542 Quotes by Steven Pressfield

The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist.

A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it’s a new business or anything at all.

A warrior culture trains for adversity. Luxury and ease are the goals advertised to the civilian world.

Now it’s 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.

Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren’t sick, they’re self-dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face.

Indeed, we own a bond, my friend. That most sublime of all: reminiscence for our vanished youth.

Dienekes says the mind is like a house with many rooms,” he said. “There are rooms one must not go into. To anticipate one’s death is one of those rooms. We must not allow ourselves even to think it.

He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.

When we experience panic, it means that we’re about to cross a threshold. We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.