Maxwell Maltz quotes:

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Times will change for the better when you change.

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.

You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.

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

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

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.

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.

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

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.

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

I am a firm believer in 'negative thinking' when used correctly. We need to be AWARE of negatives so that we can steer clear of them. A golfer needs to know where the bunkers and sand traps are - but he doesn't think continuously about the bunker - where he doesn't want to go. His mind glances at the bunker, but he DWELLS upon the green.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 make mistakes, mistakes don't make you

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

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

Successful people are able to rise above crises by relaxing no matter what the external situation. Their belief in themselves, the strength of their self-image is impenetrable armor, which protects them against shattering events.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Do not say to yourself, 'I am going to act this way tomorrow.' Just say to yourself - 'I am going to imagine myself acting this way NOW - for 30 minutes - today.'

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Happiness is the art of relaxation.

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

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

Ignore past failures and forge ahead.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It takes 21 days to develop a habit.

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.

Life is a series of problems.

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

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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

Unthaw and become more natural.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

When you believe you can... you can!

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

Why not imagine yourself successful?

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

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.

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.

Worry is one of the most destructive scourges of mankind.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively.

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.