Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Manson

In a strange way, I feel like we need to cultivate more boredom in our lives: like, boredom needs to be okay again. It needs to be seen as a good thing, and I think it's definitely a good thing for relationships.

I believe productivity is a deeply personal thing. We all have different brains and, therefore, different preferences, perspectives, and situations where we feel most effective.

Every new conversation, every new relationship, brings new challenges and opportunities for honest expression.

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.

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.

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?

'War and Peace' may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being.

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.

It's easy to want the benefits of something; it's hard to want the cost.

Whether you're from Egypt or Argentina or Singapore or Canada, you have a need to feel important, a need to feel secure, and a need to feel loved. The culture and economics just determine how those needs are expressed.

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.

There is no such thing as an optimum life.

I think that, pretty much, any good thing taken to extremes can become a bad thing.

The motivation to do anything - like change your entire life around - doesn't just come from some magical, mystical place within you. Action is both the effect of motivation and the cause of it.

I think humility - which I think is a very good value to adopt - is basically an extension of understanding your own ignorance.

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 speak four languages, and I've seen some of the most spectacular locations in the world and met hundreds of fascinating people.

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.

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.

You can always do something about the problems life gives you.

The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.

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.

People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they're looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings.

Seeking approval and people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel.

When most people set out to change their lives, they often focus on all the external stuff, like a new job or a new location or new friends or a new romantic prospects and on and on. The reality is that changing your life starts with changing the way you see everything in your life.

I started my blog back in 2009 because every Internet business and marketing seminar I watched at the time told me I had to. I had been trying to get a business started selling dating and life advice and was struggling.

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.

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.

I love massive books: books so big, like bricks, you could drown yourself in a pool with them if you're not careful.

The fear of failure never goes away. In many ways, you could argue that success multiplies the opportunities for failure. It's just more of an argument for becoming more comfortable with it.

Writing/reading is like visiting another person's brain. And a short book or article is like a short stay. You come in, have a coffee, talk about the weather or sports, and then move on.

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.

I had to decide that, you know what, I don't know who the hell I am or what I'm doing, but I do know that historically and scientifically and anecdotally, and anyone who is not an idiot knows, that waking up early and starting the day off with a nice, simple routine is a healthy and productive way to live one's life.

Life is a big and complex game. It's the largest open world game known to date. We all begin with different starting stats, and we're placed into a wide range of environments that can either give us advantages or disadvantages.

Real happiness comes from discovering a sense of importance in one's actions and in one's life.

Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, 'Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts - oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you' doesn't actually exist.' I loved the minimalist approach of it.

Obviously, we all want to feel pleasure. It can't be one of our highest priorities because, simply put, anything worthwhile in life is going to be un-pleasurable at times. Pleasure is the type of thing that if you get the other stuff right, pleasure will happen on its own.

Self Help is a notoriously crowded market, but I believe that I've successfully differentiated myself in a few ways. For one, most demographic data shows that millennials think/act/see the world differently, and I don't think there's much personal development stuff out there that caters to millennial attitudes and experiences very well.

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.

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.

In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.

You can't have a pain-free life. It can't all be roses and unicorns.

Like anything worth doing in life, happiness takes time and patience and consistency.

Approaching people looking for something in return isn't a relationship, it's a transaction.

By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship.

That first morning that I woke up self-employed, terror quickly consumed me. I found myself sitting with my laptop and realized, for the first time, that I was entirely responsible for all of my own decisions, as well as the consequences of those decisions.

Our moral philosophy determines our values - what we care about and what we don't care about - and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives.

Be motivated by something beyond simply money or glory.

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.

If everybody just stops caring about politics, we're going to lose the reins on our government.

The reason we fall in love with certain music and writing is we connect with it on a very personal level.

Success is self-defined. You can choose what you think success is, and you can always change your mind.

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.

I think people who become compulsive about fitness or eating right, a lot of the time it's out of fear that they're going to lose control or that they're not good enough, so I think anything done out of fear or motivated by fear is often unhealthy.

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.

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.

We usually think of improving our life by adding stuff - like more things, more success, more friends. I think the starting place should be removing stuff - try a month without Instagram; try a week without looking at fashion pictures. See how that affects your life, your friendships, and your ability to focus on other things.

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.

We all have great aspirations for ourselves, but if you expect yourself to change the world tomorrow, then you're going to just drown yourself in anxiety and constant feelings of inadequacy.