Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) 21 (Stoic) Quotes That Will Change You Into A Better Person About this episode Ryan gives you 21 quotes that will change you into a better person, if you let them. Each one is worth remembering, having queued in your brain for one of life’s crossroads or to drop at the perfect moment in conversation. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/pHtgQDqXqVoTalkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Make your mental health more than just another New Year’s resolution, with Talkspace. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailySto ic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,
0:46 Ryan Holiday? and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. As long as we've been alive, we've been collecting sayings about how to live. You can find them carved into the rocks of the Temple of Apollo. They're etched, it's graffiti, on the walls of Pompeii. As it happens, there's a quote from Seneca on a wall in Pompeii. There's proverbs and epigrams in the plays of Shakespeare and the commonplace books of great thinkers and writers like Erasmus. Montaigne would put some of his favorite expressions on the ceiling of his study. There's an Epictetus quote, as it happens. Maybe today you put yours in your iPhone or an Evernote. I put mine on note cards.
1:28 Ryan Holiday? But the idea is, we want to gather up these little sayings that guide us on how to live. Well, in today's episode, we have 21 quotes that I think will make you a better person. Quotes I've written down, put in my commonplace book that I try to think of often. And I think you'll like this little conversation. Excited to put this episode done. We have an article form of it as well and a YouTube video, which you can check out in the show notes. But here's 21 Stoic-inspired quotes that will change you into a better person, if you'll let.
2:10 Ryan Holiday? Theodore Roosevelt said that we all must either wear out or rust out. My choice is to wear out. I think it's this idea that, you know, use it or lose it, right? No one would have thought early on in his life that Theodore Roosevelt would have even been in a position to rust out because he was born with this crippling case of asthma and he was sickly and frail. He basically realizes, his father tells him as a young man, "Look, it doesn't matter how smart you are if you don't have the body to go with it." And he decides that he only gets one life and he's not going to spend it sitting around being frail, being weak, not being able to do things. And so he gets to work building his bodies. His father puts a gym in their house. There's no one who looks at the life of this man, his cowboy days, his writing days,
2:54 Ryan Holiday? his time as president, his time after the presidency. Nobody looks at this guy's life and says, "He wasted it," right? Nobody says that he left anything on the table. When I think about rusting out or wearing out, I just think about seizing the day, not waiting for some future when you're going to do something, but getting to work, doing what you can, resting at the end, not in the middle. Don't defer till later. Put in the work now.
3:21 Ryan Holiday? Epictetus says, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." To me, this is the essence of Stoicism. It's not what happens, it's how we respond to what happens. And I think the Stoics are so good at encapsulating this complicated philosophy in such a distilled key way. It's not what happens, it's how you respond. I have another video about this, this idea that you control how you play, what the refs do, how the weather is, how you're feeling, where the coach decides to position you. You don't control any of that, you control how you play. We don't control what happens to us in life, we control what we do about what happens to us in life. That's where our power is, that's what's up to us.
4:07 Ryan Holiday? Marcus really says the best revenge is to not be like that. Right? And he says this as a guy who experiences a coup, who's slandered, who all sorts of bad things happen to, right? And so what's he gonna do? Is he going to debase himself by being like the people who did wrong to him? Or is he gonna be above it, right? Is he going to stick to his principles? Because what the Stoics believe is that the people who do wrong, even if they are rewarded for it in some ways, are ultimately punished by it, right? Think of the worst people you know, the people who've screwed you over the most in life. Ask yourself, would you really want to live inside them, right? Would you really want to be them? No, you wouldn't, because you
4:49 Ryan Holiday? know, deep down, it's miserable to be them. And you know that you could get away with the things that they do. But that's not why you don't do them. You don't do them because you know it would degrade you, it would make you worse. And that's what Marcus really means when he says, "The best revenge is to not be like that." And I try to remember this always when I'm going through things, when I'm attacked, when somebody screws me over. I go, "Look, I gotta deal with this, I gotta figure out my way through it. But what I'm not going to do is debase myself in response to it." And that goes back to the Epictetus thing. We don't control what happens, we control how we respond. And we don't want that response to make us worse as people.
5:30 Ryan Holiday? There is good in everything, if only we look for it. Laura Ingalls Wilder lives an incredibly difficult life. She's a pioneer in Florida, in the Midwest, on the prairies. She deals with the worst things that nature can throw at a person. As the Stoics say, "Our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts." Are we gonna choose to see the good in a situation? Are we gonna choose to see what we can respond with? Are we gonna see where we have an opportunity? Are we gonna focus on the things that were taken from us? Are we gonna focus on the negativity? Are we gonna focus on the pain? Are we gonna focus on what we're going to do about it? And the first thing we can do about it is to see some level of positivity. The Stoics believe
6:10 Ryan Holiday? that the wise person could find good in anything, could turn anything into some kind of good. And that's what this idea means.
6:22 Ryan Holiday? Heraclitus says that character is fate. And what that means is who you are determines what you're gonna do. The traits you nurture, the code you live by, the things you hold to be important, that's what you can bet on, and it's also what other people are gonna bet on. To me, the other part of character is fate is just remembering, as the Stoics say, you don't go expecting figs in winter. If someone has shown you what their character is, who they are, you have to believe them. Don't expect that they're magically gonna change. Don't expect that you're gonna be the exception as far as interacting with them goes. What you see is what you get. So what that means is, not that you write other people off,
7:03 Ryan Holiday? but I think it's that you focus on cultivating and improving your character so people see what they're going to get when it comes to you, and what you know you're going to get when it comes to yourself.
7:19 Ryan Holiday? Nassim Taleb is one of my favorite writers. If you haven't read The Black Swan, or Anti-Fragile, or Fooled by Randomness, you absolutely should. But he says, "If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud." Meaning, that if you see something that's wrong in the world, if you see something that's not true, if you see someone being abused, if you see someone doing something unethical, and you simply look the other way, you are part of the problem, you are guilty as well. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "And remember, you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also." You can be corrupted by, you can be complicit in an evil happening by not saying anything. And I love this quote because it cultivates an important Stoic idea.
8:03 Ryan Holiday? Stoicism isn't just knowing what's right, but it's speaking up and doing what's right. And so if you see something that's wrong in the world, you have to speak up. There's been times that I haven't done this in my life. I talk about this in Courage is Calling, and I look back at that with great shame and embarrassment. The things I'm most proud of, even though they cost me, even though they were hard, are the times that I saw something was wrong, and I did something about it. If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
8:35 Ryan Holiday? How does Ralph Waldo Emerson get so smart? It's by learning from everyone that he meets. And his quote is a great one, and I think it's a worthy motto. He says, "Every man I meet is my master in something, and in that, I learn from him." Right? So everyone is better than you at something. We can learn from every single person we meet. If you go around thinking that you're superior, if you go around thinking that you're perfect, if you go around thinking you're better than everyone, you will not learn. That's not to say that someone is better than you at the things you value, right? That's not to say they're better than you at all the most important things, but there is something that they are better than you at. And that's what you want to find. You want to look for that. You want to learn from everyone, from everything. This is how you get better, right?
9:20 Ryan Holiday? The person who is always learning is always getting better. The person who thinks there's nothing left to learn is, in a sense, correct because it becomes impossible for them to learn anymore.
9:33 Ryan Holiday? I love Cheryl Strayed. She's a great writer. She says all sorts of brilliant things. If you haven't read her book, Dear Sugar, you absolutely should. In one of the letters in that book, she says, "Look, this isn't your responsibility, but it is your problem." I remember when I was learning to drive and I started to go through some intersection and then another car went. And I remember telling my dad or the driving instructor, I forget who it was, I remember saying something like, "But I have the right of way." And they said to me, "It doesn't matter who has the right of way if you get in an accident." Meaning, it doesn't matter who's right, it's still your problem. And I think that's what she's saying here. So when we think about who's to blame, we love blaming, right? We love pointing fingers. But it doesn't matter because now it's something you have to deal with.
10:17 Ryan Holiday? And I think this is kind of a metaphor for life. So the question is, what are you going to do? Are you going to complain? Are you going to litigate the blame? Are you going to wish it was otherwise? Are you going to resent it? Or are you going to get to work solving it? So don't worry about whose responsibility it was. Don't worry about who to blame. Just solve it.
10:37 Ryan Holiday? Marcus Verder says, "Let's waste no more time arguing what a good person is. Just be one." Right? Philosophy does ask a lot of provocative questions. It can be easy to get caught up in debates about right or wrong. It can be easy to get distracted with just theoretical debates about whether there is such a thing as right or wrong. But ultimately, a stoic just takes action. Show, don't tell. Right? So you can spend a lot of time talking, you can spend a lot of time chattering, you can spend a lot of time trying to convince, or you could just embody it. You could just be it. And again, what do you control? Do you control definitions? Or do you control your own actions? Right? So just try to be the thing that you want to see in the world, as that quote goes. Right?
11:22 Ryan Holiday? Don't try to reform other people. Don't try to convince other people. Try to reform yourself. Try to be what you want to be in the world. Try to focus on what you control.
11:35 Ryan Holiday? In the Bhagavad Gita, one of my favorite quotes, and something I try to think always of as a writer, is this idea that you're only entitled to the action, never to its fruits. I control the book that I write. I control the work that I put into the book. I control even the effort that I spend marketing. But how many copies it sells, what awards it wins, the recognition that it gets, if it's appreciated now, or appreciated 100 years from now, or never. None of that you control. And when you detach your interests from what you don't control, it actually gives you more energy and a deeper love for what it is that you do. So as a writer, I'm trying always to focus on what's up to me.
12:18 Ryan Holiday? I'm trying to focus on process, not outcomes. And I think you really find this in great people, that they are far more concerned with process than they are with outcomes, because that's what they control.
12:34 Ryan Holiday? Epicurus is seen as this sort of lover of pleasure, but that's not really what it was. I think his ethos is best captured in his quote when he says, "Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth." You know, people talk about this idea of fuck you money, like, "One day in the future, I'll have so much I won't have to care about anything." But really, it's about meeting your needs. And when your needs are met, then you're playing with house money. And I think that's what self-sufficiency is about. Getting the things that you need, not being dependent on external things, not needing more. And in fact, for the Stoics, the definition of poverty wasn't a certain amount of money. It was the need, the craving for more and more, that made someone truly impoverished.
13:16 Ryan Holiday? Jose Ortega says, "Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are." Goethe has a similar version. He says, "Tell me who you spend time with, and I will tell you who you are." Right? We are what we put our mind towards. We are dyed by the color of our thoughts. We are shaped by our inputs. So if you watch divisive television, you're going to be divisive and polarized. I think most people have a toxic, unhealthy media diet, worse than their actual diet. Then we wonder why they're unhappy, why they're easily misinformed, why they get riled up, why they're angry. This is just no way to live.
13:57 Ryan Holiday? Xeno says, "Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue." You can get back up after you've fallen. You cannot unsay what has been said. So I think part of the reason the Stoics are quiet, why they always say less than necessary, to use Robert's term, is that they don't want to say the wrong thing. They'd rather be quiet and be thought stupid, as the expression goes, than open their mouths and remove all doubt. The self-control required to just not voice every dumb opinion that you have, to not blurt out a thought two seconds after you have it. This is important. When I think about what I've said on social media, the stuff I regret the most is the stuff that I said in the heat of the moment, not the stuff that was planned, right? Not the stuff that came out of a reasoned discussion.
14:42 Ryan Holiday? And I think that will be true for you. So step back, think about it, don't rush into it. And you will not only be happier and more successful, you will do less that you are embarrassed by.
14:56 Ryan Holiday? Napoleon said, "Space, I can recover. Time, never." Robert Greene talks about this in the 33 Strategies of War. He says, "Trade space for time." Right? Time is the most valuable thing. Time to think, time to plan, time to regroup, time to prioritize. Right? This is all really important. If you're only thinking about moving ahead, if you're unable to ever back up, if you're unable to change directions, if you're unable to give up a game, you will not be successful. You can't go back in time and prepare more for something you should have prepared for. And Napoleon was really brilliant at trading space for time. And I think we're so bad at this. We don't value time. We have to remember what Seneca said,
15:40 Ryan Holiday? that time is our most precious resource and that we spend the thing that we can never get back the most frivolously. And the things we purchase for it are some of the least valuable things.
15:55 Ryan Holiday? Warren Buffett says, "You never know who's swimming until the tide goes out." I think one of the things I take from the Stoics is the idea of preparing for reversals in fortune, understanding that these reversals in fortune are inevitable. And that to take the status quo for granted, to live outside your means, to live recklessly, to assume things are always going to be this way or always going to get better, is naive and misleading. But you have to understand that most people unfortunately do live that way. And so if you go around comparing yourself to those people or you let them quicken your pace because you think you have to keep up with them, it's like it's screwing with your compass. And it's only going to be in the midst of a market correction
16:39 Ryan Holiday? or a bit of adversity or some change that you're going to realize that these were really bad people to mark yourself against, that these were really bad people to let screw with your compass. If you know you're making good, solid decisions, that you're living within your means, that you're valuing what's important, that's enough. Don't focus on what other people are doing. Don't let them distract you. Run the race that you're on. You know, don't swim naked because the tide will go out.
17:09 Ryan Holiday? Benjamin Franklin says that we search others for their virtues and we search ourselves for our vices. Marx realist says something similar, he says, tolerant with others, strict with yourself. And from what we understand from Marx realist, he lives by this. He manages to find, as Franklin says, virtues in flawed people, puts them to work in service of the empire. His strictness is contained to himself, as one biographer says. But everyone else, he tries to find a way to work with. He tries to put them to good use. And that's what I want you to do. Stoicism is not a philosophy for judging other people, for holding them to your standards. It's called self-discipline. What's the standard you're holding yourself to? That's what matters.
17:59 Ryan Holiday? The poet Juvenal says that "the world was not big enough for Alexander the Great, but a coffin was." His point was that for all of Alexander the Great's insatiable need to conquest, all of his accomplishments, that the whole world was not enough for him. In the end, like the rest of us, he was buried in a coffin. And this is just, I think, a really important reminder that, one, you can't take any of this stuff with you when you die. But two, that, that none of us are immortal. None of us are more important than anyone else, right? Memento mori, the Stoics say, none of us are exempt from this great
18:41 Ryan Holiday? equalizer of death. And we should think about that constantly because it puts everything, at least for me, in perspective.
18:52 Ryan Holiday? Churchill says that "to improve is to change, and so to be perfect is to change often." I think the point is that you can't fear change, because all improvement comes from change. And if you are afraid of change, you will not get better, right? Everything you have gotten better at in your life, every good thing, in fact, that's ever happened in your life, has come from change. And yet, what is the thing we all fear the most? We fear change. It's ridiculous. If you look back at an earlier version of yourself and you're exactly the same as that person, That should embarrass you. That's humiliating. That means you're not getting better. It certainly means you're not perfect. So we should embrace change. All good things come
19:35 Ryan Holiday? from change. Do bad things come from change? Of course. We shouldn't fear change because change is how we get better.
19:44 Ryan Holiday? Judge not lest you be judged. This comes from the Bible. I think it's most beautifully expressed in Lincoln's second inaugural when he's trying to speak about binding America back together. He goes, "Look, obviously slavery is horrible. Obviously, one has to have blinded themself and contorted themself into this insane position to think that slavery was ever okay. But look, let's judge not lest we be judged. There are plenty of things we're guilty of. There's plenty of ways we were complicit in what those other people are guilty of. Try not to judge, be understanding, try to leave other people's mistakes to their maker, as Marcus Aurelius says, and focus on where you can improve."
20:26 Ryan Holiday? Seneca, who's actually born the same year as Jesus, says that "you look at pimples on others when you yourself are covered in sores." This also goes to this Christian idea of why point out the splinter in your neighbor's eye when there's a log in your own? Focus on your mistakes. Don't judge. Leave other people to their own things. Focus on where you can get better.
20:52 Ryan Holiday? In War and Peace, Tolstoy has this quote, "That time and patience are the strongest warriors." In my book Conspiracy, I talk about this 10-year campaign of Peter Thiel to destroy a website that he thought was ruining American culture. The idea that this would have been done in some foul swoop, that this would have been done in a single brilliant maneuver, that's not how it works. Almost all great things are the result of a lot of time, a lot of patience. We talked about Warren Buffett earlier. How does Warren Buffett become one of the richest people in the world? By value investing, which means investing and holding for a long period of time, letting time work on the money, let compounding interest work
21:34 Ryan Holiday? for you. So, we want things fast. We want them quickly. But this is to cut out two of the most important allies in the world: time and patience. Everything comes to him who knows how to wait, as Tolstoy says. If you're rushing, if you're impatient, you will not be as successful as you can be. This is the Stoic idea of temperance, of self-discipline. Have to be patient, have to wait. Good things come to those who wait.
22:06 Ryan Holiday? I know that we typically talk about Stoicism here, but I thought I'd end with a quote from Buddha, because it's such a good one. He says, "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can, and no one may." Right? You have to get active in your own rescue, as the Stoics say, as do the Buddhists. It's your responsibility. It's on you. Blow your own nose, as Epictetus says, right? No one's coming to save you. There is no magical solution. There's just hard work. It's time and patience. But most of all, your own effort, focusing on the response, focusing on what's in your control, remembering that you are mortal, choosing not to rust out, but to wear out. Get to work, get moving.
22:51 Ryan Holiday? You can watch videos like this all day, can read all the books in the world, but at some point, you gotta put it down, you gotta get up from the computer, and you gotta go to work. You gotta do what you know you have to do. That's how you get better. That's how you improve. And that's what I want the final thought to leave you with today on this video. Now that you've had these quotes, and I hope you write them down, I hope you put them on the wall. But at the end of the day, we gotta follow Mark Schreli says, not just talk about it, but be about it. If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, totally for free, you can sign up for our Daily Stoic email. It's one free email every morning. The best of Stoic wisdom, dailystoic.com/email.
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