Quotes from Steven Pressfield

What does Resistance feel like? First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We're bored, we're restless. We can't get no satisfaction. There's guilt but we can't put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We're disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.

I'm keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first. What's important is the work. That's the game I have to suit up for. That's the field on which I have to leave everything I've got.

What are we trying to heal, anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.

The only items you get to keep are love for the work, will to finish, and passion to serve the ethical, creative Muse.

Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce.

The hack is like a politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He's a demagogue. He panders.

Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.

Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish — that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that's actually good.

We all fight wars—in our work, within our families and abroad in the wider world. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.

Resistance is the enemy within.

A child has no trouble believing the unvelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

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.

When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.

The capacity for empathy and self-restraint will serve us powerfully, not only in our external wars but in the conflicts within our own hearts.

In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Leonidas's and Dienekes' quips draw the individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.

The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can't/shouldn't/won't do what we know we need to do.

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius's shadow is Resistance.

Last of terror's stages, Selene had tutored Europa and me, is busyness.

Crazy,' says Paddy Mayne, 'is our business.