30 Quotes from ‘The Courage to Be Disliked’ That Will Transform Your Mindset
Unlock the secrets to change your life, achieve real happiness, and embrace the courage to live authentically.
4 min readFeb 1, 2024
My advice is this: You should start. With no regard to whether others are cooperative or not.
Authored by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, this book challenges conventional notions and empowers readers with the courage to embrace their true selves.
Here are 30 lines that will lead you to an authentic version of yourself :
- Before an effect, there is a cause. Who I am now (the effect) is determined by occurrences in the past (the causes).
- No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences — the so-called trauma- but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purpose. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
- We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those pasts experiences. Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.
- People are not driven by past causes, but move toward goals that they themselves set.
- You should arrive at answers on your own, not rely upon what you get from someone else.
- The important thing is not what one is born with, but what use one makes of that equipment.
- Unhappiness is something you choose for yourself.
- People always choose not to change
- Lifestyle is the tendencies of thought and action in life
- No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.
- To get rid of one’s problems, all one can do is live in the universe all alone.
- Loneliness is having other people and society and community around you, and having a deep sense of being excluded from them.
- To feel lonely, we need other people.
- Feelings of inferiority are subjective assumptions.
- Life is not a competition.
- We do not walk in order to compete with someone. It is in trying to progress past who one is now that there is value.
- You are the only one who can change yourself.
- All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in.
- What other people think of me, or what sort of judgment they pass on me, is the task of other people, and is not something I can do anything about.
- There is no reason of any sort that one should not live one’s life as one pleases.
- In short, that “freedom” is being disliked by other people. […] It is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom, and a sign that you are living in accordance with your own principles.
- Not wanting to be disliked is probably my task, but whether or not so-and-so dislikes me is the other person’s task.
- The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked.
- Living in fear of one’s relationships falling apart is an unfree way to live, in which one is living for other people.
- People can be of use to someone else simply by being alive, and have a true sense of their worth just by being alive.
- Accept what is irreplaceable. Accept “this me” just as it is. And have the courage to change what one can change. That is self-acceptance.
- We do not lack ability. We just lack courage. It all comes down to courage.
- Ones believes unconditionally without concerning oneself with such things as security. That is confidence.
- Seemingly linear existence is actually a series of dots; in other words, life is a series of moments. […] It is a series of moments called “now”. We can live only in the here and now. Our lives exist only in moments.
- What happened in the past has nothing whatsoever to do with you here and now, and what the future may hold is not a matter to think about here and now.
For a human being, the greatest unhappiness is not being able to like oneself.
