Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Like any good school, learning from failure isn’t free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over.”

— Ryan Holiday

352. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

354. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

357. “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

358. “We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it. And why on earth would you choose to feel anything but good?”

— Ryan Holiday

359. “If your purpose is something larger than you – to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself – then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult.”

— Ryan Holiday

360. “Where we decide to put our energy decides what we’ll ultimately accomplish.”

— Ryan Holiday

361. “An aide to Lyndon Johnson once remarked that around the man “there was a feeling – if you did everything, you would win.” Everything. Or as Marcus Aurelius put it, if it’s humanly possible, you can do it.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

363. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

365. “We should not trust the masses who say only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free.” –.”

— Ryan Holiday

366. “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. – JOHN GRAVES.”

— Ryan Holiday

367. “The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.”

— Ryan Holiday

368. “Compassion is always due,” he said to him, “to an enraged imbecile, who lays about him in blows which hurt only himself.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

370. “With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything.”

— Ryan Holiday

371. “There’s a quote from Bismarck that says, in effect, any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from other people’s experience. This.”

— Ryan Holiday

372. “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

373. “Apply yourself to thinking through difficulties – hard times can be softened, tight squeezes widened, and heavy loads made lighter for those who can apply the right pressure.”

— Ryan Holiday

374. “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

375. “One day is as all days, as the Stoics liked to say.”

— Ryan Holiday

376. “We underestimate our capabilities just as much and just as dangerously as we overestimate other abilities. Cultivate the ability to judge yourself accurately and honestly. Look inward to discern what you’re capable of and what it will take to unlock that potential.”

— Ryan Holiday

377. “If something is in our control, its worth every ounce of our efforts and energy. Death is not one of those things. It is not in our control how long we’ll live or what will come and take us from life. But thinking about mortality creates real perspective, and urgency. It doesn’t need to be depressing. Because its invigorating.”

— Ryan Holiday

378. “With growth hacking, we begin by testing until we can be confident we have a product worth marketing. Only then do we chase the big bang that kick-starts our growth engine.”

— Ryan Holiday

379. “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.”

— Ryan Holiday

380. “Let’s be honest. Most of the time we don’t find ourselves in horrible situations we must simply endure. Rather, we face some minor disadvantage or get stuck with some less-than-favorable conditions. Or we’re trying to do something really hard and find ourselves outmatched, overstretched, or out.”

— Ryan Holiday

381. “I cannot understand how some people live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.”

— Ryan Holiday

382. “She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn’t driven by passion, but by reason.”

— Ryan Holiday

383. “It is sad to consider how much time many people spend in the course of a day doing things they “have” to do – not necessary obligations like work or family, but the obligations we needlessly accept out of vanity or ignorance. Consider the actions we take in order to impress other people or the lengths we’ll go to fulfill urges or sate desires we don’t even question.”

— Ryan Holiday

384. “Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”

— Ryan Holiday

385. “The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability.”

— Ryan Holiday

386. “You must stop blaming God, and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.22.13.”

— Ryan Holiday

387. “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

388. “Getting upset is like continuing the dream while you’re awake. The thing that provoked you wasn’t real – but your reaction was. And so from the fake comes real consequences. Which is why you need to wake up right now instead of creating a nightmare.”

— Ryan Holiday

389. “A good person is invincible, for they don’t rush into contests in which they aren’t the strongest. If you want their property, take it – take also their staff, profession, and body. But you will never compel what they set out for, nor trap them in what they would avoid. For the only contest the good person enters is that of their own reasoned choice. How can such a person not be invincible?” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.6.5–7.”

— Ryan Holiday

390. “In failure or adversity, it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too; we don’t do much else when we’re busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us.”

— Ryan Holiday

391. “John D. Rockefeller, who was as rich as they come, believed that “a man’s wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on $10 and has everything he desires, he really is rich.” Today, you could try to increase your wealth, or you could take a shortcut and just want less.”

— Ryan Holiday

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Your own experiences have value. You have accumulated your own wisdom too. Stake your claim. Put something down for the ages – in words and also in example.”

— Ryan Holiday

396. “Ego leads to envy and it rots the bones of people big and small.”

— Ryan Holiday

397. “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

398. “Things must be negative but not too negative. Hopelessness, despair – these drive us to do nothing. Pity, empathy – those drive us to do something, like get up from our computers to act. But anger, fear, excitement, or laughter – these drive us to spread. They drive us to do something that makes us feel as if we are doing something, when in reality we are only contributing to what is probably a superficial and utterly meaningless conversation.”

— Ryan Holiday

399. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday