Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Ryan Holiday

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

356. “Remember, there’s no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment.”

— Ryan Holiday

357. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

359. “Maintain control over your mind and perceptions, they’d say. It’s your most prized possession.”

— Ryan Holiday

360. “We can’t blame other people for making us feel stressed or frustrated any more than we can blame them for our jealousy. The cause is within us.”

— Ryan Holiday

361. “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

362. “While everyone else is running around with a list of responsibilities a mile long – things they’re not actually responsible for – you’ve got just that one-item list. You’ve got just one thing to manage: your choices, your will, your mind. So mind it.”

— Ryan Holiday

363. “Epictetus was reminded daily how little control he had, even of his own person. As he came to study and understand Stoicism, he adopted this lesson into what he described as our “chief task in life.” It was, he said, simply “to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.”

— Ryan Holiday

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday