Steven Pressfield Quotes

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.

Each man recalls not the enemy he hated, but the champion who engaged him with such valor.

The Spartan king Agesilaus was still fighting in armor when he was eighty-two. Picasso was painting past ninety, and Henry Miller was chasing women (I'm sure Picasso was too) at eighty-nine.

Once we turn pro, we're like sharks who have tasted blood, or renunciants who have glimpsed the face of God. For us, there is no finish line. No bell ends the bout. Life is the pursuit. Life is the hunt. When our hearts burst... then we'll go out, and no sooner.

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel

"The amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears that this new person will be judged by others as "different." The tribe will declare us "weird" or "queer" or "crazy." The tribe will reject us. Here's the truth: the tribe doesn't give a shit. There is no tribe. That gang or posse that we imagine is sustaining us by the bonds we share is in fact a conglomeration of individuals who are just as fucked up as we are and just as terrified. Each individual is so caught up in his own bullshit that he doesn't have two seconds to worry about yours or mine, or to reject or diminish us because of it. When we truly understand that the tribe doesn't give a damn, we're free. There is no tribe, and there never was. Our lives are entirely up to us."

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.

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.

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.

You think Resistance isn't real? Resistance will bury you.

The professional knows when he has fallen short of his own standards. He will murder his darlings without hesitation, if that's what it takes to stay true to the goddess and to his own expectations of excellence.

Don’t think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.

We're wrong if we think we're the only ones struggling with Resistance. Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash.

The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare... The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.

A writer is a writer when he says he is.

A warrior culture trains for adversity. Luxury and ease are the goals advertised to the civilian world.