Top 280 Mark Manson Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “If there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything.”

— Mark Manson

152. “The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.”

— Mark Manson

153. “Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”

— Mark Manson

154. “Failure itself is a relative concept. If my metric had been to become an anarcho-communist revolutionary, then my complete failure to make any money between 2007 and 2008 would have been a raving success. But if, like most people, my metric had been to simply find a first serious job that could pay some bills right out of school, I was a dismal failure.”

— Mark Manson

155. “I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.”

— Mark Manson

156. “When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.”

— Mark Manson

157. “Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.”

— Mark Manson

158. “We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes.”

— Mark Manson

159. “A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else” – a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. 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

160. “Why don’t we do things we know we should do? Because we don’t feel like it. Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason, but, rather, of emotion. Self-control is an emotional problem. Laziness is an emotional problem. Procrastination is an emotional problem. Underachievement is an emotional problem. Impulsiveness is an emotional problem. This sucks, because emotional problems are much harder to deal with than logical ones.”

— Mark Manson

161. “The mark of an unhealthy relationship is two people who try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves. Rather, a healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other.”

— Mark Manson

162. “We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without actually ever reaching truth or perfection.”

— Mark Manson

163. “Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. The internet has not just open-sourced information, it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.”

— Mark Manson

164. “I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable – that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death.”

— Mark Manson

165. “The problem isn’t that we don’t know how not to get punched in the face. The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching back, we decided we deserved it.”

— Mark Manson

166. “We all have our chosen methods to numb the pain of our problems, and in moderate doses there is nothing wrong with this. But the longer we avoid and the longer we numb, the more painful it will be when we finally do confront our issues.”

— Mark Manson

167. “There’s a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the world. Anything that shakes up that comfort – even if it could potentially make your life better – is inherently scary.”

— Mark Manson

168. “I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.”

— Mark Manson

169. “Our psyche needs hope to survive the way a fish needs water. Hope is the fuel for our mental engine.”

— Mark Manson

170. “Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again?”

— Mark Manson

171. “We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. Hell, we often fight over who gets to be responsible for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important, because that’s where the real learning comes from. That’s where the real-life improvement comes from. To.”

— Mark Manson

172. “As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn’t care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much. Other people ruled my world without my even knowing. I thought happiness was a destiny not choice. I thought love was something that just happened, not something you worked for.”

— Mark Manson

173. “We all have emotional blind spots. Often they have to do with the emotions that we were taught were inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions appropriately. But this task is hugely important, and worth the effort.”

— Mark Manson

174. “Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting.”

— Mark Manson

175. “Ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion.”

— Mark Manson

176. “Before we can look at our values and prioritizations and change them into better, healthier ones, we must first become uncertain of our current values. We must intellectually strip them away, see their faults and biases, see how they don’t fit in with much of the rest of the world, to stare our own ignorance in the face and concede, because our own ignorance is greater than us all.”

— Mark Manson

177. “The constant desire to change yourself then becomes its own sort of addiction: each cycle of “changing yourself” results in similar failures of self-control, therefore making you feel as though you need to “change yourself” all over again.”

— Mark Manson

178. “There are no other opportunities to keep growing and improving, and yet it’s growth that generates happiness, not a long list of arbitrary achievements.”

— Mark Manson

179. “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. 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

180. “Get out there and expose yourself. Open yourself up and find what makes you happy. Yes, that will mean you’ll probably get hurt. But so what? The best things in life don’t come easily.”

— Mark Manson

181. “We are actually often happier with less. When we’re overloaded with opportunities and options, we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting.”

— Mark Manson

182. “There is no correct dogma or perfect ideology. There is only what your experience has shown you to be right for you – and even then, that experience is probably somewhat wrong too. And because you and I and everybody else all have differing needs and personal histories and life circumstances, we will all inevitably come to different “correct” answers about what our lives mean and how they should be lived.”

— Mark Manson

183. “The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation.”

— Mark Manson

184. “When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.”

— Mark Manson

185. “But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.”

— Mark Manson

186. “Leaders need their followers to be perpetually dissatisfied; it’s good for the leadership business. If everything were perfect and great, there’d be no reason to follow anybody.”

— Mark Manson

187. “People deny and blame others for their problems for the simple reason that it’s easy and feels good, while solving problems is hard and often feels bad. Forms of blame and denial give us a quick high. They are a way to temporarily escape our problems, and that escape can provide us a quick rush that makes us feel better.”

— Mark Manson

188. “Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years ago, I imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our certainties today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives. They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will laugh at our rituals and.”

— Mark Manson

189. “If you feel crappy, it’s because that’s your brain telling you that there’s a problem unaddressed or an issue unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it. Then like everything else, positive emotions go away, because more problems inevitably emerge.”

— Mark Manson

190. “Sadly, to deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.”

— Mark Manson

191. “It’s prosperity that causes crises in hope. It’s having six hundred channels and nothing to watch. It’s having fifteen matches on Tinder but no one good to date. It’s having two thousand restaurants to choose from but feeling sick of all the same old food. Prosperity makes meaning more difficult. It makes pain more acute.”

— Mark Manson

192. “And I don’t care how scientific you think you are or how many letters you have after your name, you’re one of us, bucko. You’re a crazy Feeling Brain-piloted meat robot just like the rest of us.”

— Mark Manson

193. “Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.”

— Mark Manson

194. “Evolution rewards the most powerful creatures, and power is determined by the ability to access, harness, and manipulate information effectively.”

— Mark Manson

195. “We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it.”

— Mark Manson

196. “Because there’s an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don’t measure up, that we’re not good enough, that things aren’t as great as they could be.”

— Mark Manson

197. “Our crises of hope often start with a basic sense that we do not have control over ourselves or our destiny.”

— Mark Manson

198. “But I’ll say this: if you consistently find it difficult to keep a woman interested in conversation; if you suffer from large amounts of anxiety around women; if you constantly feel a need to prove something to others or yourself, then there’s something there. Trust me, there’s something there. And there’s something you’re not expressing or some emotion you’re not in touch with. And that’s fine. We all go through it.”

— Mark Manson

199. “I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating.”

— Mark Manson

200. “What is objectively true about your situation is not as important as how you come to see the situation, how you choose to measure it and value it.”

— Mark Manson