Maxwell Maltz Quotes (40 Quotes)

If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.

Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.

Live in the present. The past is gone the future is unknown -- but the present is real, and your opportunities are now. You must see these opportunities they must be real for you. The catch is that they can't seem real if your mind is buried in past failures, if you keep reliving old mistakes, old guilts, old tragedies. Fight your way above the many inevitable Traumatizations of your ego, escape damnation by the past, and look to the opportunities of the present. I don't mean some vague moment in the present -- next week or next month, perhaps. I mean today, this minute.

Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent.

You are embarking on the greatest adventure of your life -- to improve your self-image, to create more meaning in your life and in the lives of others. This is your responsibility. Accept it, now.

Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise and go ahead.

Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.

People who say that life is not worthwhile are really saying that they themselves have no personal goals which are worthwhile. Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project. Always have something ahead of you to ''look forward to'' to work for and hope for.

Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.

What is opportunity, and when does it knock It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to

Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-break on.

When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative success mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or willpower.

Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person's feelings, his viewpoints, his desires and needs. Think more of what the other fellow wants, and how he must feel.

The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term is the indispensable prerequisite for success.

Your most important sale in life is to sell yourself to yourself.

It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear.

You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search.

You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.

Close scrutiny will show that most "crisis situations" are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.

You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut.

We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.

Worry is one of the most destructive scourges of mankind.

Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs.

Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow - after you have done your best to achieve success today.

You can do only one thing at a time. I simply tackle one problem and concentrate all efforts on what I am doing at the moment.

Stand up to crises. Don't let them throw you Fight to stay calm... even surmount the crisis completely and turn it into an opportunity. Refuse to renounce your self-image. No matter what happens, you must keep your good opinion of yourself. No matter what happens, you must hold your past successes in your imagination, ready for showing in the motion picture screen of your mind. No matter what happens, no matter what you lose, no matter what failures you must endure, you must keep faith in yourself. Then you can stand up to crises, with calm and courage, refusing to buckle then you will not fall through the floor. You will be able to support yourself.

Accept yourself as you are. Otherwise you will never see opportunity. You will not feel free to move toward it; you will feel you are not deserving.

The "self-image" is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior.

Realizing that our actions, feelings and behaviour are the result of our own images and beliefs gives us the level that psychology has always needed for changing personality.

We are injured and hurt emotionally, Not so much by other people or what they say and don't say, But by our own attitude and our own response.

One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life, has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center.

Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.

This is where you will win the battle in the playhouse of your mind.