Top 380 Steven Pressfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “It is that peculiar soldiers’ humor which springs from the experience of shared misery and often translates poorly to those not on the spot and enduring the same hardship.”

— Steven Pressfield

302. “That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.”

— Steven Pressfield

303. “We master the technique of our jobs.”

— Steven Pressfield

304. “His was not, I could see now, the heroism of an Achilles. He was not a superman who waded invulnerably into the slaughter, single-handedly slaying the foe by myriads. He was just a man doing a job. A job whose primary attribute was self-restraint and self-composure, not for his own sake, but for those whom he led by his example.”

— Steven Pressfield

305. “You’re supposed to learn that things that you think are nothing, as weightless as air, are actually powerful substantial forces, as real and as solid as earth.”

— Steven Pressfield

306. “In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his “real” vocation.”

— Steven Pressfield

307. “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every once in a while.”

— Steven Pressfield

308. “Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.”

— Steven Pressfield

309. “He looks upon sky and steppe and sees that which God has created. I look and see God Himself.”

— Steven Pressfield

310. “He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.”

— Steven Pressfield

311. “The habits and addictions of the amateur are conscious or unconscious self-inflicted wounds. Their payoff is incapacity. When we take our M1903 Springfield and blow a hole in our foot, we no longer have to face the real fight of our lives, which is to become who we are and to realize our destiny and our calling.”

— Steven Pressfield

312. “The power to take charge was in my hands; all I had to do was believe it.”

— Steven Pressfield

313. “The clash is epic and internal, between the ego and the Self, and the stakes are our lives.”

— Steven Pressfield

314. “Alexander operated by the same principle. Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.”

— Steven Pressfield

315. “You become an artist once you start saying that you are an artist.”

— Steven Pressfield

316. “The drawing is also a reminder that there’s an artist within each of us, and we must encourage that artist to do the work, to make something that matters, regardless of anything else that is going on.”

— Steven Pressfield

317. “Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.”

— Steven Pressfield

318. “The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work.”

— Steven Pressfield

319. “The enemy is in you, but it is not you.”

— Steven Pressfield

320. “Men feared even the shade of Alexander, lest they encounter him again beneath the earth, for surely in that world, too, none would surpass him.”

— Steven Pressfield

321. “We get ourselves in trouble because it’s a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame.”

— Steven Pressfield

322. “Those who do not understand war believe it contention between armies, friend against foe. No. Rather friend and foe duel as one against an unseen antagonist, whose name is Fear, and seek, even entwined in death, to mount to that promontory whose ensign is honor.”

— Steven Pressfield

323. “The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps.”

— Steven Pressfield

324. “I will gladly shell out $24.95 or $9.99 or 99 cents on iTunes to read or see or listen to the 24-karat treasure that you have refined from your pain and your vision and your imagination. I need it. We all do. We’re struggling here in the trenches. That beauty, that wisdom, those thrills and chills, even that mindless escape on a rainy October afternoon – I want it. Put me down for it.”

— Steven Pressfield

325. “Indeed, we own a bond, my friend. That most sublime of all: reminiscence for our vanished youth.”

— Steven Pressfield

326. “When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens.”

— Steven Pressfield

327. “Any support we get from persons of flesh and blood is like Monopoly money; it’s not legal tender in that sphere where we have to do our work. In fact, the more energy we spend stoking up on support from colleagues and loved ones, the weaker we become and the less capable of handling our business.”

— Steven Pressfield

328. “Do it or don’t do it.”

— Steven Pressfield

329. “You imagined we had entered unknown country, my friend, when we voyaged across the sea to Amazonia. Yet that was nothing beside the frontier I cross each evening with this woman who is my equal. Each dawn new continents are sighted; each night one alights on shores where no man’s sole has trod.” He.”

— Steven Pressfield

330. “The concept in all these environments seems to be that one needs to complete his healing before he is ready to do his work.”

— Steven Pressfield

331. “I, on the other hand, believe that the source of creativity is found on the same plane of reality as Resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield

332. “Our very existence makes them abominate us, for it calls their own wives and daughters to aspire to freedom.”

— Steven Pressfield

333. “But convey this, above all, to your men: let them not yield preeminence in valor to the Spartans, rather strive to outdo them. Remember, in warfare practice of arms counts for little. Courage tells all, and we Spartans have no monopoly on that. Lead your men with this in mind and all will be well.” TWENTY-THREE It was the standing order of my master on campaign that he be woken two hours before dawn, an hour prior to the men of his platoon.”

— Steven Pressfield

334. “The rancor I once bore recedes, supplanted by admiration and a sense even of loss at the mates we might have been and the times we might have shared.”

— Steven Pressfield

335. “Remember, they hate us as no other nation, for we are to them that which they fear beyond all: women unmastered by men.”

— Steven Pressfield

336. “The professional knows when he has fallen short of his own standards. He will murder his darlings without hesitation, if that’s what it takes to stay true to the goddess and to his own expectations of excellence.”

— Steven Pressfield

337. “And they knew that when battle came, he would take his place not safely in the rear, but in the front rank, at the hottest and most perilous spot on the field.”

— Steven Pressfield

338. “Now it’s 1967. Nasser and the Arabs are saying to themselves: The Jews have beaten us in Round One and Round Two, but we will wipe them out for good in Round Three.”

— Steven Pressfield

339. “When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he’s seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great characters and memorable scenes. So war is a natural topic.”

— Steven Pressfield

340. “It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.”

— Steven Pressfield

341. “The capacity for empathy and self-restraint will serve us powerfully, not only in our external wars but in the conflicts within our own hearts.”

— Steven Pressfield

342. “At the beginning, the author’s writing was like a selfie: a disposable plea for attention that was all about him and his life. But since he hadn’t done much living, there wasn’t much substance.”

— Steven Pressfield

343. “Assistance is the universal, immutable force of creative manifestation, whose role since the Big Bang has been to translate potential into being, to convert dreams into reality.”

— Steven Pressfield

344. “The enemy is a very good teacher. – the Dalai Lama.”

— Steven Pressfield

345. “Every virtue that reaches the exaggeration, is becoming a defect.”

— Steven Pressfield

346. “The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor. That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with.”

— Steven Pressfield

347. “Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual – in his phrase, “someone who reads books” – the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.”

— Steven Pressfield

348. “This is what I feared for Michael. That his generation, so strong, so well made, so bright and aware beyond its years, would compare itself to us in envy, envy of the clarity of our challenges and the brutish obviousness of our enemies.”

— Steven Pressfield

349. “Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.”

— Steven Pressfield

350. “The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.”

— Steven Pressfield