Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Richard Branson likes to say, is that “business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another coming around.”

— Ryan Holiday

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

406. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

408. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “Most happy people don’t need you to know how happy they are – they aren’t thinking about you at all.”

— Ryan Holiday

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

429. “There’s an old line about how if you want to live happy, live hidden.”

— Ryan Holiday

430. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

432. “Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”

— Ryan Holiday

433. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

435. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday

449. “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

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

— Ryan Holiday