Ryan Holiday Quotes

Your information matters as much as your physical diet. Choose carefully what you put in your brain.

3 Things You Need To Stop Doing From The Stoics

1. Stop following the mob (Chrysippus)
2. Stop avoiding discomfort (Seneca)
3. Stop taking things personally (Marcus Aurelius)

I will keep constant watch over myself and — most usefully — will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil — that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past.” — SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 83.2

Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual — it becomes sanctified and holy.

Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.

Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. — RICHARD FEYNMAN

The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.

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.

If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters — don’t wish to seem knowledgeable. And if some regard you as important, distrust yourself.” — EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 13a

Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice. — THEODORE ROOSEVELT

To each,” Winston Churchill would say, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.

Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.

Everything starts at zero. Progress is made one small step, one crappy page every day.