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Ryan Holiday

1,219 Quotes
Author of 'Ego is the Enemy' & 'The Obstacle Is The Way'.
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1,219 quotes curated by Ryan Holiday:

“Nothing but what you get from first impressions. That someone has invited you, for instance. That–but not that it's done you any harm. The fact that my son is sick–that I can see. But 'that he might die of it,' no. Stick with first impressions. Don't extrapolate. And nothing can happen to you.”
— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations
Tagged: Impressions
“How quickly we pronounce final judgments on the things that happen to us, decidedly whether they're good or bad in the first moment they occur–about how in doing so, we surrender our own agency, abandoning the belief we have the power to create meaning out of what happens to us.”
— Alex Lickerman MD, The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self
Tagged: Impressions
“I let all my negatives turn into positives, I use them as motivation. It made me go harder. I never laid down to the losses or the gains. Some losses can bend you over because you're human and the shit hurts. You can ball up. I did the opposite: I G'd up and went harder.”
— Birdman, Interview: Birdman Talks “Baby Money,” Retirement & Making Cash Money A Billion-Dollar Brand
Tagged: Impressions
“In a continuous process there is no certainty of how or when the open market position will end...Enter: Hope or Fear. Our enemies.”
— Jim Paul, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars
Tagged: Impressions
“Look at things as discrete events... an activity with a defined ending point.”
— Jim Paul, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars
Tagged: Impressions
“It's unfortunate this happened. No. It's fortunate...and I have remained unharmed.”
— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations
Tagged: Flip
“Whoever chafes at the conditions dealt by fate is unskilled in the art of life; whoever bears them nobly and makes wise use of them is a man who deserves to be considered good.”
— Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford Worlds Classics)
Tagged: emotions
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Tagged: Obstacles, emotions
“...greet that which does not depend on us serenely and without regrets, and use this obstacle to practice another virtue.”
— Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations
Tagged: emotions
“What is not good are ideals and rhetoric that don't have the possibility of changing the condition you analyze.”
— Eric Dyson, We could be heroes: an election-year letter
Tagged: Obstacles, emotions