Top 380 Steven Pressfield Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Do you understand? I hadn’t written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn’t matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and done my work.”

— Steven Pressfield

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

— Steven Pressfield

353. “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

354. “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

355. “We slew three hundred of them,” replied Artemisia, “and it took two million of us to do it.” These.”

— Steven Pressfield

356. “Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

— Steven Pressfield

357. “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

358. “Sharon was a realist. He recognized, as did Ben-Gurion and Dayan, that the Arabs had as legitimate a claim to this land as we did, and that they possessed pride and courage and anger, against which no rejoinder existed except the sword.”

— Steven Pressfield

359. “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home.”

— Steven Pressfield

360. “This is how Resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it’s colorful; Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we’re the supporting partner, shouldn’t we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike on our spouse’s coattails? And if we’re the supported partner, shouldn’t we step out from the glow of our loved one’s adoration and instead encourage him to let his own light shine?”

— Steven Pressfield

361. “Our team has zero; has he got Close Air Support, drones, anything?”

— Steven Pressfield

362. “El-Masri lies under gravel and shingle, with no part of him visible aboveground except his left hand.”

— Steven Pressfield

363. “I’m imagining the reader, whom I conjure as an aspiring artist much like my own younger, less grizzled self, to whom I hope to impart a little starch and inspiration and prime, a little, with some hard-knocks wisdom and a few tricks of the trade.”

— Steven Pressfield

364. “Nor am I “leading” in any way that the military manuals would recognise or commend. I’m just slogging miserably beside the others. But we are one, each giving his all. I catch a second wind, and I feel my brothers-in-arms catch theirs too. By.”

— Steven Pressfield

365. “There are gods who watch over lost souls, particularly those who dream, and when these divinities’ unknowable purposes align with the enterprise of these exiled souls, a force begins to flow that is as unquenchable as it is pure, and as knowing as it is indefatigable.”

— Steven Pressfield

366. “My role-options in life and career, I realized, were not limited to Businessman, Athlete, and Boneheaded Patriot.”

— Steven Pressfield

367. “Who profits from a king’s fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?”

— Steven Pressfield

368. “The hill is a sonofabitch but what can you do? Set one foot in front of another and keep climbing.”

— Steven Pressfield

369. “Like us, those vanished warriors planted their standards in the sands of their own self-summoned extinction.”

— Steven Pressfield

370. “We know what the clan is; we know how to fit into the band and the tribe. What we don’t know is how to be alone. We don’t know how to be free individuals. The.”

— Steven Pressfield

371. “What could be more natural for this man than to draw to his bosom all with whom he shared that time, even his foes? Perhaps his foes more than any.”

— Steven Pressfield

372. “Last of terror’s stages, Selene had tutored Europa and me, is busyness.”

— Steven Pressfield

373. “I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for.”

— Steven Pressfield

374. “Each man recalls not the enemy he hated, but the champion who engaged him with such valor.”

— Steven Pressfield

375. “All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion. The initial fear is that one has lost something. A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous baggage. In fact, he has become more “himself,” by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact.”

— Steven Pressfield

376. “When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?”

— Steven Pressfield

377. “It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarefied for us to breathe. Certainly I wouldn’t be writing this book, on this subject, if living with freedom were easy. 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

378. “Decisions are crazy. Sometimes all it takes to get over the hump is a friend who gives you permission.”

— Steven Pressfield

379. “Every warrior virtue proceeds from this – courage, selflessness, love of and loyalty to one’s comrades, patience, self-command, the will to endure adversity.”

— Steven Pressfield

380. “A professional does not take success or failure personally.”

— Steven Pressfield

381. “Xerxes does not want your lives, sir,” Tommie called. “Only your arms.” Leonidas laughed. “Tell him to come and get them.”

— Steven Pressfield

382. “In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity.”

— Steven Pressfield

383. “Stay primitive. Trust the soup. Swing for the seats.”

— Steven Pressfield

384. “But rationalization has its own sidekick. It’s that part of our psyche that actually believes what rationalization tells us. It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.”

— Steven Pressfield

385. “Resistance is diabolical. It can harness our drive for greatness and our instinct for professionalism and yoke them, instead, to a shadow profession, whose demands will keep us from turning our energies toward their true course.”

— Steven Pressfield

386. “The amateur is often unkind or insensitive to others, but she saves her most exquisite cruelty for herself.”

— Steven Pressfield

387. “The hero wanders. The hero suffers. The hero returns.”

— Steven Pressfield

388. “Resistance plays for keeps. It plays to kill. Resistance is fueled by fear. It has no power on its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. Master the fear and we conquer resistance.”

— Steven Pressfield