A Simpler Life Quotes

“We would be able to deduce that the point of life isn’t to have the ‘right’ reactions, just our own, very honest, ones.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“The solution to the ills of materialism – and the path to a less muddled and chaotic home – isn’t renunciation; it’s a deeper and more selective kind of love.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“The moral is clear. If we seek others, we should stay at home; if we wish to alleviate loneliness, we should turn down invitations; if we want company, we would be better off communing with dead writers and poets than hunting for solace at large gatherings.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“We may have been asked along to the evening, but our deeper selves have not been invited.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease, and clarity

“Hatred is just a result of standing too far away, not daring to investigate who a person might really be or what they have gone through. There are – in the end – very few monsters; there are mostly only hasty judgements.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease, and clarity

“How to care less about the news”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease, and clarity

“Our lives will feel – and be – simpler when we’ve probed our minds to yield up their most secret and precious insight: the knowledge of what we truly want.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“Existence becomes overcomplicated when we submit ourselves to tasks or possessions without having a clear sense of their purpose. When we don’t properly know why we’re doing something, we don’t know how much of it we need in our life. Simplicity, therefore, can be defined as the result and precious fruit of clarifying our goals.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“The current notion of retirement is unimaginative about what an individual might retire from. Mostly, the vision is that one stops working so as to be able to undertake outdoor leisure pursuits – tennis, gardening, sailing – and perhaps move to a place with a milder climate. But we can be more ambitious about both what we unshackle ourselves from and what we aspire to do instead: we could retire to connect more deeply with our own minds, to develop our creative potential, to keep a handle on anxiety or to explore who we could be if we stopped caring so much about what other people thought of us.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“Our societies are very keen for us to have busy, competitive, complicated lives. We should express thanks for the well-meaning suggestions and then, as soon as possible and without causing anyone offence, announce our early retirement in the name of the simpler, kinder lives we long for.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“When we lead quiet and simple lives, we aren’t deprived; we have been granted the privilege of being able to travel the unfamiliar, sometimes daunting, but essentially wondrous continents inside our own minds.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“On our walk around the block, themes we’ve lost touch with – childhood, an odd dream we had recently, a friend we haven’t seen for years, a big task we had always told ourselves we’d undertake – float into our attention. In physical terms, we’re hardly going any distance at all, but we’re crossing acres of mental territory. A short while later, we’ll be back at home once again. No one has missed us, or perhaps even noticed that we’ve been out. Yet we are subtly different: a slightly more complete, more visionary, courageous and imaginative version of the person we knew how to be before we wisely went on a modest journey.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“What if our real problem is not that we haven’t had time to travel enough – but that we don’t know how to make the most of what is already to hand?”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“Very often, the truly significant news is trapped inside our own mind – but the crush of news from without hampers our ability to pick up on our own tentative thoughts and emerging ideas. The news gives us one of the most prestigious excuses ever invented to never spend time roaming freely inside our own thoughts. Of course, the news that is broadcast to us will be important to someone, somewhere – but most of the time it is wholly disconnected from our own real priorities over the coming years, which are to make the most of our life and our talents in the time that remains to us.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“The art we really need is that which follows the opposite arc – celebrating people who downshifted, adjusted, but still endured and prospered internally.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“We will be able to choose poverty voluntarily – to freely forgo luxuries, comforts and the prestige of being prosperous – once we focus our lives on what deeply matters to us. We will fall out of love with money the more we learn to fall in love with something else: farming, music, service, writing, God, quiet evenings at home or the painting of slow, delicate lines across pale pink canvases.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“A thinking culture is not one without achievement; it is one that properly understands the role played by good thinking in the delivery of good doing. Working life might look much less productive from the outside, but in reality we would be locating true hard work where it actually has to unfold: inside our own minds.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“Truly ‘good’ materialism leads us to want fewer things and to choose them with care, while bad materialism results in us filling our homes with needless stuff that we have no room for in our hearts. We clutter up our wardrobes, homes and lives because the messages our possessions are sending us aren’t being listened”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“At the end of our quiet day, we turn in early, so we’ll be fresh in the morning. In the minutes before we sleep, we go over the memories of a trip from years ago: recapturing the charming manners of a particular waiter or the pleasure of opening the shutters in the morning and looking down a narrow street towards the sea; we’re planning to stay quietly put for a while and we don’t need to go anywhere – our lives are rich and large already.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“but the moral Thoreau drew was almost identical: to those who are inwardly free, there are riches enough available in a hut.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“Our lives are brief, and so it is the quality of our experiences, rather than the extent of our possessions, that matters. The more things we own, the more we are exposed to misfortune: a fashionable home will soon be outdated, our prestige in the eyes of others will fluctuate for trivial reasons and the monuments we hope to be remembered by will be misinterpreted or torn down. The hut is an impermanent accommodation – it might be blown down in a storm or washed away in a flood, officials might arrive at our door and force us to leave – but by living here our needs become so simple that chance has less to work on.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“If we are able to foster a parental perspective on ourselves, irrespective of what the rest of the world happens to think, we can legitimately (and without falling into narcissistic exaggeration), see ourselves as honourable and worthy of regard – despite everything. And if we can feel a proper, deserved compassion for ourselves, our interest in how others may judge us recedes: in the end, it doesn’t matter if they respect or love us; we love and respect ourselves enough to endure.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“It is because the parent stands so near to their child – because they were there from the child’s first moment and have seen their struggles and know their history – that they will be natively inclined to extend complex compassion to them. What might look like foolishness, greed, degeneracy or sickness from afar emerges, through a nuanced, fine-grained knowledge of the whole story, as something very different. We could weep for anyone if we really knew what they had gone through. The parent loves their child because they understand them. Parents are, for good reason, the least consensus-driven people in the world. No wonder they wait at the prison gates.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“They know that, from the outside, the child could be dismissed as a ‘felon’, ‘an idiot’ or ‘disgusting’. But no human is ever simply their worst moment – and every worst moment has a long history, which invariably merits a high degree of sympathy. The more we know of someone, the more difficult it becomes to caricature them with a single hostile slogan. Hatred is just a result of standing too far away, not daring to investigate who a person might really be or what they have gone through. There are – in the end – very few monsters; there are mostly only hasty judgements.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“The parent stays on the child’s side for one central reason: they understand them fully.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“We mustn’t compare our inner reality with the deceptive façades of those around us.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“We don’t need a landed estate to qualify as an aristocrat; what counts is the very sane conviction that ‘what most people think’ isn’t and should never be a reasonable guide to our own lives.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“Hatred is just a result of standing too far away, not daring to investigate who a person might really be or what they have gone through.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

“The crucial step towards leading a simpler life isn’t – as we might initially suppose – to get rid of things. It’s to ask ourselves what our true longings are and what are the ends at which we are aiming. Simplicity isn’t so much a life with few things and commitments in it, as a life with the right, necessary things, attuned to our flourishing. Our lives will feel – and be – simpler when we’ve probed our minds to yield up their most secret and precious insight: the knowledge of what we truly want.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease, and clarity

“If we don’t really know what friends are for, we can’t tell how many we need. It’s a general truth: the more we know what we’re trying to achieve in any area, the simpler and plainer our lives can become.”
― The School of Life, A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease, and clarity