Steven Pressfield Quotes

Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it

Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.

Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. . . The one thing that creative souls around the world have in common is that they all have to practice to maintain their skills. Art is a vast democracy of habit.

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

The Arts are learnt by reason and method; they are mastered by practice.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

Two is not a winner, and three nobody remembers. What does it take to be number one?

Listen not to the critics who put their own dreams on the shelf.

So the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, "I know what Zen is," or "I have attained enlightenment." This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point. If you start to practice zazen, you will begin to appreciate your beginner's mind. It is the secret of Zen practice.

Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are an artist - it punishes you.

Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win.

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

Most great art is freedom within form. Without form, we are amateurs, without freedom, we are robots.

Leo's goals are works of art.

It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.

Picture all the money that I've gotten off tours. Now picture me plotting for more.

A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

And when neither their property nor honour is touched, the majority of men live content, and he has only to contend with the ambition of a few, whom he can curb with ease in many ways.

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.

In college I had to major in something, so I was like, "Okay I like art history, so I will major in that." I never really had any ambitions to work in museums or anything, though.

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

This ego has all the desires, ambitions, wants to be always on the top of everything. You are exploited by this ego. And this never allows you even a glimpse of your real authentic self, and your life is there, in your authenticity. Hence, this ego only produces misery, suffering, fighting, frustration, madness, suicide, murder - all kinds of crime.