Quotes from Steven Pressfield

When we commit fully to our calling, we acknowledge the forces of inspiration that we hope to summon to our aid.

Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years.

Know that all that is," Bagger Vance's voice came again as if in a dream, "flows from the union of the Field and the Knower.

Work—day-in, day-out exertion and concentration—produces progress and order. That's a law of the universe.

The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.

Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.

The field is level, the professional understands, only in heaven.

He who whets his steel, whets his courage.

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.

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.

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.

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.