Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “You can also commit injustice by doing nothing.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

203. “As a young basketball player, Bill Bradley would remind himself, “When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

205. “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

206. “You don’t control the situation, but you control what you think about it.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

208. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

213. “Don’t explain your philosophy,” Epictetus said, “embody it.”

— Ryan Holiday

214. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

216. “The fact is, the body keeps score.”

— Ryan Holiday

217. “To argue, to complain, or worse, to just give up, these are choices. Choices that more often than not, do nothing to get us across the finish line.”

— Ryan Holiday

218. “Facts are better than dreams, as Churchill put it.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

220. “Every chemical reaction requires a catalyst. Let this be yours.”

— Ryan Holiday

221. “Let others slap each others on the back while you’re back in the lab or the gym or pounding the pavement.”

— Ryan Holiday

222. “Put yourself in tough situations. Accept challenges. Familiarize yourself with the unfamiliar. That’s how you widen your perspective and your understanding.”

— Ryan Holiday

223. “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

224. “Throw out your conceited opinions, for it is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.” E PICTETUS, D ISCOURSES, 2.17.1.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

226. “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

227. “If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one.”

— Ryan Holiday

228. “The philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a Stoic as someone who “transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking.” It’s a loop that becomes easier over time.”

— Ryan Holiday

229. “If they can force you,” Seneca has Hercules say in one of his plays, “then you’ve forgotten how to die.” Remember that.”

— Ryan Holiday

230. “Every positive has its negative. Every negative has its positive. The action is in the pushing through – all the way through to the other side. Making a negative into a positive.”

— Ryan Holiday

231. “Think progress, not perfection. Under this kind of force, obstacles break apart. They have no choice. Since you’re going around them or making them irrelevant, there is nothing for them to resist.”

— Ryan Holiday

232. “Lord Byron said: ‘Tis the Cause makes all, Degrades or hallows courage in its fall.”

— Ryan Holiday

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

236. “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

237. “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

238. “Our reasoned choice – our ‘prohairesis,’ as the stoics called it – is a kind of invincibility that we can cultivate. We can shrug off hostile attacks and breeze through pressure and problems.”

— Ryan Holiday

239. “Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there.”

— Ryan Holiday

240. “You can take the bite out of any tough situation by bringing a calm mind to it. By considering it and meditating on it in advance.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

242. “Our capacity to try, try, try is inextricably linked with our ability and tolerance to fail, fail, fail.”

— Ryan Holiday

243. “Man is pushed by drives,” Viktor Frankl observed. “But he is pulled by values.” Ruled by or ruling? Which are you? Without the right values, success is brief. If we wish to do more than flash, if we wish to last, then it is time to understand how to battle this new form of ego and what values and principles are required in order to beat it.”

— Ryan Holiday

244. “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

245. “A man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able – always remembering the results will be infinitesimal – and to attend to his own soul. – LEROY PERCY.”

— Ryan Holiday

246. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

248. “Robert Caro has written that “power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals.”

— Ryan Holiday

249. “The economics of the internet are exploited to change public perception – and sell product.”

— Ryan Holiday

250. “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