Steven Pressfield Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

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
Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstance, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.

Steven Pressfield
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
Why have I nominated you, lady, to bear up beneath this most terrible of trials, you and your sisters of the Three Hundred? Because you can.

Steven Pressfield
It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.

Steven Pressfield
The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone.

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

Steven Pressfield
There is something I must tell you. When Leonidas selected you for the Three Hundred, I went to him in private and argued strenuously against your inclusion. I thought you would not fight. [...] I was wrong.

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
Next morning I went over to Paul's for coffee and told him I had finished. Good for you, he said without looking up. Start the next one today.

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

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

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

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
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
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
Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.

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