Quotes from Maxwell Maltz

Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.

You are embarking on the greatest adventure of your life - to improve your self-image, to create more meaning in your life and in the lives of others. This is your responsibility.

Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.

You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut.

You make mistakes, mistakes don't make you

Faith, courage, optimism, looking forward, bring us new life and more life. Futility, frustration, living in the past are not only characteristic of 'old age'; they contribute to it.

Life is a series of problems.

To really 'live,' that is to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can life with. You must find yourself acceptable to 'you.'

Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.

You can do only one thing at a time. I simply tackle one problem and concentrate all efforts on what I am doing at the moment.

Happiness is simply a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.

Another cause of confusion, and the resulting feelings of nervousness, hurry, and anxiety, is the absurd habit of trying to do many things at one time.

Our self image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.

Self-esteem is as necessary to the spirit as food is to the body.

Accept yourself as you are. Otherwise you will never see opportunity. You will not feel free to move toward it; you will feel you are not deserving.

Times will change for the better when you change.

You make mistakes, mistakes don't make you

You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience.

A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment...For imagination sets the goal 'picture' which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of 'will,' as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.

If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.

It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.