Summary of The School of Life & Alain de Botton's The School of Life

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 We are often the last people to know what is going on inside us. We suffer because there is no easy way to introspection. We are not a fixed destination, but an eternally mobile, unfocused, and vaporous specter.#2 Emotional skepticism is the recognition that our own minds can be faulty and misleading. It is the first step towards emotional maturity, which involves the understanding that we will never know everything, and the willingness to accept that fact.#3 The presence of the unknown past colors and sharply distorts our perceptions of the present. We interpret what is happening in the present through expectations fostered in long years whose real nature we have forgotten.#4 The picture doesn't show any of these things. The person who looks at it and the way they elaborate on it reveals far more about their emotional inheritance than it does about the image itself.