Maxwell Maltz famous quotes

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

#Decision #Habit #Behavior

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

#Moving On #Moving Forward #Men

We, whoever we are, must have a daily goal in our lives, no matter how small or great, to make that day mean something.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Mean #Goal #Matter

If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Inspirational #Friendship #Love Yourself

A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Environment #Imagine #Being True

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

#Self Esteem #Keys #Personality

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Business #Real #Goal

When you believe you can... you can!
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Business #Believe

Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible....
-- Maxwell Maltz

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Life #Happiness #Courage

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Giving #Personality #Feelings

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Business #Moving #Steps

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

#Inspirational #Persons

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Self #Effort

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

#Action #Guidance #Guides

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Life #Motivational #Goal

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

#Winning #Mind #Battle

Our self image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Self Esteem #Together #Habit

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Hurt #Attitude #People

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Giving #Imagination #Promise

Your most important sale in life is to sell yourself to yourself.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Self Esteem #Important #Life Is

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Integrity #Self #Accomplishment

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Real #Differences #Preparation

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

#Adversity #Doors #World

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Winning #Done

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Effort #Problem #Moments

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Jobs #Effort

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Inspirational #Change #Power

The most delightful surprise in life is to suddenly recognise your own worth.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Surprise #Life Is #Recognise

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 recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live - with your self-respect alive and growing.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Opportunity #Destiny #Doors

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

#Motivational #Positive Thinking #Sun

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

#Inspirational #Self Esteem #Love Yourself

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

#Wrestling #Opportunity #Growth

Times will change for the better when you change.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Life Changing #Work

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

#Self #Games #Names

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

#Self Esteem #Body #Spirit

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

#Self #Determine

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Self Esteem #Moving #Opportunity

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivation #Inspiration #Goal

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

#Feelings #Care #Emotion

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Successful #Thinking

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

#Real #Nervous #Nervous System

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Thinking #Feelings #Desire

You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Inspirational #Motivational #Mistake

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Real #Mistake #Mean

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

#Self #Keys #Discipline

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Feel Better #Thinking #Mind

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

#Capacity

When you're not goal-striving, not looking forward, you're not really living.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Goal #Looking Forward #Strive

I may be a mistake maker, but I'm also a mistake breaker.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Mistake #May #Makers

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

#Determine

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Stars #Spring #Mean

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

#Trying #Grows

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Emptiness #Symptoms

Ignore past failures and forge ahead.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Failure #Past

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

#Self Esteem #Vices #Opinion

When a person has adequate self-esteem little slights offer no threat at all - they are simply "passed over" and ignored. Even deeper emotional wounds are likely to heal faster and cleaner, with no festering sores to poison life and spoil happiness.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Self Esteem #Emotional #Poison

Develop an enthusiasm for life, create a need for more life, and you will receive more life.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Law Of Attraction #Enthusiasm #Needs

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

#Happiness #Thinking #Waiting

Happiness is simply a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Happiness #Thinking #Mind

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

#Feelings #Habit #Behavior

The biggest secret of self-esteem is this: Begin to appreciate other people more; show respect for any human being merely because he is a child of God and therefore a thing of value.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Children #Self Esteem

It is the job of conscious rational thought to decide what you want, select the goals you wish to achieve-and concentrate upon these rather than upon what you do not want. To spend time and effort concentrating upon what you do not want is not rational.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Jobs #Goal

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Inspirational #Imagination #Goal

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

#Loneliness #Real #Self

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

#Real #Past #Opportunity

It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Ideas #Mind #Negative

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Sports #Jobs #Thinking

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Real #Thinking

Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because again - your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Life #Motivational #Attitude

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Inspirational Life #Play #Outcomes

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Responsibility #Adventure #Self

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Mean #Thinking #Giving

Get into the habit of laughing; too many of us have forgotten how to laugh. As people grow older, they sometimes forget that they ever laughed. It is a part of their childhood that they can no longer remember.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Laughter #People #Laughing

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

#Fear #Psychological #Exposure

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Real #Emotional #Keys

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Confusion #Anxiety #Feelings

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Worry #Creative #Want

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

#Lying #Naps #Down And

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.'
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Self #Hands #Phrases

Happiness is the art of relaxation.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Art #Relaxation

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

#Climbing #Mountain #Ulcers

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Men #Imagination #Use

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

#Effort #Creative #Jam

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.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Success #Christian #Ideas

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

#Powerful #Hypnosis #Ideas

Science has now confirmed what philosophers, mystics, and other intuitive people have long declared: every human being has been literally "engineered for success" by his Creator. Every human being has access to a power greater than himself.
-- Maxwell Maltz

#Motivational #Long #People