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Ryan Holiday Quotes

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Famous Ryan Holiday Quotes

“There are two ways to be wealthy: to get everything you want, or to want everything you have...the same goes for freedom. If you chafe and fight and struggle for more, you will never be free. If you could find and focus on the pockets of freedom you already have, well, then you'd be free right here, right now.”

WealthFreedomAttentionFocusMindfulness
Book:The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
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“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.”

GoodnessBe The Light
Book:The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
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“Show up and try. Get on the treadmill. Pick up the violin. Answer some emails. Script out some scenes. Reach out to some clients. Read some reports. Lift a couple weights. Jog one mile. Cross one thing off the to-do list. Chase down a lead. It doesn't matter what it is; all aspects of our life benefit from this circumscribed kind of discipline.”

InspirationalPhilosophyLeadershipWorkBusinessPsychologySelf HelpPersonal DevelopmentProductivity
Author:Ryan Holiday
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“Only you know what it will look like to train in your art like a samurai, an Olympic athlete, a master in pursuit of excellence. Only you will know what you need to practice from morning until night, what to repeat ten thousand times. It won't be easy, but in that burden is also freedom and confidence. The pleasure of the flow state. The rhythm of second nature. The quiet calmness of knowing that, from the practice, you'll know exactly what to do when it counts .... the pride and the dependability of doing it too.”

InspirationalPhilosophyLeadershipWorkBusinessPsychologySelf HelpPersonal DevelopmentProductivity
Book:Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control
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“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.”

FearPower
Book:The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
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“We have only minimal control over the rewards for our work and effort - other people’s validation, recognition, rewards. It’s far better when doing the work itself is sufficient. When fulfilling our own internal standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. The less attached we are to the outcomes, the better. Our ego wants recognition & compensation. We have expectations. Let the effort, not the results be enough. Maybe your parents/kids/partner/etc won’t be impressed. We can’t let THAT be what motivates us. We can change the definition of success to: ‘peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.’ With this definition we decide not to let externals determine if something is worth doing. It’s on us.”

MotivationPrideEgoSelf RespectControlPeace Of MindEgoism
Book:Ego Is the Enemy
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“When our cause is young, we feel so intensely that it seems wrong to take it slow. This is our inability to see that burning ourselves out isn’t going to hurry the journey along. The critical work that you want to do will require your deliberation and consideration. Not passion. Not naïveté. It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead - humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through. Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you feel you *must* do or say, not what you care about and wish to be. Then you will do great things. Then you will stop being your old, good-intentioned, but ineffective self.”

PurposePatience
Book:Ego Is the Enemy
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“Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? The answer is that it doesn't matter. There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. We're simply talking about a lot of hours - that to get where we want to go isn't about brilliance, but continual effort. It means it's all within reach - for all of us, provided we have the constitution and humbleness to be patient and the fortitude to put in the work.”

HumilityPatienceWork Ethic
Book:Ego Is the Enemy
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“Our own path, whatever we aspire to, will in some ways be defined by the amount of nonsense we are willing to deal with. It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how great your connections are, how much money you have. When you want to do something - something big and important and meaningful - you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doens’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.”

HumilityEgoPatience
Book:Ego Is the Enemy
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“We are what we repeatedly do,' Aristotle said. 'Therefore, excellence is not an act, but a habit.' The stoics add to that that we are a product of our thoughts: 'Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind'; Marcus Aurelius put it. Think about your activities of the last week, as well as what you have planned for today and the week that follows. The person you'd like to be...how close do your actions actually correspond to him or her? Which fire are you feeding? Which person are you becoming?”

MindfulnessThoughtsActionsThe One You Feed
Book:The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
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“At some time during the process, [of writing] I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months later, those painful pages were dirt that nourished my yard, which I could walk with bare feet. It was a real and tangible connection to that larger immensity. I liked to remind myself that the same process is going to happen to me when I'm done, when I die and nature tears me up...”

HumilityEgoSelf DelusionShortcomingDrawback
Book:Ego Is the Enemy
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“Los perros, Dios los bendiga, son apasionados, como lo pueden atestiguar numerosas ardillas, pájaros, cajas, mantas y juguetes. Los perros no logran la mayor parte de lo que se proponen hacer. Sin embargo, tienen una ventaja en todo esto: una memoria de muy corto plazo que mantiene a raya la horrible sensación de futilidad e impotencia. Por otro lado la realidad de nosotros los humanos no tiene razones para ser sensible a las ilusiones bajo las cuales funcionamos. Con el tiempo, la realidad termina por interferir.”

RealidadPasiónPerros
Book:Ego Is the Enemy
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“It's a pushing age," Churchill wrote his mother as a young man, "and we must shove with the rest." It may well be that Winston Churchill was the greatest pusher in history. His life spanned the final calvary charge of the British Empire, which he witnesses as a young war correspondent in 1898, and ended well into the nuclear age, indeed the space age, both of which he helped usher in. His first trip to America was on a steamship (to be introduces on stage by Mark Twain, no less) and his final one was on a Boeing 707 that flew 500 miles per hour. In between he saw two world wars, the invention of the car, radio, and rock and roll, and countless trials and triumphs.”

Churchill
Book:Stillness Is the Key
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“It´s a populist irony--the strongman comes to power by making impossible and destructive promises to the disenfranchised. Do they actually have any intention of helping these people? Of course not. In fact, they´ll actively stymie any reforms that will actually make the system more fair. All that matters is their iron grip on their ignorant base and the power that comes from it.”

PopulistFascistAuthoritarianStrongman
Book:Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
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“There is no prize for having read the most books before you die. Even if you were the most dedicated reader in the world—a book a day, even—your collection would probably never be bigger than a small branch library. What if, when it came to your reading and learning, you prioritized quality over quantity? What if you read the few great books deeply instead of briefly skimming all the new books? Your shelves might be emptier, but your brain and your life would be fuller.”

On ReadingQuotes On Books
Book:The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
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“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.”

JournalismBlogsReporting
Book:Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
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“Appearances are deceiving. *Having* authority is not the same as *being* an authority. *Having* the right and *being* the right are not the same either. Being promoted doesn't necessarily mean you're doing good work and it doesn't mean you are worthy of promotion (they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies). *Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.* To be or to do - life is a constant roll call.”

EgoThe Power Of Choice
Book:Ego Is the Enemy
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