Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 10

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

— Ryan Holiday

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

58. “This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn’t.”

— Ryan Holiday

59. “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

60. “Accept only what is true. 2. Work for the common good. 3. Match our needs and wants with what is in our control. 4. Embrace what nature has in store for us.”

— Ryan Holiday

61. “Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.”

— Ryan Holiday

62. “It’s important to connect the so-called temptation with its actual effects. Once you understand that indulging might actually be worse than resisting, the urge begins to lose its appeal. In this way, self-control becomes the real pleasure, and the temptation becomes the regret.”

— Ryan Holiday

63. “Stoicism teaches that we can’t control or rely on anything outside what Epictetus called our “reasoned choice” – our ability to use our reason to choose how we categorize, respond, and reorient ourselves to external events.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

65. “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

66. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call.”

— Ryan Holiday

67. “Done enough times, done with sincerity and feeling, routine becomes ritual. The regularity of it – the daily cadence – creates deep and meaningful experience.”

— Ryan Holiday

68. “Self-awareness is the ability to objectively evaluate the self. It’s the ability to question our own instincts, patterns, and assumptions.”

— Ryan Holiday

69. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

71. “Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections.”

— Ryan Holiday

72. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

75. “Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual – it becomes sanctified and holy.”

— Ryan Holiday

76. “Adversity can harden you. Or it can loosen you up and make you better – if you let it.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

78. “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

79. “Vires acquirit eundo.”

— Ryan Holiday

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

84. “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

85. “And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice! – EURIPIDES.”

— Ryan Holiday

86. “On the surface of the ocean there is stillness,” the monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said of the human condition, “but underneath there are currents.”

— Ryan Holiday

87. “You can’t learn if you think you already know. You will not find the answers if you’re too conceited and self-assured to ask the questions. You cannot get better if you’re convinced you are the best.”

— Ryan Holiday

88. “Man is pushed by drives, but he is pulled by values – Viktor Frankl.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

90. “If you wish to improve,” Epictetus once said, “be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.”

— Ryan Holiday

91. “Character is a powerful defense in a world that would love to be able to seduce you, buy you, tempt you, and change you. If you know what you believe and why you believe it, you’ll avoid poisonous relationships, toxic jobs, fair-weather friends, and any number of ills that afflict people who haven’t thought through their deepest concerns. That’s your education. That’s why you do this work.”

— Ryan Holiday

92. “Happy is the man who can make others better,” Seneca writes, “not merely when he is in their company, but even when he is in their thoughts.”

— Ryan Holiday

93. “A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold. A student is self-critical and self-motivated, always trying to improve his understanding so that he can move on to the next topic, the next challenge. A real student is also his own teacher and his own critic. There is no room for ego there.”

— Ryan Holiday

94. “Remember that today when you try to extend your reach outward – that it’s much better and more appropriately directed inward.”

— Ryan Holiday

95. “Without virtue and training, Aristotle observed, “it is hard to bear the results of good fortune suitably.”

— Ryan Holiday

96. “It’s important for us to remember in our own journey to self-improvement: one never arrives. The sage – the perfect Stoic who behaves perfectly in every situation – is an ideal, not an end.”

— Ryan Holiday

97. “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

98. “If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.”

— Ryan Holiday

99. “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

100. “How you handle even minor adversity might seem like nothing, but, in fact, it reveals everything.”

— Ryan Holiday