Top 380 Steven Pressfield Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 8

51. “The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.”

— Steven Pressfield

52. “Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill.”

— Steven Pressfield

53. “Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred and fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.”

— Steven Pressfield

54. “We will have to choose between the life we want for our future and the life we have left behind.”

— Steven Pressfield

55. “When we sit down to work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”

— Steven Pressfield

56. “The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.”

— Steven Pressfield

57. “To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls.”

— Steven Pressfield

58. “The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work.”

— Steven Pressfield

59. “Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield

60. “We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.”

— Steven Pressfield

61. “When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”

— Steven Pressfield

62. “The amateur tweets. The pro works.”

— Steven Pressfield

63. “The professional conducts his business in the real world. Adversity, injustice, bad hops and rotten calls, even good breaks and lucky bounces all comprise the ground over which the campaign must be waged. The field is level, the professional understands, only in heaven.”

— Steven Pressfield

64. “The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone.”

— Steven Pressfield

65. “Don’t prepare, do. Don’t let Resistance sucker you into wasting months on background, foundation, planning. All that can come later.”

— Steven Pressfield

66. “On the artist’s journey we are redefining and reconfiguring ourselves and our lives.”

— Steven Pressfield

67. “Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue.”

— Steven Pressfield

68. “Concerning all acts of initiative there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.”

— Steven Pressfield

69. “When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.”

— Steven Pressfield

70. “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

— Steven Pressfield

71. “Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional crazy heart.”

— Steven Pressfield

72. “Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working.”

— Steven Pressfield

73. “The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.”

— Steven Pressfield

74. “No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That’s why they call it rewriting.”

— Steven Pressfield

75. “The professional, though he accepts money, does his work out of love. He has to love it. Otherwise he wouldn’t devote his life to it of his own free will.”

— Steven Pressfield

76. “The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. She harnesses the urge for trouble and transforms it in her work.”

— Steven Pressfield

77. “Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe inforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn’t just psychological; it’s biological. It’s in our cells.”

— Steven Pressfield

78. “The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.”

— Steven Pressfield

79. “Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.”

— Steven Pressfield

80. “Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous.”

— Steven Pressfield

81. “Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.”

— Steven Pressfield

82. “Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?”

— Steven Pressfield

83. “There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us. Step one is to recognize this. This recognition alone is enormously powerful. It saved my life, and it will save yours.”

— Steven Pressfield

84. “He who whets his steel, whets his courage.”

— Steven Pressfield

85. “Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.”

— Steven Pressfield

86. “If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.”

— Steven Pressfield

87. “Resistance is the enemy within.”

— Steven Pressfield

88. “You are a writer when you tell yourself you are. No one else’s opinion matters. Screw them. You are when you say you are.”

— Steven Pressfield

89. “You’ve got the watches,” say the Taliban, “but we’ve got the time.”

— Steven Pressfield

90. “We cannot let external criticism, even if it’s true, fortify our internal foe. That foe is strong enough already.”

— Steven Pressfield

91. “Every artist has to face his own demons and evolve his own method of working.”

— Steven Pressfield

92. “We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.”

— Steven Pressfield

93. “Resistance really takes the shape, for me, in voices in my head telling me why I can’t do something or why I should put it off for another day, procrastinate for another day.”

— Steven Pressfield

94. “Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long. You may think you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.”

— Steven Pressfield

95. “The part we create from can’t be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted; soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we’ve got, the better and richer that part becomes.”

— Steven Pressfield

96. “The only intercourse possible between the knight and the dragon is battle.”

— Steven Pressfield

97. “The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket.”

— Steven Pressfield

98. “To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.”

— Steven Pressfield

99. “I believe in previous lives and the Muse – and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.”

— Steven Pressfield

100. “I’m superstitious. I keep mum while I’m working on something.”

— Steven Pressfield