196 Quotes by Maxwell Maltz

The ‘self-image’ is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.

If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed with Psycho-Cybernetics!

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.

Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy – period! Not happy “because of”.

This is where you will win the battle – in the playhouse of your mind.

I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.

Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle,” I told him. “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go. It’s no wonder you feel shaky.

Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end – and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we consciously dwell on the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error and keep berating ourselves because of it, then – unwittingly – the error or failure itself becomes the “goal” that is consciously held in imagination and memory.

Experimental and clinical psychologists have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.