Ryan Holiday Quotes

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

My perspective will create my perception

What is nonsense, and what is not, then, may be merely a matter of perspective.

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

All experience is subjective.

Perception is reality. People take what they want to from things.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

Your thoughts do not create reality, but they do create your experience.

There is no such thing as a true account of anything.

Reality is perspective. All you have to do is Believe.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

Perception is a prism, and reality is like shot silk - depends where the light hits.

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

There are many levels of truth.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

'Darkness' is a subjective word; it depends what your viewpoint is and how you live life.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

Shakespeare said, nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.