Steven Pressfield Quotes

When you look fear in the face, you are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'

Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.

When I'm scared - and I'm always scared when I have to face an audience, when I have to read a review, when I publish a book...then, I think of my grandfather. My grandfather was this strong, tough Basque who would never bend....What would he do? Well, he would go ahead, close his eyes, and drive forward. You do it and the spirit that is within you....is there.

For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

Some days it is a heroic act just to refuse the paralysis of fear and straighten up and step into another day.

My motto is: feel the fear and do it anyway.

Courage is tricky, oily. Easy to drop, easy to misplace." "I thought that if you had courage you always had it.". . . "Lilah, nothing is always there. Not courage, not joy, not hate or hope or anything else. We find courage, lose it, sometimes misplace it for years, and sometimes live in its grace for a while.

Don't let fear stop you. Don't give up because you are paralyzed by insecurity or overwhelmed by the odds, because in giving up, you give up hope. Understand that failure is a process in life, that only in trying can you enrich yourself and have the possibility of moving forward. The greatest obstacle in life is fear and giving up because of it.

The hope of courage lies in every heart, together with the fear that we will fail. When the test came, you did not fail.

The difference between success and failure isn't the absence of fear but the determination to pursue your heart's desires no matter how scared you are.

Bravery is feeling fear but doing the thing anyway.

Courage is one step ahead of fear.

Only one feat is possible: not to have run away.

If a man were to place himself in an attitude to bear manfully the greatest evil that can be inflicted on him, he would find suddenly that there was no such evil to bear; his brave back would go a-begging.

Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the recognition that some things are more important than fear - and what's more important to me is faith.

Courage means to keep making forward progress while you still feel afraid!

It is not a matter of being fearless. The fear is sometimes constant, but it's about moving forward regardless of the fear. Courage means feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Nothing is to be feared but fear itself. Nothing grievous but to yield to grief.

The true test of courage is to be afraid and to go ahead and do it anyway - to be scared, is to have your knees knocking, but to walk on in there anyway.

Fear is not life-giving enough to sustain itself. We can move in the direction of fear only so long before it brings us to our knees, or to our end.

Fear doesn't go away. The battle must be fought anew every day.

The greatest sin is fear and giving up.

Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.

A warrior never worries about his fear.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.