Ryan Holiday Quotes

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

To be a philosopher... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

All our philosophy is as dry as dust if it is not immediately translated into some act of living service.

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

If you don’t understand how problems came to be, how are you going to know how to fix them?

History makes one wise, but not competent to solve concrete problems.

I think, when people hear the word 'philosophy,' they think of Plato and a bunch of people sitting around in their robes pontificating about life and how it should be. But really, somebody who is an active philosopher should not only be thinking of these things but putting them into practice.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all is truth beauty and is beauty truth, and does a falling tree in the forest make a sound if there's no one there to hear it, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.

Throughout history, one of the biggest problems is that the correct course of action is not always obvious, and the obvious course of action is not always correct.

A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.

We are taught for the schoolroom, not for life.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.

If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.

You can't solve a problem until you address the problem.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.