more our days are filled with new, unpredictable and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. Conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in an evanescent blur.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“If the goal is to have a longer life, whatever the dieticians may urge, it seems like the priority should not be to add raw increments of time but to ensure that whatever years remain feel appropriately substantial. The aim should be to densify time rather than to try to extract one or two more years from the grip of death.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“The more we experience new things, the longer every section of time will seem; the more we are navigating the familiar, the more time will feel as if it is rushing past.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“Children who grow up in the company of difficult adults cannot change or get rid of their caregivers. From a position of impotence, they settle on doing one thing extremely well: hoping against hope that these adults will magically change and learn to be kind. If they just hold on long enough, and are sufficiently polite and compliant, then the difficult adult will take mercy and alter. These suffering souls then take their misguided patience out into their adult relationships, with similarly negligible results.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“We don’t ultimately grow kind by thinking about manners. We grow kind by thinking about self-doubt and self-hatred. A kinder world would be one that wasn’t more decorous, but one more alive to the presence of despair, to our susceptibility to shame and to our craving for any sign (however small) of our right to exist.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“It may be no bad rule of thumb to imagine that the stranger, with no disrespect to their exclusivity, is just a version of us that we haven’t yet got to know.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“Hating ourselves is the easy bit. Learning to give ourselves a break is the true, rare and properly adult achievement.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“Genuine love isn’t blind to defects; it is compassionate towards them and readily sets them within an awareness of a person’s overall qualities and character.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“The crucial ingredient lies neither in mental equipment nor in training, but in what a person can allow themselves to believe they are capable of; the limiting factor is mental low self-esteem. The”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“A good life requires us to do two relatively tricky things: know how to go along with the rules sufficiently well so as not to get mired in needless fights with authority; and simultaneously never to believe too blindly or too passively in the long-term validity of everything we’re asked to study. We need to be outwardly obedient and inwardly discerning.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“To the surprise of any visiting alien, humans blithely educate themselves as if the chief requirement of adulthood were the possession of a set of technical skills, with no acknowledgement of the fact that what mostly runs us into the sands is not any shortfall in our command of matrix algebra or the French pluperfect but our inability to master what we could call the emotional dimensions of our lives: our understanding of ourselves, our capacity to deal with our lovers, children and colleagues, our degrees of self-confidence, our handle on calm and self-compassion.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“Everything we deeply want either will not happen or will be unsatisfying when it does. We must stop crying as if any of it really mattered or there ever was another way. We must pity ourselves and then change tack. The tragic view is obvious. Being miserable is the default. Everything makes very little sense. Now let’s surprise ourselves with a little irresponsible laughter, the kind it can take a lifetime of sorrow to perfect.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“So, despite everything – the loneliness, the shame, the compromise, the self-hatred and the sure knowledge that the agony isn’t over yet – one turns to the light and says a big rebellious obstinate joyful ‘yes’ to the universe (which naturally doesn’t give a damn).”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“The greatest wisdom we’re capable of is to know why true wisdom won’t be fully possible and instead pride ourselves on having at least a slight vantage point on our madness.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“What are the implications of fully accepting the arrival fallacy? We may still have ambitions, but we’ll have a certain ironic detachment about what is likely to happen when we fulfil them. We’ll know the itch will start up again soon enough. Knowing the arrival fallacy, we’ll be subject to illusion, but at least aware of the fact. When we watch others striving, we may experience slightly less envy. It may look as if certain others have reached ‘there’, but we know they are still longing and worrying in mansions and on executive floors.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“It doesn’t matter what goals we have: they will never be enough. Life is a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal-seeking. The only stable element in our lives is craving: the only destination is the journey.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“Goethe’s own view was radically different. His idea of freedom was bound up with the idea of his own growth: he would be free in so far as he had the chance to develop his personality.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“We don’t need to add years; we need to densify the time we have left by ensuring that every day is lived consciously. We can do this via a manoeuvre as simple as it is momentous: by starting to notice all that we have as yet only seen.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly or it may drag. It may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density. Crucially,”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“Amidst these stories, we’re liable to find a few people who will tell us, very sincerely, that their plan B ended up, eventually, superior to their plan A. They worked harder for it, they had to dig deeper to find it and it carried less vanity and fear within it.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“The first element involves fully acknowledging that we are never cursed for having to make a plan B. Plan As simply do not work out all the time. No one gets through life with all their careful plan As intact. Something unexpected, shocking and abhorrent regularly comes along, not only to us, but to all human beings. We are simply too exposed to accident, too lacking in information, too frail in our capacities, to avoid some serious avalanches and traps.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“What feels insightful about this division of existence is that it acknowledges that a Sannyasa way of living can’t be right for everyone at all times – yet, by the same token, that no good life can be complete without a version of it. There are years when we simply have to keep our heads down and study, years when we have to bring up children and accumulate some capital. But there are also, just as importantly, years when what we need to do above all is say ‘enough’, enough to material and superficial demands, enough to sexual and romantic entanglements, enough to status and sociability – and, instead, learn to turn our minds inwards and upwards.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“We cannot be good to anyone else until we have serviced some of our own inner callings.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“For some of us, though, the problem isn’t so much that we are heedless of this advice, but rather that we take it far too closely and relentlessly to heart. So mindful are we of the risks of selfishness that we run into an opposite danger: an abnegation of the self, a modesty that borders on self-erasure, an automatic impulse to give everything over to competing parties, a shyness about pressing ourselves forward and a manic inability to say ‘no’ or cause the slightest frustration to others.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“The mature person knows that robust self-assertion is always an option down the line. This gives them the confidence not to need to shout immediately, to give others the benefit of every doubt and not to assume the worst and then hit back with undue force. The mature like themselves enough not to suspect that everyone would have a good reason to mock and slander them.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“We can develop how often, and how loudly, the adult inside delivers their verdicts. What’s more, encouraging this adult voice requires no particular technical skill or arcane practice. All we need to do, at important moments when our other inner characters will be rushing to get to the microphone of the mind, is to hold them all back purposefully, breathe deeply and ask ourselves one simple but categorical question: what would the adult say here?”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School

“When this kind of forgiveness feels impossible, therapists speak of a manoeuvre of the mind known as ‘splitting’, a tendency to declare some people to be entirely good and others, just as simply, entirely awful. In dividing humanity like this, we protect ourselves from what can feel like the impossible dangers of disappointment or grown-up ambivalence.”
― The School of Life, What They Forgot to Teach You at School