Welcome to the world of Mark Manson, where raw honesty meets profound wisdom. Mark Manson is a contemporary author and blogger renowned for his refreshing take on self-help and personal development. With a no-nonsense approach, Manson cuts through the fluff of traditional self-help rhetoric, offering insights that are as practical as they are profound. His words resonate with millions worldwide, challenging conventional thinking and inspiring individuals to lead more authentic, fulfilling lives.
In this collection, we delve into some of Mark Manson’s most thought-provoking quotes. Whether you’re seeking motivation, perspective, or simply a dose of truth, you’ll find his words both enlightening and empowering. These quotes encapsulate Manson’s unique perspective on topics ranging from happiness and relationships to success and resilience. So, whether you’re here for a quick dose of inspiration or a deeper exploration of Manson’s philosophy, dive in and discover the wisdom of Mark Manson.
OK, I’m as lazy as the next guy. Full disclosure. And I often feel guilty about it. Mark Manson
Our moral philosophy determines our values – what we care about and what we don’t care about – and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives. Mark Manson
I’m constantly obsessing about brand. I think of my books in terms of brand. I think of my blog articles in terms of branding. How does it fit my branding? I think in terms of demographics. Mark Manson
I started my blog back in 2009 because every Internet business and marketing seminar I watched at the time told me I had to. I had been trying to get a business started selling dating and life advice and was struggling. Mark Manson
What I really, really love is writing. If I can just write and make a really nice living out of that, why would I change that? Mark Manson
Many people come to self-help material because they feel like something is wrong with them or the way they are. The problem is that anything that tells you how to improve your life is also implying that there is something inherently wrong with you the way you are. Mark Manson
Life is a never-ending stream of problems that must be confronted, surmounted, and/or solved. Mark Manson
The American Dream is simple: it’s the unwavering belief that anybody – you, me, your friends, your neighbors, grandma Verna – can become exceedingly successful, and all it takes is the right amount of work, ingenuity, and determination. Mark Manson
Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, ‘Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts – oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you’ doesn’t actually exist.’ I loved the minimalist approach of it. Mark Manson
There is no such thing as an optimum life. Mark Manson
We all have great aspirations for ourselves, but if you expect yourself to change the world tomorrow, then you’re going to just drown yourself in anxiety and constant feelings of inadequacy. Mark Manson
We’re not accustomed to judging things on philosophical importance. Mark Manson
Be motivated by something beyond simply money or glory. Mark Manson
Seeking approval and people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel. Mark Manson
I think my approach to a creative career was very entrepreneurial. Even though I’m a writer, I’ve always viewed my work much in the same way as a startup or marketer might view their work. Mark Manson
The truth is, I do some of my best writing at 3 A.M. while blasting ‘Every Time I Die’ into my ear drums. Mark Manson
One thing that I think most people don’t notice is that if you’re sitting around telling yourself, ‘I want to be happier,’ there’s a kind of subconscious message that you’re also telling yourself at the same time, which is, ‘What I have is not enough.’ Mark Manson
When the standard of success becomes merely acting – when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite – we propel ourselves ahead. Mark Manson
I’m your typical highly educated, progressive white dude. I’ve lived my life resisting racism both within myself and in the society around me. Mark Manson
It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn’t treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn’t hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them. Mark Manson
The first step in making better choices is to simply be brutally honest about your own behavior to yourself. What are the choices you are making? How are you spending your time? What are you neglecting that you shouldn’t? Mark Manson
When people lay around whining to their therapists and ex-wives that they’re finally going to ‘change’ themselves, they are promising something imaginary and made up. Mark Manson
Success is self-defined. You can choose what you think success is, and you can always change your mind. Mark Manson
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us. Mark Manson
I think that, pretty much, any good thing taken to extremes can become a bad thing. Mark Manson
If everybody just stops caring about politics, we’re going to lose the reins on our government. Mark Manson
Every new conversation, every new relationship, brings new challenges and opportunities for honest expression. Mark Manson
Here’s a pro-tip: there’s no such thing as a ‘gym person.’ There are just people who go to the gym. Similarly, there’s no such thing as a ‘productive person.’ There are just people who do productive things fairly often. Mark Manson
You can always do something about the problems life gives you. Mark Manson
Just because you fall in love with someone doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good partner for you to be with over the long term. Mark Manson
Death is important for a couple reasons. The first is that death creates scarcity in our life, which therefore gives our decisions meaning and value. From a practical point of view, it therefore makes sense that we keep our own deaths in mind when deciding how to use our time. Mark Manson
By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship. Mark Manson
The reason we fall in love with certain music and writing is we connect with it on a very personal level. Mark Manson
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life’s problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life’s ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price. Mark Manson
A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically. Mark Manson
Whether you’re from Egypt or Argentina or Singapore or Canada, you have a need to feel important, a need to feel secure, and a need to feel loved. The culture and economics just determine how those needs are expressed. Mark Manson
I can’t really stand self-help stuff myself. Mark Manson
I was a big party guy in my twenties, and kind of a playboy as well. I adopted a lot of values and goals that were fairly superficial and, in many cases, self-destructive. They looked cool and sounded sexy on the surface, but underneath, there was no real meaning going on, just a lot of escapism. Mark Manson
Everything has an opportunity cost, and the big things we want in life – like happiness and healthy relationships and wealth – they all have big opportunity costs. Mark Manson
The motivation to do anything – like change your entire life around – doesn’t just come from some magical, mystical place within you. Action is both the effect of motivation and the cause of it. Mark Manson
Aside from birthing me my first grey hairs and keeping me up at night more times than I’d like to count, ‘The Subtle Art’ taught me a lot about the nature of work. And a lot of that had to do with how my perception of the work itself evolved over the course of writing the book. Mark Manson
Self Help is a notoriously crowded market, but I believe that I’ve successfully differentiated myself in a few ways. For one, most demographic data shows that millennials think/act/see the world differently, and I don’t think there’s much personal development stuff out there that caters to millennial attitudes and experiences very well. Mark Manson
The first and perhaps most important thing to realize about being happier in life is to stop trying to be so happy in life. Mark Manson
I had to decide that, you know what, I don’t know who the hell I am or what I’m doing, but I do know that historically and scientifically and anecdotally, and anyone who is not an idiot knows, that waking up early and starting the day off with a nice, simple routine is a healthy and productive way to live one’s life. Mark Manson
Obviously, we all want to feel pleasure. It can’t be one of our highest priorities because, simply put, anything worthwhile in life is going to be un-pleasurable at times. Pleasure is the type of thing that if you get the other stuff right, pleasure will happen on its own. Mark Manson
Many people get into a relationship as a way to compensate for something they lack or hate within themselves. This is a one-way ticket to a toxic relationship because it makes your love conditional – you will love your partner as long as they help you feel better about yourself. Mark Manson
If I ask you, ‘What do you want out of life?’ and you say something like, ‘I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,’ it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything. Everyone wants that. Mark Manson
When most people set out to change their lives, they often focus on all the external stuff, like a new job or a new location or new friends or a new romantic prospects and on and on. The reality is that changing your life starts with changing the way you see everything in your life. Mark Manson
I believe productivity is a deeply personal thing. We all have different brains and, therefore, different preferences, perspectives, and situations where we feel most effective. Mark Manson
Life is a big and complex game. It’s the largest open world game known to date. We all begin with different starting stats, and we’re placed into a wide range of environments that can either give us advantages or disadvantages. Mark Manson
I hate calendars, and after running my own online business for almost 10 years, I still don’t have one. Mark Manson
Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life’s legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly. Mark Manson
I think it’s always been normal for humans to compare themselves to each other, but we’re so hyper-connected all the time now that it’s driving us insane. Mark Manson
You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. Mark Manson
Don’t hang out with a bunch of people who drag you down when you can hang out with one person who makes you feel good. Mark Manson
How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there’s a really important distinction to understand is that you can’t completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don’t ever make that separation for what goes on with them. Mark Manson
I think most people who try to start a business, they realise very quickly that one of the biggest hurdles is having to be self-determined. Mark Manson
Real happiness comes from discovering a sense of importance in one’s actions and in one’s life. Mark Manson
At the core of all human behavior, the good feelings we all want are more or less the same. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing to sustain. Mark Manson
My belief is that we all already care about something important. We all already know what is important and meaningful for ourselves. The problem is just that many of us have lost touch with it. Mark Manson
Little things, when we’re caught up and fretting about them, often appear to be big and meaningful and world-changing in the moment they are happening. Mark Manson
Approaching people looking for something in return isn’t a relationship, it’s a transaction. Mark Manson
We usually think of improving our life by adding stuff – like more things, more success, more friends. I think the starting place should be removing stuff – try a month without Instagram; try a week without looking at fashion pictures. See how that affects your life, your friendships, and your ability to focus on other things. Mark Manson
I think people who become compulsive about fitness or eating right, a lot of the time it’s out of fear that they’re going to lose control or that they’re not good enough, so I think anything done out of fear or motivated by fear is often unhealthy. Mark Manson
The fear of failure never goes away. In many ways, you could argue that success multiplies the opportunities for failure. It’s just more of an argument for becoming more comfortable with it. Mark Manson
Happiness is not something you achieve. It’s not something you do or someplace you get to. Happiness is something you inhabit. Mark Manson
Generally, our first idea of what our business is going to be is not the right one. It takes a few iterations; to get there, you have to be able to let go. Mark Manson
What’s interesting about emotions is that the more you try to control them or to bottle them up, the stronger they get. So, the more I try to stop being sad, the sadder I’m going to get. Mark Manson
One of the beautiful things about Tyler Durden in ‘Fight Club’ is that he seems to understand the implicit vanity and self-absorption that comes with the desire to improve oneself. Mark Manson
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not. Mark Manson
We start caring way too much about that new TV show or how many likes we’re getting on Facebook or what our mother will think of our new house plant. These are bad values that turn us into frivolous people. Mark Manson
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. Mark Manson
There’s a paradox with self-improvement, and it is this: the ultimate goal of all self-improvement is to reach the point where you no longer feel the need to improve yourself. Mark Manson
I love massive books: books so big, like bricks, you could drown yourself in a pool with them if you’re not careful. Mark Manson
People want to offer opportunities to people they care about. They want to help people they believe are good people or have shared life experiences with. Mark Manson
‘War and Peace’ may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being. Mark Manson
Self-publishing provides more freedom and control, but it also provides more risk. Publishing provides more credibility and promotion, but your vision can also get lost in the bureaucratic machinery of the business. It’s a tough decision to make. Mark Manson
In 2008, after holding down a day job for all of six weeks, I gave up on the whole job thing to pursue an online business. At the time, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I figured if I was going to be broke and miserable, I might as well be while working on my own terms. Mark Manson
That first morning that I woke up self-employed, terror quickly consumed me. I found myself sitting with my laptop and realized, for the first time, that I was entirely responsible for all of my own decisions, as well as the consequences of those decisions. Mark Manson
One of the problems of modern society, or the post-Internet age, is that there are so many things bombarding us that we could care about. I think it’s more important than ever to really get clear and focus on what’s worth caring about and what’s just noise or distraction. Mark Manson
Long-term, perpetual travel is the dream of many. But surprisingly, for such a popular desire, few people realize how accessible it is. Mark Manson
Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration. Mark Manson
Like anything worth doing in life, happiness takes time and patience and consistency. Mark Manson
If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have. Mark Manson
Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other’s faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few years at most. Mark Manson
For whatever reason, when it came out in 1995, ‘Infinite Jest’ became a cultural event. It was the massive book that was ‘cool’ for all the Gen Xers to read. Mark Manson
I felt that no self-help book had been written for millennials yet, so my ultimate goal was to write it. Mark Manson
True love – that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy – is a choice. It’s a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances. Mark Manson
For all we know, we are the only shot the universe has at intelligent self-organization. Therefore, we need to take it seriously. Mark Manson
Writing/reading is like visiting another person’s brain. And a short book or article is like a short stay. You come in, have a coffee, talk about the weather or sports, and then move on. Mark Manson
It’s easy to want the benefits of something; it’s hard to want the cost. Mark Manson
I speak four languages, and I’ve seen some of the most spectacular locations in the world and met hundreds of fascinating people. Mark Manson
At some point, most of us reach a place where we’re afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we’re already good at. This confines us and stifles us. Mark Manson
I think humility – which I think is a very good value to adopt – is basically an extension of understanding your own ignorance. Mark Manson
Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite. Mark Manson
We don’t know what change is because we don’t know what the hell we are. If I wake up tomorrow and do the exact opposite of everything I do today, am I a changed person? Or am I simply the same person who decided to try something different? Mark Manson
In a strange way, I feel like we need to cultivate more boredom in our lives: like, boredom needs to be okay again. It needs to be seen as a good thing, and I think it’s definitely a good thing for relationships. Mark Manson
People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they’re looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings. Mark Manson
As soon as you try to eliminate a thought or emotion, you make it stronger. Mark Manson
There’s nothing wrong with having goals, but obsessing over them is often counterproductive because, in reality, achieving a goal isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Mark Manson
