The Most Inspirational Ryan Holiday Quotes

Ryan Holiday is an American author, marketer, and entrepreneur. He was born on June 16, 1987 in Sacramento, California and currently resides in Austin, Texas. In the past he served as a media strategist, as a Director of Marketing for American Apparel and as a columnist.

Ryan currently devotes most of his time to being an author and writing extensively about how to apply great works of philosophy to improve your daily life. In particular, he has helped millions of people get re-engaged with stoic philosophy. His most popular books are The Obstacle is The Way and Stillness is the Key.

Ryan is a deep thinker, with many inspirational quotes that will change how you see and think about things.

Our Favorite Quotes from Ryan Holiday

  1. “You’re the chief marketing officer for YOU the company.” Ryan Holiday
  2. “Am I saying this because I want to prove how smart I am or am I saying this because it needs to be said.” Ryan Holiday
  3. “Where the head goes, the body follow. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.” Ryan Holiday
  4. When something happens, you decide what it means. Is it the end? Or the beginning? Is it the worst thing that has ever happened to you? Or is it just a setback? You have the power to choose how you perceive every situation in life.” Ryan Holiday
  5. “If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.” Ryan Holiday
  6. “If you want anything from life, you have to start moving towards it. Only action will bring you closer. Start now, not tomorrow.” Ryan Holiday
  7. “It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit.” Ryan Holiday
  8. “Life is competition and if you want to achieve anything in life, you have to work hard for it. When you think: “Life is hard.” Know that it’s supposed to be hard. If you get discouraged, try another angle until you succeed. Every attempt brings you one step closer.” Ryan Holiday
  9. “We must be willing to roll the dice and lose. Prepare, at the end of the day, for none of it to work.” Ryan Holiday
  10. “We get disappointed too quickly. The main cause? We often expect things will turn out fine—we have too high expectations. No one can guarantee your success so why not expect to lose? You try with all your effort, it doesn’t work out, you accept it, and move on.” Ryan Holiday
  11. “The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher.” Ryan Holiday
  12. “Don’t shy away from difficulty. Are you in a relationship because you fear loneliness? Are you staying at a job that you hate? Don’t do things just because they’re easy. How do you expect to grow?” Ryan Holiday
  13. “The world might call you a pessimist. Who cares? It’s far better to seem like a downer than to be blindsided or caught off guard.” Ryan Holiday
  14. “Just expecting to lose is not enough if you want to accomplish something. If you rehearse everything that can go wrong in your mind, you will not be caught by surprise when things actually go wrong. The Stoics called this Premeditatio malorum, which means premeditation of evils.” Ryan Holiday
  15. “Don’t waste a second looking back at your expectations. Face forward, and face it with a smug little grin.” Ryan Holiday
  16. “The great law of nature is that it never stops. There is no end.” Ryan Holiday
  17. “When you overcome one obstacle, another one waits in the shadows. Life is a process of overcoming obstacles, one after the other. The obstacle becomes the way so you might as well enjoy it.” Ryan Holiday
  18. “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great individuals, like great companies, find a way to transform weakness into strength. ” Ryan Holiday
  19. “Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.” Ryan Holiday
  20. “You know what’s better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.” Ryan Holiday
  21. “Everything sucks. I know it. You know it. Let that free you.” Ryan Holiday
  22. “The question to ask, when you feel pride is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see?” Ryan Holiday
  23. “Great times are great softeners.” Ryan Holiday
  24. “No thank you, I can’t afford to panic.” Ryan Holiday
  25. “Some things make us emotional, but you have to practice to keep your emotions in control. In every situation, no matter how bad it is, keep calm and try to find a solution. Sometimes the best solution is walking away.” Ryan Holiday
  26. ”No one is asking you to look at the world through rose-colored glasses.” Ryan Holiday
  27. “See the world for what it is. Not what you want it to be or what it should be.” Ryan Holiday
  28. “I don’t keep Facebook on my phone and I don’t use any apps with alerts. The idea is that the phone answers to me rather than the other way around.” Ryan Holiday
  29. “Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.” Ryan Holiday
  30. “Think progress, not perfection.” ― Ryan Holiday
  31. “We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.”
  32. “Working really late is overrated and usually the result of poor planning.” Ryan Holiday
  33. “True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.” Ryan Holiday
  34. “First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it is.” Ryan Holiday
  35. “Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.” Ryan Holiday
  36. “Working really late is overrated and usually the result of poor planning.” Ryan Holiday
  37. “True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.” Ryan Holiday
  38. “First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it is.” Ryan Holiday
  39. “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.” Ryan Holiday
  40. “When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?” Ryan Holiday
  41. “The economics of the internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important – and more important – and more profitable – than the truth.” Ryan Holiday
  42. “Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
  43. “It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you’ve decided to lay siege to in your own life—that’s persistence.”
  44. “It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit. Plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you’ve decided to lay siege to in your own life – that’s persistence.” Ryan Holiday
  45. “We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek.” Ryan Holiday
  46. “If we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way.” Ryan Holiday
  47. “Imagine the power you’d have in your life and relationships if all the things that trouble everyone else didn’t matter so much.” Ryan Holiday
  48. “No one is keeping you from your dream job.” Ryan Holiday
  49. “Compare yourself against the progress you’ve made.” Ryan Holiday
  50. “Genius often really is just persistence in disguise.” Ryan Holiday
  51. “End of night thoughts: What bad habit did I curb today? How am I better? Were my actions just?” Ryan Holiday
  52. “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.” Ryan Holiday
  53. “Ordinary people shy away from negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are their best in these situations. They turn personal tragedy or misfortune – really anything, everything to their advantage.” Ryan Holiday
  54. “Adversity can harden you. Or it can loosen you up and make you better if you let it.” Ryan Holiday
  55. “In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what you’ve been given.” Ryan Holiday
  56. “Failure shows us the way by showing us what isn’t the way.” Ryan Holiday
  57. “Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home.” Ryan Holiday
  58. “The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this.” Ryan Holiday
  59. “What matters most is not what our obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure.” Ryan Holiday
  60. “Think progress, not perfection.” Ryan Holiday
  61. “Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception preceded action. Right action follows the right perspective.” Ryan Holiday
Read ->  Chanakya Quotes to Help Improve Your Life (81 of them!)

See also: David Hume Quotes and John Locke Quotes

Video: Ryan Holiday – 12 Stoic Lessons that Will Immediately Change Your Life

This is an amazing fun and educational video that will take you through a few quick points that you can immediately apply to change your life today!

Related: Best Epictetus Quotes

Summary

Ryan has authored several books. If you want to learn more about stoicism, we highly recommend you start with The Daily Stoic – it will give you a nugget of stoicism every day for a year.

If you like Ryan as much as we do, be sure to check out his website and sign up for his email list.

Finally, if you want to see one of Ryan’s best interviews, check this one out. This interview is with Tom Bilyeu and they discuss the keys to a good life!

Related: The Most Interesting Quotes from Man’s Search for Meaning and Viktor Frankl’s Best Quotes

Image Credit: Luiz Berengue, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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