Steven Pressfield Quotes

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.

I approve of all you say, gentlemen. The fleet's needs are many and urgent. One, however, must take precedence. This item the men need before all, and we must get it for them without fail and without deferral. We must get the men a victory.

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.

The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. That's what I mean when I say turning pro. Resistance hates it when we turn pro.

Is it healthy for a society to entrust its defense to one percent of its population, while the other 99 percent thanks its lucky stars that it doesn’t have to do the dirty work?

Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.

Good. Then we will fight in the shade

"If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death."

The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present.

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.

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

There’s no mystery to turning pro. It’s a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that.

The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. [...] Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein.

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.

Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of Resistance.