Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other. Let.”

— Ryan Holiday

252. “We tell ourselves that we’ll get started once the conditions are right, or once we’re sure we can trust this or that. When, really, it’d be better to focus on making due with what we’ve got. On focusing on results instead of pretty methods.”

— Ryan Holiday

253. “Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles. There are options. Settle in for the long haul and then try each and every possibility, and you’ll get there.”

— Ryan Holiday

254. “Both egotistical and insecure people make their flaws central to their identity – either by covering them up or by brooding over them or externalizing them.”

— Ryan Holiday

255. “It means you’re the least important person in the room – until you change that with results.”

— Ryan Holiday

256. “If we’re to overcome our obstacles, this is the message to broadcast – internally and externally. We will not be stopped by failure, we will not be rushed or distracted by external noise. We will chisel and peg away at the obstacle until it is gone. Resistance is futile.”

— Ryan Holiday

257. “The market was inherently unpredictable and often vicious –.”

— Ryan Holiday

258. “We must prepare for pride and kill it early – or it will kill what we aspire to. We must be on guard against that wild self-confidence and self-obsession.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

260. “Epictetus is saying that one becomes a philosopher when they begin to exercise their guiding reason and start to question the emotions and beliefs and even language that others take for granted.”

— Ryan Holiday

261. “No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement.”

— Ryan Holiday

262. “True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility;.”

— Ryan Holiday

263. “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

264. “When student is ready, the teacher appears.”

— Ryan Holiday

265. “Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function.”

— Ryan Holiday

266. “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

267. “Remember you are mortal.”

— Ryan Holiday

268. “We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out. – THEODORE ROOSEVELT.”

— Ryan Holiday

269. “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

270. “We must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe. On top of all this, we have to build an organization and a system around what we do – one that is about the work and not about us.”

— Ryan Holiday

271. “We must master ourselves unless we’d prefer to be mastered by someone or something else.”

— Ryan Holiday

272. “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

273. “Sun Tzu would say that it is best to win without fighting – to have maneuvered in such a way that the enemy has lost before it has even begun.”

— Ryan Holiday

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

279. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

281. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

283. “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

284. “Whatever you’re going through, whatever is holding you down or standing in your way, can be turned into a source of strength – by thinking of people other than yourself. You won’t have time to think of your own suffering because there are other people suffering and you’re too focused on them.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

286. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

288. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

297. “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

298. “Constantly train your intellect, he told him, “for the greatest thing in the smallest compass is a sound mind in a human body.”

— Ryan Holiday

299. “Remember: Between mountains lies the valley. You may have tumbled down from your former heights. You may have been thrown down. Or simply lost your way. But now you find yourself here. It is a low point. So? A long desert. A desolate valley. Either way, you’ll need to cross it. You’ll need patience and endurance and most of all love. You can’t let this period make you bitter. You have to make sure it makes you better. Because people are counting on you.”

— Ryan Holiday

300. “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