196 Quotes by Maxwell Maltz

A step in the wrong direction is better than staying on the spot all our life. Once you’re moving forward you can correct your course as you go. Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you’re standing still.

Do not tolerate for a minute the idea that you are prohibited from any achievement by the absence of in-born talent or ability. This is a lie of the grandest order, an excuse of the saddest kind.

Live in the present. The past is gone; the future is unknown – but the present is real, and your opportunities are now.

Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you’re standing still.

The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.

In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, “It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it’s there. If you’re carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them.

You make mistakes. Mistakes don’t make you.

You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.

Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle. A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it’s moving forward towards something.