Quotes from Maxwell Maltz

The ''self-image'' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.

If you make friends with yourself, you'll never be alone.

Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and 'natural' as opposed to self-conscious and studied.

The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.

Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.

It is common knowledge among psychologists that most of us underrate ourselves, short-change ourselves, sell ourselves short. Actually, there is no such thing as a superiority complex. People who seem to have one are actually suffering from feelings of inferiority; their superior self is a fiction, a coverup, to hide from themselves and others their deep-down feelings of inferiority and insecurity.

You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search.

Conscious effort inhibits and 'jams' the automatic creative mechanism.

Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent.

Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow - after you have done your best to achieve success today

We age not by years but by events and our emotional reactions to them.

Adopt the motto—It doesn't matter who's right, but what's right.

The most liberating of all thoughts is disregard or "disconcern" for what other people think. Famous mail-order impresario and entrepreneur J. Peterman wrote (in his autobiography Peterman Rides Again); "Once you realize that most people are keeping up appearances and putting on a show, their approval becomes less important." Excessive concern over what other people think inhibits personality more than any other factor.

Do not tolerate for a minute the idea that you are prohibited from any achievement by the absence of in-born talent or ability. This is a lie of the grandest order, an excuse of the saddest kind.

Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy - period! Not happy because of.

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. —Bruce Barton

He must have a burning desire to solve the problem. But after he has defined the problem sees in his imagination the desired end result secured all the information and facts that he can then additional struggling fretting and worrying over it does not help but seems to hinder the solution.

The Success-type personality is composed of: S-ense of direction U—nderstanding C-ourage C-harity E-steem S-elf-Confidence S-elf-Acceptance.

Close scrutiny will show that most 'crisis situations' are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.

Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent.

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

Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle. A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it's moving forward towards something.

To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior.

Times will change for the better when you change.