Oliver Burkeman Quotes

So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

The technologies we use to try to "get on top of everything" always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the "everything" of which we're trying to get on top.

It was said of Rabbi Simcha Bunim that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: Bishvili nivra ha'olam – "For my sake the world was created." On the other he wrote: V'anokhi afar v'aefer – "I am but dust and ashes." He would take out each slip of paper as necessary, as a reminder to himself.' – TOBA SPITZER

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

Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.

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.

So imprudent are we," he wrote, "that we wander in the times which are not ours

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up," Herzen says. "But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life's bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.

the more that you remain aware of life's finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distractions.

For a civilisation so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task.

nurture your relationships, pursue challenging goals, spend time in nature, and make room for fun.

Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again – as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster.

the willingness to make small, incremental adjustments, to tolerate imperfection and bumpy progress, and not to throw in the towel in frustration the moment something starts to go wrong.

It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists – people who really do get a lot done – very rarely include techniques for 'getting motivated' or 'feeling inspired'. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood.

We recoil from the notion that this is it — that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we'll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are — so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, "we don't have to consciously participate in what it's like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality." This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call "neurosis," and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness.