Maxwell Maltz Quotes

The most delightful surprise in life is to suddenly recognize your own worth.

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.

Times will change for the better when you change.

Creative striving for a goal that is important to you as a result of your own deep-felt needs, aspirations, and talents (and not the symbols which the "Joneses" expect you to display) brings happiness as well as success because you will be functioning as you were meant to function. Man is by nature a goal-striving being. And because man is "built that way," he is not happy unless he is functioning as he was made to function - as a goal striver. Thus true success and true happiness not only go together but each enhances the other.

In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, "It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it's there. If you're carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them.

His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort towards reaching that goal. Dunlap found that either "positive practice" (refraining from the habit) or "negative practice" (performing the habit consciously and voluntarily) would have beneficial effect provided the desired end result was kept constantly in mind.

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

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

Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end - and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we consciously dwell on the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error and keep berating ourselves because of it, then - unwittingly - the error or failure itself becomes the "goal" that is consciously held in imagination and memory.

Unthaw and become more natural.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

True success and true happiness not only go together but each other enhances the other.

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.

It is common knowledge among psychologists that most of us underrate ourselves, short-change ourselves, sell ourselves short. Actually, there is no such thing as a superiority complex. People who seem to have one are actually suffering from feelings of inferiority; their "superior" self is a fiction, a coverup, to hide from themselves and others their deep-down feelings of inferiority and insecurity.

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.

I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.

The lucky of successful person has learned a simple secret. Call up, capture, evoke the feeling of success. When you feel successful and confident, you will act successfully.

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.'

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.

We age not by years but by events and our emotional reactions to them.

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

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

The clay or putty-like material stays soft and malleable enough to do so many, many times. In his infinite wisdom, God manufactured the self-image of similar material, so it remains malleable throughout our entire lives. No one is ever too old, too jaded, too frightened, or too traumatized to "wet the clay" and begin remaking it as they imagine and desire.

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.

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

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

Ideas are changed, not by will, but by other ideas

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.

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

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

Ignore past failures and forge ahead.

Knowledge Gives You Power.

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

No man is hurt but by himself," said Diogenes.

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

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

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.

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.

Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have "experienced" rather than what we have learned intellectually.

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.

When you believe you can ... you can!

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

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.

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.

Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience.

If you intend to insist on justice in order to live a successful and happy life, you will not do so in this lifetime, on this planet.

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

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

It takes 21 days to develop a habit.

Our present thinking, our mental habits, our attitudes towards past experiences, and our attitudes towards the future - all have an influence upon old recorded [neuronal] engrams. The old can be changed, modified, replaced, by our present thinking.

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

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

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.

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.

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

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

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

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

Nothing can work me damage except myself," said St. Bernard.

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

The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

Conscious effort inhibits and 'jams' the automatic creative mechanism.

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

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

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.

Life is a series of problems.

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.

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.

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

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.

Experimental and clinical psychologists have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an "actual" experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

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

You make mistakes, mistakes don't make you

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

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.