Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. – ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

303. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.”

— Ryan Holiday

331. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

333. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

336. “Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things.”

— Ryan Holiday

337. “There is a beautiful dialogue called “Icaromenippus, an Aerial Expedition” by the poet Lucian in which the narrator is given the ability to fly and sees the world from above. Turning his eyes earthward, he sees how comically small even the richest people, the biggest estates, and entire empires look from above. All their battles and concerns were made petty in perspective.”

— Ryan Holiday

338. “Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work.”

— Ryan Holiday

339. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

341. “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

342. “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

343. “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it.”

— Ryan Holiday

344. “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

345. “Who wants to be the person who can never let go? Is there so little meaning in your life that your only pursuit is work until you’re eventually carted off in a coffin? Take pride in your work. But it is not all.”

— Ryan Holiday

346. “Seneca writes that unbruised prosperity is weak and easy to defeat in the ring, but “a man who has been at constant feud with misfortunes acquires a skin calloused by suffering.” This man, he says, fights all the way to the ground and never gives up. That’s what Epictetus means too. What kind of boxer are you if you leave because you get hit? That’s the nature of the sport! Is that going to stop you from continuing?”

— Ryan Holiday

347. “If we expect to be leaders, we must see that thankless service comes with the job. We must do what leaders do, because it’s what leaders do – not for the credit, not for the thanks, not for the recognition. It’s our duty.”

— Ryan Holiday

348. “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

349. “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

350. “See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.”

— Ryan Holiday