Oliver Burkeman Quotes

#1. No matter how much success you may experience in life, your eventual story - no offence intended - will be one of failure. Your bodily organs will fail, and you'll die.

Oliver Burkeman

#2. What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.

Oliver Burkeman

#3. It was called Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life 'better' or 'happier', in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding.

Oliver Burkeman

#4. Part of the problem with positive thinking, and many related approaches to happiness, is exactly this desire to reduce big questions to one-size-fits-all self-help tricks or ten point plans.

Oliver Burkeman

#5. Bereaved people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss.

Oliver Burkeman

#6. The greatest benefit of negative capability - the true power of negative thinking - is that it lets the mystery back in.

Oliver Burkeman

#7. Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities - for success, for happiness, for really living - are waiting.

Oliver Burkeman

#8. Mainly, it's not that there are things you can't say. It's that there are things you can't say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

Oliver Burkeman

#9. I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.

Oliver Burkeman

#10. The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.

Oliver Burkeman

#11. Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.

Oliver Burkeman

#12. in recent years, some psychologists have reached the conclusion that pessimism may often be as healthy and productive as optimism. At

Oliver Burkeman

#13. It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort.

Oliver Burkeman

#14. The real trick to producing great work isn't to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it's to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We're all in deep water. Which is fine: it's by far the most exciting place to be.

Oliver Burkeman

#15. We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs. When Descartes said 'I think, therefore I am,' he had not discovered 'the most fundamental truth', Tolle insists; instead, he had given expression to 'the most basic error'.

Oliver Burkeman

#16. It's more important than ever that we find new ways to cultivate curiosity - because our careers, our happiness, and our children's flourishing all depend upon it.

Oliver Burkeman

#17. Once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.

Oliver Burkeman

#18. Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

Oliver Burkeman

#19. (A writer's working space, Montaigne also believed, ought to have a good view of the cemetery; it tended to sharpen one's thinking.)

Oliver Burkeman

#20. Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?.

Oliver Burkeman

#21. Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible.

Oliver Burkeman

#22. Never have I trusted Fortune,' writes Seneca, 'even when she seemed to be at peace. All her generous bounties - money, office, influence - I deposited where she could ask for them back without disturbing me.

Oliver Burkeman

#23. There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life.

Oliver Burkeman

#24. The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable,

Oliver Burkeman

#25. We spend our lives failing to realise this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them, without realising that interdependence makes us what we are.

Oliver Burkeman

#26. True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.

Oliver Burkeman

#27. Ask yourself whether you are happy', observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.' At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.

Oliver Burkeman

#28. [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

Oliver Burkeman

#29. Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent.

Oliver Burkeman

#30. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

Oliver Burkeman

#31. We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them; their flourishing depends on a certain degree of not being protected, of being open to experiences both negative and positive.

Oliver Burkeman

#32. For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones

Oliver Burkeman

#33. Resisting a task is usually a sign that it's meaningful-which is why it's awakening your fears and stimulating procrastination. You could adopt "Do whatever you're resisting the most" as a philosophy of life.

Oliver Burkeman