Steven Pressfield Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Steven Pressfield
The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones.

Steven Pressfield
You have never tasted freedom friend, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.

Steven Pressfield
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
Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Steven Pressfield
We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are... That we actually have the guts, the perserverance, the capacity... because, if it's true, then we become estranged from all we know.

Steven Pressfield
When we are succeeding - that is, when we have begun to overcome our self-doubt and self-sabotage, when we are advancing in our craft and evolving to a higher level - that's when panic strikes. When we experience panic, it means that we're about to cross a threshold. We're poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.

Steven Pressfield
I have always found the spear to be a rather inelegant weapon

Steven Pressfield
It is a terrible thing to be a king, especially a great one, for one must serve ideals of the spirit at the price of lovers of flesh and blood. 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
Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.

Steven Pressfield
Humankind is commanded to ascend from savagery. This is God's mandate, which cries out from the epicenter of our being: the imperative to mount from the base to the noble, from the savage to the civil, from beast to human.

Steven Pressfield
These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my comanions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons.

Steven Pressfield
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
Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.

Steven Pressfield
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

Steven Pressfield
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous.

Steven Pressfield
Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?

Steven Pressfield
What finally convinced me to go ahead was simply that I was so unhappy not going ahead.

Steven Pressfield
This aspis was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand. He crossed to the ranks of Thespians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield.

Steven Pressfield
To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.

Steven Pressfield
At Athens and Athens alone, a new stamp of person was being born, neither baron nor yeoman, but a man of the city. A citizen.

Steven Pressfield
Is there a spiritual element to creativity? Hell, yes. Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.

Steven Pressfield
It's better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.

Steven Pressfield
Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.

Steven Pressfield
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
Those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

Steven Pressfield
The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.

Steven Pressfield
When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.

Steven Pressfield
You English are loath to embrace the virtues of the warrior. Such an act embarrasses you. You prefer to see yourselves as civilians summoned reluctantly to arms, as-what is the word?-'amatuers.' But you are warriors, you English. You are, Chapman. Trust me, who has faced you in the field.

Steven Pressfield