Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that might still happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself why it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.”

— Ryan Holiday

102. “Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes – so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil – nothing is so self-blinding.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

105. “The process is about doing the right things, right now. Not worrying about what might happen later, or the results, or the whole picture.”

— Ryan Holiday

106. “Each of us must break the link in the chain of what the Buddhists call samsara, the continuation of life’s suffering from generation to generation.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

113. “There’s a saying about how the Irish ship captain located all the rocks in the harbor – using the bottom of his boat. Whatever works, right? Remember.”

— Ryan Holiday

114. “Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.“ That’s all there needs to be.”

— Ryan Holiday

115. “Greek word euthymia, which he defines as “believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path, and not being in doubt by following the myriad footpaths of those wandering in every direction.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

121. “According to the Stoics, the circle of control contains just one thing: YOUR MIND. That’s right, even your physical body isn’t completely within the circle.”

— Ryan Holiday

122. “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

123. “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

124. “And, above all, be willing to learn from anyone and everyone, regardless of their station in life.”

— Ryan Holiday

125. “Doing new things invariably means obstacles. A new path is, by definition, uncleared. Only with persistence and time can we cut away debris and remove impediments. Only in struggling with the impediments that made others quit can we find ourselves on untrodden territory – only by persisting and resisting can we learn what others were too impatient to be taught.”

— Ryan Holiday

126. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

129. “Confucius wrote that the “gentleman is self-possessed and relaxed, while the petty man is perpetually full of worry.”

— Ryan Holiday

130. “Take it. Eat it until you’re sick. Endure it. Quietly brush it off and work harder. Play the game. Ignore the noise; for the love of God, do not let it distract you. Restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one.”

— Ryan Holiday

131. “The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong. Musashi understood that the observing eye sees simply what is there. The perceiving eye sees more than what is there. The observing eye sees events, clear of distractions, exaggerations, and misperceptions. The perceiving eye sees “insurmountable obstacles” or “major setbacks” or even just “issues.” It brings its own issues to the fight.”

— Ryan Holiday

132. “Ignore what other people are doing. Ignore what’s going on around you. There is no competition. There is no objective benchmark to hit. There is simply the best that you can do – that’s all that matters.”

— Ryan Holiday

133. “A wise man can make use of whatever comes his way, he said, but is in want of nothing. “On the other hand,” he said, “nothing is needed by the fool for he does not understand how to use anything but he is in want of everything.” There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.”

— Ryan Holiday

134. “Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

— Ryan Holiday

135. “If the breaking day sees someone proud, The ending day sees them brought low. No one should put too much trust in triumph, No one should give up hope of trials improving. Clotho mixes one with the other and stops Fortune from resting, spinning every fate around. No one has had so much divine favor That they could guarantee themselves tomorrow. God keeps our lives hurtling on, Spinning in a whirlwind.” – SENECA, THYESTES, 613.”

— Ryan Holiday

136. “We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything.” Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, pg 99.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

138. “That’s why the philosophers warn us not to be satisfied with mere learning, but to add practice and then training. For as time passes we forget what we learned and end up doing the opposite, and hold opinions the opposite of what we should.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.9.13–14.”

— Ryan Holiday

139. “The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.”

— Ryan Holiday

140. “Just because the conditions aren’t exactly to your liking, or you don’t feel ready yet, doesn’t mean you get a pass. If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.”

— Ryan Holiday

141. “Our duty is rarely easy, but it is important. It’s also usually the harder choice. But we must do it.”

— Ryan Holiday

142. “The less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are.”

— Ryan Holiday

143. “The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you “push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.”

— Ryan Holiday

144. “Knowledge – self-knowledge in particular – is freedom.”

— Ryan Holiday

145. “External things can’t fix internal issues.”

— Ryan Holiday

146. “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

147. “We’re all just humans, doing the best we can. We’re all just trying to survive, and in the process, inch the world forward a little bit.”

— Ryan Holiday

148. “Everything is change. Embrace that. Flow with it.”

— Ryan Holiday

149. “We will be and do many things in our lives. Some are prestigious, some are onerous, none are beneath us. To whatever we face, our job is to respond with: hard work honesty helping others as best we can You should never have to ask yourself, But what am I supposed to do now? Because you know the answer: your job.”

— Ryan Holiday

150. “When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu says, “the whole world belongs to you.”

— Ryan Holiday