Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”

— Ryan Holiday

352. “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

353. “Philosophy’s true use – “An operating system for life’s difficulties and hardships”.”

— Ryan Holiday

354. “If Perception and Action were the disciplines of the mind and the body, then Will is the discipline of the heart and the soul.”

— Ryan Holiday

355. “If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? – HILLEL.”

— Ryan Holiday

356. “Listen and connect with people, don’t perform for them.”

— Ryan Holiday

357. “For nothing outside my reasoned choice can hinder or harm it – my reasoned choice alone can do this to itself.”

— Ryan Holiday

358. “The old way – where product development and marketing were two distinct and separate processes – has been replaced.”

— Ryan Holiday

359. “So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

361. “Principles are better than instructions and “hacks.” We can figure out the specifics later – but only if we learn the right way to approach them.”

— Ryan Holiday

362. “Is there a chance? Do I have a shot? Is there something I can do?”

— Ryan Holiday

363. “So we ask ourselves: Why are things the way they are? What practices should be questioned and which should remain sound? This allows us to be both exotic and accessible, shocking but not gratuitous, fresh without sacrificing timelessness.”

— Ryan Holiday

364. “We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty.”

— Ryan Holiday

365. “Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.”

— Ryan Holiday

366. “Whether what you’re going through is your fault or your problem doesn’t matter, because it’s yours to deal with right now.”

— Ryan Holiday

367. “Our perceptions are the thing that we’re in complete control of.”

— Ryan Holiday

368. “Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening – not always, but it can feel that way when we’re deep in the middle of it.”

— Ryan Holiday

369. “What happened yesterday – what happened five minutes ago – is the past. We can reignite and restart whenever we like. Why not do it right now?”

— Ryan Holiday

370. “Today, you could try to increase your wealth, or you could take a shortcut and just want less.”

— Ryan Holiday

371. “Just because you’ve begun down one path doesn’t mean you’re committed to it forever, especially if that path turns out to be flawed or impeded. At that same time, this is not an excuse to be flighty or incessantly noncommittal.”

— Ryan Holiday

372. “Remember, if there is one core teaching at the heart of this philosophy, it’s that we’re not as smart and as wise as we’d like to think we are. If we ever do want to become wise, it comes from the questioning and from humility – not, as many would like to think, from certainty, mistrust, and arrogance.”

— Ryan Holiday

373. “Is there anything sadder than the immense lengths we’ll go to impress someone? The things we’ll do to earn someone’s approval can seem, when examined in retrospect, like the result of some temporary form of insanity.”

— Ryan Holiday

374. “Stoicism as the ideal “personal operating system.”

— Ryan Holiday

375. “If we can focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to realize they are fighting an unwinnable battle.”

— Ryan Holiday

376. “From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force. If.”

— Ryan Holiday

377. “An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before. To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing. When given an unfair task, some rightly see it as a chance to test what they’re made of – to give it all they’ve got, knowing full well how difficult it will be to win. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative.”

— Ryan Holiday

378. “We spend a lot of time thinking about how things are supposed to be, or what the rules say we should do. Trying to get it all perfect. 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

379. “In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

381. “Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.”

— Ryan Holiday

382. “The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged chance, conquered the chance, and made chance the servitor. – E. H. CHAPIN.”

— Ryan Holiday

383. “I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego – and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.”

— Ryan Holiday

384. “Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

386. “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

— Ryan Holiday

387. “We choose how we’ll look at things. We retain the ability to inject perspective into a situation. We can’t change the obstacles themselves – that part of the equation is set – but the power of perspective can change how the obstacles appear.”

— Ryan Holiday

388. “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

389. “Each project matters, and the only degrading part is giving less than one is capable of giving.”

— Ryan Holiday

390. “If solitude is the school of genius, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.”

— Ryan Holiday

391. “The same is true for you today. The order and the peace might be interrupted by a new circumstance. OK. Get a hold of yourself and find your way back.”

— Ryan Holiday

392. “As the famous conqueror and warrior Genghis Khan groomed his sons and generals to succeed him later in life, he repeatedly warned them, “If you can’t swallow your pride, you can’t lead.” He told them that pride would be harder to subdue than a wild lion. He liked the analogy of a mountain. He would say, “Even the tallest mountains have animals that, when they stand on it, are higher than the mountain.”

— Ryan Holiday

393. “In actuality, the will has a lot more to do with surrender than with strength. Try “God willing” over “the will to win” or “willing it into existence,” for even those attributes can be broken. True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.”

— Ryan Holiday

394. “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

395. “What thrives online is not the writing that reflects anything close to the reality in which you and I live. Nor does it allow for the kind of change that will create the world we wish to live in.”

— Ryan Holiday

396. “Not “be positive” but learn to be ceaselessly creative and opportunistic. Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good.”

— Ryan Holiday

397. “As a young basketball player, Bill Bradley would remind himself, “When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing, and when you meet him he will win.”

— Ryan Holiday

398. “So today, as RSS buttons disappear from browsers and blogs, just know that this happened on purpose, so that readers could be deceived more easily.”

— Ryan Holiday

399. “That’s what Seneca is reminding us. As someone who was one of the richest men in Rome, he knew firsthand that money only marginally changes life. It doesn’t solve the problems that people without it seem to think it will. In fact, no material possession will. External things can’t fix internal issues.”

— Ryan Holiday

400. “Sometimes, staying put, going sideways, or moving backward is actually the best way to eliminate what blocks or impedes your path.”

— Ryan Holiday