Quotes from Steven Pressfield

The Greeks' sculpture and athletics celebrated the human form, their literature and music human passion, their discourse and philosophy human reason. In

RESISTANCE IS INTERNAL Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves. We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. Peripheral opponents, as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.

In fact, we are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us.

RESISTANCE IS IMPLACABLE Resistance is like the Alien or the Terminator or the shark in Jaws. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction, programmed from the factory with one object only: to prevent us from doing our work. Resistance is implacable, intractable, indefatigable. Reduce it to a single cell and that cell will continue to attack. This is Resistance's nature. It's all it knows.

RESISTANCE IS UNIVERSAL We're wrong if we think we're the only ones struggling with Resistance. Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.

Memoirs of the North Africa campaign attest that, fierce and brutal as much of the fighting was, relations between individual enemies retained a quality of forbearance that seems, today, almost impossible to imagine. This

RESISTANCE NEVER SLEEPS Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five. In other words, 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.

I type that. I type the whole chapter and the one after that and the one after that. Do I have a plan? Am I taking notes? I'm working mindlessly, like a chimpanzee. I want Hemingway's stuff to sink into me by osmosis.

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.   We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.   Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

The first duty is to sacrifice to the gods and pray them to grant you the thoughts, words, and deeds likely to render your command most pleasing to the gods and to bring yourself, your friends, and your city the fullest measure of affection and glory and advantage. —Xenophon, The Cavalry Commander

The soul. Mother love. Courage. These are closer to God, she taught, because they alone are the same on both sides of death, in front of the curtain and behind. "When I first came

I read R.D. Laing, I read Victor Frankl. Anything by Ken Kesey or Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, R. Crumb, Bob Dylan. These sacred texts are passed from one hand to another like relics of a religious past or harbingers of a new faith.