Quotes by Maxwell Maltz

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not ones better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.”

“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, Its no use - I cant do it”

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

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

“Stand up to crises. Dont 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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

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

“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.”

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

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

“We are injured and hurt emotionally, Not so much by other people or what they say and dont say, But by our own attitude and our own response.”

“Friends are relatives you make for yourself.”

You make mistakes, mistakes dont make you