Mark Manson Quotes

When in doubt, check your intentions.

Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room. Everybody wants that. It’s easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

We all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards than others. And while it’s easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with.

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. 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.

I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.

But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better — toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects.

La Ley de la Retrocesión”, que presenta la idea de que mientras más persigas el sentirte bien todo el tiempo, más insatisfecho estarás; pues perseguir algo sólo refuerza el hecho de que careces de ello.

Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.

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.

Our values are imperfect and incomplete, and to assume that they are perfect and complete is to put us in a dangerously dogmatic mindset that breeds entitlement and avoids responsibility.

You can’t think your way out of feelings. But you can act your way into new ones.

If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering — for what purpose?

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The most disciplined people aren't fighting their emotions; they've just rearranged them so that doing the "right" thing feels easy.

And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.