Steven Pressfield Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
The instinct that pulls us toward art is the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness. The Ego hates this. Because the more awake we become, the less we need the Ego.

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

Steven Pressfield
Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.

Steven Pressfield
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
Artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work; they're just taking dictation.

Steven Pressfield