Ryan Holiday Quotes

One way to remember who you are,” he said, “is to remember who your heroes are.

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.

you must reclaim the ability to abstain because within it is your clarity and self-control.

Success breeds softness.

It also breeds fear: We become addicted to our creature comforts. And then we become afraid of losing them.

Not a lot of people understand this... but you actually don’t have to have an opinion about everything. You don’t have to decide if something is good or bad. Marcus Aurelius says limiting the amount of opinions we have is one of the most powerful things we can do in life.

We should not trust the masses who say only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free.” —

Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer.

In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion.

It’s a temptation that exists for everyone — for talk and hype to replace action.

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

Remember: No one is having less fun than an overextended, overcommitted person with debtors at their door.

You can't let fear rule.

Because there has never been a person who did something that mattered without pissing people off.

It’s not that he was wrong to have great ambitions. Alexander just never grasped Aristotle’s “golden mean” — that is, the middle ground. Repeatedly, Aristotle speaks of virtue and excellence as points along a spectrum. Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other. Generosity, which we all admire, must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use. Where the line — this golden mean — is can be difficult to tell, but without finding it, we risk dangerous extremes. This is why it is so hard to be excellent, Aristotle wrote. “In each case, it is hard work to find the intermediate; for instance, not everyone, but only one who knows, finds the midpoint in a circle.

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. — EPICTETUS