Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

414. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

422. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

425. “Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously.”

— Ryan Holiday

426. “The goodness inside you is like a small flame, and you are its keeper. It’s your job, today and every day, to make sure that it has enough fuel... every person has their own version of the flame... so long as your flame flickers, there will be some light in the world.”

— Ryan Holiday

427. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

432. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

434. “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

435. “At one time or another, we all indulge this sort of gratifying label making. Yet every culture seems to produce words of caution against it. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Don’t cook the sauce before catching the fish. The way to cook a rabbit is first to catch a rabbit. Game slaughtered by words cannot be skinned. Punching above your weight is how you get injured. Pride goeth before the fall.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

443. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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