How to Survive the Modern World Quotes

“A blank sheet of paper on a brisk Monday morning can panic the mind into silence. The best sort of thinking emerges when we have no set agenda, in the hollows of the day, when we are just walking around the park or taking a train journey, having a bath or staring blankly into space. It is then that our best, but also most furtive, thoughts may be lured out of the unconscious and can be glimpsed by reason before they run away again.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“We would need to experience so much less if we knew how to draw appropriate value from what we had already done and seen. Our impulse for constant movement may at heart be a confession of an inability to process. We feel the need for so many new experiences because we have been so poor at absorbing the ones we have had.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“We are in need of a service that could track down the fertile zone in which the needs of the world and our aptitudes connect, a service to highlight the spark of genius inside every one of us — so that we might one day contribute to a tool that counts and die without so much regret.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“In his great work Attachment and Loss (published in three volumes in 1969, 1972 and 1980), Bowlby explained that an adult’s sense of self is built up through the relationships it has as a child: if a parent or carer is warm, consistent, attuned, steady and kind, the child will thrive. It will have confidence in itself and in the world. It will know how to love and will have the courage to start relationships, secure in the knowledge that it can complain calmly if its needs are neglected.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“We need a society ready to meet us on our own terms — not one that is trying to get us to laugh sentimentally. We know in our hearts, and at 4 a.m. when we wake up in a panic, what life is really like — the despairing, anxious, always unsettled, always fretful and always questioning business it is. The next stage of our evolution will be to take what we know of ourselves and build a society around it, a society that has the courage to accept its true psychological complexity.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Unfortunately, modern society is like a giant jollying person. It wants to pick us up and play peekaboo with us constantly. Television, advertising, parties, friends, the media — all conspire to suggest that doing great and feeling well-adjusted, optimistic and breezy might in some ways be normal.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“This kind of jolly person is different from a happy person; a happy person smiles because they feel like it; a jollying person smiles because they are compelled to, because there is all sorts of unprocessed grief inside them from which they are manically in flight. If they stopped laughing for a moment, they might have to confront everything regrettable that they have not until now been able to face; all the emotions they haven’t dared to accept in themselves — the anger against someone who let them down, the rage against something or someone they were supposed to love, the guilt about the error they so regret.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“There is a freedom that our age seems subtly yet horribly keen to deny us: the freedom to be miserable.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“But it is almost impossible to find anyone over seventy who does not care for gardening. By then, most people’s ambitions will have taken a substantial hit: love or work will not have worked out in key ways. At this point, the consolation offered by gardening starts to feel very significant. Flowers become something to be cherished precisely because of their lack of exigencies or overt grandeur. The world beyond will always resist our efforts to bend it to our will, but in the garden, with some effort, regular watering and some luck with the sun, we can for brief weeks be the midwives to something as visually seductive as it is cheering. We are moved by the flowers’ tender beauty because we know, by this stage, so much about pain and disappointment; we aren’t sentimental so much as traumatised. We won’t turn down this one of nature’s gifts. It isn’t the largest, but it may — on a mild summer evening — be very much good enough.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“. A civilisation that was more excited about the arrival of a train than the end of nature had forgotten its priorities.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“By enmeshing ourselves tightly with other humans, we not only cut ourselves off from fresh air, we deny ourselves the experience of ‘otherness’, of creatures who can put our own melodramas into perspective via their haughty disregard for our existence — and their laser-like focus on their own, utterly contrasting priorities.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Though we may strive to look powerful and to be in the know, to impress and to dominate, in truth we are at our most endearing when we are strong enough to reveal our vulnerability; when we can admit to all we don’t understand and are blind to.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“There is no use expecting to be remembered by the name our parents thoughtfully gave to a small assemblage of cells — all now long dead — many years ago. The woodlice and the pigeons will be grateful. We are not strangers to death: atom by atom, we’ve been falling apart and being remade for over thirteen billion years.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“We were never really an ‘I’; we just borrowed some bits of the universe for a few moments and will go on to be many other things, just as valuable, in time.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“The ego emerges from its analyses as something far closer to what Buddhism has long suggested: an artful illusion, a flickering, unsteady flame unaware of most of what it is, an entity thoroughly merged with and traversed by the world beyond it, an ‘I’ destined to dissolve after a brief span and to be reabsorbed by a cosmic totality from which it should never have imagined itself to be distinct.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Evolutionary history teaches us that humans should be a lot worse than they are. Humanity is rushing to catch up with its ideals and we can afford to be rather more gentle towards its constant but inevitable lapses. The wonder isn’t, in the end, that we’re so uncivilised but that we ever manage, now and then, to have a few moments of civilisation.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“What ends up looking perfect will, and must, demand long periods when it feels ugly, confused and beyond rescue. We would not give up so easily — because we never expected things to be other than hellish.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“On the receiving end of love, we crave not so much for someone to be awed by us as for them to see our failings clearly and yet to treat us with generosity and warmth.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“But since then, most grave problems have arguably not been caused by an absence of liberty so much as by a superabundance of it. In the name of freedom, we have been left to overeat, to drink ourselves to death, to bankrupt ourselves on fruitless goods, to damage our loved ones’ childhoods — and to destroy our lives.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“We’re reminded that what school is chiefly about — in any era — is the acceptance of authority; a good child follows the rules. And the promise is always the same: if we are submissive and jump through the hoops, we will be rewarded, not just in next Tuesday’s test or the end-of-year exams, but in life more broadly. The teachers know and they can illuminate the path for us. The problem is that what schools chiefly know about is how to do well at school, which is subtly but importantly different from doing well at life.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“In its zeal for productivity, the modern education system appeared to forget that if two-thirds of a person’s happiness is determined by the state of their emotional lives, it may make little sense to educate them for twenty years predominantly in the details of technical and managerial proficiency. We will only ever be as content — or as productive — as our emotional fragilities allow.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“It’s a stupidity we pay dearly for. A dumb book or song can be shelved and disturb no one. A dumb building will stand defacing the Earth and upsetting all who must look at it for hundreds of years. On this basis alone, architecture is the most important of the arts — and, to enforce the problem further, the one we are never taught anything about in school.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“In a degraded environment, however safe and rich our material lives, our spirits will sink. We take our cues from what the buildings around us ‘speak about’. If they speak of grace and charm, kindness and light, our mood will be buoyant; if, however, they seem to threaten and intimidate us, we will feel humiliated and cowed. Modernity has had little respect for our fragility. It has imagined that, so long as the roof didn’t leak, we could dwell among buildings of unsurpassed ugliness and not lose our will to live.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Modernity became ugly because we forgot how to articulate that beauty is, in the end, as much of a necessity for a building as a functioning roof. We lost the vocabulary to describe our pain.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Busy people evade a different order of undertaking. They are practically a hive of activity, yet they don’t get round to working out their real feelings about their work. They constantly delay the investigation of their own direction. They are lazy when it comes to understanding the purpose of their lives. Their busy-ness is a subtle but powerful form of distraction — in fact, a kind of laziness.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Window daydreaming is a strategic rebellion against the excessive demands of immediate pressures in favour of the slow development of more substantial plans.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“We are much better at executing plans than stepping back to evaluate whether the plans are the right ones. We can be geniuses at working out the thousand small steps required to advance a project, but poor at giving ourselves the time and space to figure out whether the project was ever even relevant.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“It is easy to measure how much money we are making. It’s much harder to notice how much calm we have lost. We don’t keep a close eye on the true price of our noisy lives; we don’t properly add up what the business trip or the conference might have done to our levels of serenity and creativity or to our relationship with those who truly matter to us. We don’t notice how agitated every newspaper article makes us feel and how dispiriting every encounter with a false friend can prove. We are like early scientists handling uranium without a sense of the dangers.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Were we to be good travellers, we would know how to treat a walk to the shops as its own kind of precious adventure.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

“Going forward, in a calculated fight against the spirit of the age, we might do well to ask all new acquaintances not what they do but what they have been thinking or daydreaming about recently.”
― The School of Life, How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times