Top 100 Pressfield Quotes
#1. The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.
Steven Pressfield
#2. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
Steven Pressfield
#3. The Kabbalah describes angels as bundles of light, meaning intelligence, consciousness. Kabbalists believe that above every blade of grass is an angel crying "Grow! Grow!" ... I believe that above the entire human race is one super-angel, crying "Evolve! Evolve!"
Steven Pressfield
#4. 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
#5. The pain of being human is that we're all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.
Steven Pressfield
#6. Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.
Steven Pressfield
#8. 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
#9. The Principle of Priority states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first.
Steven Pressfield
#11. Ignorance and arrogance are the artist's and entrepreneur's indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no
idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.
Steven Pressfield
#12. Monopoly money; it's not legal tender in that sphere where we have to do our work. In fact, the more energy we spend stoking up on support from colleagues and loved ones, the weaker we become and the less capable of handling our business.
Steven Pressfield
#14. 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
#15. Slay that dragon once, and he will never have power over you again.
Steven Pressfield
#17. Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.
Steven Pressfield
#19. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us .
Steven Pressfield
#20. The more resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you - and the more gratification you will fell when you finally do it.
Steven Pressfield
#21. Start before you're ready. Good things happen when we start before we're ready.
Steven Pressfield
#22. The part that needs healing is our personal life. Personal life has nothing to do with work. Besides, what better way of healing than to find our center of self-sovereignty? Isn't that the whole point of healing?
Steven Pressfield
#23. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion.
Steven Pressfield
#24. The first duty is to sacrifice to the gods and pray them to grant you the thought,words, and deeds likely to render your command most pleasing to the gods and bring yourself, your friends, and your city the fullest measure of affection and glory and advantage
Xenophon
#25. A cavalryman's horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be alowed to know this.
Steven Pressfield
#26. She (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.
Steven Pressfield
#27. I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.
Steven Pressfield
#28. If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business.
Steven Pressfield
#29. The opposite of fear is love - love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.
Steven Pressfield
#30. Dienekes says the mind is like a house with many rooms," he said. "There are rooms one must not go into. To anticipate one's death is one of those rooms. We must not allow ourselves even to think it.
Steven Pressfield
#31. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.
Steven Pressfield
#33. I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.
Steven Pressfield
#34. 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
#35. What happens when we turn pro is, we finally listen to that still, small voice inside our heads. At last we find the courage to identify the secret dream or love or bliss that we have known all along was our passion, our calling, our destiny.
Steven Pressfield
#36. Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.
Steven Pressfield
#38. The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.
Steven Pressfield
#39. 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
#40. The professional tackles the project that will make him stretch. He takes on the assignment that will bear him into uncharted waters, compel him to explore unconscious parts of himself.
Steven Pressfield
#42. The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it. He
Steven Pressfield
#43. There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What
Steven Pressfield
#44. preparation, order, patience, endurance, acting in the face of fear and failure
Steven Pressfield
#45. The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.
Steven Pressfield
#46. 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
#47. The concept in all these environments seems to be that one needs to complete his healing before he is ready to do his work.
Steven Pressfield
#48. You are a writer when you tell yourself you are. No one else's opinion matters. Screw them. You are when you say you are.
Steven Pressfield
#49. There's a phrase you hear in Israel: "We're not Jews, we're Israelis." What that means is that the stereotype we're familiar with here in the States of the Diaspora Jew, i.e. Jews in America or Europe or Russia, etc. does not fit at all with the reality of the homegrown "sabras" of Israel.
Steven Pressfield
#51. One thing I've found in any project is almost universally about three quarters of the way through - or maybe a little father, maybe seventh eighths on the way through - any project will explode.
Steven Pressfield
#52. On the field of The Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.
Steven Pressfield
#53. When we raise our game aesthetically, we elevate it morally and spiritually as well.
Steven Pressfield
#54. Artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work; they're just taking dictation.
Steven Pressfield
#55. 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
#56. In my experience, depth of work consists of two components. The first is recklessness; the second is discipline. Dionysian; Apollonian. Passion;reason.
Steven Pressfield
#57. Have you ever wondered why the slang terms for intoxication are so demolition-oriented? Stoned, smashed, hammered. It's because they're talking about the Ego. It's the Ego that gets blasted, waxed, plastered.
Steven Pressfield
#58. You have never tasted freedom, friend," Dienekes spoke, "or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.
Steven Pressfield
#59. Resistance is a repelling force. It's negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.
Steven Pressfield
#60. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.
Steven Pressfield
#61. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe inforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn't just psychological; it's biological. It's in our cells.
Steven Pressfield
#62. Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance?
Steven Pressfield
#63. A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.
Steven Pressfield
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
Steven Pressfield
#67. The drawing is also a reminder that there's an artist within each of us, and we must encourage that artist to do the work, to make something that matters, regardless of anything else that is going on.
Steven Pressfield
#68. Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.
Steven Pressfield
#69. 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
#70. How many pages have I produced? I don't care. Are they any good? I don't even think about it. All that matters is I've put in my time and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that, for this day, for this session, I have overcome Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
#73. We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.
Steven Pressfield
#74. What factors make you decide to take a particular role?" The actor always answers: "Because I'm afraid of it.
Steven Pressfield
#75. Rooster was a bad slave. He had no use for anyone, not even the gods. Not that he was angry at the gods, like some I'd met. He just dismissed them entirely. There were no gods, and that was that.
Steven Pressfield
#76. When we turn pro we stop running from our fears. We turn around and face them.
Steven Pressfield
#77. 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
#80. 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
#81. Last of terror's stages, Selene had tutored Europa and me, is busyness.
Steven Pressfield
#82. A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it's a new business or anything at all.
Steven Pressfield
#83. Leonidas's and Dienekes' quips draw the individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.
Steven Pressfield
#87. Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt.
Steven Pressfield
#88. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.
Steven Pressfield
#89. Who profits from a king's fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?
Steven Pressfield
#90. Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long. You may think you've lost your passion, or that you can't identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.
Steven Pressfield
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. plunge at once into matters as a Greek would, but offered first prayers for the free people's well-being.
Steven Pressfield
#94. I guess what I want to say to us artists and entrepreneurs is that conventional yardsticks of success don't apply to all enterprises. Labors of love count.
Steven Pressfield
#95. The pro keeps coming on. He beats Resistance at its own game by being even more resolute and even more implacable than it is.
Steven Pressfield
#96. My wish for you, Kallistos, is that you survive as many battles in the flesh as you have already fought in your imagination. Perhaps then you will acquire the humility of a man and bear yourself no longer as the demigod you presume yourself to be.
Steven Pressfield
#97. It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.
What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
#98. I wrote in the 'War of Art' that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.
Steven Pressfield
#99. We feed it [Resistance] with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
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