Mark Manson Quotes

All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. Nonstop. Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that's what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That's the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average. The deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough. So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction.

After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause.

You crave honesty from others but fear it from yourself.

But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them. And because entitled people always need to feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their time thinking about themselves. After all, it takes a lot of energy and work to convince yourself that your shit doesn’t stink, especially when you’ve actually been living in a toilet.

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.

Certainty is the enemy of growth.

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

Your purpose is not found, it is created by doing things that feel fun and useful.

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law” — the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory.
And life doesn’t work that way.
Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for. […] Our struggles determine our successes.

We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. Hell, we often fight over who gets to be responsible for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important, because that's where the real learning comes from. That's where the real-life improvement comes from. To simply blame others is only to hurt yourself.

"You know, it's funny. We tend to always assume other people are thinking about us as much as we're thinking about ourselves. But the truth is, that everyone else is too busy worrying about what other people are thinking about them, to bother noticing us in the first place".

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.

The happiest people are not the ones with the most options, but the ones who are most satisfied with their choices.