Steven Pressfield Quotes

“A cavalryman's horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be alowed to know this.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.”

Source: The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great

Steven Pressfield Quotes

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“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.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

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

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“A horse must be a bit mad to be a good cavalry mount, and its rider must be completely so.”

Source: Do the Work

“This man has conquered the world! What have you done?"
The philosopher replied without an instant's hesitation, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

Source: The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great

“Fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

Source: The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great

“It’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Steven Pressfield book The War of Art

Source: The War of Art (2002), p. 13

“Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.”

“Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. "I write only when inspiration strikes," he replied. "Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.”

“Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don't believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.”

Variant: Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.”

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

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“The song we’re composing already exists in potential. Our work is to find it.”

Dienekes p. 60
Gates of Fire (1998)
Source: Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

“Start before you're ready.”

Source: Do the Work

“Resistance by definition is self-sabotage.”

Source: Do the Work

“He who whets his steel, whets his courage”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.”

Source: Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

“As all born teachers, he was primarily a student.”

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“Persian envoy "our arrows will black out the sun…" Dienekes of the Spartans.."Good, then we'll fight in the shade.”

Source: Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

Source: Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

“Fear saps passion.”

“Do you love your country? […] This man, with his life, has preserved it. Bear him with honor.”

Do the Work

“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

Orontes (Handing over Xeones' corpse to Athenian civilians) p. 430
Gates of Fire (1998)

Steven Pressfield book The War of Art

Source: The War of Art (2002), p. 50

“Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstance, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”

“Among the ways the Spartans differ from other peoples is this. When an ally in distress applies to them for aid, they alone dispatch neither troops nor treasure but a solitary commander, a general. This officer alone, assuming charge of the beleagured forces, is sufficiant, they feel, to turn affairs about and produce victory. This as the world knows is what happened at Syracuse.”

Zachary Stein, p. 27
Killing Rommel (2008)

Steven Pressfield book Tides of War

Polemides, p. 162
Tides of War (2000)

“The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command. The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?”

Steven Pressfield book The Profession

Gent, p. 2
The Profession (2011)

“It is a terrible thing to be a king, especially a great one, for one must serve ideals of the spirit at the price of lovers of flesh and blood. Who profits from a king's fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?”

“A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and the chiseled squint of the vetern.”

Damon p. 221
Last of the Amazons (2002)

“Straight to her face advanced the Athenian Lykos, and it must be said that it took no slender spirit for him to do so, such was the light of slaughter in the Amazon's eyes. "What do you call this, thou savage!" The prince gestured to the broth irrigating the walls and floors of the canyon. "Are these God's footsteps?" Is this the 'path of holiness' in which your race treads?" Theseus hastened forward, reining-in at his countryman's shoulder. "This is not war," Lykos bellowed to Antiope. "It is butchery!" Theseus sought to speak, as if to offer extenuation for the actions of the Amazons. Lykos cut him off with a curse. "You cannot defend the indefensible!"”

Damon p. 91
Last of the Amazons (2002)

“At Athens and Athens alone, a new stamp of person was being born, neither baron nor yeoman, but a man of the city. A citizen.”

Lykos p. 153
Last of the Amazons (2002)

“One act I will never stand for is leaving our fellows behind. Bugger military protocol, or lofty notions of honour. I can't live with running out on a pal, and I won't let any of you do it either.”

Father p. 87
Last of the Amazons (2002)

“Why have I nominated you, lady, to bear up beneath this most terrible of trials, you and your sisters of the Three Hundred? Because you can.”

Major Mike Mallory, p. 60
Killing Rommel (2008)

“To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.”

Leonides p. 427
Gates of Fire (1998)

Steven Pressfield book The War of Art

Source: The War of Art (2002), p. 13

“This aspis was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand. He crossed to the ranks of Thespians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield.”

“You English are loath to embrace the virtues of the warrior. Such an act embarrasses you. You prefer to see yourselves as civilians summoned reluctantly to arms, as-what is the word?-'amatuers.' But you are warriors, you English. You are, Chapman. Trust me, who has faced you in the field.”

Polynikes p. 405
Gates of Fire (1998)

“In the end the American dream boils down to what? I'm getting mine and to hell with you.”

Oberleutnant Ehrlich, wounded German POW, p. 237
Killing Rommel (2008)

Steven Pressfield book The Profession

General Salter, p. 306
The Profession (2011)

“If you think this is funny, wait 'till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical!”

“The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. […] Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein.”

Polynikes p. 80
Gates of Fire (1998)

“There is something I must tell you. When Leonidas selected you for the Three Hundred, I went to him in private and argued strenuously against your inclusion. I thought you would not fight. […] I was wrong.”

Richmond Chapman, p. 177
Killing Rommel (2008)

“I have always found the spear to be a rather inelegant weapon”

Polynikes p. 324
Gates of Fire (1998)

“I love a guy who knows how to bitch. Any moron can gripe about chow or rotations, but someone who can get exercised over architecture is my kind of dude.”

Apollo p. 47
Gates of Fire (1998)

Steven Pressfield book The Profession

Gent, p. 202
The Profession (2011)

“I had always wondered what it felt like to die.”