Top 120 Maxwell Maltz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.”

— Maxwell Maltz

52. “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.”

— Maxwell Maltz

53. “Happiness is native to the human mind and its physical machine. We think better, perform better, feel better, and are healthier when we are happy.”

— Maxwell Maltz

54. “Within you, whoever you may be, regardless of how big a failure you may think yourself to be, is the ability and the power to do whatever you need to do to be happy and successful.”

— Maxwell Maltz

55. “You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”

— Maxwell Maltz

56. “Another cause of confusion, and the resulting feelings of nervousness, hurry, and anxiety, is the absurd habit of trying to do many things at one time.”

— Maxwell Maltz

57. “Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.”

— Maxwell Maltz

58. “Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project.”

— Maxwell Maltz

59. “Develop an enthusiasm for life, create a need for more life, and you will receive more life.”

— Maxwell Maltz

60. “Why not imagine yourself successful?”

— Maxwell Maltz

61. “Do not say to yourself, ‘I am going to act this way tomorrow.’ Just say to yourself – ‘I am going to imagine myself acting this way NOW – for 30 minutes – today.’”

— Maxwell Maltz

62. “The greatest cause of ulcers is mountain-climbing over molehills.”

— Maxwell Maltz

63. “Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.”

— Maxwell Maltz

64. “Your present negative beliefs were formed by thought PLUS feelings. Generate enough emotion, or deep feeling and your new thoughts and ideas will cancel them out.”

— Maxwell Maltz

65. “See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, grappling with them in an aggressive intelligent manner.”

— Maxwell Maltz

66. “Stop measuring yourself against “their” standards. You are not “them” and can never measure up. Neither can “they” measure up to yours – nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it, and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.”

— Maxwell Maltz

67. “To really ‘live,’ that is to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can life with. You must find yourself acceptable to ‘you.’”

— Maxwell Maltz

68. “Life is a series of problems.”

— Maxwell Maltz

69. “Your nervous system can’t tell real failure from imagined failure.”

— Maxwell Maltz

70. “If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever.”

— Maxwell Maltz

71. “Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you’re standing still.”

— Maxwell Maltz

72. “A healthy strong ego, with plenty of self-esteem, does not feel itself threatened by every innocent remark.”

— Maxwell Maltz

73. “Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.”

— Maxwell Maltz

74. “The minute that we change our minds, and stop giving power to the past, the past with its mistakes loses power over us.”

— Maxwell Maltz

75. “For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.”

— Maxwell Maltz

76. “Worry is one of the most destructive scourges of mankind.”

— Maxwell Maltz

77. “True success and true happiness not only go together but each other enhances the other.”

— Maxwell Maltz

78. “When a person has adequate self-esteem little slights offer no threat at all – they are simply “passed over” and ignored. Even deeper emotional wounds are likely to heal faster and cleaner, with no festering sores to poison life and spoil happiness.”

— Maxwell Maltz

79. “Unthaw and become more natural.”

— Maxwell Maltz

80. “Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.”

— Maxwell Maltz

81. “Adopt the motto: It doesn’t matter who’s right, but what’s right.”

— Maxwell Maltz

82. “We age not by years but by events and our emotional reactions to them.”

— Maxwell Maltz

83. “Failure feelings – fear, anxiety, lack of self-confidence – do not spring from some heavenly oracle. They are not written in the stars. They are not holy gospel. Nor are they intimations of a set and decided fate which means that failure is decreed and decided. They originate from your own mind.”

— Maxwell Maltz

84. “Do your worrying before you place your bet, not after the wheel stops turning.”

— Maxwell Maltz

85. “Science has now confirmed what philosophers, mystics, and other intuitive people have long declared: every human being has been literally “engineered for success” by his Creator. Every human being has access to a power greater than himself.”

— Maxwell Maltz

86. “You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut.”

— Maxwell Maltz

87. “Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism.”

— Maxwell Maltz

88. “Happiness isn’t something that happens to you. It is what you yourself do and determine upon.”

— Maxwell Maltz

89. “Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise and go ahead.”

— Maxwell Maltz

90. “It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear.”

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

92. “It is the job of conscious rational thought to decide what you want, select the goals you wish to achieve-and concentrate upon these rather than upon what you do not want. To spend time and effort concentrating upon what you do not want is not rational.”

— Maxwell Maltz

93. “Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively.”

— Maxwell Maltz

94. “As soon as the error has been recognized and corrections made, it’s equally important that the error be forgotten and the successful attempt remembered and dwelt upon.”

— Maxwell Maltz

95. “We simply must get it through our heads that holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue, but a vice.”

— Maxwell Maltz

96. “It is well known that when Thomas A. Eddison was stymied by a problem, he would lie down and take a short nap.”

— Maxwell Maltz

97. “The greatest miracle you can hope for is self-acceptance.”

— Maxwell Maltz

98. “Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. – Bruce Barton.”

— Maxwell Maltz

99. “The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.”

— Maxwell Maltz

100. “One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life, has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center.”

— Maxwell Maltz