542 Quotes by Steven Pressfield

The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you’re finished.

Every virtue that reaches the exaggeration, is becoming a defect.

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.

I believe in previous lives and the Muse – and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.

If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business.

The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage.

The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.

The clash is epic and internal, between the ego and the Self, and the stakes are our lives.

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.