Ryan Holiday Quotes

The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who makes it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.

The economics of the Internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important—and more profitable—than the truth.

Men, the philosopher’s lecture-hall is a hospital—you shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you aren’t well when you enter it. —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 3.23.30

The diseases of the rational soul are long-standing and hardened vices, such as greed and ambition—they have put the soul in a straitjacket and have begun to be permanent evils inside it. To put it br...

A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold. A student is self-critical and self-motivated, always trying to improve his understan...

You know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don’t like? Love. That’s right, love.

A poet’s function . . . is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.

We must be sure to act with deliberation, boldness, and persistence. Those are the attributes of right and effective action.

You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to.

You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings.

This is the nature of the American legal system, and of conspiracy as well. It’s slow, adversarial. Moral quandaries and personal issues are reduced to brief moments and decided on small points of law...

The brilliant strategist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart came to a stunning conclusion: In only 6 of the 280 campaigns was the decisive victory a result of a direct attack on the enemy’s main army. O...

Understand at last that you have something in you more powerful and divine than what causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mere puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind? Is it not fear, susp...

The strategic goal was the same: to reach people in an effective, scalable, and data-driven way.

You’re becoming who you are going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Paul Graham explains, The best way to increase a startup’s growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends.

Not be positive but learn to be ceaselessly creative and opportunistic. Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good.

The only thing you truly possess is your ability to make choices (and to use reason and judgment when doing so).

As Plutarch finely expressed, The future bears down upon each one of us with all the hazards of the unknown.

But what is philosophy? Doesn’t it simply mean preparing ourselves for what may come? Don’t you understand that really amounts to saying that if I would so prepare myself to endure, then let anything...