Top 280 Mark Manson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “A needy man’s actions and words will therefore be primarily motivated by impressing and winning approval from others.”

— Mark Manson

252. “Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us. 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

253. “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

254. “Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they’re not the same thing.”

— Mark Manson

255. “Young adulthood is a period when many people struggle with values, control, and community.”

— Mark Manson

256. “Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more. 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.”

— Mark Manson

257. “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

258. “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

259. “You are going to be incompatible with most.”

— Mark Manson

260. “Maybe remind the Feeling Brain how good it feels to have exercised, how great it will feel to look good in a bathing suit this summer, how much you respect yourself when you’ve followed through on your goals, how happy you are when you live by your values, when you act as an example to the ones you love.”

— Mark Manson

261. “The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none, and the more upset we become. And it is at the heart of the paradox of progress.”

— Mark Manson

262. “We know who we are and we accept ourselves, including some of the parts we aren’t thrilled about.”

— Mark Manson

263. “I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the summit.”

— Mark Manson

264. “If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing so.”

— Mark Manson

265. “These moments of non-fuckery are the moments that most define our lives.”

— Mark Manson

266. “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.”

— Mark Manson

267. “Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life.”

— Mark Manson

268. “Honest self-questioning is difficult. It requires asking yourself simple questions that are uncomfortable to answer. In fact, in my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true.”

— Mark Manson

269. “If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. 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.” Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who don’t do well.”

— Mark Manson

270. “Take a moment and think of something that’s really bugging you. Now ask yourself why it bugs you. Chances are the answer will involve a failure of some sort. Then take that failure and ask why it seems “true” to you. What if that failure wasn’t really a failure? What if you’ve been looking at it the wrong.”

— Mark Manson

271. “But we need to reject something. Otherwise, we stand for nothing. If nothing is better or more desirable than anything else, then we are empty and our life is meaningless. We are without values and therefore live our life without any purpose.”

— Mark Manson

272. “We joke online about “first-world problems,” but we really have become victims of our own success. 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.”

— Mark Manson

273. “What if you didn’t have to prove anything to the people in your life for them to like you?”

— Mark Manson

274. “The problem is that we’re finding out that romantic love is kind of like cocaine. Like, frighteningly similar to cocaine. Like, stimulates the exact same parts of your brain as cocaine. Like, gets you high and makes you feel good for a while but also creates as many problems as it solves, as does cocaine.”

— Mark Manson

275. “I think your mind is so open your brain fell out!”10.”

— Mark Manson

276. “When moral gaps persist for a long enough time, they normalize.16 They become our default expectation.”

— Mark Manson

277. “That means everything you say and do must be done without any ulterior motive. You are simply expressing your thoughts and feelings as they come to you, without inhibition, without shame.”

— Mark Manson

278. “How attractive a man is is inversely proportional to how needy he is. The more needy in his life, the less attractive and vice-versa.”

— Mark Manson

279. “Because sharing yourself with someone doesn’t mean just physically occupying the same area. It doesn’t mean exchanging facts with one another. It means opening up about your values, desires, feelings, and dreams. It means exposing your shame and insecurities and doubts and fears. It means living with somebody on an emotional plane, inhabiting that same heart-space together because that’s the one thing we can’t ever achieve by ourselves.”

— Mark Manson

280. “A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems.”

— Mark Manson

281. “Welcome to the Feedback Loop from Hell !!!”

— Mark Manson

282. “I still thought stuff like this was about reason and evidence, not feelings and values. And values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.”

— Mark Manson

283. “Emerson once wrote, “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.”

— Mark Manson

284. “Romance novels are basically pornography for women.”

— Mark Manson

285. “YOUR values determine your behavior, not what you think she wants, not what you think others want, but what is best for you and best for the relationship.”

— Mark Manson

286. “This confines us and stifles us. We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.”

— Mark Manson

287. “Intimacy is the feeling you can completely be yourself around someone no matter what.”

— Mark Manson

288. “You care, and you desperately convince yourself that because you care, it all must have some great cosmic meaning behind it. You care because, deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid the Uncomfortable Truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance. And you – like me, like everyone – then project that imagined sense of importance onto the world around you because it gives you hope.”

— Mark Manson

289. “They feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary.”

— Mark Manson

290. “Words and appearances are merely a symptom of a greater internal problem.”

— Mark Manson

291. “Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances.”

— Mark Manson

292. “Friction is when a woman finds you to be an attractive man, but there are value differences or external circumstances that prevent her from acting on that attraction or being interested in you.”

— Mark Manson

293. “Perhaps then, we will not only realize but finally embrace the Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our purpose, and we were, and still are, nothing.”

— Mark Manson

294. “The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?”

— Mark Manson

295. “Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.”

— Mark Manson

296. “But these were side effects of a deeper, more primary lesson. And the primary lesson was this: there is nothing to be afraid of. Ever.”

— Mark Manson

297. “Hopefully by now you’re getting a clearer idea of what demographic of women you’re currently attracting and which demographic of women you’d like to attract. In the next chapter, we will get into specifics on how to pursue the correct demographic for you and become as attractive as you possibly can be.”

— Mark Manson

298. “And it took me a long time and a lot of struggle to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it. I was in love with the result – the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing – but I wasn’t in love with the process.”

— Mark Manson

299. “Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion. The two are inseparable.”

— Mark Manson