Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

410. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

412. “Be natural and yourself and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

414. “Facts are better than dreams, as Churchill put it.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

416. “To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.”

— Ryan Holiday

417. “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

418. “If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation- deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

420. “A great destiny, Seneca reminds us, is great slavery.”

— Ryan Holiday

421. “How often does that happen to us? We comfort a friend during a breakup, only to be surprised when our own relationship ends. We must prepare in our minds for the possibility of extreme reversals of fate. The next time you make a donation to charity, don’t just think about the good turn you’re doing, but take a moment to consider that one day you may need to receive charity yourself.”

— Ryan Holiday

422. “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

423. “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

424. “Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

427. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

433. “Very few go astray who comport themselves with restraint. – CONFUCIUS.”

— Ryan Holiday

434. “It’s much easier to control our perceptions and emotions than it is to give up our desire to control other people and events.”

— Ryan Holiday

435. “Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.” There is plenty else going on right here to care about any of that.”

— Ryan Holiday

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

445. “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

446. “You can take the bite out of any tough situation by bringing a calm mind to it. By considering it and meditating on it in advance.”

— Ryan Holiday

447. “Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.”

— Ryan Holiday

448. “Ego loves this notion, the idea that something is “fair” or not. Psychologists.”

— Ryan Holiday

449. “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

450. “We all demand reparation for our early wounds to our narcissism,” thinking we are owed because we were wronged or deprived.”

— Ryan Holiday