Quotes by Stefan Molyneux

The true self is that which is in touch with reality. The false self is the aspects of your personality that are adapted to threats and no longer consciously recognizes either the adaptation or the threat.

Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering

We are haunted houses of history. Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive.

The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.

The unconscious is the true accumulation of your history. It can be accepted or rejected but it cant fundamentally be altered.

If theres more that you can do, then do it. If theres not more that you can do, then be content with what youre doing. But if there is despair, the despair can only be that you can do more. Because when youre doing as much as you can do, you will not feel despair. Because despair is the gap between what you could be doing and what you are doing.

Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person.

No mean person is mean all the time. The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate so that you can hold out the hope for someone. So someone will hold out the hope that theyre gonna catch you on the sunny side or that youre gonna be nice this time. The tyranny is inconsistency. Somebody thats consistently mean is something that is pretty easy to sort out. The reality is that the meanest people can be wonderful sometimes. Thats the whole point of meanness because otherwise its too obvious. Its the niceness that gets you trapped in the dysfunction. That is the problem and so the fact that you have this belief that there is hope in the relationship is foundational to the dysfunction.

The woman who left abusive husbands in the 60s and 70s improved the institution of marriage because men now know that women can leave their husbands and the women or men who stay in abusive relationships are a massive advertisement to non- consequentiality of abuse.So, if you stay in a abusive relationship you are signaling to everyone who ever comes in contact with you or hears about you that abusers face no consequences to their abuse therefore by staying in an abusive relationship you are encouraging and subsidizing abuse.By getting out of abusive relationships you are saying the whole world over that abusers cant get away with it. That there are negative consequences to child, adult, or spousal abuse. You name it. It just doesnt have consequences for you, it has consequences for other people.When you break out and reject abusive and irredeemable relationships you are sending a clear signal which all abusers are listening for at all times. Can I get away with it? Thats all theyre thinking. It is my hope that abusers hear this and say Oh shit. The game is up.

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions.

All money does with an empty heart is allow you to be miserable in style.

Theres great peace in surrendering to principles

The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do.

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

It takes a huge amount of culture to normalize crazy, and of course thats its main focus

Bullying is an attack upon the runts of the litter - the weak of the species, and it is predicated on a lack of bond with the parents. If a child has a secure bond with the parents, that forms a force-field around the child in terms of bullying. If the child does not have a strong bond with the parents, then its like being separated from the herd - those are the ones who get picked off by the human predators in childhood and adulthood. So keep your contacts as close as you can, they provide an amazing shield against bullies and users.

Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business...because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people.

A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.