Read an extract from The School of Life: Quotes to Live By

A collection of enlightening quotes, delivering some of the most important lessons The School of Life has to offer.

Great conversations are as rare as a beautiful square in a foreign city that one stumbles on at night and then doesn’t know how to get back to in the daytime.

Friends are less critical of us than our partners, not because they’re any kinder or understand things more clearly; they just care a lot less.

Most people could be bearable if they could only acknowledge how peculiar they are. It’s the insistence on normality that kills the spirit.

As successful self-propagandists know, the main source of information for how things are going with us is us.

Being on the receiving end of hypocritical politeness may feel grating – but at least people are bothering to lie.

A ‘good reputation’ wouldn’t matter quite so much if people were more in the habit of judging others on their own merits.

There are people we would long ago have forgotten all about if they hadn’t started to ignore us.

Seeing through people is so easy – and it gets you nowhere.

We mostly lose our tempers, not with those who are actually to blame but with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

It can be awkward to say to a friend, ‘I need cheering up for the misery your success has caused me.’

Definition of an egoist: someone insufficiently interested in me.

For paranoia about ‘what other people think’: remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.

Acquiring enemies may feel like a sign that one’s life has gone wrong, but it’s more likely to be an indication that one has found a few things to believe in.

Getting to the top always has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

So many of life’s problems would be softened if we had three or four exceptional friends living within a two-minute radius.

Quotes to Live By, illustrated by Avi Ofer, is available now from The School of Life.