100 Top Quotes From The Obstacle Is the Way
The Obstacle Is the Way draws its inspiration from the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and presents a profound and timeless approach to dealing with life's challenges. Ryan Holiday advocates for embracing obstacles not as impediments but as opportunities for growth, learning, and transformation. Drawing from the wisdom of historical figures like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, the book offers practical strategies for developing resilience, adaptability, and a positive mindset in the face of adversity.
Rather than avoiding difficulties, readers are encouraged to confront obstacles head-on, viewing them as a path to uncovering one's inner strength and wisdom. Holiday explores the three core disciplines of perception, action, and will that enable individuals to turn obstacles into advantages. By internalizing these principles, readers can navigate life's trials with grace and tenacity, transforming setbacks into stepping stones on the journey towards personal mastery and success. (The Obstacle Is the Way Summary).
The Obstacle Is the Way Quotes
"We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.” (Meaning)
"The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”
"If an emotion can't change the condition or the situation you're dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. But it's what I feel. Right, no one said anything about not feeling it. No one said you can't ever cry. Forget "manliness." If you need to take a moment, by all means, go ahead. Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one's emotions, not in pretending they don't exist.”
"Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing and herever we are going, we owe it to ourselves, to our art, to the world to do it well.”
"Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.”
"For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are. As though the why matters. Emerson put it best: “We cannot spend the day in explanation.” Don’t waste time on false constructs.”
"The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation. Because the only variable we control completely is ourselves.”
"Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
"It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you’ve decided to lay siege to in your own life—that’s persistence.”
"In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices. —EPICTETUS”
"In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer.”
"Failure shows us the way—by showing us what isn’t the way.”
"Remember that this moment is not your life, it’s just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.”
"To argue, to complain, or worse, to just give up, these are choices. Choices that more often than not, do nothing to get us across the finish line.”
"You know what’s better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.”
"Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles.”
"Each time, you’ll learn something. Each time, you’ll develop strength, wisdom, and perspective. Each time, a little more of the competition falls away. Until all that is left is you: the best version of you.”
"Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive.”
"To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives. It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear."
"All great victories, be they in politics, business, art, or seduction, involved resolving vexing problems with a potent cocktail of creativity, focus, and daring. When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go—carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”
"Failure really can be an asset if what you’re trying to do is improve, learn, or do something new.”
"Certain things in life will cut you open like a knife. When that happens—at that exposing moment—the world gets a glimpse of what’s truly inside you. So what will be revealed when you’re sliced open by tension and pressure? Iron? Or air? Or bullshit?”
"When people ask where we are, what we’re doing, how that “situation” is coming along, the answer should be clear: We’re working on it. We’re getting closer. When setbacks come, we respond by working twice as hard.”
"How we interpret the events in our lives, our perspective, is the framework for our forthcoming response—whether there will even be one or whether we’ll just lie there and take it. Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
"In its own way, the most harmful dragon we chase is the one that makes us think we can change things that are simply not ours to change. That someone decided not to fund your company, this isn’t up to you. But the decision to refine and improve your pitch? That is. That someone stole your idea or got to it first? No. To pivot, improve it, or fight for what’s yours? Yes.”
"Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority.”
"You’ll have far better luck toughening yourself up than you ever will trying to take the teeth out of a world that is—at best—indifferent to your existence.”
"On the path to successful action, we will fail—possibly many times. And that’s okay. It can be a good thing, even. Action and failure are two sides of the same coin. One doesn’t come without the other. What breaks this critical connection down is when people stop acting—because they’ve taken failure the wrong way.”
"What matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure.”
"People turn shit into sugar all the time—shit that’s a lot worse than whatever we’re dealing with. I’m talking physical disabilities, racial discrimination, battles against overwhelmingly superior armies. But those people didn’t quit. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves. They didn’t delude themselves with fantasies about easy solutions. They focused on the one thing that mattered: applying themselves with gusto and creativity.”
"See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must. What blocked the path now is a path. What once impeded action advances action. The Obstacle is the Way.”
"Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness—these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings.”
"The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It's the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in, don't let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can't afford to panic.”
"A good person dyes events with his own color and turns whatever happens to his own benefit.”
"You will come across obstacles in life—fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure.”
"Perspective has two definitions. Context: a sense of the larger picture of the world, not just what is immediately in front of us Framing: an individual’s unique way of looking at the world, a way that interprets its events”
"But thinking about and being aware of our mortality creates real perspective and urgency. It doesn’t need to be depressing. Because it’s invigorating.”
"Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness - these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to.”
"Discipline in perception lets you clearly see the advantage and the proper course of action in every situation—without the pestilence of panic or fear.”
"Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them?”
"Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
"Our perceptions are the thing that we’re in complete control of.”
"Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?”
"There is always a countermove, always an escape or way through. No one said it would be easy and of course the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it.”
"The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth. The obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this.”
"While others obsess with observing the rules, we’re subtly undermining them and subverting them to our advantage.”
"Seize this moment to deploy the plan that has long sat dormant in your head.”
"In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given. And the only way you’ll do something spectacular is by using it all to your advantage.”
"An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before. To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing.”
"It is said of the Jews, deprived of a stable homeland for so long, their temples destroyed, and their communities in the Diaspora, that they were forced to rebuild not physically but within”
“Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it.”
"Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness?”
"First, see clearly. Next, act correctly. Finally, endure and accept the world as it is.”
"Great entrepreneurs are never out of the game for long. They slip many times, but they don't fall.”
"Every negative has a positive. Push a negative hard enough and deep enough that it will break through into its counterside.”
"Death doesn’t make life pointless, but rather purposeful.”
"Philosophy's true use - ""An operating system for life's difficulties and hardships"".”
"We decide what story to tell ourselves. Or whether we will tell one at all.”
"Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn’t mean you have to agree. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn’t mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves. Or whether we will tell one at all. Welcome to the power of perception. Applicable in each and every situation, impossible to obstruct. It can only be relinquished. And that is your decision.”
"Knowing that life is a marathon and not a sprint is important. Conserve your energy. Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. Passing one obstacle simply says you’re worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it."
"Always prepare ourselves for more difficult times. Always accept what we’re unable to change. Always manage our expectations. Always persevere. Always learn to love our fate and what happens to us. Always protect our inner self, retreat into ourselves. Always submit to a greater, larger cause. Always remind ourselves of our own mortality.”
"The implications of our obstacle are theoretical - they exist in the past and the future. We live in the moment. And the more we embrace that, the easier the obstacle will be to face and move. You can take the trouble you're dealing with and use it as an opportunity to focus on the present moment."
"When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go—carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”
"A man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul.”
"With a business, we take most failures less personally and understand they’re part of the process.”
"Like any good school, learning from failure isn’t free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over.”
"The worst is yet to come.”
"Action is commonplace, right action is not. As a discipline, it’s not any kind of action that will do, but directed action. Everything must be done in the service of the whole. Step by step, action by action, we’ll dismantle the obstacles in front of us. With persistence and flexibility, we’ll act in the best interest of our goals."
"Action requires courage, not brashness—creative application and not brute force. Our movements and decisions define us: We must be sure to act with deliberation, boldness, and persistence. Those are the attributes of right and effective action. Nothing else—not thinking or evasion or aid from others. Action is the solution and the cure to our predicaments.”
"While overpaid CEOs take long vacations and hide behind e-mail autoresponders, some programmer is working eighteen-hour days coding the start-up that will destroy that CEO’s business.”
"Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds -- that sacred place of reason, action and will -- and throw off our compasses.”
"If we’re to overcome our obstacles, this is the message to broadcast—internally and externally. We will not be stopped by failure, we will not be rushed or distracted by external noise. We will chisel and peg away at the obstacle until it is gone. Resistance is futile.”
"There are far more failures in the world due to a collapse of will than there will ever be from objectively conclusive external events.”
"Our actions may be impeded but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.”
"Bad luck is actually a chance for us to make up some time. We're like runners who train on hills, or at an altitude so they can beat the runners who expected the course would be flat.”
"We blame our bosses, the economy, our politicians, other people, or we write ourselves off as failures or our goals as impossible. When really only one thing is at fault: our attitude and approach.”
"Being trapped is just a position, not a fate. You get out of it by addressing and eliminating each part of that position through small, deliberate actions—not by trying (and failing) to push it away with superhuman strength. With”
"It’s really just taking action—whether that’s approaching someone you’re intimidated by or deciding to finally crack a book on a subject you need to learn.”
"Speculation led to disaster, he realized, and he needed to always ignore the “mad crowd” and its inclinations.”
“It’s a cliché question to ask, What would I change about my life if the doctor told me I had cancer? After our answer, we inevitably comfort ourselves with the same insidious lie: Well, thank God I don’t have cancer.”
"Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.”
"Welcome to the power of perception. Applicable in each and every situation, impossible to obstruct. It can only be relinquished.”
"Never in a hurry never worried never desperate never stopping short”
"Take the trouble you’re dealing with and use it as an opportunity to focus on the present moment.”
"The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up. — CHUCK PALAHNIUK”
"An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before. To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing. When given an unfair task, some rightly see it as a chance to test what they’re made of—to give it all they’ve got, knowing full well how difficult it will be to win. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative.”
"Just because the conditions aren’t exactly to your liking, or you don’t feel ready yet, doesn’t mean you get a pass. If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.”
"I know you had nothing to do with the injustice that brought me to this jail, so I’m willing to stay here until I get out. But I will not, under any circumstances, be treated like a prisoner—because I am not and never will be powerless.”
"The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you “push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.”
"Determination, if you think about it, is invincible. Nothing other than death can prevent us from following Churchill’s old acronym: KBO. Keep Buggering On.”
"It doesn’t matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you’re in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you facie is intimidating or burdensome. What matters right now is right now.”
"We spend a lot of time thinking about how things are supposed to be, or what the rules say we should do. Trying to get it all perfect. We tell ourselves that we’ll get started once the conditions are right, or once we’re sure we can trust this or that. When, really, it’d be better to focus on making due with what we’ve got. On focusing on results instead of pretty methods.”
"Doing new things invariably means obstacles. A new path is, by definition, uncleared. Only with persistence and time can we cut away debris and remove impediments. Only in struggling with the impediments that made others quit can we find ourselves on untrodden territory—only by persisting and resisting can we learn what others were too impatient to be taught.”
"You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen. Or you create an alterative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp.”
"If something is in our control, its worth every ounce of our efforts and energy. Death is not one of those things. It is not in our control how long we'll live or what will come and take us from life. But thinking about mortality creates real perspective, and urgency. It doesn't need to be depressing. Because its invigorating.”
"Life speeds on the bold and favors the brave.”
"If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one.”
"Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness? Nope. Then get back to work! Subconsciously, we should be constantly asking ourselves this question: Do I need to freak out about this?”
"Be realistic we're told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the ""other"" party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It's this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back.”
"Great times are great softeners”
"Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can’t actually influence is wasted—self-indulgent and self-destructive. So much power—ours, and other people’s—is frittered away in this manner. To see an obstacle as a challenge, to make the best of it anyway, that is also a choice—a choice that is up to us.”
― Quotes from the book The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday
The Obstacle Is the Way Author
Ryan Holiday is a gifted writer known for his philosophical approach to life and success. Through his books, he draws wisdom from ancient Stoic philosophy and applies it to modern-day challenges. In "The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph," Holiday introduces readers to the Stoic concept of embracing obstacles as opportunities for growth and transformation. He weaves together inspiring stories of historical figures and contemporary examples, demonstrating how individuals can adopt a resilient mindset to navigate adversities successfully. Ryan Holiday's writing not only offers practical advice for overcoming challenges but also encourages readers to reframe their perspectives on obstacles, empowering them to build mental fortitude and pursue their goals with unwavering determination. With a blend of storytelling and practical wisdom, Ryan Holiday's works serve as invaluable guides for those seeking to find strength and meaning in life's trials.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
