Quotes from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Mark Manson ·  224 pages

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“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable." ~~~~ Mark Manson”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. (p.9)”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“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.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life



“Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life



“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life



“There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. It’s impossible not to be. Choosing to not consciously interpret events in our lives is still an interpretation of the events of our lives. Choosing”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy. As”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life fucks us.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously,”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life



“Because here’s the thing that’s wrong with all of the “How to Be Happy” shit that’s been shared eight million times on Facebook in the past few years—here’s what nobody realizes about all of this crap: The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So I’ll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: 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. The”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.” And”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet. An”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life. If I’m choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I’m rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn. The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life



“Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with “romance” in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it!”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. Let’s”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life


“We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes.”
― Mark Manson, quote from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life



About the author

Mark Manson
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