Steven Pressfield (born September 1943) is an American author of historical fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays.
In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term grown, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our high nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.
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.
Don't prepare, do. Don't let Resistance sucker you into wasting months on background, foundation, planning. All that can come later.
Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.
Sometimes, when we're terrified of embracing our true calling, we'll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us. Are you pursuing a shadow career?
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.
The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it.
To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls.
Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance?
Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt.
You and I may only be mortals, with all the foolishness and fallibility that that state implies, but we're mortals made in the image of heaven. The gods can't do their work without us. So let's be bold, in their cause and in our own. It's our job, we humans, to make manifest that which is unmanifest-and to raise into consciousness, in this material dimension, that which had been known before only in heaven.
To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
Don't cheat the world of your contribution. Give it what you've got.
When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.
I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.
That’s why an artist must be a warrior and, like all warriors, artists over time acquire modesty and humility. They may, some of them, conduct themselves flamboyantly in public. But alone with the work they are chaste and humble. They know they are not the source of the creations they bring into being. They only facilitate. They carry. They are the willing and skilled instruments of the gods and goddesses they serve.
One thing I've found in any project is almost universally about three quarters of the way through - or maybe a little father, maybe seventh eighths on the way through - any project will explode.
The only intercourse possible between the knight and the dragon is battle.
The hero wanders, the hero suffers, the hero returns. You are that hero.
Is there a spiritual element to creativity? Hell, yes. Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.