Mark Manson Quotes

Your relationships aren’t random. They’re emotional remixes of your childhood.

But once you notice the same old melodies, you can stop auditioning for roles that keep breaking your fucking heart.

"Life is about loving people, not about trying to impress them".

Being busy is not being able to add anything else to your calendar. Being fulfilled is not wanting to add anything else to your calendar. Don’t confuse one for the other.

Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is “solving.” If you’re avoiding your problems or feel like you don’t have any problems, then you’re going to make yourself miserable. If you feel like you have problems that you can’t solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable. The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place. To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a top-ten article on the Huffington Post or from any specific guru or teacher. It doesn’t magically appear when you finally make enough money to add on that extra room to the house. You don’t find it waiting for you in a place, an idea, a job — or even a book, for that matter. Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress — the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other — in other words, they're using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other's support. ...The mark of an unhealthy relationship is when two people who try to solve each other's problems in order to feel good about themselves. Rather, a healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems in other to feel good about each other.

Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for.

We don't need more time, we need less fear. The calendar isn't the problem—your lack of courage is.

The worst thing that ever happened to you will either define you or refine you. You choose.

Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. It never changes. Even when you’re happy. Even when you’re farting fairy dust. Even when you win the lottery and buy a small fleet of Jet Skis, you still won’t know what the hell you’re doing. Don’t ever forget that. And don’t ever be afraid of that.

Improving your life does not remove your problems. It simply exchanges them for better problems.

As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn't care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much. Other people ruled my world without my even knowing. I thought happiness was a destiny not choice. I thought love was something that just happened, not something you worked for.

One of those realizations was this: that life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention.
This isn’t to say that all suffering is equal. Some suffering is certainly more painful than other suffering. But we all must suffer nonetheless.

Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.

deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems. As a result, many of these repressed individuals struggle to deal with problems throughout their lives. And if they can’t solve problems, then they can’t be happy.

here’s something that’s weird but true: we don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is.