Top 120 Maxwell Maltz Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search.”

— Maxwell Maltz

102. “Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person’s feelings, his viewpoints, his desires and needs. Think more of what the other fellow wants, and how he must feel.”

— Maxwell Maltz

103. “Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have not goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.”

— Maxwell Maltz

104. “Knowledge Gives You Power.”

— Maxwell Maltz

105. “One’s capacity for friendship, which can be developed, is basic to one’s capacity for happiness.”

— Maxwell Maltz

106. “The lucky of successful person has learned a simple secret. Call up, capture, evoke the feeling of success. When you feel successful and confident, you will act successfully.”

— Maxwell Maltz

107. “Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end – and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we consciously dwell on the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error and keep berating ourselves because of it, then – unwittingly – the error or failure itself becomes the “goal” that is consciously held in imagination and memory.”

— Maxwell Maltz

108. “I don’t like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything,” said Henry Ward Beecher.”

— Maxwell Maltz

109. “The individual who is actively engaged in a struggle, or in striving toward an important goal, does not come up with pessimistic philosophies concerning the meaninglessness or the futility of life.”

— Maxwell Maltz

110. “The “Success-type” personality is composed of: S-ense of direction U – nderstanding C-ourage C-harity E-steem S-elf-Confidence S-elf-Acceptance.”

— Maxwell Maltz

111. “It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.”

— Maxwell Maltz

112. “If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed with Psycho-Cybernetics!”

— Maxwell Maltz

113. “You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.”

— Maxwell Maltz

114. “Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy – period! Not happy “because of”.”

— Maxwell Maltz

115. “Do not tolerate for a minute the idea that you are prohibited from any achievement by the absence of in-born talent or ability. This is a lie of the grandest order, an excuse of the saddest kind.”

— Maxwell Maltz

116. “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs.”

— Maxwell Maltz

117. “Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle,” I told him. “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go. It’s no wonder you feel shaky.”

— Maxwell Maltz

118. “To the degree that we deny the gift of life, we embrace death.”

— Maxwell Maltz

119. “I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.”

— Maxwell Maltz

120. “If you intend to insist on justice in order to live a successful and happy life, you will not do so in this lifetime, on this planet.”

— Maxwell Maltz

121. “The clay or putty-like material stays soft and malleable enough to do so many, many times. In his infinite wisdom, God manufactured the self-image of similar material, so it remains malleable throughout our entire lives. No one is ever too old, too jaded, too frightened, or too traumatized to “wet the clay” and begin remaking it as they imagine and desire.”

— Maxwell Maltz

122. “It is common knowledge among psychologists that most of us underrate ourselves, short-change ourselves, sell ourselves short. Actually, there is no such thing as a superiority complex. People who seem to have one are actually suffering from feelings of inferiority; their “superior” self is a fiction, a coverup, to hide from themselves and others their deep-down feelings of inferiority and insecurity.”

— Maxwell Maltz

123. “Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and ‘natural’ as opposed to self-conscious and studied.”

— Maxwell Maltz

124. “Get yourself a goal worth working for.”

— Maxwell Maltz

125. “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go.”

— Maxwell Maltz

126. “Experimental and clinical psychologists have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.”

— Maxwell Maltz

127. “The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea – from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source – and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist’s words have over the hypnotized subject.”

— Maxwell Maltz

128. “Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have “experienced” rather than what we have learned intellectually.”

— Maxwell Maltz

129. “Ideas are changed, not by will, but by other ideas.”

— Maxwell Maltz

130. “In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, “It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it’s there. If you’re carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them.”

— Maxwell Maltz

131. “In expecting to grow “old” at a given age we may unconsciously set up a negative goal image for our Creative Mechanism to accomplish.”

— Maxwell Maltz

132. “2. The self-image can be changed. Numerous case histories have shown that one is never too young or too old to change his self-image and thereby start to live a new life. 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

133. “The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

— Maxwell Maltz

134. “No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes. – William E. Gladstone.”

— Maxwell Maltz

135. “No man is hurt but by himself,” said Diogenes.”

— Maxwell Maltz

136. “Learning the happiness habit, you become a master instead of a slave, or as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.”

— Maxwell Maltz

137. “You must have a clear mental picture of the correct thing before you can do it successfully.”

— Maxwell Maltz