101+ Oliver Burkeman Quotes on Self-Improvement and Success

Oliver Burkeman is a renowned author, journalist, and speaker known for his expertise in the fields of psychology, productivity, and self-improvement. With a career spanning over two decades, Burkeman has written for prestigious publications such as The Guardian and The New York Times, sharing his insights on topics ranging from happiness and success to time management and decision-making. His thought-provoking work challenges conventional wisdom and encourages readers to embrace uncertainty, confront their fears, and cultivate a more meaningful and fulfilling life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Oliver Burkeman on life, leadership, happiness.

Top 10 Oliver Burkeman Quotes

1. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.
2. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations.
3. 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.
4. The unconscious is the repository of everything that we’re avoiding.
5. The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect.
6. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.
7. Without noticing we’re doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.
8. 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.
9. I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.
10. You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it.

Oliver Burkeman Short Quotes

• The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not.
• The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities.
• You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.
• Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?
• So imprudent are we,” he wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours.
• This world of polluted attention creates the opportunity to sell silence back to us, at a profit.
• But the deeper truth remains: many of us are perpetually preoccupied with plans.
• Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
• What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.

Oliver Burkeman Quotes About Life

There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. — Oliver Burkeman

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. — Oliver Burkeman

You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life. — Oliver Burkeman

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. — Oliver Burkeman

It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life. — Oliver Burkeman

Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility. — Oliver Burkeman

Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? — Oliver Burkeman

In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? — Oliver Burkeman

But the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose. — Oliver Burkeman

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

Oliver Burkeman Quotes About Happiness

To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness. — Oliver Burkeman

One of the more distasteful aspects of positive thinking – and of conventional approaches to happiness in general – is the way in which they seem to encourage self-absorption. — Oliver Burkeman

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

Healthy and happy people, research suggests, generally have a less accurate, overly optimistic grasp of their true ability to influence events than do those who are suffering from depression. — Oliver Burkeman

Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities - for success, for happiness, for really living - are waiting. — Oliver Burkeman

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

...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

The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. — Oliver Burkeman

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

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

Oliver Burkeman Quotes About Time

Rendering yourself more efficient – either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder – won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. — Oliver Burkeman

In other words, it’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different, and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestowed meaning on the choice I did make. And the same applies, of course, to an entire lifetime. — Oliver Burkeman

If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed. — Oliver Burkeman

He should think of himself more ‘like a frog’, she said. 'You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored; then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while.' — Oliver Burkeman

It’s true that killing time on the Internet often doesn’t feel especially fun these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun in order to dull the pain of finitude. It just needs to make you feel unconstrained. — Oliver Burkeman

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. — Oliver Burkeman

You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own. — Oliver Burkeman

Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. — Oliver Burkeman

The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. — Oliver Burkeman

Each time you kiss your child goodnight, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. — Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman Quotes About Productivity

The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. — Oliver Burkeman

You know how some people are passionate about bodybuilding or fashion or rock climbing or poetry? Productivity geeks are passionate about crossing items off their to-do list so it’s sort of the same except infinitely sadder. — Oliver Burkeman

Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? — Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman Famous Quotes And Sayings

Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count. — Oliver Burkeman

The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. — Oliver Burkeman

It follows from this that time management broadly defined should be everyone’s chief concern. Arguably time management is all life is, yet the modern discipline known as time management - like its hipper cousin, productivity - is a depressingly, narrow minded affair focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or in cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt, but they’re hardly all that matters. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru, who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing, might be to experience more of that wonder. — Oliver Burkeman

Ultimately, what defines the ‘cult of optimism’ and the culture of positive thinking – even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms – is that it abhors a mystery. It seeks to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness – even if you do manage to achieve it – is shallow and unsatisfying. The greatest benefit of negative capability – the true power of negative thinking – is that it lets the mystery back in. — Oliver Burkeman

You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well. — Oliver Burkeman

The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one – which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. — Oliver Burkeman

When time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you're faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder or working for longer - as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution - instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. — Oliver Burkeman

Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work. — Oliver Burkeman

Attachment, this argument runs, is the only thing that motivates anyone to accomplish anything worthwhile in the first place. If you weren’t attached to things being a certain way, rather than another way – and to feeling certain emotions, rather than others – why would you ever attempt to thrive professionally, to better your material circumstances, to raise children, or to change the world? — Oliver Burkeman

We spend our lives failing to realize this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others. — Oliver Burkeman

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,’ argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. ‘Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting. — Oliver Burkeman

An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is” – and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long. — Oliver Burkeman

The goal, it seemed, had become a part of their identity, and so their uncertainty about the goal no longer merely threatened the plan; it threatened them as individuals. — Oliver Burkeman

This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it nearly as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact, it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control. — Oliver Burkeman

We seek the fulfillment 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

Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help. — Oliver Burkeman

Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from the same effort, to avoid the painful constraints of reality. And most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is because it means that though choices are inevitable, and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. — Oliver Burkeman

Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do. — Oliver Burkeman

Expressing the matter, in such startling terms, makes it easy to see why philosophers from ancient Greece to the present have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence. We’ve been granted the mental capacity to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, but practically no time at all to put them into action. — Oliver Burkeman

Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today. — Oliver Burkeman

It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die. — Oliver Burkeman

He may be right about the importance of not fearing failure, but then again, you don’t hear speeches or read autobiographies by people who were unafraid of failure and then did indeed simply fail. — Oliver Burkeman

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

We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. — Oliver Burkeman

One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most. — Oliver Burkeman

For many people, the unwritten rules of sidewalk choreography now include this: If what I’m reading or watching on my phone is sufficiently interesting to me, it’s entirely up to you to get out of my way. — Oliver Burkeman

The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson. — Oliver Burkeman

We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us. — Oliver Burkeman

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

Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? — Oliver Burkeman

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. — Oliver Burkeman

How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? — Oliver Burkeman

Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. — Oliver Burkeman

Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe bomber’, had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsory shoe-checking for all travelers. — Oliver Burkeman

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

Just as a factory pumping out pollutants degrades that air for everyone, so a TV blasting cable news into an airport lounge degrades the attentional capacities of everyone nearby. — Oliver Burkeman

To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place. — Oliver Burkeman

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

You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one – which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. — Oliver Burkeman

Develop a strong attachment to your good looks – as opposed to merely enjoying them while they last – and you will suffer when they fade. — Oliver Burkeman

I am aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are. — Oliver Burkeman

This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future. — Oliver Burkeman

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

Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can't persuade himself to believe are good. — Oliver Burkeman

Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we'll be ceaselessly happy and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave. — Oliver Burkeman

What made Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein such creative geniuses? It wasn't reading books or watching YouTube talks about How To Be More Creative, that's for sure... If startling insights could be systematically arrived at, they wouldn't be startling. The best you can do is to create a conducive environment: put in the hours; take time to daydream; avoid mind-corroding substances. — Oliver Burkeman

Reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won't occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it. All to often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best. — Oliver Burkeman

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

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. — Oliver Burkeman

Life Lessons by Oliver Burkeman

1. Embrace uncertainty: Burkeman emphasizes the importance of accepting and even embracing uncertainty as an inherent part of life. Rather than striving for absolute control and certainty, he encourages individuals to develop resilience and adaptability, recognizing that uncertainty can lead to personal growth and unexpected opportunities.
2. Confront your fears: Burkeman advocates for confronting fears and stepping outside of one's comfort zone. He believes that by facing our fears head-on, we can overcome self-imposed limitations and discover our true potential. Embracing discomfort and taking calculated risks can lead to personal and professional growth.
3. Seek meaning over happiness: In a society obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, Burkeman challenges this notion and suggests that seeking meaning and purpose in life is a more fulfilling endeavor. He encourages individuals to explore what truly matters to them and to align their actions with their values, even if it means embracing discomfort or making unconventional choices.