Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It’s the logic of two campers and the bear – you don’t need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other camper.”

— Ryan Holiday

302. “Twitter isn’t designed to help you get in and get out with the best information as quickly as possible – it’s supposed to suck you into either a contentious world of argument and debate or an echo chamber that reassures you everyone thinks like you do.”

— Ryan Holiday

303. “When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go – carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”

— Ryan Holiday

304. “Outward appearances are deceptive. What’s within them, beneath them, is what matters.”

— Ryan Holiday

305. “How noble and good everyone could be,” she wrote, “if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal.”

— Ryan Holiday

306. “The gift of free will is that in this life we can choose to be good or we can choose to be bad. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not.”

— Ryan Holiday

307. “The image of the Zen philosopher is the monk up in the green, quiet hills, or in a beautiful temple on some rocky cliff. The Stoics are the antithesis of this idea. Instead, they are the man in the marketplace, the senator in the Forum, the brave wife waiting for her soldier to return from battle, the sculptor busy in her studio. Still, the Stoic is equally at peace.”

— Ryan Holiday

308. “The combination of power, fear, and mania can be deadly. The leader, convinced that he might be betrayed, acts first and betrays others first. Afraid that he’s not well liked, he works so hard to get others to like him that it has the opposite effect. Convinced of mismanagement, he micromanages and becomes the source of the mismanagement. And on and on – the things we fear or dread, we blindly inflict on ourselves.”

— Ryan Holiday

309. “When success begins to slip from your fingers – for whatever reason – the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.”

— Ryan Holiday

310. “The areas of great interest to the Stoics all make an appearance here: virtue, mortality, emotions, self-awareness, fortitude, right action, problem solving, acceptance, mental clarity, pragmatism, unbiased thought, and duty. The Stoics were pioneers of the morning and nightly rituals: preparation in the morning, reflection in the evening.”

— Ryan Holiday

311. “A mind that isn’t in control of itself, that doesn’t understand its power to regulate itself, will be jerked around by external events and unquestioned impulses.”

— Ryan Holiday

312. “Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness – these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to.”

— Ryan Holiday

313. “One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”

— Ryan Holiday

314. “Roger Ebert calls snarking “cultural vandalism.” He’s right. Snark makes culture impossible, or rather, it makes the conditions that make culture possible impossible. Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability: These are the targets of snark. “Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line,” he wrote.”

— Ryan Holiday

315. “We have to do the kind of thinking that 99 percent of the population is just not doing, and we have to stop doing the destructive thinking that they spend 99 percent of their time doing.”

— Ryan Holiday

316. “Forgive them; they are deprived of truth. They wouldn’t do this if they weren’t. Use this knowledge to be gentle and gracious.”

— Ryan Holiday

317. “In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer.”

— Ryan Holiday

318. “Great entrepreneurs are never out of the game for long. They slip many times, but they don’t fall.”

— Ryan Holiday

319. “Failure really can be an asset if what you’re trying to do is improve, learn, or do something new.”

— Ryan Holiday

320. “Have you taken the time to get clarity about who you are and what you stand for? Or are you too busy chasing unimportant things, mimicking the wrong influences, and following disappointing or unfulfilling or nonexistent paths?”

— Ryan Holiday

321. “Richard Branson likes to say, is that “business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another coming around.”

— Ryan Holiday

322. “Our job is not to ‘go with our gut’ or fixate on the first impression we form about an issue. No, we need to be strong enough to resist thinking that is too neat, too plausible, and therefore almost always wrong.”

— Ryan Holiday

323. “He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. – ADAM SMITH.”

— Ryan Holiday

324. “To borrow from Budd Schulberg’s description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was “indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch.” I no longer have those illusions.”

— Ryan Holiday

325. “When people are: – rude or disrespectful: They underestimate us. A huge advantage. – conniving: We won’t have to apologize when we make an example out of them. – critical or question our abilities: Lower expectations are easier to exceed. – lazy: Makes whatever we accomplish seem all the more admirable.”

— Ryan Holiday

326. “Keep your own journal, whether it’s saved on a computer or in a little notebook. Take time to consciously recall the events of the previous day. Be unflinching in your assessments. Notice what contributed to your happiness and what detracted from it. Write down what you’d like to work on or quotes that you like. By making the effort to record such thoughts, you’re less likely to forget them.”

— Ryan Holiday

327. “Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive. It’s a lot more complicated. Socrates had a mean, nagging wife; he always said that being married to her was good practice for philosophy.”

— Ryan Holiday

328. “Not only should you be testing your project as you create it, you must most seriously test your creation as it begins to resemble a final product. So you know what you have – so you can improve it. So you know what you have – so that you might figure out what to do with it. So you know what you have – so you can adjust your expectations.”

— Ryan Holiday

329. “Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.”

— Ryan Holiday

330. “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

331. “You know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don’t like? Love. That’s right, love.”

— Ryan Holiday

332. “When action is our priority, vanity falls away.”

— Ryan Holiday

333. “How different would the world look if people spent as much time listening to their conscience as they did to chattering broadcasts? If they could respond to the calls of their convictions as quickly as we answer the dings and rings of technology in our pockets?”

— Ryan Holiday

334. “If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.” He.”

— Ryan Holiday

335. “The struggle is great, the task divine – to gain mastery, freedom, happiness, and tranquility. – EPICTETUS.”

— Ryan Holiday

336. “Let’s make one thing clear: we never earn the right to be greedy or to pursue our interests at the expense of everyone else. To think otherwise is not only egotistical, it’s counterproductive.”

— Ryan Holiday

337. “The writer Anne Lamott jokes in Bird by Bird, “Ever wonder what God thinks of money? Just look at the people he gives it to.”

— Ryan Holiday

338. “Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously.”

— Ryan Holiday

339. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”

— Ryan Holiday

340. “The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.”

— Ryan Holiday

341. “No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.”

— Ryan Holiday

342. “There’s nothing to feel guilty about for being idle. It’s not reckless. It’s an investment. There is nourishment in pursuits that have no purpose – that is their purpose.”

— Ryan Holiday

343. “What was so special about Belisarius was that he accepted the bargain. Doing the right thing was enough. Serving his country, his God, and doing his duty faithfully was all that mattered. Any adversity could be endured and any rewards were considered extra.”

— Ryan Holiday

344. “To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell – this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world.”

— Ryan Holiday

345. “The observing eye sees what is. The perceiving eye sees what things supposedly.”

— Ryan Holiday

346. “Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you.”

— Ryan Holiday

347. “Socrates had a mean, nagging wife; he always said that being married to her was good practice for philosophy.”

— Ryan Holiday

348. “Don’t spend much time thinking about what other people think. Think about what you think. Think instead about the results, about the impact, about whether it is the right thing to do.”

— Ryan Holiday

349. “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

350. “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