Top 380 Steven Pressfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business.”

— Steven Pressfield

202. “The song we’re composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.”

— Steven Pressfield

203. “The hero’s journey can take place on a battlefield or in a cubicle. We can live it out amid public clamor or in the soundless vault between our ears. The demons we are dueling are always the same. They are our own fears of becoming who we are. No one who has ever lived – or ever will – has a journey like ours. And yet our journey is universal. It is every woman’s and every man’s.”

— Steven Pressfield

204. “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

205. “One thing I’ve found in any project is almost universally about three quarters of the way through – or maybe a little father, maybe seventh eighths on the way through – any project will explode.”

— Steven Pressfield

206. “A contemporary or near-future book is much harder because you can’t fake the facts. There are people alive who know much more than you do about the subject. You have to really have your research together – and of course no one can know everything about a topic.”

— Steven Pressfield

207. “The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don’t create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.”

— Steven Pressfield

208. “Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure.”

— Steven Pressfield

209. “A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.”

— Steven Pressfield

210. “When you’re a working writer, sooner or later friends and acquaintances will get you alone and confide that they, too, have a book in them.”

— Steven Pressfield

211. “Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the Self. Art.”

— Steven Pressfield

212. “I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.”

— Steven Pressfield

213. “The years have taught me one skill: how to be miserable. I know how to shut up and keep humping. This is a great asset because it’s human, the proper role for a mortal.”

— Steven Pressfield

214. “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Begin it now.”

— Steven Pressfield

215. “What husband is he who abandons his wife? What wife is she taken without love? The gods demand of us action and the use of our free will! That is piety, not to buckle beneath necessity’s yoke like dumb beasts!”

— Steven Pressfield

216. “A nation is born in blood and purchases with blood its right to stand in the ranks with other nations.”

— Steven Pressfield

217. “The pain of being human is that we’re all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”

— Steven Pressfield

218. “When we truly understand that the tribe doesn’t give a damn, we’re free. There is no tribe, and there never was. Our lives are entirely up to us.”

— Steven Pressfield

219. “The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.”

— Steven Pressfield

220. “The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they. – Plutarch Sayings of the Spartans.”

— Steven Pressfield

221. “When Krishna instructed Arjuna that we have a right to our labor but not to the fruits of our labor, he was counseling the warrior to act territorially, not hierarchically. We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.”

— Steven Pressfield

222. “There’s no mystery to turning pro. It’s a decision brought about by an act of will.”

— Steven Pressfield

223. “Our greatest fear is fear of success. When we are succeeding – that is, when we have begun to overcome our self-doubt and self-sabotage, when we are advancing in our craft and evolving to a higher level – that’s when panic strikes.”

— Steven Pressfield

224. “We’re facing dragons too. Fire-breathing griffins of the soul, whom we must outfight and outwit to reach the treasure of our self-in-potential and to release the maiden who is God’s plan and destiny for ourselves and the answer to why we were put on this planet.”

— Steven Pressfield

225. “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

226. “When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty.”

— Steven Pressfield

227. “You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.”

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

229. “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

230. “A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman.”

— Steven Pressfield

231. “The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”

— Steven Pressfield

232. “Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work.”

— Steven Pressfield

233. “The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist.”

— Steven Pressfield

234. “The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage.”

— Steven Pressfield

235. “Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.”

— Steven Pressfield

236. “I once worked as a writer for a big New York ad agency. Our boss used to tell us: Invent a disease. Come up with the disease, he said, and we can sell the cure. Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These aren’t diseases, they’re marketing ploys. Doctors didn’t discover them, copywriters did. Marketing departments did. Drug companies did. Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield

237. “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

238. “Leonidas began softly, his voice carrying in the dawn stillness, heard with ease by all. “Shall I tell you where I find this strength, friends? In the eyes of our sons in scarlet before us, yes. And in the countenances of their comrades who will follow in battles to come. But more than that, my heart finds courage from these, our women, who watch in tearless silence as we go.”

— Steven Pressfield

239. “Remember, Resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others. It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason-for-being, on the response of others to our work. Resistance knows we can’t take this. No one can.”

— Steven Pressfield

240. “Once we turn pro, we’re like sharks who have tasted blood, or renunciants who have glimpsed the face of God. For us, there is no finish line. No bell ends the bout. Life is the pursuit. Life is the hunt. When our hearts burst... then we’ll go out, and no sooner.”

— Steven Pressfield

241. “The linebacker and the Army Ranger go into action as part of a team. But the artist and the entrepreneur enter combat alone. I take my hat off to every man or woman who does this.”

— Steven Pressfield

242. “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

243. “Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren’t sick, they’re self-dramatizing. Sometimes the hardest part of a medical job is keeping a straight face.”

— Steven Pressfield

244. “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 thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to?”

— Steven Pressfield

245. “What is the pain of being human? It’s the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either.”

— Steven Pressfield

246. “Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it.”

— Steven Pressfield

247. “These characters might not be interesting to anyone else but they’re absolutely fascinating to us. They are us. Meaner, smarter, sexier versions of ourselves. It’s fun to be with them because they’re wrestling with the same issue that has its hooks into us. They’re our soul mates, our lovers, our best friends. Even the villains. Especially the villains.”

— Steven Pressfield

248. “We get ourselves in trouble because it’s a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It’s easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman’s wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.”

— Steven Pressfield

249. “The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.”

— Steven Pressfield

250. “As artists and professionals, it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.”

— Steven Pressfield