Ona Artist

29 Brilliant Quotes That Demonstrate Why Successful People Are Humble

Ryan Holiday's book <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Enemy-Ryan-Holiday/dp/1591847818/">Ego Is The Enemy</a></em> dives deep into what can hold us back most in life, our egos. The below quotes are a summary of some of Ryan's most memorable lines in
QC Bot
June 16, 2016
“Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Success, Stop Ego, Keep Learning, Stay Open
“One must ask: if your belief in yourself is not dependent on actual achievement, then what is it dependent on? The answer, too often when we are just setting out, is nothing. Ego. And this is why we so often see precipitous rises followed by calamitous falls.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Ego
“When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes— but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned. Ego is self-anointed, its swagger is artifice. One is girding yourself, the other gaslighting. It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Ego, Confidence, Humility
“Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego. Give yourself a little credit for this choice, but not so much, because you’ve got to get back to the task at hand: practicing, working, improving.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Work, Work Strategies, Self-improvement
“Sometimes because we can’t face what’s been said or what’s been done, we do the unthinkable in response to the unbearable: we escalate. This is ego in its purest and most toxic form.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Keep Your Cool, Ego Lashes Out, How Not To Act Under Pressure
“Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. Let them covet what you have, not the other way around. ”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Independence, Follow Your Dreams, Make It Happen
“Pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged— what about subjecting yourself to it deliberately? Change your mind. Change your surroundings… An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Amateurs vs. Professionals, What Makes Someone A Professional, How To Learn, Work Strategies, Mix It Up, Get Confused
“The bigger the ego the harder the fall.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Independence, Follow Your Dreams, Make It Happen
“If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Ego, Honest Communication
“If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Ego, Honest Communication
“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Impressive, How To Be Impressive
“Humble in our aspirations. Gracious in our success. Resilient in our failures.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Failure, Humble, How To Be A Good Person
“Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Greatness, Humble Work, How To Grow
“What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Diligence, Self-awareness, Confidence
“Entitlement assumes: This is mine. I’ve earned it. At the same time, entitlement nickels and dimes other people because it can’t conceive of valuing another person’s time as highly as its own. It delivers tirades and pronouncements that exhaust the people who work for and with us, who have no choice other than to go along. It overstates our abilities to ourselves, it renders generous judgment of our prospects, and it creates ridiculous expectations.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Entitlement
“If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Learning, Never Stop Learning
“A smart man or woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of their power and reach.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Power, Reach
“Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Power, Reach
“The only real failure is abandoning your principles.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Failure, Principles, Betraying Yourself
“It’s a temptation that exists for everyone— for talk and hype to replace action.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Talk Hype, Hype, Walk the Walk, Don't Just Talk The Talk, Ego
“If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Reputation
“A person who can think long term doesn’t pity herself during short-term setbacks.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Long Term, The Obstacle Is The Way, Don't Pity Yourself
“The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see?”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Humble, How To Fight Against Pride, Pride, Be Humble
“Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if— especially if— it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it. There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Learning, How To Live, Courage
“Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Greatness, Work, Hard Work, Work Ethic
“Make it so you don’t have to fake it— that’s they key. Can you imagine a doctor trying to get by with anything less? Or a quarterback, or a bull rider? More to the point, would you want them to? So why would you try otherwise?”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Don't Fake It, Do It Right
“What is truly ambitious is to face life and proceed with quiet confidence in spite of the distractions.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Ambitious, What It Means To Be Ambitious
“There is a real danger in believing it when people use the word ‘genius’— and it’s even more dangerous when we let hubris tell ourselves we are one. The same goes for any label that comes along with a career: are we suddenly a ‘filmmaker,’ ‘writer,’ ‘investor,’ ‘entrepreneur,’ or ‘executive’ because we’ve accomplished one thing? These labels put you at odds not just with reality, but with the real strategy that made you successful in the first place. From that place, we might think that success in the future is just the natural next part of the story— when really it’s rooted in work, creativity, persistence, and luck.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: Genius, Creative Professions
“While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive, visionary geniuses who remade the world in their image with sheer, almost irrational force, I’ve found that if you go looking you’ll find that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition.”
— Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Tagged: History, Goals, Self-improvement