Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “We don’t need pity – our own or anyone else’s – we need purpose, poise, and patience.”

— Ryan Holiday

152. “On the path to successful action, we will fail – possibly many times. And that’s okay. It can be a good thing, even. Action and failure are two sides of the same coin. One doesn’t come without the other. What breaks this critical connection down is when people stop acting – because they’ve taken failure the wrong way.”

— Ryan Holiday

153. “You may be sure that you are at peace with yourself,” Seneca wrote, “when no noise reaches you, when no word shakes you out of yourself, whether it be flattery or a threat, or merely an empty sound buzzing about you with unmeaning sin.”

— Ryan Holiday

154. “Great men have almost always shown themselves as ready to obey as they afterwards proved able to command. – LORD MAHON.”

— Ryan Holiday

155. “Every man has a passion gnawing away at the bottom of his heart, just as every fruit has its worm. – ALEXANDRE DUMAS.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

157. “The Blitzkrieg strategy was designed to exploit the flinch of the enemy – he must collapse at the sight of what appears to be overwhelming force. Its success depends completely on this response. This military strategy works because the set-upon troops see the offensive force as an enormous obstacle bearing down on them. This.”

— Ryan Holiday

158. “I have the power within me to keep that out. I can see the truth.”

— Ryan Holiday

159. “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says. You can’t learn if you think you already know.”

— Ryan Holiday

160. “Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them?”

— Ryan Holiday

161. “There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. – SENECA.”

— Ryan Holiday

162. “When success begins to slip from your fingers – for whatever reason – the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.”

— Ryan Holiday

163. “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

— Ryan Holiday

164. “It’s the logic of two campers and the bear – you don’t need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other camper.”

— Ryan Holiday

165. “Remember: you’re a free agent. When someone points out a legitimate flaw in your belief or in your actions, they’re not criticizing you. They’re presenting a better alternative. Accept it!”

— Ryan Holiday

166. “You can also commit injustice by doing nothing.”

— Ryan Holiday

167. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

169. “Free and cheap helps.” So does making the entire process as easy and seamless as possible. The more you reduce the cost of consumption, the more people will be likely to try your product. Which means price, distribution, and other variables are not only essential business decisions, they are essential marketing decisions.”

— Ryan Holiday

170. “If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”

— Ryan Holiday

171. “Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned. Ego is self-anointed, its swagger is artifice. One is girding yourself, the other gaslighting. It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.”

— Ryan Holiday

172. “Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.”

— Ryan Holiday

173. “Don’t feed insecurity. Don’t feed delusions of grandeur. Both are obstacles to stillness. Be confident. You’ve earned it.”

— Ryan Holiday

174. “Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn’t mean you have to agree. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn’t mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves.”

— Ryan Holiday

175. “The obstacle is not only turned upside down but used as a catapult.”

— Ryan Holiday

176. “Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them? We might not be emperors, but the world is still constantly testing us. It asks: Are you worthy? Can you get past the things that inevitably fall in your way? Will you stand up and show us what you’re made of?”

— Ryan Holiday

177. “So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation. So much of what we get wrong comes from the same place. We’re reacting to shadows. We’re taking as certainties impressions we have yet to test. We’re not stopping to put on our glasses and really look.”

— Ryan Holiday

178. “Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. – COLIN POWELL.”

— Ryan Holiday

179. “History is written with blood, sweat, and tears, and it is etched into eternity by the quiet endurance of courageous people.”

— Ryan Holiday

180. “He was patient because he knew that difficult things took time.”

— Ryan Holiday

181. “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.”

— Ryan Holiday

182. “Because when you play all the way to the whistle, there’s no reason to worry about the clock.”

— Ryan Holiday

183. “As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work. This is difficult considering our conflict of interest – which is to say, the ultimate conflict of interest: We made it. The way to balance that conflict of interest is to bring in people who are objective.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

185. “The morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Or late in the evening after the world has gone to sleep. Grab these moments. Schedule them. Cultivate them.”

— Ryan Holiday

186. “Stress and problems are tariffs that come attached to success.”

— Ryan Holiday

187. “When, as the football coach Bill Walsh explained, “self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.” This is the ego, as the writer Cyril Connolly warned, that “sucks us down like the law of gravity.”

— Ryan Holiday

188. “Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion. How are we supposed to reach, motivate, or lead other people if we can’t relate to their needs – because we’ve lost touch with our own?”

— Ryan Holiday

189. “Even one minute without playing the blame game is progress in the art of living.”

— Ryan Holiday

190. “The belief that an individual can make a difference is the first step. The next is understanding that you can be that person.”

— Ryan Holiday

191. “The only real failure is abandoning your principles.”

— Ryan Holiday

192. “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. – VIKTOR FRANKL.”

— Ryan Holiday

193. “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. So much power – ours, and other people’s – is frittered away in this manner. To see an obstacle as a challenge, to make the best of it anyway, that is also a choice – a choice that is up to us.”

— Ryan Holiday

194. “No harshness, no deprivation, no toil should interfere with our empathy toward others.”

— Ryan Holiday

195. “Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.” Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, pg 74.”

— Ryan Holiday

196. “Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.”

— Ryan Holiday

197. “Persistence is an action. Perseverance is a matter of will. One is energy. The other, endurance.”

— Ryan Holiday

198. “As they say, this moment is not your life. But it is a moment in your life. How will you use it?”

— Ryan Holiday

199. “Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. “We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp,” he writes. “Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”

— Ryan Holiday

200. “Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. William Ernest Henley.”

— Ryan Holiday