Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “Fix your attention on your intelligence. Let it do its thing.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

455. “What thrives online is not the writing that reflects anything close to the reality in which you and I live. Nor does it allow for the kind of change that will create the world we wish to live in.”

— Ryan Holiday

456. “Use this knowledge to be gentle and gracious.”

— Ryan Holiday

457. “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

458. “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

459. “Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.”

— Ryan Holiday

460. “The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged chance, conquered the chance, and made chance the servitor. – E. H. CHAPIN.”

— Ryan Holiday

461. “It’s supposed to be hard. Your first attempts aren’t going to work. It’s going to take a lot out of you – but energy is an asset we can always find more of. It’s a renewable resource. Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

463. “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

464. “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

465. “With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything.”

— Ryan Holiday

466. “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

468. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— 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. “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

473. “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

474. “What we desire makes us vulnerable.”

— Ryan Holiday

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

489. “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

490. “Stoicism is designed to be medicine for the soul.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

494. “That’s Stoic joy – the joy that comes from purpose, excellence, and duty. It’s a serious thing – far more serious than a smile or a chipper voice.”

— Ryan Holiday

495. “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

496. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

499. “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

500. “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