Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Maxwell Maltz - Page 2

Happiness is the art of relaxation.

It takes 21 days to develop a habit.

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.

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

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 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.

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

Worry is one of the most destructive scourges of mankind.

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.

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

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

People who say that life is not worthwhile are really saying that they themselves have no personal goals which are worthwhile. Prescription: Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project. Decide what you want out of a situation. Always have something ahead of you to “look forward to” — to work for and hope for.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It doesn't matter how many times you have failed.... What matters is the successful attempt.

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.

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

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

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.

Close scrutiny will show that most of these everyday socalled “crisis situations” are not life-or-death matters at all, but opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.

Ignore past failures and forge ahead.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why not imagine yourself successful?

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.

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.

Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you're stalled, “standing still”.

Unthaw and become more natural.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Life is a series of problems.