Maxwell Maltz Quotes

Times will change for the better when you change.

You make mistakes, mistakes don't make you

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

If you make friends with yourself, you'll never be alone.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The most delightful surprise in life is to suddenly recognize 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

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

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

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.

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.

Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs.

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. —Bruce Barton

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.

The "Success-type" personality is composed of: S-ense of direction U—nderstanding C-ourage C-harity E-steem S-elf-Confidence S-elf-Acceptance.

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

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.

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

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.

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

He must have a burning desire to solve the problem. But after he has defined the problem sees in his imagination the desired end result secured all the information and facts that he can then additional struggling fretting and worrying over it does not help but seems to hinder the solution.

You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.

I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything," said Henry Ward Beecher.

your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined.

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.

Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy - period! Not happy "because of".

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.

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.

Get yourself a goal worth working for.

The individual who is actively engaged in a struggle, or in striving toward an important goal, does not come up with pessimistic philosophies concerning the meaninglessness or the futility of life.

Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle,” I told him. “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go. It’s no wonder you feel shaky.

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.

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

The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.

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.

If you make friends with yourself, you’ll never be alone.

You must have a clear mental picture of the correct thing before you can do it successfully.

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

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes. —William E. Gladstone

The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea - from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source - and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist's words have over the hypnotized subject.

Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other. The word “habit” originally meant a garment or clothing... Our habits are literally garments worn by our personalities. They are not accidental, or happenstance. We have them because they fit us. They are consistent with our self-image and our entire personality pattern. 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.

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.

Stop measuring yourself against “their” standards. You are not “them” and can never measure up. Neither can “they” measure up to yours—nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it, and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.

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

If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed.

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 the degree that we deny the gift of life, we embrace death.

The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

It doesn't matter who’s right but what's right.

The New Psycho-Cybernetics with Maxwell Maltz and Dan Kennedy.

Learning the happiness habit, you become a master instead of a slave, or as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go.

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.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.

You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.

There are “standard” convictions which are strongly held by nearly everyone. These are (1) the feeling or belief that one is capable of doing his share, holding up his end of the log, exerting a certain amount of independence, and (2) the belief that there is “something” inside you which should not be allowed to suffer indignities.

Knowledge Gives You Power.

Remember, above all, that the key to any crisis situation is you.

Positive thinking” cannot be used effectively as a patch or a crutch to the same old self-image.

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

1. “Do Your Worrying Before You Place Your Bet, Not After the Wheel Starts Turning

It has been amply demonstrated that attempting to use effort or willpower to change beliefs or to cure bad habits has an adverse, rather than a beneficial, effect.

Psychologist H. L. Hollingworth said that happiness requires problems, plus a mental attitude that is ready to meet distress with action toward a solution.

It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed in the past. What matters is the successful attempt, which should be remembered, reinforced, and dwelt upon.

Decide What You Want—Not What You Don’t Want

from impulsive and ill-considered actions; the other is

In expecting to grow “old” at a given age we may unconsciously set up a negative goal image for our Creative Mechanism to accomplish.

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

Dr. Norton L. Williams, a psychiatrist, addressing a medical convention, said that modern man’s anxiety and insecurity stemmed from a lack of self-realization, and that inner security can only be found “in finding in oneself an individuality, uniqueness, and distinctiveness that is akin to the idea of being created in the image of God.” He also said that self-realization is gained by “a simple belief in one’s own uniqueness as a human being, a sense of deep and wide awareness of all people and all things, and a feeling of constructive influencing of others through one’s own personality.

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.

Remember the fairy story “The Elves and the Shoemaker”? The shoemaker found that if he cut out the leather, and laid out the patterns before retiring, little elves came and actually put the shoes together for him while he was sleeping.

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.

Happiness is not the reward of virtue,” said Spinoza in his book Ethics, “but virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain our lusts; but, on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore are we able to restrain them.

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.

You can have many goals, but concentrating on just one at a time will help you accomplish far more than attempting to focus on many at once. Get the fire of desire started within being single-minded about one goal and the flame will naturally spread to the others without you forcing it. 4.

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?

If he feels bad because he is inferior, the cure is to make himself as good as everybody else, and the way to feel really good is to make himself superior. This striving for superiority gets him into more trouble, causes more frustration, and sometimes brings about a neurosis where none existed before. He becomes more miserable than ever, and “the harder he tries,” the more miserable he becomes.

2. The self-image can be changed. Numerous case histories have shown that one is never too young or too old to change his self-image and thereby start to live a new life. 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.

It appears that in our popular thinking about happiness we have managed to get the cart before the horse. “Be good,” we say, “and you will be happy.” “I would be happy,” we say to ourselves, “if I could be successful and healthy.” “Be kind and loving to other people and you will be happy.” It might be nearer the truth if we said, “Be happy—and you will be good, more successful, healthier, feel and act more charitably toward others.

I've spent thirty years working with the visualization techniques developed by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, author of the 30-million-copy best-seller Psycho-Cybernetics, and I use those techniques — like “Theater in Your Mind” — to visualize my letter's recipients as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, walking, talking human beings. I visualize their day's experience. How did it start out? What did they do when they first arrived at the office? Do they get their mail presorted? Opened? From an “in” basket? Hand-delivered? When do they get it? Where will they stand or sit when going through it? At that time, what else are they thinking about? Preoccupied with? What do they worry about, complain about, secretly wish for, enjoy? Through this stretch of my own imagination, I try to become one with the recipients of my letter, so I can anticipate their thoughts and reactions.

The word “habit” originally meant a garment, or clothing. We still speak of riding habits, and habiliments. This gives us an insight into the true nature of habit. Our habits are literally garments worn by our personalities. They are not accidental, or happenstance. We have them because they fit us. They are consistent with our self-image and our entire personality pattern. 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.

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.

It is not knowledge of actual inferiority in skill or knowledge that gives us an inferiority complex and interferes with our living. It is the feeling of inferiority that does this. And this feeling of inferiority comes about for just one reason: We judge ourselves, and measure ourselves, not against our own “norm” or “par” but against some other individual’s “norm.” When we do this, we always, without exception, come out second best. But because we think and believe and assume that we should measure up to some other person’s “norm,” we feel miserable, and second-rate, and conclude that there is something wrong with us.

I have found one of the most effective means of helping people achieve an adequate or successful personality is to first of all give them a graphic picture of what the successful personality looks like. Remember, the creative guidance mechanism within you is a goal-striving mechanism, and the first requisite for using it is to have a clear-cut goal or target to shoot for. A great many people want to improve themselves, and long for a better personality, but have no clear-cut idea of the direction in which improvement lies, or what constitutes a good personality. A good personality is one that enables you to deal effectively and appropriately with environment and reality, and to gain satisfaction from reaching goals that are important to you.

One of the most pleasant thoughts to any human being is the thought that he is needed, that he is important enough and competent enough to help and add to the happiness of some other human being. However, if we make a moral issue out of happiness and conceive of it as something to be earned as a sort of reward for being unselfish, we are very apt to feel guilty about wanting happiness. Happiness comes from being and acting unselfishly—as a natural accompaniment to the being and acting, not as a “payoff” or prize. If we are rewarded for being unselfish, the next logical step is to assume that the more self-abnegating and miserable we make ourselves, the happier we will be. The premise leads to the absurd conclusion that the way to be happy is to be unhappy.

Then, consciously decide that throughout the day: 1. I will be as cheerful as possible. 2. I will try to feel and act a little more friendly toward other people. 3. I am going to be a little less critical and a little more tolerant of other people, their faults, failings, and mistakes. I will place the best possible interpretation on their actions. 4. Insofar as possible, I am going to act as if successes are inevitable, and I already am the sort of personality I want to be. I will practice “acting like” and “feeling like” this new personality. 5. I will not let my own opinion color facts in a pessimistic or negative way. 6. I will practice smiling at least three times during the day. 7. Regardless of what happens, I will react as calmly and as intelligently as possible. 8. I will ignore completely and close my mind to all those pessimistic and negative “facts” that I can do nothing to change.

Many people find they get better results if they imagine themselves sitting before a large motion picture screen—and imagine that they are seeing a motion picture of themselves. The important thing is to make these pictures as vivid and as detailed as possible. You want your mental pictures to approximate actual experience as much as possible. The way to do this is to pay attention to small details, sights, sounds, objects, in your imagined environment. One of my patients was using this exercise to overcome her fear of the dentist. She was unsuccessful, until she began to notice small details in her imagined picture—the smell of the antiseptic in the office, the feel of the leather on the chair arms, the sight of the dentist’s well-manicured nails as his hands approached her mouth, etc. Details of the imagined environment are all-important in this exercise, because for all practical purposes, you are creating a practice experience. And if the imagination is vivid enough and detailed enough, your imagination practice is equivalent to an actual experience insofar as your nervous system is concerned.

A bird does not need to take lessons in nest-building. Nor does it need to take courses in navigation. Yet birds do navigate thousands of miles, sometimes over open sea. They have no newspapers or TV to give them weather reports, no books written by explorer or pioneer birds to map out for them the warm areas of the earth. Nonetheless the bird “knows” when cold weather is imminent and the exact location of a warm climate even though it may be thousands of miles away. In attempting to explain such things, we usually say that animals have certain instincts that guide them. Analyze all such instincts and you will find they assist the animal to successfully cope with its environment. In short, animals have a Success Instinct. We often overlook the fact that man, too, has a Success Instinct, much more marvelous and much more complex than that of any animal. Our Creator did not shortchange man. On the other hand, man was especially blessed in this regard. Animals cannot select their goals. Their goals (self-preservation and procreation) are preset, so to speak. And their success mechanism is limited to these built-in goal-images, which we call “instincts.” Man, on the other hand, has something animals don’t: Creative Imagination. Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. With his imagination he can formulate a variety of goals. Man alone can direct his Success Mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.