Quotes from Maxwell Maltz

Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs.

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

Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have "experienced" rather than what we have learned intellectually.

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

Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.

What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live -- with your self-respect alive and growing.

The clay or putty-like material stays soft and malleable enough to do so many, many times. In his infinite wisdom, God manufactured the self-image of similar material, so it remains malleable throughout our entire lives. No one is ever too old, too jaded, too frightened, or too traumatized to "wet the clay" and begin remaking it as they imagine and desire.

Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle," I told him. "A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go. It's no wonder you feel shaky.

The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea - from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source - and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist's words have over the hypnotized subject.

The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the "area of the possible." The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.

Experimental and clinical psychologists have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an "actual" experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything," said Henry Ward Beecher.

your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined.

If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed with Psycho-Cybernetics!

I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.

Get yourself a goal worth working for.

Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward.

The individual who is actively engaged in a struggle, or in striving toward an important goal, does not come up with pessimistic philosophies concerning the meaninglessness or the futility of life.

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

Stop measuring yourself against "their" standards. You are not "them" and can never measure up. Neither can "they" measure up to yours—nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it, and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.

The lucky of successful person has learned a simple secret. Call up, capture, evoke the feeling of success. When you feel successful and confident, you will act successfully.

No man is hurt but by himself," said Diogenes.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes. —William E. Gladstone

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.