Top 80 Steven Kotler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sooner or later, there’s always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can’t clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward.”

— Steven Kotler

52. “I’ve gotten really good at pulling the veil down,” says Way, “at camouflaging reality, locking out my conscious mind and riding my focus into the zone.”

— Steven Kotler

53. “The great civil rights leader Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.”

— Steven Kotler

54. “Ecstatic technology isn’t limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly’s early research established, it’s the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.”

— Steven Kotler

55. “Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that...”

— Steven Kotler

56. “It was a silly time to try to make a living out of words, but it was a silly time in general.”

— Steven Kotler

57. “Temple University sports psychologist Michael Sachs, who made an extensive study of these states, summed this up nicely: “Every gold medal or world championship that’s ever been won, most likely, we now know, there’s a flow state behind the victory.”

— Steven Kotler

58. “Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.”

— Steven Kotler

59. “Perhaps you will live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Steven Kotler

60. “Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?”

— Steven Kotler

61. “You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.”

— Steven Kotler

62. “When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles – parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor – but, by then, we know they’re just costumes with zippers.”

— Steven Kotler

63. “The United States is in a tough spot.”

— Steven Kotler

64. “If you’re interested in mastery,” says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, “you have to learn this lesson. To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk – you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.”

— Steven Kotler

65. “No one wants distortion, but choosing itself is the distortion.”

— Steven Kotler

66. “All no means is they don’t know for sure or there’s a secret being kept, like someone’s trying to hide something really good.”

— Steven Kotler

67. “I rap for the trees... for the trees have no tongues.”

— Steven Kotler

68. “But the easiest way to live in the moment is to put yourself in a situation where there’s no other choice.”

— Steven Kotler

69. “Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code.”

— Steven Kotler

70. “Lion was the one who pointed out that naming hotels after Millennial values – the Truth, the Purpose, the Community – now that his generation had reached the age where the luxury of billboard ethics had been derailed by the verities of life, might be lucrative. “Aspirational nostalgia,” he dubbed it.”

— Steven Kotler

71. “After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.”

— Steven Kotler

72. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,”24 William Blake.”

— Steven Kotler

73. “It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.”

— Steven Kotler

74. “When Felix walked off the project,” says Walshe, “it was the darkest moment in his life. But a phobia – that’s deeply rooted fear. To face that, to come back, to trust strangers with his life, to put himself back into position to do something no one else had ever conceived of? I’ve seen plenty of astounding feats of human performance, but emotionally, Felix’s journey is the farthest I’ve ever seen an athlete come.”

— Steven Kotler

75. “His em-tracking machinery is driven by words more than images, but that’s only his make and model. Empathy is related to intuition, and intuition is individually customized, tuned to dominant talents. Chefs need tastes, painters images. His experience is biblical: It starts with logos.”

— Steven Kotler

76. “The second is trickier: the person who knows what to do next is the leader. We’re entirely nonhierarchical in that way. But in a combat environment, when split seconds make all the difference, there’s no time for second-guessing. When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.”

— Steven Kotler

77. “He defined the state as “being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

— Steven Kotler

78. “Experiencing the selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness of nonordinary states of consciousness can accelerate learning, facilitate healing, and provide measurable impact in our lives and work. But we have to revise or tactics and upend convention to make the most of those advantages.”

— Steven Kotler

79. “Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.”

— Steven Kotler

80. “If you’re interested in being your best, your inner monologue needs to support the best you want to be. In fact, when it comes to sustained performance, because doubt and disappointment are constant companions, controlling your thoughts is often the ball game.”

— Steven Kotler

81. “Zimbardo’s Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Melanie Rudd found that an experience of timelessness is so powerful it shapes behavior. In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness “felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”

— Steven Kotler

82. “Here, we want to break that mission statement down into smaller chunks, dividing up the impossible into a long series of difficult but doable goals that, if accomplished, render said impossible much more probable.”

— Steven Kotler

83. “Most of our fears and most of our anxieties don’t exist in the present.”

— Steven Kotler

84. “Treat fear like a playmate,” suggests Ulmer. “This transforms the emotion from a problem to be solved into a resource to be savored.”

— Steven Kotler