Words matter. These are the best Mark Manson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is no such thing as an optimum life.
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.
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.
We’re not accustomed to judging things on philosophical importance.
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.
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.
Happiness is not something you achieve. It’s not something you do or someplace you get to. Happiness is something you inhabit.
Every new conversation, every new relationship, brings new challenges and opportunities for honest expression.
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.
It’s easy to want the benefits of something; it’s hard to want the cost.
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.
I think that, pretty much, any good thing taken to extremes can become a bad thing.
I love massive books: books so big, like bricks, you could drown yourself in a pool with them if you’re not careful.
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.’
I hate calendars, and after running my own online business for almost 10 years, I still don’t have one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life is a never-ending stream of problems that must be confronted, surmounted, and/or solved.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
As soon as you try to eliminate a thought or emotion, you make it stronger.
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.
‘War and Peace’ may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being.
Like anything worth doing in life, happiness takes time and patience and consistency.
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.
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.
If everybody just stops caring about politics, we’re going to lose the reins on our government.
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.
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?
The first and perhaps most important thing to realize about being happier in life is to stop trying to be so happy in life.
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.
Seeking approval and people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel.
The truth is, I do some of my best writing at 3 A.M. while blasting ‘Every Time I Die’ into my ear drums.
A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically.
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.
For all we know, we are the only shot the universe has at intelligent self-organization. Therefore, we need to take it seriously.
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.
Be motivated by something beyond simply money or glory.
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.