Quotes from Steven Pressfield

The lioness hunts. The alpha female defends the wolf pack. The Warrior Ethos is not, at bottom, a manifestation only of male aggression or of the masculine will to dominance. Its foundation is society-wide. It rests on the will and resolve of mothers and wives and daughters—and, in no few instances, of female warriors as well—to defend their children, their home soil and the values of their culture.

If we were born to paint, it's our job to become a painter.

It seems counterintuitive, but it's true: in order to achieve flow, magic, the zone, we start by being common and ordinary and workmanlike. We set our palms against the stones in the garden wall and search, search, search until at last, in the instant when we're ready to give up, our fingers fasten upon the secret door. Like a child entering a meadow, we step over the threshold, forgetting everything except the butterfly that flits across our vision.

Enough for now about the antagonists arrayed against us. Let's consider the champions on our side: Stupidity Stubbornness Blind faith Passion Assistance (the opposite of Resistance) Friends and family

The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket. The

Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we'll all be sharing dinner in hell.

I write all day. I have no idea what I'm doing. I have never heard of narrative structure or theme or concept or act 1, act 2, act 3. I work entirely on instinct. I'm writing, as I said, about Burton Lines, about the trucking company. I'm writing about myself.

The Muse honors the working stiff.

plunge at once into matters as a Greek would, but offered first prayers for the free people's well-being.

Remember, the Muse favors working stiffs.

And I read. I write all day and read all night.

The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood.

I read War and Peace, I read Madame Bovary, I read Fathers and Sons, The Red and the Black, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. I read Hunger, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote. I read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, Quiet Days in Clichy. I read Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. My friend Paul is a character in this one.

I read everything you're supposed to read in high school and college but never do, or if you do, you're so psyched to read to the test that you don't learn a damn thing. Am I learning anything now? Fuck no. The books pass through my consciousness like sunlight through glass. I don't care. They're in my cells now. I love them. Their impress has etched itself in some occult recess of my heart.

When one of tal Kyrte misses steppe and sky, she longs not just for their beauty but also their cruelty. For among the free people the foreawareness of one's death, and heaven's indifference to it, is the keenest and most brilliant pleasure, rendering all precious. This is the supreme mystery, the fact of existence itself, before which mortals may only stand in silence.

Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying…Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen… we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. insights accrete.

I wish every aspiring writer or artist could have a year or two years like this—a season when you have no responsibilities except to your own Muse and your own daimon, a run of months when you're invisible to everybody but yourself, when you don't give a shit about anything except the challenge before you, when you could drop dead on the street and no one would stop except to step over your cold corpse, and you don't care.

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine.

If you find yourself criticizing other people, you're probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own. Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.

I don't know what your story is, son, and I don't wanna know. I can see you're working something out in your life. I can see you're trying your best. I can cut you slack. I'm trying to. But there's one thing you have to understand.

The amateur prizes shallowness and shuns depth. The culture of Twitter and Facebook is paradise for the amateur.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

RESISTANCE IS INVISIBLE Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experience it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It's a repelling force. It's negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.

The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason. In