Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “What I’ve learned most clearly from blogs is that the majority of them write about the problems from the outside for a reason – because they are missing the abilities that allow people to move to the inside.”

— Ryan Holiday

52. “No one will argue that writing is an easy profession. Getting someone to pay you for your words isn’t easy. But there are strategies you can use to simplify the process and transform what you can produce.”

— Ryan Holiday

53. “Our duty is to do the right thing – right now.”

— Ryan Holiday

54. “Life speeds on the bold and favors the brave.”

— Ryan Holiday

55. “You become the sum of your actions, and as you do, what flows from that – your impulses – reflect the actions you’ve taken. Choose wisely.”

— Ryan Holiday

56. “You are not your body and hair-style, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES.”

— Ryan Holiday

57. “As Gavin de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear, “When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?”

— Ryan Holiday

58. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. – HERBERT SIMON.”

— Ryan Holiday

59. “I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent – no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.” – SENECA, ON PROVIDENCE, 4.3.”

— Ryan Holiday

60. “For Hercules, the choice was between vice and virtue, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trod path and the road less traveled. We all face this choice.”

— Ryan Holiday

61. “There’s a great expression: Whatever you’re not changing, you’re choosing. Later, you’re going to wish you did something. Whether it’s leaving an abusive relationship or starting a company, don’t fight it – decide it. Now.”

— Ryan Holiday

62. “Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty. The greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void, facing it instead of scrambling to make it go away. The question is, when faced with your particular challenge, do you seek the respite of talk or do you face the struggle head-on?”

— Ryan Holiday

63. “To whatever we face, our job is to respond with: hard work honesty helping others as best we can.”

— Ryan Holiday

64. “You’re not as good as you think. You don’t have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.”

— Ryan Holiday

65. “As Diogenes, the famous Cynic, once said, “It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.” To want nothing makes one invincible – because nothing lies outside your control.”

— Ryan Holiday

66. “Duris dura franguntur.”

— Ryan Holiday

67. “No one said life was easy. No one said it would be fair.”

— Ryan Holiday

68. “Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, makes space for gratitude and wonder.”

— Ryan Holiday

69. “The more things we desire and the more we have to do to earn or attain those achievements, the less we actually enjoy our lives – and the less free we are.”

— Ryan Holiday

70. “Vires acquirit eundo.”

— Ryan Holiday

71. “What’s essential is invisible to the eye.”

— Ryan Holiday

72. “People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.”

— Ryan Holiday

73. “The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.”

— Ryan Holiday

74. “If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.” Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, pg 104.”

— Ryan Holiday

75. “Solo cuando estamos libres del ego y su influencia podemos alcanzar realmente nuestro mayor potencial.”

— Ryan Holiday

76. “It’s a temptation that exists for everyone – for talk and hype to replace action.”

— Ryan Holiday

77. “Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what’s outside your control.”

— Ryan Holiday

78. “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.”

— Ryan Holiday

79. “Doing the right thing almost always takes courage, just as discipline is impossible without the wisdom to know what is worth choosing. What good is courage if not applied to justice? What good is wisdom if it doesn’t make us more modest?”

— Ryan Holiday

80. “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it.”

— Ryan Holiday

81. “Perfectionism rarely begets perfection – only disappointment.”

— Ryan Holiday

82. “Every event has two handles – one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t. If your brother does you wrong, don’t grab it by his wronging, because this is the handle incapable of lifting it. Instead, use the other – that he is your brother, that you were raised together, and then you will have hold of the handle that carries.” – EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 43.”

— Ryan Holiday

83. “Stillness, then, is actually a way to superior performance. Looseness will give you more control than gripping tightly – to a method or a specific outcome.”

— Ryan Holiday

84. “Do I need this? Or is it really about ego?”

— Ryan Holiday

85. “The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth.”

— Ryan Holiday

86. “You get what you deserve. Instead of being a good person today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.”

— Ryan Holiday

87. “To each,” Winston Churchill would say, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

— Ryan Holiday

88. “There’s no time off. There aren’t even weekends. We are always preparing for what life might throw at us – and when it does, we’re ready and don’t stop until we’ve handled it.”

— Ryan Holiday

89. “Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.”

— Ryan Holiday

90. “If it wasn’t scary, everyone would do it. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be any growth in it.”

— Ryan Holiday

91. “Casi siempre el camino a la victoria pasa por un lugar llamado ‘fracaso’”.”

— Ryan Holiday

92. “As Goethe once observed, the great failing is “to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth.”

— Ryan Holiday

93. “As the Quaker William Penn observed, “Buildings that lie so exposed to the weather need a good foundation.”

— Ryan Holiday

94. “The Japanese have a concept, shinrin yoku – forest bathing – which is a form of therapy that uses nature as a treatment for mental and spiritual issues.”

— Ryan Holiday

95. “When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn’t wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety?” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.13.1.”

— Ryan Holiday

96. “See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must.”

— Ryan Holiday

97. “The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.”

— Ryan Holiday

98. “This obsession with the past, with something that someone did or how things should have been, as much as it hurts, is ego embodied. Everyone else has moved on, but you can’t, because you can’t see anything but your own way. You can’t conceive of accepting that someone could hurt you, deliberately or otherwise. So you hate.”

— Ryan Holiday

99. “To quote Fight Club again, “We buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like.”

— Ryan Holiday

100. “There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.”

— Ryan Holiday