Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

205. “Stoicism as the ideal “personal operating system.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “Behind mountains are more mountains.”

— Ryan Holiday

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

219. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

235. “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

236. “Not, I want to do good – that’s an excuse. But, I will do good in this particular instance, right now. Set a standard; hold fast to it. That’s all there is.”

— Ryan Holiday

237. “Epicurus once said that the wise will accomplish three things in their life: leave written works behind them, be financially prudent and provide for the future, and cherish country living.”

— Ryan Holiday

238. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

240. “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

241. “Begin with awareness and reflection. Not just once, but every single second of every single.”

— Ryan Holiday

242. “Stop pretending that what you’re going through is somehow special or unfair. Whatever trouble you’re having – no matter how difficult – is not some unique misfortune picked out especially for you. It just is what it is.”

— Ryan Holiday

243. “Character,” de Gaulle reflected at the end of his life, “is above all the ability to disregard insults or abandonment by one’s own people. One must be willing to lose everything. There is no such thing as half a risk.”

— Ryan Holiday

244. “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

245. “The goodness inside you is like a small flame, and you are its keeper. It’s your job, today and every day, to make sure that it has enough fuel, that it doesn’t get obstructed or snuffed out.”

— Ryan Holiday

246. “The most critical part of this system was the belief that you, the student who has sought out Stoicism, have the most important job: to be good! To be wise. “To remain the person that philosophy wished to make us.” Do your job today. Whatever happens, whatever other people’s jobs happen to be, do yours. Be good.”

— Ryan Holiday

247. “You don’t have to always be amazing. You do always have to show up. What matters is sticking around for the next at bat.”

— Ryan Holiday

248. “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. – PROVERBS 16:32.”

— Ryan Holiday

249. “Virtue” can seem old-fashioned. Yet virtue – arete – translates to something very simple and very timeless: Excellence. Moral. Physical. Mental. In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.”

— Ryan Holiday

250. “No one is alone, in suffering or in joy.”

— Ryan Holiday