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. “To borrow from Budd Schulberg’s description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was “indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.” I no longer have those illusions.”

— Ryan Holiday

453. “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

454. “Our job is not to ‘go with our gut’ or fixate on the first impression we form about an issue. No, we need to be strong enough to resist thinking that is too neat, too plausible, and therefore almost always wrong.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation- deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions.”

— Ryan Holiday

460. “To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.”

— Ryan Holiday

461. “Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously.”

— Ryan Holiday

462. “Not only should you be testing your project as you create it, you must most seriously test your creation as it begins to resemble a final product. So you know what you have – so you can improve it. So you know what you have – so that you might figure out what to do with it. So you know what you have – so you can adjust your expectations.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

464. “A great destiny, Seneca reminds us, is great slavery.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

481. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

483. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

485. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

493. “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

494. “So we ask ourselves: Why are things the way they are? What practices should be questioned and which should remain sound? This allows us to be both exotic and accessible, shocking but not gratuitous, fresh without sacrificing timelessness.”

— Ryan Holiday

495. “Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one.”

— Ryan Holiday

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

500. “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