“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? 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.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“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.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“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, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“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, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.” It’s”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“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.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek. Because we will be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status, our ambition will not be grandiose but iterative—one foot in front of the other, learning and growing and putting in the time.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him. —GOETHE”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers throughout history have “gone out into the wilderness” and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It’s because in doing so they found perspective, they understood the larger picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to. Creativity”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“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.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation- deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“We have only minimal control over the rewards for our work and effort—other people’s validation, recognition, rewards. So what are we going to do? Not be kind, not work hard, not produce, because there is a chance it wouldn’t be reciprocated? C’mon. Think of all the activists who will find that they can only advance their cause so far. The leaders who are assassinated before their work is done. The inventors whose ideas languish “ahead of their time.” According to society’s main metrics, these people were not rewarded for their work. Should they have not done it? Yet in ego, every one of us has considered doing precisely that. If that is your attitude, how do you intend to endure tough times? What if you’re ahead of the times? What if the market favors some bogus trend? What if your boss or your clients don’t understand? It’s far better when doing good work is sufficient. In other words, the less attached we are to outcomes the better. When fulfilling our own standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. When the effort—not the results, good or bad—is enough. With ego, this is not nearly sufficient. No, we need to be recognized. We need to be compensated. Especially problematic is the fact that, often, we get that. We are praised, we are paid, and we start to assume that the two things always go together. The “expectation hangover” inevitably ensues.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“Take inventory for a second. What do you dislike? Whose name fills you with revulsion and rage? Now ask: Have these strong feelings really helped you accomplish anything? Take an even wider inventory. Where has hatred and rage ever really gotten anyone? Especially because almost universally, the traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people—their dishonesty, their selfishness, their laziness—are hardly going to work out well for them in the end. Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment. The question we must ask for ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“The future bears down upon each one of us with all the hazards of the unknown.” The only way out is through.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“You’re not as good as you think. You don’t have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
“You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not rawtalent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.”
― Ryan Holiday, quote from Ego Is the Enemy
Ryan Holiday
Born place: The United States
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“He wrote the future onto my face with his lips.”
― Camilla Gibb, quote from Sweetness in the Belly
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. ... in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.”
― John Maynard Keynes, quote from The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
“I wouldn’t be surprised if in fifty years’ time we have not totally exhausted the gold content of the earth!”
― Ian Fleming, quote from Goldfinger
“I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an
encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.”
― Alain Badiou, quote from In Praise of Love
“Overcoming the obstacles of physical ailments and hurt makes us stronger for the ordeal.”
― Michael Newton, quote from Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives
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VagabondBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
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