Steven Pressfield Quotes

The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.

performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions.

"If addictions and shadow careers are metaphors, sex is the richest one of all and the most difficult to decode. Why are we obsessed with sex? Does sex represent conquest or surrender? Are we seeking the oblivion of orgasm or the transcendence of escaping the ego? Is union with another our goal, or are we seeking to dominate or humiliate our partner? Is sex about love? Are we seeking a soul-mate, a mother/father? Are we trying to reach God? "I don't see what all the fuss about sex is," said the comedian. "It's only friction." My"

I can procrastinate thinking about my procrastination problem. I can procrastinate dealing with my problem of procrastinating thinking about my procrastination problem.

Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren’t sick, they’re self-dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face.

This is what I feared for Michael. That his generation, so strong, so well made, so bright and aware beyond its years, would compare itself to us in envy, envy of the clarity of our challenges and the brutish obviousness of our enemies.

Resistance is implacable, intractable, indefatigable.

In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his “real” vocation.

When we raise our game aesthetically, we elevate it morally and spiritually as well.

The professional keeps his eye on the doughnut and not on the hole. He reminds himself it's better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.

The artist and the fundamentalist arise from societies at differing stages of development. The artist is the advanced model. His culture possesses affluence, stability, enough excess of resource to permit the luxury of self-examination. The artist is grounded in freedom. He is not afraid of it. He is lucky. He was born in the right place. He has a core of self- confidence, of hope for the future. He believes in progress and evolution. His faith is that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world.

The pain of being human is that we're all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.

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

We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.

It's one thing to study war
and another to live the warrior's life.

- Telamon of Arcadia, mercenary of the fifth century B.C.