Quotes from Steven Pressfield

Never forget, Alexandros, that this flesh, this body, does not belong to us. Thank God it doesn't. If I thought this stuff was mine, I could not advance a pace into the face of the enemy. But it is not ours, my friend. It belongs to the gods and to our children, our fathers and mothers and those of Lakedaemon a hundred, a thousand years yet unborn. It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital.

We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is.

Someone once asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue from which all others flowed. He replied: Contempt for death. For us as artists, read failure. Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue.

The word amateur comes from the Latin root meaning to love.

We want a rite of passage. We want to grow up.

Fear of rejection isn't just psychological; it's biological. It's in our cells. Resistance knows this and uses it against us. It uses fear of rejection to paralyze us and prevent us, if not from doing our work, then from exposing it to public evaluation

How else account this usage, that enemies of yore may, by the passage of years alone, become friends?

Nothing, not even a horse-breeding establishment, eats cash like a ship, and none gobbles it more greedily than a trireme.

That was what I did at night. I read all the stuff that you're supposed to read in college but never do, or if you do, you're not paying attention. I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Turgenev. I read Cervantes and Flaubert and Stendhal and Knut Hamsun, and I read every American except Faulkner.

The professional blows critics off. He doesn't even hear them. Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouthpieces of Resistance and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious. They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads. That is their real evil.

will tell His Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field.

I will tell His Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field.

In an odd way," he says, "your making a hash of this has brought you into the club. We've all committed our share of balls-ups. What counts is setting things right and pressing on.

But a ship of war runs on heart as much as sweat. There must be love among the men or you're finished.

Good," he said. "Then we'll have our battle in the shade.

Rest in peace, motherfucker.

Questions for ourselves: "How much do we want it?" "What sacrifices are we willing to make to see this project succeed?" "Have we 'moved'—lock, stock, and barrel—to our inner Paris?

The good alone die young.

This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack.

The Muses were nine sisters, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, which means memory. Their names are Clio, Erato, Thalia, Terpsichore, Calliope, Polyhymnia, Euterpe, Melpomene, and Urania. Their job is to inspire artists.

Eternity is in love with the creations of time. – William Blake

When you move your material ass to the geographic site of your dream, your peers and potential mentors think at once, This person is serious. She has committed. She has burned the boats. She is one of us.

Eternity is in love with the creations of time means, to me, that in some way these creatures of the higher sphere (or the sphere itself, in the abstract) take joy in what we time-bound beings can bring forth into physical existence in our limited material sphere.

These days, of course, a branding presence is even more indispensable to an artist or entrepreneur. Can we do it? Are we intimidated? Are we too shy or introverted? Too proud? You and I can't put half our ass where our heart wants to be. We have to be in all the way.