Maxwell Maltz Quotes

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

Your ego is just an idea implanted in your mind. It is poisonous. Your ego keeps driving you madder and madder.

The whole idea of being mesmerized and not in control of your own actions is fascinating and a little spooky. I remember hearing about someone who'd gone to a magic act, and a person in the audience had become hypnotized by observing too closely what magician was doing on stage, and thought it was spooky to lose your consciousness that way.

Actually, actually, when he first put us into hypnosis, he didn't know what he was going to get.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

We tend to believe our own propaganda a little too completely.

Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways.

It's not enough to bash in heads. You've got to bash in minds.

What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life.

An idea accepted as true from any source can be every bit as powerful as hypnosis.

I think hypnosis is entertaining. I believe it's real.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

He was telling the students about the hypnotic technique of using quotes in a conversation. An idea is more palatable ... if it comes from someone else. The unconscious thinks in terms of content and structure. If you introduce a pattern with the words, 'My friend was telling me,' the critical part of her mind shuts off.

Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.

Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.

What evidence would you need to see to change your mind about this?

What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.

The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.

Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.

Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions.

The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.

When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.

Screw the truth into men's minds.

There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.

That is the trouble with many inventors; they lack patience. They lack the willingness to work a thing out slowly and clearly and sharply in their mind, so that they can actually "feel it work." They want to try their first idea right off; and the result is they use up lots of money and lots of good material, only to find eventually that they are working in the wrong direction. We all make mistakes, and it is better to make them before we begin.