Ryan Holiday Quotes

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.

One of the things that separates us from other people is our ability to be strict and self-disciplined.

Where other people are fine making excuses or taking shortcuts, we are not.

Where other people wing it or do what’s easiest, taking the path of least resistance, we don’t.

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.

When success begins to slip from your fingers — for whatever reason — the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.

Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.

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

Sleep is an act of character.

It's easy to be grateful for the things that go well, but you have to be grateful for those that don't.

The obstacles. The frustrations. The wrong turns. The stresses and difficulties. The people who wronged you. The bad days.

Those are all opportunities to make you better.

The Stoics spent so much effort trying to limit their attachments to various comforts.

They worked hard at not needing the newest or fanciest or most expensive new luxury.

They understood that it was not only ungrateful – it was a quest that only ever ended in disappointment.

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

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. — RALPH WALDO EMERSON

What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him. — GOETHE

Just because you’ve begun down one path doesn’t mean you’re committed to it forever , especially if that path turns out to be flawed or impeded. At that same time, this is not an excuse to be flighty or incessantly noncommittal.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life,” Joan Didion observed, “is the source from which self-respect springs.

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