Mark Manson Quotes

"I say, if you cringe over yourself, that's good. It means that you have grown. You should actually never stop cringing.

"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".

The greatest romantic relationships are when both people think they're the one who got lucky

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

You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.

Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not.

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

As alluring as it is, entitlement isolates us. Our curiosity and excitement for the world turns in upon itself and reflects our own biases and projections onto every person we meet and every event we experience. This feels sexy and enticing and may feel good for a while and sells a lot of tickets, but it’s spiritual poison.

[The author has been writing of people striving for “this fleeting sense of being part of something greater and more unknowable than themselves”]
And entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe, that we are the one suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others.

Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial.

Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. No one trusts a yes-man.

For victims, the hardest thing to do in the world is to hold themselves accountable for their problems. They’ve spent their whole life believing that others are responsible for their fate. That first step of taking responsibility for themselves is often terrifying.

Entitled people who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them, and they will receive the love they’ve always wanted.

The mark of an unhealthy relationship is 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 order to feel good about each other.

I try to live with few rules, but one that I’ve adopted over the years is this: if it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up.