Quotes from Steven Pressfield

The American people... have had enough of sacrificing their sons and daughters in the name of some illusory world order; they want someone else's sons and daughters to bear the burden. The American people are willing to pay for this privilege, in cash and in the circumscription of their own liberty.

It's okay to be an introvert, to seek out the quiet corners at a cocktail party, to care about quality, to have your mood be affected by your surroundings.

Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they're better friends, truer friends. And we're better and truer to them.

You have never tasted freedom, friend," Dienekes spoke, "or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.

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.

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

The enemy is a very good teacher. — the Dalai Lama

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

There's a problem with the hierarchical orientation, though. When the numbers get too big, the thing breaks down. A pecking order can hold only so many chickens.

The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage.

He's a sturdy fellow, bald as a hen's egg, and like all engineers, practical as a pensioner.

Faced with our imminent extinction, Tom Laughlin believes, all assumptions are called into question.

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.

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.

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.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman.

What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.

The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. That's what I mean when I say turning pro. Resistance hates it when we turn pro.

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

Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These aren't diseases, they're marketing ploys. Doctors didn't discover them, copywriters did.

The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else. The ancient Spartans schooled themselves to regard the enemy, any enemy, as nameless and faceless. In other words, they believed that if they did their work, no force on earth could stand against them.

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

RESISTANCE AND PROCRASTINATION   Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it's the easiest to rationalize. We don't tell ourselves, "I'm never going to write my symphony." Instead we say, "I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow.

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