Top 380 Steven Pressfield Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it?”

— Steven Pressfield

152. “We’re wrong if we think we’re the only ones struggling with Resistance. Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield

153. “As all born teachers, he was primarily a student.”

— Steven Pressfield

154. “Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.”

— Steven Pressfield

155. “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield

156. “You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.”

— Steven Pressfield

157. “The pro keeps coming on. He beats Resistance at its own game by being even more resolute and even more implacable than it is.”

— Steven Pressfield

158. “A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope.”

— Steven Pressfield

159. “The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death – survival, not only for the story’s characters, but often for the society itself. That’s why I’m drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they’re not technically “war stories.””

— Steven Pressfield

160. “Our greatest battle is to become ourselves, in the face of adversity.”

— Steven Pressfield

161. “Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance?”

— Steven Pressfield

162. “A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it’s a new business or anything at all.”

— Steven Pressfield

163. “Right now with blogs and the flood of internet access, a multitude of aspiring writers think they’re ready for prime time. They’re not. Be great. Read. Write. Bust your ass. Learn and find your voice. As hard as you think it is, it’s a hundred times harder.”

— Steven Pressfield

164. “The artist and the fundamentalist both confront the same issue, the mystery of their existence as individuals.”

— Steven Pressfield

165. “These are not easy questions. Who am I? Why am I here? They’re not easy because the human being isn’t wired to function as an individual.”

— Steven Pressfield

166. “What force is yanking at our sleeves? This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don’t even notice. But it’s a miracle.”

— Steven Pressfield

167. “No industry is immune and no occupation is safe. All of us need to begin to think in terms of our own inner strengths, our resilience and resourcefulness, our capacity to adapt and to rely upon ourselves and our families.”

— Steven Pressfield

168. “Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors. All are continually asking, “What does this represent? What does it stand for?” They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.”

— Steven Pressfield

169. “Crazy,′ says Paddy Mayne, ’is our business.”

— Steven Pressfield

170. “Never forget, Alexandros, that this flesh, this body, does not belong to us. Thank God it doesn’t. If I thought this stuff was mine, I could not advance a pace into the face of the enemy. But it is not ours, my friend. It belongs to the gods and to our children, our fathers and mothers and those of Lakedaemon a hundred, a thousand years yet unborn. It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital.”

— Steven Pressfield

171. “Stay stupid. Trust the soup. Start before you’re ready.”

— Steven Pressfield

172. “In short, if the Muse exists, she does not whisper to the untalented.”

— Steven Pressfield

173. “Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield

174. “Rationalization is Resistance’s right-hand man. Its job is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work.”

— Steven Pressfield

175. “Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be – and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.”

— Steven Pressfield

176. “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

— Steven Pressfield

177. “The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind.”

— Steven Pressfield

178. “The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her. Her artistic self contains many works and many performances. Already the next is percolating inside her. The next will be better, and the one after that better still.”

— Steven Pressfield

179. “The professional has learned better. He respects Resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he’ll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow.”

— Steven Pressfield

180. “The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps. To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro it’s his vocation.”

— Steven Pressfield

181. “Don’t think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.”

— Steven Pressfield

182. “Turning pro is like kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It’s a decision, a decision to which we must re-commit every day.”

— Steven Pressfield

183. “The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else. The ancient Spartans schooled themselves to regard the enemy, any enemy, as nameless and faceless. In other words, they believed that if they did their work, no force on earth could stand against them.”

— Steven Pressfield

184. “Improvisation is not a wild scramble at the last minute. You are not pulling plans out of thin air. Improvisation is the payoff of scrupulous preparation and drill.”

— Steven Pressfield

185. “Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

— Steven Pressfield

186. “Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish – that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that’s actually good.”

— Steven Pressfield

187. “The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.”

— Steven Pressfield

188. “Our greatest fear is fear of success.”

— Steven Pressfield

189. “Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance? Does Resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives before we wake up to its existence? How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don’t do that.”

— Steven Pressfield

190. “Why have I stressed professionalism so heavily? Because the most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

— Steven Pressfield

191. “Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product.”

— Steven Pressfield

192. “The professional keeps his eye on the doughnut and not on the hole. He reminds himself it’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”

— Steven Pressfield

193. “Sometimes on Wednesday I’ll read something that I wrote on Tuesday and I’ll think, “This is crap. I hate it and I hate myself.” Then I’ll re-read the identical passage on Thursday. To my astonishment, it has become brilliant overnight. Ignore false negatives. Ignore false positives. Both are Resistance. Keep working.”

— Steven Pressfield

194. “The payoff for a life of adversity is freedom.”

— Steven Pressfield

195. “A warrior culture trains for adversity. Luxury and ease are the goals advertised to the civilian world.”

— Steven Pressfield

196. “Fame Imperishable and glory that will never die – that is what we march for!”

— Steven Pressfield

197. “What we get when we turn pro is, we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and to live out.”

— Steven Pressfield

198. “You may think that 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. Fear saps passion. When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”

— Steven Pressfield

199. “Do I really believe that my work is crucial to the planet’s survival? Of course not. But it’s as important to me as catching that mouse is to the hawk circling outside my window. He’s hungry. He needs a kill. So do I.”

— Steven Pressfield

200. “When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We’re doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth.”

— Steven Pressfield