Top 500 Ryan Holiday Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.” It’s.”

— Ryan Holiday

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

406. “Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

— Ryan Holiday

407. “Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?”

— Ryan Holiday

408. “Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them? We might not be emperors, but the world is still constantly testing us. It asks: Are you worthy? Can you get past the things that inevitably fall in your way? Will you stand up and show us what you’re made of?”

— Ryan Holiday

409. “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

410. “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it.”

— Ryan Holiday

411. “Use this knowledge to be gentle and gracious.”

— Ryan Holiday

412. “What we desire makes us vulnerable.”

— Ryan Holiday

413. “And Johnson, genuinely hated by his opponent and the crowd, still enjoying every minute of it. Smiling, joking, playing the whole fight. Why not? There’s no value in any other reaction. Should he hate them for hating him? Bitterness was their burden and Johnson refused to pick it up.”

— Ryan Holiday

414. “It’s far better that we become pragmatic and adaptable – able to do what we need to do anywhere, anytime. The place to do your work, to live the good life, is here.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

416. “A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?”

— Ryan Holiday

417. “Dorothy Day, the Catholic nun and social activist, admonished herself much the same. “Turn off your radio,” she wrote, “put away your daily paper. Read one review of events and spend time reading.” Books, spend time reading books – that’s what she meant. Books full of wisdom.”

— Ryan Holiday

418. “If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us. One.”

— Ryan Holiday

419. “Bill Walsh says, “Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called ’failure.”

— Ryan Holiday

420. “Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can’t actually influence is wasted, self-indulgent, and self-destructive.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

422. “Seneca writes that unbruised prosperity is weak and easy to defeat in the ring, but “a man who has been at constant feud with misfortunes acquires a skin calloused by suffering.” This man, he says, fights all the way to the ground and never gives up. That’s what Epictetus means too. What kind of boxer are you if you leave because you get hit? That’s the nature of the sport! Is that going to stop you from continuing?”

— Ryan Holiday

423. “Will we fall short of our own standards? Yes. When this happens, we don’t need to whip ourselves, as Clamence did, we must simply let it instruct and teach us, as all injuries do.”

— Ryan Holiday

424. “You rush in to stamp out the sparks and end up fanning them into flames. This is the risk.”

— Ryan Holiday

425. “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

426. “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says.”

— Ryan Holiday

427. “As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work. This is difficult considering our conflict of interest – which is to say, the ultimate conflict of interest: We made it. The way to balance that conflict of interest is to bring in people who are objective.”

— Ryan Holiday

428. “Take action. Get out from under all your stuff. Get rid of it. Give away what you don’t need. You were born free – free of stuff, free of burden. But since the first time they measured your tiny body for clothes, people have been foisting stuff upon you. And you’ve been adding links to the pile of chains yourself ever since.”

— Ryan Holiday

429. “Fix your attention on your intelligence. Let it do its thing.”

— Ryan Holiday

430. “That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.”

— Ryan Holiday

431. “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

432. “Reminding ourselves each day that we will die helps us treat our time as a gift. Someone on a deadline doesn’t indulge himself with attempts at the impossible, he doesn’t waste time complaining about how he’d like things to be.”

— Ryan Holiday

433. “If we expect to be leaders, we must see that thankless service comes with the job. We must do what leaders do, because it’s what leaders do – not for the credit, not for the thanks, not for the recognition. It’s our duty.”

— Ryan Holiday

434. “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

435. “When the student is ready, the old Zen saying goes, the teacher appears.”

— Ryan Holiday

436. “To be rational today, we have to do just three things: First, we must look inward. Next, we must examine ourselves critically. Finally, we must make our own decisions – uninhibited by biases or popular notions.”

— Ryan Holiday

437. “Placed in some situation that seems unchangeable and undeniably negative, we can turn it into a learning experience, a humbling experience, a chance to provide comfort to others.”

— Ryan Holiday

438. “At the end of a frustrating exchange, you might find yourself thinking, Ugh, this person is such an idiot. Or asking, Why can’t they just do things right? But not everyone has had the advantages that you’ve had.”

— Ryan Holiday

439. “We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it. And why on earth would you choose to feel anything but good?”

— Ryan Holiday

440. “Find what you do out of rote memory or routine. Ask yourself: Is this really the best way to do it? Know why you do what you do – do it for the right reasons.”

— Ryan Holiday

441. “Get your day scheduled. Limit the interruptions. Limit the number of choices you need to make.”

— Ryan Holiday

442. “When you get right down to it, the real skill for marketers today isn’t going to be helping some big, boring company grow 1 percent a year but creating a totally new brand from nothing using next-to-no resources.”

— Ryan Holiday

443. “Always prepare ourselves for more difficult times. Always accept what we’re unable to change. Always manage our expectations. Always persevere. Always learn to love our fate and what happens to us. Always protect our inner self, retreat into ourselves. Always submit to a greater, larger cause. Always remind ourselves of our own mortality.”

— Ryan Holiday

444. “We can learn to perceive things differently, to cut through the illusions that others believe or fear. We can stop seeing the “problems” in front of us as problems. We can learn to focus on what things really are. Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds – that sacred place of reason, action and will – and throw off our compass.”

— Ryan Holiday

445. “No harshness, no deprivation, no toil should interfere with our empathy toward others.”

— Ryan Holiday

446. “In other words, through our perception of events, we are complicit in the creation – as well as the destruction – of.”

— Ryan Holiday

447. “The Stoics were pioneers of the morning and nightly rituals: preparation in the morning, reflection in the evening.”

— Ryan Holiday

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

— Ryan Holiday

449. “How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you’re doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?”

— Ryan Holiday

450. “Stoicism is designed to be medicine for the soul.”

— Ryan Holiday