Mark Manson

“Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration.”

“There's nothing wrong with having goals, but obsessing over them is often counterproductive because, in reality, achieving a goal isn't always what it's cracked up to be.”

“People want to offer opportunities to people they care about. They want to help people they believe are good people or have shared life experiences with.”

“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.”

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

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

“My belief is that we all already care about something important. We all already know what is important and meaningful for ourselves. The problem is just that many of us have lost touch with it.”

“We don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much.”

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

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

“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.”

“Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other's faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few years at most.”

“Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.”

“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.”

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

“At some point, most of us reach a place where we're afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we're already good at. This confines us and stifles us.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“One thing that I think most people don't notice is that if you're sitting around telling yourself, 'I want to be happier,' there's a kind of subconscious message that you're also telling yourself at the same time, which is, 'What I have is not enough.'”