Top 100 Steven Pressfield Quotes
#1. These are not easy questions. Who am I? Why am I here? They're not easy because the human being isn't wired to function as an individual.
Steven Pressfield
#2. The rancor I once bore recedes, supplanted by admiration and a sense even of loss at the mates we might have been and the times we might have shared.
Steven Pressfield
#3. Alexander operated by the same principle. Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.
Steven Pressfield
#4. Slay that dragon once, and he will never have power over you again.
Steven Pressfield
#5. Start before you're ready. Good things happen when we start before we're ready.
Steven Pressfield
#6. She (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.
Steven Pressfield
#7. I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.
Steven Pressfield
#8. What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out.
Steven Pressfield
#10. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.
Steven Pressfield
#11. The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.
Steven Pressfield
#12. When we raise our game aesthetically, we elevate it morally and spiritually as well.
Steven Pressfield
#13. Artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work; they're just taking dictation.
Steven Pressfield
#14. Remember, the Muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas. To the gods the supreme sin is not rape or murder, but pride. To think of yourself as a mercenary, a gun for hire, implants the proper humility. It purges pride and preciousness.
Steven Pressfield
#15. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.
Steven Pressfield
#16. Here's another test. Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it? If
Steven Pressfield
#17. It is that peculiar soldiers' humor which springs from the experience of shared misery and often translates poorly to those not on the spot and enduring the same hardship.
Steven Pressfield
#18. Remember, Resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others. It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason-for-being, on the response of others to our work. Resistance knows we can't take this. No one can.
Steven Pressfield
#19. What factors make you decide to take a particular role?" The actor always answers: "Because I'm afraid of it.
Steven Pressfield
#20. When we turn pro we stop running from our fears. We turn around and face them.
Steven Pressfield
#21. When you're a working writer, sooner or later friends and acquaintances will get you alone and confide that they, too, have a book in them.
Steven Pressfield
#23. The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.
Steven Pressfield
#26. Someone once asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue from which all others flowed. He replied: "Contempt for death." For us as artists, read "failure.
Steven Pressfield
#27. Resistance really takes the shape, for me, in voices in my head telling me why I can't do something or why I should put it off for another day, procrastinate for another day.
Steven Pressfield
#28. We feed it [Resistance] with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
#29. I believe in previous lives and the Muse - and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.
Steven Pressfield
#30. As artists and professionals, it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.
Steven Pressfield
#31. The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are. They are invested in maintaining us as we are.
Steven Pressfield
#32. It's one thing to lie to ourselves. It's another thing to believe it.
Steven Pressfield
#33. On the artist's journey we are redefining and reconfiguring ourselves and our lives.
Steven Pressfield
#34. When we make our art a practice, when we make our workspace sacred and enter it daily with respect and high intention, then we elevate our actions (even if they're taking place within the profane arena of commerce) beyond ego and above gimme-gimme ambition.
Steven Pressfield
#35. Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish - that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that's actually good.
Steven Pressfield
#36. Because a warrior carries helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line.
Steven Pressfield
#37. Sharon was a realist. He recognized, as did Ben-Gurion and Dayan, that the Arabs had as legitimate a claim to this land as we did, and that they possessed pride and courage and anger, against which no rejoinder existed except the sword.
Steven Pressfield
#38. El-Masri lies under gravel and shingle, with no part of him visible aboveground except his left hand
Steven Pressfield
#39. It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior's life.
Steven Pressfield
#40. Fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.
Steven Pressfield
#41. We will have to choose between the life we want for our future and the life we have left behind.
Steven Pressfield
#42. It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, 'Suppertime!'
Steven Pressfield
#43. Cousin, the days of gods and heroes are over."
"Not to me. Not to them.
Steven Pressfield
#44. Don't think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we've acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
Steven Pressfield
#45. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
Steven Pressfield
#46. If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it's our job to realize it and get down to business.
Steven Pressfield
#47. In short, if the Muse exists, she does not whisper to the untalented.
Steven Pressfield
#49. Bagger Vance: Don't make no sense is all ... Man say he don't play no golf when he out here this shade of night hittin balls off in the dark where he can't even see 'em ...
Rannulph Junuh: Yep ... Well, I've done things that have made less sense ...
Bagger Vance: As we all have ...
Steven Pressfield
#50. Every artist has to face his own demons and evolve his own method of working.
Steven Pressfield
#51. Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. "I write only when inspiration strikes," he replied. "Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
Steven Pressfield
#52. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure.
Steven Pressfield
#53. We need to ascend beyond our own petty Resistance, our own negative self-judgment and self-sabotage, our own "I'm not worthy" mind-set.
Steven Pressfield
#54. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.
Steven Pressfield
#56. We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.
Steven Pressfield
#57. You've got the watches," say the Taliban, "but we've got the time.
Steven Pressfield
#58. Are you paralyzed with fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
Steven Pressfield
#59. The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.
Steven Pressfield
#61. The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket.
Steven Pressfield
#62. Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?
Steven Pressfield
#63. The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.
Steven Pressfield
#65. Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they're better friends, truer friends. And we're better and truer to them.
Steven Pressfield
#66. The more you love your art/ calling/ enterprise, the more important its accomplishment to the evolution of your soul, the more you will fear it and the more Resistance you will experience facing it.
Steven Pressfield
#68. Our guns do not strip the foe of life with surgical strokes. They take them in a holocaust.
Steven Pressfield
#69. Warfare is theatre, I have said, and the essence of theatre is aritifce. What we show, we will not do. What we don't show, we will do.
Steven Pressfield
#70. The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.
Steven Pressfield
#71. Making yourself a corporation (or just thinking of yourself in that way) reinforces the idea of professionalism because it separates the artist-doing-the-work from the will-and-consciousness-running-the-show.
Steven Pressfield
#72. Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual - in his phrase, "someone who reads books" - the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.
Steven Pressfield
#73. But nothing really clicked for me until I gave up completely on hitting the overlap and just did what I loved, even when I thought nobody else in the world would be interested.
Steven Pressfield
#74. Like us, those vanished warriors planted their standards in the sands of their own self-summoned extinction.
Steven Pressfield
#75. Now it's 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.
Steven Pressfield
#76. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it. If
Steven Pressfield
#77. I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow.
Steven Pressfield
#78. We have the right to our labor but not to the fruit of our labor.
Steven Pressfield
#80. Indeed, we own a bond, my friend. That most sublime of all: reminiscence for our vanished youth.
Steven Pressfield
#81. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us.
Steven Pressfield
#82. The hill is a sonofabitch but what can you do? Set one foot in front of another and keep climbing.
Steven Pressfield
#84. THE HUMAN CONDITION The Daily Show reported recently that scientists in Japan had invented a robot that is capable of recognizing its own reflection in a mirror. "When the robot learns to hate what it sees," said Jon Stewart, "it will have achieved full humanity.
Steven Pressfield
#85. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.
Steven Pressfield
#87. We know what the clan is; we know how to fit into the band and the tribe. What we don't know is how to be alone. We don't know how to be free individuals. The
Steven Pressfield
#88. Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle.
Steven Pressfield
#89. Tutors are usually shaggy, ill-groomed junior dons who smoke and drink to excess and never leave their rooms except for illicit sexual liaisons or to replenish their stocks of tobacco and spirits. A
Steven Pressfield
#90. Long-term, we must begin to build our internal strengths. It isn't just skills like computer technology. It's the old-fashioned basics of self-reliance, self-motivation, self-reinforcement, self-discipline, self-command.
Steven Pressfield
#91. Art is a war - between ourselves and the forces of self-sabotage that would stop us from doing our work. The artist is a warrior.
Steven Pressfield
#92. Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work.
Steven Pressfield
#93. Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.
Steven Pressfield
#94. What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead.
Steven Pressfield
#95. Listen to me, young Hardy. A day will come for you when play becomes torment. When you are drowning, not in water but on dry land. In that hour remember me. I will preserve you.
Steven Pressfield
#96. Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor.
Steven Pressfield
#97. The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work.
Steven Pressfield
#98. In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term grown, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our high nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
#99. The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you're finished.
Steven Pressfield
#100. So she concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods.
Steven Pressfield
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