196 Quotes by Maxwell Maltz

You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.

If you make friends with yourself, you’ll never be alone.

It is common knowledge among psychologists that most of us underrate ourselves, short-change ourselves, sell ourselves short. Actually, there is no such thing as a superiority complex. People who seem to have one are actually suffering from feelings of inferiority; their "superior" self is a fiction, a coverup, to hide from themselves and others their deep-down feelings of inferiority and insecurity.

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.

His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort towards reaching that goal. Dunlap found that either "positive practice" (refraining from the habit) or "negative practice" (performing the habit consciously and voluntarily) would have beneficial effect provided the desired end result was kept constantly in mind.

What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live -- with your self-respect alive and growing.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.

The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea - from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source - and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist's words have over the hypnotized subject.

An idea accepted as true from any source can be every bit as powerful as hypnosis.