Top 280 Mark Manson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Bukowski once wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.” Looking.”

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Mark Manson

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

280. “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

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

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Mark Manson

286. “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

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

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Mark Manson

292. “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

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

— Mark Manson

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

— Mark Manson

295. “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

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

— Mark Manson

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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