Steven Pressfield Quotes

Every virtue that reaches the exaggeration, is becoming a defect

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

Dienekes says the mind is like a house with many rooms,” he said. “There are rooms one must not go into. To anticipate one’s death is one of those rooms. We must not allow ourselves even to think it.

A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and chiseled squint of the veteran. Even his submissions to terror, the very shit with which he paints his thighs under fire is trophy to him; he points it out to his comrades, laughing in the aftercourse of action as if it were a decoration for valour, for it makes him a salt, a veteran, an old hand.

The hero’s journey can take place on a battlefield or in a cubicle. We can live it out amid public clamor or in the soundless vault between our ears. The demons we are dueling are always the same. They are our own fears of becoming who we are. No one who has ever lived — or ever will — has a journey like ours. And yet our journey is universal. It is every woman’s and every man’s.

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.

Habit will be your champion. When you train the mind to think one way and one way only, when you refuse to allow it to think in another, that will produce great strength in battle.’ They

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.

Stay stupid. Trust the soup. Start before you’re ready.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality.

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.

From that day, I vowed never to squander a moment's care over the good opinion of others. May they rot in hell. You have heard of my abstemiousness in matters of food and sex. Here is why: I punished myself. If I caught my thoughts straying to another's opinion of me, I sent myself to bed without supper. As for women, I likewise permitted myself none. I missed no few meals, and no small pleasure, before I brought this vice under control.

Listen to me, young Hardy. A day will come for you when play becomes torment. When you are drowning, not in water but on dry land. In that hour remember me. I will preserve you.

If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can.