Steven Pressfield Quotes

The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it.

Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.

Our greatest fear is fear of success. 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.

Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don't do it. If you're doing it, stop.

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.

I will gladly shell out $24.95 or $9.99 or 99 cents on iTunes to read or see or listen to the 24-karat treasure that you have refined from your pain and your vision and your imagination. I need it. We all do. We're struggling here in the trenches. That beauty, that wisdom, those thrills and chills, even that mindless escape on a rainy October afternoon — I want it. Put me down for it.

The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All the warrior can give is his life; all the athlete can do is leave everything on the field.

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.

His was not, I could see now, the heroism of an Achilles. He was not a superman who waded invulnerably into the slaughter, single-handedly slaying the foe by myriads. He was just a man doing a job. A job whose primary attribute was self-restraint and self-composure, not for his own sake, but for those whom he led by his example.

...fear doesn't go away.

Bagger Vance: Don't make no sense is all... Man say he don't play no golf when he out here this shade of night hittin balls off in the dark where he can't even see 'em...
Rannulph Junuh: Yep... Well, I've done things that have made less sense...
Bagger Vance: As we all have...

Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.

Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

Assistance is the universal, immutable force of creative manifestation, whose role since the Big Bang has been to translate potential into being, to convert dreams into reality.

Resistance's goal is not to would or disable. Resistance aims to kill.