Maxwell Maltz Quotes

You make mistakes, mistakes don't make you

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

“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

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

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

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.

— Maxwell Maltz

“Do not tolerate for a minute the idea that you are prohibited from any achievement by the absence of in-born talent or ability. This is a lie of the grandest order, an excuse of the saddest kind.”

— Maxwell Maltz

“Remember that both behavior and feeling spring from belief. To root out the belief that is responsible for your feeling and behavior-ask yourself, "Why?" Is there some task that you would like to do, some channel in which you would like to express yourself, but you hang back feeling that "I can't"? Ask yourself, "Why?" "Why do I believe that I can't?" Then ask yourself, "Is this belief based on an actual fact or on an assumption-or a false conclusion?" Then ask yourself the questions: 1. Is there any rational reason for such a belief? 2. Could it be that I am mistaken in this belief? 3. Would I come to the same conclusion about some other person in a similar situation? 4. Why should I continue to act and feel as if this were true if there is no good reason to believe it?”

— Maxwell Maltz

“If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed with Psycho-Cybernetics!”

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

The most liberating of all thoughts is disregard or "disconcern" for what other people think. Famous mail-order impresario and entrepreneur J. Peterman wrote (in his autobiography Peterman Rides Again); "Once you realize that most people are keeping up appearances and putting on a show, their approval becomes less important." Excessive concern over what other people think inhibits personality more than any other factor.

— Maxwell Maltz

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.

— Maxwell Maltz

“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.”

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

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

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

Happiness is the art of relaxation.

— Maxwell Maltz

“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

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.'

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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.”

— Maxwell Maltz

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

— Maxwell Maltz

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

— Maxwell Maltz

“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.”

— Maxwell Maltz

“Ignore past failures and forge ahead.”

— Maxwell Maltz

“Why not imagine yourself successful?”

— Maxwell Maltz