Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

— Ryan Holiday

452. “The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up. – CHUCK PALAHNIUK.”

— Ryan Holiday

453. “We choose how we’ll look at things. We retain the ability to inject perspective into a situation. We can’t change the obstacles themselves – that part of the equation is set – but the power of perspective can change how the obstacles appear.”

— Ryan Holiday

454. “Each project matters, and the only degrading part is giving less than one is capable of giving.”

— Ryan Holiday

455. “The same is true for you today. The order and the peace might be interrupted by a new circumstance. OK. Get a hold of yourself and find your way back.”

— Ryan Holiday

456. “You can take the bite out of any tough situation by bringing a calm mind to it. By considering it and meditating on it in advance.”

— Ryan Holiday

457. “Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.”

— Ryan Holiday

458. “Ego loves this notion, the idea that something is “fair” or not. Psychologists.”

— Ryan Holiday

459. “In actuality, the will has a lot more to do with surrender than with strength. Try “God willing” over “the will to win” or “willing it into existence,” for even those attributes can be broken. True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.”

— Ryan Holiday

460. “We all demand reparation for our early wounds to our narcissism,” thinking we are owed because we were wronged or deprived.”

— Ryan Holiday

461. “Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?”

— Ryan Holiday

462. “The goodness inside you is like a small flame, and you are its keeper. It’s your job, today and every day, to make sure that it has enough fuel... every person has their own version of the flame... so long as your flame flickers, there will be some light in the world.”

— Ryan Holiday

463. “Reminding ourselves each day that we will die helps us treat our time as a gift. Someone on a deadline doesn’t indulge himself with attempts at the impossible, he doesn’t waste time complaining about how he’d like things to be.”

— Ryan Holiday

464. “Not “be positive” but learn to be ceaselessly creative and opportunistic. Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good.”

— Ryan Holiday

465. “What we desire makes us vulnerable.”

— Ryan Holiday

466. “By planning to the end you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.” The second habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is: begin with an end in mind.”

— Ryan Holiday

467. “And Johnson, genuinely hated by his opponent and the crowd, still enjoying every minute of it. Smiling, joking, playing the whole fight. Why not? There’s no value in any other reaction. Should he hate them for hating him? Bitterness was their burden and Johnson refused to pick it up.”

— Ryan Holiday

468. “It’s far better that we become pragmatic and adaptable – able to do what we need to do anywhere, anytime. The place to do your work, to live the good life, is here.”

— Ryan Holiday

469. “Dorothy Day, the Catholic nun and social activist, admonished herself much the same. “Turn off your radio,” she wrote, “put away your daily paper. Read one review of events and spend time reading.” Books, spend time reading books – that’s what she meant. Books full of wisdom.”

— Ryan Holiday

470. “So today, as RSS buttons disappear from browsers and blogs, just know that this happened on purpose, so that readers could be deceived more easily.”

— Ryan Holiday

471. “Man is a thinking reed,” D. T. Suzuki, one of the early popularizers of Buddhism in the West, once said, “but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think.”

— Ryan Holiday

472. “There is a helpful analogy to explain the logos: We are like a dog leashed to a moving cart. The direction of the cart will determine where we go. Depending on the length of the leash, we also have a fair amount of room to explore and determine the pace, but ultimately what each of us must choose is whether we will go willingly or be painfully dragged. Which will it be?”

— Ryan Holiday

473. “Bill Walsh says, “Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called ’failure.”

— Ryan Holiday

474. “That’s what Seneca is reminding us. As someone who was one of the richest men in Rome, he knew firsthand that money only marginally changes life. It doesn’t solve the problems that people without it seem to think it will. In fact, no material possession will. External things can’t fix internal issues.”

— Ryan Holiday

475. “In other words, through our perception of events, we are complicit in the creation – as well as the destruction – of.”

— Ryan Holiday

476. “A monk is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all. – EVAGRIUS PONTICUS.”

— Ryan Holiday

477. “Most happy people don’t need you to know how happy they are – they aren’t thinking about you at all.”

— Ryan Holiday

478. “People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.” It’s.”

— Ryan Holiday

479. “Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

— Ryan Holiday

480. “Rockefeller had sangfroid: unflappable coolness under pressure. He could keep his head while he was losing his shirt. Better yet, he kept his head while everyone else lost theirs.”

— Ryan Holiday

481. “Take action. Get out from under all your stuff. Get rid of it. Give away what you don’t need. You were born free – free of stuff, free of burden. But since the first time they measured your tiny body for clothes, people have been foisting stuff upon you. And you’ve been adding links to the pile of chains yourself ever since.”

— Ryan Holiday

482. “People are getting a little desperate. People might not show their best elements to you. You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like. There is no better time than now to have a moral and civic backbone. To have a moral and civic true north. This is a tremendous opportunity for you, a young person, to be heroic.”

— Ryan Holiday

483. “When the student is ready, the old Zen saying goes, the teacher appears.”

— Ryan Holiday

484. “To paraphrase Nietzsche, sometimes being superficial – taking things only at first glance – is the most profound approach.”

— Ryan Holiday

485. “That is not to say that the good will always outweigh the bad. Or that it comes free and without cost. But there is always some good – even if only barely perceptible at first – contained within the bad. And we can find it and be cheerful because of it.”

— Ryan Holiday

486. “You have to do your best while you still have a chance. Life is short. You never know when the game, when your body, will be taken away from you. Don’t waste it!”

— Ryan Holiday

487. “Placed in some situation that seems unchangeable and undeniably negative, we can turn it into a learning experience, a humbling experience, a chance to provide comfort to others.”

— Ryan Holiday

488. “A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?”

— Ryan Holiday

489. “At the end of a frustrating exchange, you might find yourself thinking, Ugh, this person is such an idiot. Or asking, Why can’t they just do things right? But not everyone has had the advantages that you’ve had.”

— Ryan Holiday

490. “Todo lo que se hace bien es noble, por humilde que sea.”

— Ryan Holiday

491. “There’s an old proverb that money doesn’t change people, it just makes them more of who they are. Robert Caro has written that “power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.” In some ways, prosperity – financial and personal – is the same way.”

— Ryan Holiday

492. “If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us. One.”

— Ryan Holiday

493. “Most of us are afraid of dying. But sometimes this fear begs the question: To protect what exactly? For a lot of people the answer is: hours of television, gossiping, gorging, wasting potential, reporting to a boring job, and on and on and on. Except, in the strictest sense, is this actually a life? Is this worth gripping so tightly and being afraid of losing? It doesn’t sound like it.”

— Ryan Holiday

494. “When you get right down to it, the real skill for marketers today isn’t going to be helping some big, boring company grow 1 percent a year but creating a totally new brand from nothing using next-to-no resources.”

— Ryan Holiday

495. “Always prepare ourselves for more difficult times. Always accept what we’re unable to change. Always manage our expectations. Always persevere. Always learn to love our fate and what happens to us. Always protect our inner self, retreat into ourselves. Always submit to a greater, larger cause. Always remind ourselves of our own mortality.”

— Ryan Holiday

496. “The Stoics were pioneers of the morning and nightly rituals: preparation in the morning, reflection in the evening.”

— Ryan Holiday

497. “Will we fall short of our own standards? Yes. When this happens, we don’t need to whip ourselves, as Clamence did, we must simply let it instruct and teach us, as all injuries do.”

— Ryan Holiday

498. “You rush in to stamp out the sparks and end up fanning them into flames. This is the risk.”

— Ryan Holiday

499. “Think progress, not perfection. Under this kind of force, obstacles break apart. They have no choice. Since you’re going around them or making them irrelevant, there is nothing for them to resist.”

— Ryan Holiday

500. “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says.”

— Ryan Holiday