Top 280 Mark Manson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.”

— Mark Manson

52. “It’s the backwards law again: the more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel. But the converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know.”

— Mark Manson

53. “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. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences.”

— Mark Manson

54. “Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.”

— Mark Manson

55. “We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.”

— Mark Manson

56. “It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change. Question.”

— Mark Manson

57. “Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.”

— Mark Manson

58. “We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”

— Mark Manson

59. “People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”

— Mark Manson

60. “We can be truly successful only at things we are willing to fail at.”

— Mark Manson

61. “The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future.”

— Mark Manson

62. “With great power comes great responsibility.” It is true. But there’s a better version of this quote, a version that actually is profound, and all you have to do is switch the nouns around: “With great responsibility comes great power.” 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. I.”

— Mark Manson

63. “We all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards than others. And while it’s easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with. People.”

— Mark Manson

64. “Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.” And.”

— Mark Manson

65. “But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them.”

— Mark Manson

66. “Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.”

— Mark Manson

67. “You don’t feel loved until you trust that the love being expressed toward you comes without any special conditions or baggage attached to it.”

— Mark Manson

68. “A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, ‘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

69. “The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we’re going to be forced to suffer by simply existing, we might as well learn how to suffer well.”

— Mark Manson

70. “Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems.”

— Mark Manson

71. “The less you talk about your shame, the more of it you have.”

— Mark Manson

72. “People who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves form learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information. It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of learning and growth.”

— Mark Manson

73. “What pain do you want in your life?”

— Mark Manson

74. “The smallest dog barks the loudest.”

— Mark Manson

75. “People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good. As political cartoonist Tim Kreider put it in a New York Times op-ed: “Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure.”

— Mark Manson

76. “Victim Mentality. Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances. This.”

— Mark Manson

77. “Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else.”

— Mark Manson

78. “Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other – in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.”

— Mark Manson

79. “Rejection exists for a reason – it’s a means to keep people apart who are not good for each other.”

— Mark Manson

80. “Psychologists sometimes refer to this concept as the ‘hedonic treadmill’: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different.”

— Mark Manson

81. “Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness.”

— Mark Manson

82. “They forgot that the world doesn’t run on information. People don’t make decisions based on truth or facts. They don’t spend their money based on data. They don’t connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings.”

— Mark Manson

83. “Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt: doubt about our own beliefs, doubt about our own feelings, doubt about what the future may hold for us unless we get out there and create it for ourselves. Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we’re wrong all the time. Because we are. Being.”

— Mark Manson

84. “Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing.”

— Mark Manson

85. “Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake, that even if it hurts you today, even if it hurts others, being honest is still the right thing to do.”

— Mark Manson

86. “We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life.”

— Mark Manson

87. “To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.”

— Mark Manson

88. “The first step to being more attractive is to see rejection as a means to eliminate women who won’t make you happy from your life. It’s a blessing, not a curse.”

— Mark Manson

89. “Instead of thinking, “I wonder if she’ll like me,” think, “I wonder what she’s like?”

— Mark Manson

90. “There is no such thing as change without pain, no growth without discomfort. It’s why it is impossible to become someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be.”

— Mark Manson

91. “There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. 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. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. It’s impossible not to be. Choosing to not consciously interpret events in our lives is still an interpretation of the events of our lives. Choosing.”

— Mark Manson

92. “Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. 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. Pain.”

— Mark Manson

93. “Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve. When a culture’s standard of success is to “be extraordinary,” it then becomes better to be at the extreme low end of the bell curve than to be in the middle, because at least there you’re still special and deserve attention.”

— Mark Manson

94. “Disappointment Panda would be the hero that none of us would want but all of us would need. He’d be the proverbial vegetables to our mental diet of junk food.”

— Mark Manson

95. “After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.”

— Mark Manson

96. “All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life. But those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionately more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man. That we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.”

— Mark Manson

97. “A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident. A rich woman doesn’t feel a need to convince anybody that she’s rich. Either you are or you are not. And if you’re dreaming of something all the time, then you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not that.”

— Mark Manson

98. “Entitlement closes in upon itself in a kind of narcissistic bubble, distorting anything and everything in such a way as to reinforce itself. People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness.”

— Mark Manson

99. “Because here’s another sneaky little truth about life. You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.”

— Mark Manson

100. “Ultimately, the most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitments, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice.”

— Mark Manson