Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Principles are better than instructions and “hacks.” We can figure out the specifics later – but only if we learn the right way to approach them.”

— Ryan Holiday

452. “Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”

— Ryan Holiday

453. “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

454. “Just because you’ve begun down one path doesn’t mean you’re committed to it forever, especially if that path turns out to be flawed or impeded. At that same time, this is not an excuse to be flighty or incessantly noncommittal.”

— Ryan Holiday

455. “Keep your own journal, whether it’s saved on a computer or in a little notebook. Take time to consciously recall the events of the previous day. Be unflinching in your assessments. Notice what contributed to your happiness and what detracted from it. Write down what you’d like to work on or quotes that you like. By making the effort to record such thoughts, you’re less likely to forget them.”

— Ryan Holiday

456. “Very few go astray who comport themselves with restraint. – CONFUCIUS.”

— Ryan Holiday

457. “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

458. “When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go – carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

460. “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

461. “You know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don’t like? Love. That’s right, love.”

— Ryan Holiday

462. “The areas of great interest to the Stoics all make an appearance here: virtue, mortality, emotions, self-awareness, fortitude, right action, problem solving, acceptance, mental clarity, pragmatism, unbiased thought, and duty. The Stoics were pioneers of the morning and nightly rituals: preparation in the morning, reflection in the evening.”

— Ryan Holiday

463. “The old way – where product development and marketing were two distinct and separate processes – has been replaced.”

— Ryan Holiday

464. “Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness – these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to.”

— Ryan Holiday

465. “Roger Ebert calls snarking “cultural vandalism.” He’s right. Snark makes culture impossible, or rather, it makes the conditions that make culture possible impossible. Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability: These are the targets of snark. “Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line,” he wrote.”

— Ryan Holiday

466. “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

467. “Failure really can be an asset if what you’re trying to do is improve, learn, or do something new.”

— Ryan Holiday

468. “Be natural and yourself and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day.”

— Ryan Holiday

469. “Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you.”

— Ryan Holiday

470. “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

471. “Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.”

— Ryan Holiday

472. “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

473. “Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening – not always, but it can feel that way when we’re deep in the middle of it.”

— Ryan Holiday

474. “Uninvited guests might arrive at your home, but you don’t have to ask them to stay for dinner. You don’t have to let them into your mind.”

— Ryan Holiday

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

487. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— 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. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

495. “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

496. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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