542 Quotes by Steven Pressfield

Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful; honor and recognition in case of success.

The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.

I’m imagining the reader, whom I conjure as an aspiring artist much like my own younger, less grizzled self, to whom I hope to impart a little starch and inspiration and prime, a little, with some hard-knocks wisdom and a few tricks of the trade.

The amateur has not mastered the technique of his art. Nor does he expose himself to judgment in the real world. If we show our poem to our friend and our friend says, “It’s wonderful, I love it,” that’s not real-world feedback, that’s our friend being nice to us. Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it’s for failure.

Artists are modest. They know they’re not doing the work; they’re just taking dictation.

A contemporary or near-future book is much harder because you can’t fake the facts. There are people alive who know much more than you do about the subject. You have to really have your research together – and of course no one can know everything about a topic.

You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true. Fear saps passion. When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.