Top 280 Mark Manson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual.”

— Mark Manson

202. “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

203. “Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of equilibrium, some limitation that has been exceeded. And like our physical pain, our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or even undesirable.”

— Mark Manson

204. “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

205. “That my most important values are honesty, empathy, and intellectual curiosity. That I’m unwilling to tolerate women who don’t make me happy, no matter how hot they are.”

— Mark Manson

206. “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

207. “Nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.”

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

209. “Science is arguably the most effective religion because it is the first religion that is able to evolve and improve upon itself.”

— Mark Manson

210. “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

211. “Many celebrities are probably just as clueless about life as the people who gawk at them and follow their every move.”

— Mark Manson

212. “Despite dreaming about making a living through his art, the real potential of becoming An Artist Nobody Likes was far, far scarier than remaining An Artist Nobody’s Heard Of. At least he was comfortable with and used to being An Artist Nobody’s Heard Of.”

— Mark Manson

213. “Because construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as the opposite. It takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizing to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all.”

— Mark Manson

214. “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

215. “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

216. “When viewed from this perspective, personal growth can actually be quite scientific. Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and important; that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data. There.”

— Mark Manson

217. “This is the fundamental problem of hope – not an educated Thinking Brain, but an uneducated Feeling Brain, a Feeling Brain that has adopted and accepted poor value judgments about itself and the world.”

— Mark Manson

218. “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

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

— Mark Manson

220. “Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments.”

— Mark Manson

221. “The belief always takes precedence. Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change. In.”

— Mark Manson

222. “Hope doesn’t care about the problems that have already been solved. Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved. Because the better the world gets, the more we have to lose. And the more we have to lose, the less we feel we have to hope for.”

— Mark Manson

223. “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

224. “Everybody on this planet shares a handful of universal emotional realities: ambition, shame, alienation, loneliness, achievement, regret, hardship, friendship, love, heartbreak. We’ve all experienced it. The facts change, the feelings are the same.”

— Mark Manson

225. “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

226. “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

227. “Ever notice that the most important moments in life are always accompanied by somebody in a robe? Weddings, graduations, funerals, court hearings, judicial committee hearings, open heart surgeries, baptisms, and yes, even church sermons.”

— Mark Manson

228. “George Orwell said that to see what’s in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

— Mark Manson

229. “Like a surgeon’s scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It can uplift us, and it can destroy us. Just as there are healthy and damaging forms of confidence, and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also healthy and damaging forms of hope. And the difference between the two is not always clear.”

— Mark Manson

230. “After all, the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear. Disappointment Panda would be the hero that none of us would want but all of us would need.”

— Mark Manson

231. “The two go together. You cannot be an attractive and life-changing presence to some women without being a joke or an embarrassment to others. You simply can’t. You have to be controversial. You have to polarize. It’s the name of the game. And getting good at the game is learning to open yourself up enough emotionally, learning.”

— Mark Manson

232. “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

233. “Life is essentially an endless series of problems,” the panda told me.”

— Mark Manson

234. “People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. Our.”

— Mark Manson

235. “Bad ideologies such as racism or sexism persist due to ignorance far more than malice.”

— Mark Manson

236. “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. Likely people you know too. That doesn’t minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean you aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances.”

— Mark Manson

237. “Freedom itself demands discomfort. It demands dissatisfaction. Because the freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own. The lower our tolerance for pain, the more we indulge in fake freedoms, the less we will be able to uphold the virtues necessary to allow a free, democratic society to function.”

— Mark Manson

238. “I try to live with few rules, but one that I’ve adopted over the years is this: if it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up. I.”

— Mark Manson

239. “Being slapped also taught me that you can’t always control how people react to you. Some people are completely out of their minds or they behave very inappropriately. You can’t help this. You cannot control what happens in every interaction. The sooner you accept this, the better off you will be.”

— Mark Manson

240. “And again, for the love of god, if you don’t find her attractive, don’t pursue her.”

— Mark Manson

241. “But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.”

— Mark Manson

242. “We all possess some degree of narcissism. It’s inevitable, as everything we ever know or experience has happened to us or been learned by us. The nature of our consciousness dictates that everything happen through us. It’s only natural, then, that our immediate assumption is that we are at the center of everything – because we are at the center of everything we experience.”

— Mark Manson

243. “Democracy can exist only when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some things you might want for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way.”

— Mark Manson

244. “There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident.”

— Mark Manson

245. “If you think you can kiss her, you probably could have ten minutes ago.”

— Mark Manson

246. “There are some experiences that you can have only when you’ve lived in the same place for five years, when you’ve been with the same person for over a decade, when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half your lifetime. Now that I’m in my thirties, I can finally recognize that commitment, in its own way, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would otherwise never be available to me, no matter where I went or what I did.”

— Mark Manson

247. “If I’m ever able to hope for nothing, it will be for the simple reason that I’m already with you.”

— Mark Manson

248. “A needy man’s actions and words will therefore be primarily motivated by impressing and winning approval from others.”

— Mark Manson

249. “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.”

— Mark Manson

250. “It was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself – especially the worst parts of himself – and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt.”

— Mark Manson