Top 280 Mark Manson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “With great responsibility comes great power.”

— Mark Manson

2. “Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.”

— Mark Manson

Featured in: Resilience Quotes

3. “Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”

— Mark Manson

4. “The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

— Mark Manson

5. “You can’t win if you don’t play.”

— Mark Manson

6. “Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.”

— Mark Manson

7. “What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” the relevant question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?”

— Mark Manson

8. “Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.”

— Mark Manson

9. “We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.”

— Mark Manson

10. “The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.”

— Mark Manson

11. “Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law” – the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”

— Mark Manson

12. “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”

— Mark Manson

13. “The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.”

— Mark Manson

14. “That’s simply reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.”

— Mark Manson

15. “You cannot be a powerful and life-changing presence to some people without being a joke or an embarrassment to others.”

— Mark Manson

16. “My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.”

— Mark Manson

17. “Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”

— Mark Manson

18. “Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress.”

— Mark Manson

19. “Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense.”

— Mark Manson

20. “Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

— Mark Manson

21. “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”

— Mark Manson

22. “We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.”

— Mark Manson

23. “Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone. It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you.”

— Mark Manson

24. “When in doubt, check your intentions.”

— Mark Manson

25. “Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.”

— Mark Manson

26. “Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.”

— Mark Manson

27. “Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.”

— Mark Manson

28. “The older you get, the more experienced you get, the less significantly each new experience affects you.”

— Mark Manson

29. “The Buddha said that suffering is like being shot by two arrows. The first arrow is the physical pain – it’s the metal piercing the skin, the force colliding into the body. The second arrow is the mental pain, the meaning and emotion we attach to the being struck, the narratives that we spin in our minds about whether we deserved or didn’t deserve what happened. In many cases, our mental pain is far worse than any physical pain. In most cases, it lasts far longer.”

— Mark Manson

30. “I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory.”

— Mark Manson

31. “If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering – for what purpose?”

— Mark Manson

32. “We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing we essentially have no identity at all.”

— Mark Manson

33. “Our struggles determine our successes.”

— Mark Manson

34. “Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.” – The Dalai Lama.”

— Mark Manson

35. “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin.”

— Mark Manson

36. “Ask yourself this: why would you want to be intimate with someone who doesn’t appreciate you? Why would you ever settle for such a person? Because she’s hot? Come on, have a little more self-respect. Have some higher standards.”

— Mark Manson

37. “Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.”

— Mark Manson

38. “Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress – the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Sometimes.”

— Mark Manson

39. “The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.”

— Mark Manson

40. “This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.”

— Mark Manson

41. “The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”

— Mark Manson

42. “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

— Mark Manson

43. “Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.”

— Mark Manson

44. “Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times. Let’s.”

— Mark Manson

45. “Why do you care that I’m dead when you’re still so afraid to live?” I.”

— Mark Manson

46. “Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”

— Mark Manson

47. “Because happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Joy doesn’t just sprout out of the ground like daisies and rainbows. Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.”

— Mark Manson

48. “If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something – anything, really – and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself. I call this the “do something” principle. After.”

— Mark Manson

49. “True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Sometimes.”

— Mark Manson

50. “The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice – whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.”

— Mark Manson