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
- “You’re the chief marketing officer for YOU the company.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “Where the head goes, the body follow. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.” Ryan Holiday
- 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
- “If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Don’t waste a second looking back at your expectations. Face forward, and face it with a smug little grin.” Ryan Holiday
- “The great law of nature is that it never stops. There is no end.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “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
- “Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.” Ryan Holiday
- “You know what’s better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.” Ryan Holiday
- “Everything sucks. I know it. You know it. Let that free you.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “Great times are great softeners.” Ryan Holiday
- “No thank you, I can’t afford to panic.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- ”No one is asking you to look at the world through rose-colored glasses.” Ryan Holiday
- “See the world for what it is. Not what you want it to be or what it should be.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.” Ryan Holiday
- “Think progress, not perfection.” ― Ryan Holiday
- “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.”
- “Working really late is overrated and usually the result of poor planning.” Ryan Holiday
- “True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.” Ryan Holiday
- “First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it is.” Ryan Holiday
- “Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.” Ryan Holiday
- “Working really late is overrated and usually the result of poor planning.” Ryan Holiday
- “True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition.” Ryan Holiday
- “First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it is.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
- “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.”
- “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
- “We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “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
- “No one is keeping you from your dream job.” Ryan Holiday
- “Compare yourself against the progress you’ve made.” Ryan Holiday
- “Genius often really is just persistence in disguise.” Ryan Holiday
- “End of night thoughts: What bad habit did I curb today? How am I better? Were my actions just?” Ryan Holiday
- “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “Adversity can harden you. Or it can loosen you up and make you better if you let it.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “Failure shows us the way by showing us what isn’t the way.” Ryan Holiday
- “Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home.” Ryan Holiday
- “The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this.” Ryan Holiday
- “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
- “Think progress, not perfection.” Ryan Holiday
- “Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception preceded action. Right action follows the right perspective.” Ryan Holiday
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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