Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body, then Will is the discipline of the heart and the soul.”

— Ryan Holiday

452. “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

453. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”

— Ryan Holiday

454. “Anne Lamott once observed that all writers “are little rivers running into one lake,” all contributing to the same big project.”

— Ryan Holiday

455. “For nothing outside my reasoned choice can hinder or harm it – my reasoned choice alone can do this to itself.”

— Ryan Holiday

456. “We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty.”

— Ryan Holiday

457. “So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation.”

— Ryan Holiday

458. “No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.”

— Ryan Holiday

459. “When action is our priority, vanity falls away.”

— Ryan Holiday

460. “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

461. “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

462. “Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.”

— Ryan Holiday

463. “To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell – this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world.”

— Ryan Holiday

464. “Is there anything sadder than the immense lengths we’ll go to impress someone? The things we’ll do to earn someone’s approval can seem, when examined in retrospect, like the result of some temporary form of insanity.”

— Ryan Holiday

465. “In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.”

— Ryan Holiday

466. “Marcus Aurelius had a version of this exercise where he’d describe glamorous or expensive things without their euphemisms – roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, without any of the ornamentation. We.”

— Ryan Holiday

467. “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

468. “Don’t try to grab that moment and hold on to it with all your might. It’s not under your control how long it lasts. Enjoy it, recognize it, remember it. Having it for a moment is the same as having it forever.”

— Ryan Holiday

469. “Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”

— Ryan Holiday

470. “The fact is, the body keeps score.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

473. “Philosophy’s true use – “An operating system for life’s difficulties and hardships”.”

— Ryan Holiday

474. “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

475. “An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before. To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing. When given an unfair task, some rightly see it as a chance to test what they’re made of – to give it all they’ve got, knowing full well how difficult it will be to win. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative.”

— Ryan Holiday

476. “From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force. If.”

— Ryan Holiday

477. “It’s much easier to control our perceptions and emotions than it is to give up our desire to control other people and events.”

— Ryan Holiday

478. “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

479. “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

480. “Our perceptions are the thing that we’re in complete control of.”

— Ryan Holiday

481. “What happened yesterday – what happened five minutes ago – is the past. We can reignite and restart whenever we like. Why not do it right now?”

— Ryan Holiday

482. “If we can focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to realize they are fighting an unwinnable battle.”

— Ryan Holiday

483. “There’s nothing to feel guilty about for being idle. It’s not reckless. It’s an investment. There is nourishment in pursuits that have no purpose – that is their purpose.”

— Ryan Holiday

484. “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

485. “Remember, if there is one core teaching at the heart of this philosophy, it’s that we’re not as smart and as wise as we’d like to think we are. If we ever do want to become wise, it comes from the questioning and from humility – not, as many would like to think, from certainty, mistrust, and arrogance.”

— Ryan Holiday

486. “We spend a lot of time thinking about how things are supposed to be, or what the rules say we should do. Trying to get it all perfect. We tell ourselves that we’ll get started once the conditions are right, or once we’re sure we can trust this or that. When, really, it’d be better to focus on making due with what we’ve got. On focusing on results instead of pretty methods.”

— Ryan Holiday

487. “It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support so that others can be good. The better wording for the advice is this: Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

490. “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

491. “No pressure. Just presence. Just happy to be there.”

— Ryan Holiday

492. “Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can’t actually influence is wasted, self-indulgent, and self-destructive.”

— Ryan Holiday

493. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

495. “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

496. “Today, you could try to increase your wealth, or you could take a shortcut and just want less.”

— Ryan Holiday

497. “To be or to do – life is a constant roll call.”

— Ryan Holiday

498. “I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego – and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

500. “If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.”

— Ryan Holiday