Ryan Holiday Quotes

“Our duty is to do the right thing—right now.”

“You've got to get yourself—and your perceptions—under control.”

“In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.”

“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.”

“Whatever you're going through, whatever is holding you down or standing in your way, can be turned into a source of strength—by thinking of people other than yourself. You won't have time to think of your own suffering because there are other people suffering and you're too focused on them.”

“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.”

“Bad luck is actually a chance for us to make up some time. We're like runners who train on hills, or at an altitude so they can beat the runners who expected the course would be flat.”

“It's okay to be discouraged. It's not okay to quit.”

“There is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up.”

“You'll have far better luck toughening yourself up, than you ever will trying to take the teeth out of a world that is, at best, indifferent to your existence.”

“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

“There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.”

“The intervening years are a blur of events — some good and some pretty bad. I would rise pretty rapidly in business. The chaos and the conflict in that company — to say nothing of the temptations and responsibilities — would shape me as a person. I learned how to manage people, I learned how to maneuver and accomplish things. Mostly, I learned how to survive — crisis after crisis after crisis.”

“Stoicism is the ideal operating system.”

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

“I've always been curious about why that's a bad thing. What else would you want them to be studying, other than a philosophy built around virtue? You could argue that they're missing the point, or they're picking and choosing what they take from it. But there are much darker rabbit holes that people have chosen to go down.”

“I am very ambitious as a writer. I no longer have any ambitions as an author. I'm not aiming at lists. I don't think about deals. I rarely even look at sales numbers. I have stopped tracking how other people's books are doing. I have locked into process and tuned out publishing.”

“Success is autonomy. The world is so unpredictable, and there's so many things we don't control. So for me, success is: do I have control over the reasonable things that a human being should be able to control?”

“I've come to understand that staying up late, working through every weekend — that's actually a sign of ill-discipline. I've just never seen someone sit there and torture themselves for twelve hours and produce good work at the end of it.”

“The best one I've read. Ryan Holiday is brilliant. If I had read The Obstacle Is the Way sooner, a few things might have been different.”