“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.” — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
“The artist and the fundamentalist both confront the same issue, the mystery of their existence as individuals. Each asks the same questions: Who am… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
The Kabbalah describes angels as bundles of light, meaning intelligence, consciousness. Kabbalists believe that above every blade of grass is an angel crying "Grow!… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
There is an enemy. There is an intelligent, active, malign force working against us. Step one is to recognize this. This recognition alone is… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution. — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
“that of dealing death, of loosing another man’s soul and sending it down to hell. You want to savor it, to twist the blade… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share
When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us... Ideas come. Insights accrete. — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of Resistance. — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
The Gnostics believed that exile was the essential condition of man. Do you agree? I do. The artist and the addict both wrestle with this experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And… — Steven Pressfield Copy Share Image
