Top 380 Steven Pressfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Steven Pressfield

153. “The instinct that pulls us toward art is the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness. The Ego hates this. Because the more awake we become, the less we need the Ego.”

— Steven Pressfield

154. “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

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

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “The Warrior Ethos evolved to counter the instinct of self-preservation.”

— Steven Pressfield

162. “The more important an activity is to your soul’s evolution, the more you will feel resistance to it.”

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

164. “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

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

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Steven Pressfield

171. “There’s no mystery to turning pro. It’s a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that.”

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us .”

— Steven Pressfield

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

182. “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

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

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

185. “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

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

— Steven Pressfield

187. “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

188. “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

189. “For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its own skin. That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too.”

— Steven Pressfield

190. “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

191. “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

192. “The professional is acutely aware of the intangibles that go into inspiration. Out of respect for them, she lets them work. She grants them their sphere while she concentrates on hers.”

— 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 great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.”

— Steven Pressfield

195. “The awakening an artist must be ruthless, not only with herself but with others.”

— Steven Pressfield

196. “But nothing really clicked for me until I gave up completely on hitting the overlap and just did what I loved, even when I thought nobody else in the world would be interested.”

— Steven Pressfield

197. “The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.”

— Steven Pressfield

198. “If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can.”

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

200. “In the hierarchy, the artist faces outward. Meeting someone new he asks himself, What can this person do for me? How can this person advance my standing? In the hierarchy, the artist looks up and looks down. The one place he can’t look is that place he must: within.”

— Steven Pressfield