Ryan Holiday Quotes

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.

Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today's youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.

No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.

Reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.

Be skeptical, but not as a social position, not claiming to be so intelligent that you cannot believe what other people say. It's not about being right and making everybody else wrong. No, you are skeptical because you know without a doubt that everybody lives in their own story, and in their story they have their own truth. But it's only truth in their mind, just as your truth is only truth in your mind, and nobody else's.

Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

I don't view myself as a particularly intelligent people, but I do have one ability that I've demonstrated over and over again, that's helped me see things that other people for whatever reason have not seen. That's that most people see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. I guess it could be stated that most people only hear the music, not the lyrics of human events.

People are very sophisticated consumers of information, and they're pulling all different things.

Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.

We need to educate young people to deal with new modes of education that are emerging with the new electronic technologies and we need to educate them to not only learn how to critically read this ubiquitous screen culture but also how to be cultural producers.

The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned.

If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.

Civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.

I like to make people think.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

I wish people were willing to dig a little deeper than the surface elements of a premise before tossing one story in with another.

This is what I would ask of the American people, and that is, and the media does not do this terribly often - put things in contact.

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

People have a responsibility, especially with today's media, to read between the lines.

When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent.

He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. 'One must have some question,' he wrote, 'addressed to the book one is going to read.

My goal in life is to make people think. If I do that, I've been a success.