Ryan Holiday

I used to go around and ask every smart person I met—even emailing important people I didn’t know— “What books do you recommend to a kid like me?”

There’s something for you. It’s right around you.

It takes a somewhat deranged type of person to sit down and read a thousand pages of something just for the fun of it.

No wonder we are stressed. No wonder we are so busy.

Like every kid, I was forced to read Fahrenheit 451 in high school.

Don’t travel.

No sober person has ever walked into a nightclub and said: “I like this. Let’s spend more time in places like this.”

Everything you see on HGTV is wrong and dangerous.

There is a French saying popular with revolutionaries: On s’engage et puis on voit. “One jumps into the fray and then figures it out.”

Ask yourself, “Who is making more noise, me or the babies on the flight?”

“When faced with people’s bad behavior, turn around and ask when you have acted like that.”

“You ought to be preparing yourself…to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand,” James Madison once wrote to Thomas Jefferson.