Maxwell Maltz Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.''

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.

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.

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

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.

One's capacity for friendship, which can be developed, is basic to one's capacity for happiness.

As soon as the error has been recognized and corrections made, it's equally important that the error be forgotten and the successful attempt remembered and dwelt upon.

Admit your mistakes but don't cry over them. Correct them and go forward.

Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project.

Faith, courage, optimism, looking forward, bring us new life and more life. Futility, frustration, living in the past are not only characteristic of 'old age'; they contribute to it.

Why not imagine yourself successful?

Visualizing, creative mental picturing, is no more difficult than what you do when you remember some scene out of the past, or worry about the future. Acting out new action patterns is no more difficult than deciding, then following through on tying your shoes in a new and different manner each morning, instead of continuing to tie them in your old habitual way, without thought or decision.

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.

Ignore past failures and forge ahead.

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one's better abilities or 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.

Happiness is native to the human mind and its physical machine. We think better, perform better, feel better, and are healthier when we are happy.

Plan all you want for the future. Prepare for it. But don't worry about how you will react tomorrow, or even five minutes from now. Your creative mechanism will react appropriately in the 'now' if you pay attention to what is happening now.

Another cause of confusion, and the resulting feelings of nervousness, hurry, and anxiety, is the absurd habit of trying to do many things at one time.

Do your worrying before you place your bet, not after the wheel stops turning.

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, grappling with them in an aggressive intelligent manner.

Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle. A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it's moving forward towards something.

We act, we behave, and we feel the vibration that we're in at the present time according to what we consider our self image to be. And we do not deviate from that pattern. The image you hold of yourself is a premise, a foundation (idea) on which your entire personality is built. This image, not only controls your behavior but your circumstances as well.

Unthaw and become more natural.

You are not your mistakes. Just because you have done something stupid does not make you stupid.

I am a firm believer in 'negative thinking' when used correctly. We need to be AWARE of negatives so that we can steer clear of them. A golfer needs to know where the bunkers and sand traps are - but he doesn't think continuously about the bunker - where he doesn't want to go. His mind glances at the bunker, but he DWELLS upon the green.

Your present negative beliefs were formed by thought PLUS feelings. Generate enough emotion, or deep feeling and your new thoughts and ideas will cancel them out.

Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.

Life is a series of problems.

When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern.

The minute that we change our minds, and stop giving power to the past, the past with its mistakes loses power over us.

To really 'live,' that is to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can life with. You must find yourself acceptable to 'you.'

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

Failure feelings - fear, anxiety, lack of self-confidence - do not spring from some heavenly oracle. They are not written in the stars. They are not holy gospel. Nor are they intimations of a set and decided fate which means that failure is decreed and decided. They originate from your own mind.

Every day you must try to make yourself grow. This you can do.

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.

Fully 95 percent of our behavior, feeling, and response is habitual.

Happiness is the art of relaxation.

A step in the wrong direction is better than staying on the spot all our life. Once you're moving forward you can correct your course as you go. Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you're standing still.

You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.

Times will change for the better when you change.

Self-esteem is as necessary to the spirit as food is to the body.

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.

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

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.

The greatest cause of ulcers is mountain-climbing over molehills.

It is well known that when Thomas A. Eddison was stymied by a problem, he would lie down and take a short nap.

Change your mental imagery, and the feelings will take care of themselves.

Adopt the motto: It doesn't matter who's right, but what's right.

Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'

Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism.

The un-happiest of mortals is that man who insists upon reliving the past, over and over in imagination - continually criticizing himself for past mistakes - continually condemning himself for past sins.

This Creative Mechanism within you is impersonal. It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending upon the goals which you yourself set for it. Present it with success goals and it functions as a Success Mechanism. Present it with negative goals, and it operates just as impersonally, and just as faithfully as a Failure Mechanism.

Within you, whoever you may be, regardless of how big a failure you may think yourself to be, is the ability and the power to do whatever you need to do to be happy and successful.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively.

The greatest miracle you can hope for is self-acceptance.

Do not say to yourself, 'I am going to act this way tomorrow.' Just say to yourself - 'I am going to imagine myself acting this way NOW - for 30 minutes - today.'

Self-discipline is the golden key; without it, you cannot be happy.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have not goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.

It was as if personality itself had a 'face'. This non-physical face of personality seemed to be the real key to personality change. It remained scarred, distorted, 'ugly' or inferior the person himself acted out this role in his behaviour regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this 'face of personality' could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery.

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.

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.

Worry is one of the most destructive scourges of mankind.

We simply must get it through our heads that holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue, but a vice.

You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.

Your nervous system can't tell real failure from imagined failure.

Live in the present. The past is gone; the future is unknown - but the present is real, and your opportunities are now.

It takes 21 days to develop a habit.

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.

Happiness isn't something that happens to you. It is what you yourself do and determine upon.

Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you're standing still.

Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than "you" ever could by conscious thought. "You" supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

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.

When you believe you can... you can!

If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever.

A healthy strong ego, with plenty of self-esteem, does not feel itself threatened by every innocent remark.

Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and ‘natural’ as opposed to self-conscious and studied.

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