A Literary Prescription for

Life Lessons

For the things nobody can tell you, and everybody tries to.

Everybody collects them, mostly by getting something wrong first. The lessons that stick are rarely the ones printed on a card: they tend to be specific, slightly embarrassing, and learnt at the exact moment they would have been most useful to know in advance. This page gathers what people say when they are asked directly — palliative nurses recording what the dying wish they had done differently, a gerontologist who interviewed a thousand people over sixty-five, novelists who spent four hundred pages watching a character work something out the slow way. Some of it will be familiar and some of it will land at exactly the wrong angle, which is usually a sign it applies. These books, poems and quotes are for anyone taking stock, or starting out, or trying to pass something on to somebody who is not quite listening yet.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Three of these ask people directly what they learnt and write down the answers. The rest are novels and memoirs where nobody is told anything and you absorb it anyway, which is generally the more durable method. They range from a boy on Corfu counting scorpions to three generations of women getting through twentieth-century China.

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

Bronnie Ware · 2011

Ware spent years as a palliative nurse and kept noticing that people at the end said roughly the same five things. Not one of them wished they had worked harder or owned more. They wished they had lived a life true to themselves rather than the one expected, stayed in touch, expressed their feelings, let themselves be happier. It sounds like a poster until you read the individual stories, at which point it stops being a list and becomes rather hard to shake off.

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · 1850

Dickens called it his favourite child, and it is the fullest novel there is about being formed by what happens to you. David is worked half to death as a boy, misjudges almost everyone in the first half, and gradually learns to tell the difference between people who charm him and people who are good to him. It is long, and it is funny, and it contains more usable observation about character than most books of advice.

30 Lessons for Living

Karl Pillemer · 2011

Pillemer, a Cornell gerontologist, interviewed more than a thousand Americans over sixty-five and asked what they had actually learnt. Some of the answers are surprising: almost nobody advised working harder, almost everybody said choose your partner with enormous care and worry a great deal less. It is closer to a thousand grandparents in one room than to a self-help book, and the sections on marriage and on regret are the ones people quote afterwards.

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · 1995

Four strangers share a cramped flat in an unnamed Indian city during the Emergency, and Mistry puts them through a great deal. Be warned that it is bleak in places. What has kept it on shelves for thirty years is the title: the lesson the book keeps returning to is that you have to hold hope and despair in balance, because letting go of either one is what actually finishes people off.

My Family and Other Animals

Gerald Durrell · 1956

The Durrells move to Corfu in 1935 and ten-year-old Gerald spends five years looking at scorpions, tortoises and his own eccentric relatives with equal attention. It is one of the funniest books in English and it teaches something quite serious by example rather than instruction: that the quality of a life has a great deal to do with the quality of the attention you pay it. Nobody in the book is told a lesson. You simply absorb one.

Wild Swans

Jung Chang · 1991

Three generations of women in China: a grandmother sold as a warlord’s concubine, a mother who joined the Communist Party as an idealist, and Chang herself, who lived through the Cultural Revolution and got out. It is a family memoir and it is also the clearest available demonstration that what a person learns about the world depends enormously on when they happened to be born into it.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 1952

An old fisherman who has caught nothing for eighty-four days hooks a marlin larger than his boat, fights it for three days, and brings home a skeleton. A hundred pages, and people have argued about the lesson ever since: whether it is about defeat, or about the fact that how you conduct yourself during the fight is the only part you get to keep. Read it once at twenty and again at fifty and it is not the same book.

Poems about life lessons

Advice, delivered by the usual suspects

A thirteen-year-old who had already worked out the important thing, a tedious old man in a play whose son is not listening, and a schoolteacher of forty-five years with nothing to prove. Each takes a minute.

“My Kingdom” (extract)

Louisa May Alcott, 1845

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell,
And very hard I find the task
Of governing it well;
For passion tempts and troubles me,
A wayward will misleads,
And selfishness its shadow casts
On all my words and deeds.

I do not ask for any crown
But that which all may win,
Nor seek to conquer any world
Except the one within.

Alcott was thirteen when she wrote this, which is either dispiriting or encouraging depending on your mood. The lesson she had already worked out is the one most people spend decades arriving at: the only territory you have any real authority over is the one behind your own eyes, and governing it well is considerably harder than it looks from outside.

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from “Hamlet” (Polonius’s advice)

William Shakespeare, 1603

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act.
…
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
…
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend.
…
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Worth remembering that Shakespeare puts this in the mouth of Polonius, a tedious old man nobody in the play takes seriously, and that his son is barely listening. That is part of the joke and part of the point: good advice is almost always delivered by somebody irritating, at the wrong moment, to a person who will have to find it out for themselves anyway. The last three lines survived regardless.

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“A Little Song of Life”

Lizette Woodworth Reese, 1900

Glad that I live am I;
That the sky is blue;
Glad for the country lanes,
And the fall of dew.

After the sun the rain;
After the rain the sun;
This is the way of life,
Till the work be done.

All that we need to do,
Be we low or high,
Is to see that we grow
Nearer the sky.

Reese taught in Baltimore schools for forty-five years, so she had watched a great many people grow up and had time to work out what mattered. Twelve lines, no instruction beyond the last four, and the middle stanza is the entire lesson: after the sun the rain, after the rain the sun. Not a promise that things improve. A statement that they alternate, and always have.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about life lessons to keep

Short lines, most of which will make more sense in about a decade.

We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey

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Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley

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I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

Bronnie Ware

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Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

Maya Angelou

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Nobody learns a thing from being told it. You learn it the day you finally recognise that you are living inside the sentence somebody said to you fifteen years ago.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Where things settle

A few short practices for the quiet needed to notice what you have already worked out.

Why One Small Thing Can Change Your Day

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A short talk on how one small, deliberate thing can quietly change the shape of a whole day.

Listen Now For Free

Meditation for Peace, Stillness and Presence

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A quiet practice for stepping out of the noise for a few minutes, which is usually where anything you have actually learnt makes itself heard.

Listen Now For Free

Healing Doesn’t End. It Deepens.

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On why healing isn’t a finish line you cross once, but something that keeps deepening — gentler company for the long haul.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations — twenty-one days is roughly how long it takes for a small idea to stop being an idea and start being something you do.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Life Lessons

Where should I start?

Start with The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware, which is short and has more effect than its length suggests, or 30 Lessons for Living by Karl Pillemer if you would rather hear from a thousand people who are still here. For a novel, David Copperfield contains more usable observation about character than most books of advice.

What do people actually say they learnt, at the end?

Remarkably consistent things, and none of them are about achievement. Across both Ware’s palliative work and Pillemer’s thousand interviews the same items come up: choose your partner carefully, say the thing while the person is alive to hear it, stay in touch with friends, worry very much less than you do, and live a life that is recognisably your own rather than the one that was expected.

Which quotes about life lessons are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience” (John Dewey), “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him” (Aldous Huxley) and “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better” (Maya Angelou). You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

Can you actually learn a life lesson from a book?

Not in the sense of being told it and thereby knowing it. What a book can do is put the sentence in your head early, so that when the situation finally arrives you recognise it instead of being surprised by it. That is why the same novel is a different book at twenty and at fifty. The words have not changed. You have caught up with them.

Life Lessons

Prescribed reading

Advice, delivered by the usual suspects

Quotes about life lessons to keep

Where things settle

Reading for Life Lessons

Where should I start?

What do people actually say they learnt, at the end?

Which quotes about life lessons are worth keeping?

Can you actually learn a life lesson from a book?

More prescriptions await.