Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor once said. This is how we fight the ego, by really knowing ourselves.”

— Ryan Holiday

203. “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Nietzsche said.”

— Ryan Holiday

204. “The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth.”

— Ryan Holiday

205. “Longfellow captured the true heroism of Florence Nightingale in a poem. It wasn’t just her bravery, it wasn’t just the deprivations she endured without complaint. It was what she did for people. Honor to those whose words or deeds Thus help us in our daily needs, And by their overflow Raise us from what is low.”

— Ryan Holiday

206. “And it works. Small tweaks can change what once felt like impossible tasks. Suddenly, where we felt weak, we realize we are strong. With perspective, we discover leverage we didn’t know we had.”

— Ryan Holiday

207. “A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money.”

— Ryan Holiday

208. “When I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also big. I’m big because I’m connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me.” We just can’t forget which is bigger and which has been here longer.”

— Ryan Holiday

209. “As Viktor Frankl puts it in The Will to Meaning, “Man is pushed by drives but pulled by values.” These values and inner awareness prevent us from being puppets.”

— Ryan Holiday

210. “That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne.”

— Ryan Holiday

211. “We try, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, to “shrug it all off and wipe it clean – every annoyance and distraction – and reach utter stillness.” To build a kind of mental vault or stronghold that no distraction or false impression can breach.”

— Ryan Holiday

212. “Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only they truly live. Not satisfied to merely keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. Only an ingrate would fail to see that these great architects of venerable thoughts were born for us and have designed a way of life for us.” – SENECA.”

— Ryan Holiday

213. “Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. – ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN.”

— Ryan Holiday

214. “That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it.”

— Ryan Holiday

215. “When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn’t wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety?” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.13.1.”

— Ryan Holiday

216. “Consider this mind-set. never in a hurry never worried never desperate never stopping short.”

— Ryan Holiday

217. “No need to be too hard on yourself. Hold yourself to a higher standard but not an impossible one. And forgive yourself if and when you slip up.”

— Ryan Holiday

218. “If you seek to avoid all disruptions to tranquility – other people, external events, stress – you will never be successful. Your problems will follow you wherever you run and hide. But if you seek to avoid the harmful and disruptive judgments that cause those problems, then you will be stable and steady wherever you happen to be.”

— Ryan Holiday

219. “As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, so a well-employed life brings a happy death. – LEONARDO DA VINCI.”

— Ryan Holiday

220. “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

221. “As James Basford remarked, “It requires a strong constitution to withstand repeated attacks of prosperity.” Well, that’s where we are now.”

— Ryan Holiday

222. “Best of all, an honest understanding of what is within our control provides real clarity about the world: all we have is our own mind. Remember that today when you try to extend your reach outward – that it’s much better and more appropriately directed inward.”

— Ryan Holiday

223. “If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear to love. – JOHN CAGE.”

— Ryan Holiday

224. “The good things in life cost what they cost. The unnecessary things are not worth it at any price. The key is being aware of the difference.”

— Ryan Holiday

225. “Most rudeness, meanness, and cruelty are a mask for deep-seated weakness. Kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength. You have that strength. Use it.”

— Ryan Holiday

226. “Are you okay being alone? Are you strong enough to go a few more rounds if it comes to that? Are you comfortable with challenges? Does uncertainty bother you? How does pressure feel? Because these things will happen to you. No one knows when or how, but their appearance is certain. And life will demand an answer. You chose this for yourself, a life of doing things. Now you better be prepared for what it entails.”

— Ryan Holiday

227. “We don’t abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 1.2.37b.”

— Ryan Holiday

228. “I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The.”

— Ryan Holiday

229. “Here’s the other part: once you win, everyone is gunning for you. It’s during your moment at the top that you can afford ego the least – because the stakes are so much higher, the margins for error are so much smaller. If anything, your ability to listen, to hear feedback, to improve and grow matter more now than ever before.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

231. “Remember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet. As something being passed around comes to you, reach out your hand and take a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don’t stop it. It hasn’t yet come? Don’t burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front of you. Act this way with children, a spouse, toward position, with wealth – one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods.”

— Ryan Holiday

232. “You must put in place training and habits now to replace ignorance and ill discipline. Only then will you begin to behave and act.”

— Ryan Holiday

233. “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

234. “In Aristotle’s famous Ethics, he uses the analogy of a warped piece of wood to describe human nature. In order to eliminate warping or curvature, a skilled woodworker slowly applies pressure in the opposite direction – essentially, bending it straight. Of course, a couple of thousand years later Kant snorted, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing can be made straight.” We might not ever be straight, but we can strive for straighter.”

— Ryan Holiday

235. “With success, particularly power, come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control, and paranoia. Hopefully you won’t find yourself so crazed that you start anthropomorphizing, and inflicting retribution on inanimate objects.”

— Ryan Holiday

236. “Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life,” he once said. “I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way.”

— Ryan Holiday

237. “Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls. – EPICTETUS.”

— Ryan Holiday

238. “Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling. – DAVID MARANISS.”

— Ryan Holiday

239. “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

240. “And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”

— Ryan Holiday

241. “You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there.”

— Ryan Holiday

242. “False ideas about yourself destroy you. For.”

— Ryan Holiday

243. “When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes – but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. 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

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

— Ryan Holiday

245. “We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek. Because we will be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status, our ambition will not be grandiose but iterative – one foot in front of the other, learning and growing and putting in the time.”

— Ryan Holiday

246. “First, you ought to live your own life in such a way that it doesn’t negatively impose on others. Second, you have to be open-minded and accepting enough to let others do the same. Can you do that? Even when you really, really disagree with the choices they’re making? Can you understand that their life is their business and yours is your own? And that you’ve got plenty to wrestle with yourself without bothering anyone else?”

— Ryan Holiday

247. “Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.”

— Ryan Holiday

248. “No slavery is more disgraceful,” he quipped, “than one which is self-imposed.”

— Ryan Holiday

249. “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. Or whether we will tell one at all. Welcome to the power of perception. Applicable in each and every situation, impossible to obstruct. It can only be relinquished. And that is your decision.”

— Ryan Holiday

250. “It’s not that we need to believe that God is great, only that God is greater than us.”

— Ryan Holiday