Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

257. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

260. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

262. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

267. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given. And the only way you’ll do something spectacular is by using it all to your advantage.”

— Ryan Holiday

281. “Give more. Give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story.”

— Ryan Holiday

282. “Ernest Hemingway opens his book The Sun Also Rises with a Bible verse: “One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose.”

— Ryan Holiday

283. “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

284. “The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher. We can’t afford to shy away from the things that intimidate us. We don’t need to take our weaknesses for granted.”

— Ryan Holiday

285. “Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.”

— Ryan Holiday

286. “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

287. “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

288. “If we do not focus on our internal integration – on self-awareness – we risk external disintegration.”

— Ryan Holiday

289. “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

290. “My friend the philosopher and martial artist Daniele Bolelli once gave me a helpful metaphor. He explained that training was like sweeping the floor. Just because we’ve done it once, doesn’t mean the floor is clean forever. Every day the dust comes back. Every day we must sweep.”

— Ryan Holiday

291. “We must, as Shakespeare said, “meet the time as it seeks us.” Our destiny is here. Let’s seize it.”

— Ryan Holiday

292. “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

293. “Welcome to the power of perception. Applicable in each and every situation, impossible to obstruct. It can only be relinquished.”

— Ryan Holiday

294. “Ego needs honors in order to be validated. Confidence, on the other hand, is able to wait and focus on the task at hand regardless of external recognition.”

— Ryan Holiday

295. “They work quietly in the corner. They turn their inner turmoil into product – and eventually to stillness.”

— Ryan Holiday

296. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

299. “Opportunities are not usually deep, virgin pools that require courage and boldness to dive into, but instead are obscured, dusted over, blocked by various forms of resistance. What is really called for in these circumstances is clarity, deliberateness, and methodological determination.”

— Ryan Holiday

300. “Under the comb the tangle and the straight path are the same. – HERACLITUS.”

— Ryan Holiday