Quotes from Steven Pressfield

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence. Those

Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual—in his phrase, "someone who reads books"—the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.

Resistance is a repelling force. It's negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.

All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion.

Life is action, Junah. Even choosing not to act, we act. We cannot do otherwise. Therefore act with vigor!

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

I'm keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first.

Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.

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.

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

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

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