“The Obstacle Is the Way”: What Marcus Aurelius Actually Wrote

The thought is his. The five words are not.

"The obstacle is the way" appears in no translation of the Meditations. It is the title of Ryan Holiday’s 2014 book, The Obstacle Is the Way, and Holiday has never hidden where it came from: he has written that the Meditations "inspired my own book," and that the translation he read, as a nineteen-year-old in 2006, was Gregory Hays’s.

So this is not a fake in the way that the Gladiator line is. It is a compression. A book title went into quotation marks and acquired the name of the man whose idea it summarizes, and somewhere along the way the original dropped out.

What he actually wrote

The passage is Book V, section 20. In Hays’s translation, the lines that inspired the title read:

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.Meditations V.20, trans. Gregory Hays (2002)

That is already tighter than Marcus. Here is the same passage in George Long’s 1862 translation, in full, which is closer to the shape of the Greek:

In one respect man is the nearest thing to me, so far as I must do good to men and endure them. But so far as some men make themselves obstacles to my proper acts, man becomes to me one of the things which are indifferent, no less than the sun or wind or a wild beast. Now it is true that these may impede my action, but they are no impediments to my affects and disposition, which have the power of acting conditionally and changing: for the mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid; and so that which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act; and that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road.Meditations V.20, trans. George Long (1862)

Read the first sentence again. The obstacle Marcus has in mind is not bad luck or a hard project. It is other people.

The part the slogan leaves out

The passage begins with an obligation: he must do good to people and put up with them. Then it admits the problem. Some of them will get in his way. When they do, he treats their obstruction like weather, something outside his control, and turns his attention to the one thing it cannot reach: how he chooses to respond.

That is a narrower and more demanding claim than the slogan. "The obstacle is the way" can sound like a promise that every setback is secretly an opportunity. Marcus is not promising that. He is describing a discipline. When a person blocks you, your intention and your character are still yours, and the obstruction becomes the material you practice on.

Holiday himself has made the same point about the passage. Rereading it for the book’s tenth anniversary edition, he wrote: "He was talking about difficult people!"

How the five words became "Marcus"

There is no careful study dating the moment the title started circulating as a direct quotation, so we will not invent one. What can be said is modest. The phrase barely registers in Google Books before Holiday’s 2014 title. Quote cards and social posts did the rest, as they do: a short, confident sentence travels better than a paragraph about difficult colleagues, and a famous emperor’s name travels better than a living author’s.

Which to quote

If you want the slogan, credit it to Holiday. It is his title, and it is a good one.

If you want Marcus, quote the passage and cite it, Meditations V.20, and name your translator. The Hays lines are the punchiest; Long’s are the most faithful to what Marcus was actually worried about. Either way, a reader can open the book and find it, which is the whole point of a citation.

This is one of the Stoic quotes on our misattribution list, along with a Marcus line that came from a 1913 American magazine and an Epictetus line that is a modern paraphrase. For more on why translations of the Meditations differ so much, see which translation to read.

Sources: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations V.20, trans. George Long (1862), Project Gutenberg #15877; trans. Gregory Hays (Modern Library, 2002); Ryan Holiday, "Meditations by Marcus Aurelius" (ryanholiday.net, 2017) and "100 More Lessons From 100 More Reads of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations" (ryanholiday.net, 2025).

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