542 Quotes by Steven Pressfield

"We're never alone. As soon as we step outside the campfire glow, our Muse lights on our shoulder like a butterfly. The act of courage calls for infallibly that deeper part of ourselves that supports and sustains us."

"Arabs lie. Let me tell you this, Gent, if you don’t know it already. We lie for fun, we lie for profit, we lie all the time, and we don’t even know why."

"The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone."

"In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call pseudoandreia, false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general's eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like[...] It made no difference. None was a match for the warriors of Lakedaemon, and all knew it."

"My wish for you, Kallistos, is that you survive as many battles in the flesh as you have already fought in your imagination. Perhaps then you will acquire the humility of a man and bear yourself no longer as the demigod you presume yourself to be."

"We feed it [Resistance] with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance."

"Like us, those vanished warriors planted their standards in the sands of their own self-summoned extinction."

"Its [Resistance] aim is to shove us away, distract us from doing our work."

"To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution."

"Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet."