Dr. Maxwell Maltz is the author of one of my favourite personal development books of all time, Psycho Cybernetics. It is one of the few books I consider as essential reading.
Dr. Maxwell Maltz started his career as a plastic surgeon who discovered that whilst some of his patients recovered their confidence and self-esteem after surgery, others didn’t.
Why was this?
It came down to the internal self-image the person held about themselves. He further found that just by getting some of his patients to change their self-image through simple visualisation techniques that a lot of them no longer felt the need for surgery.
His work went further into discovering that the primary factor of whether or not a person succeeds is the self-image they hold of themselves.
Dr. Maxwell Maltz passed in 1975 but his work continues to inspire millions long after. Below I’ve put together 47 of the best Maxwell Maltz Quotes that will inspire you to success.
47 Maxwell Maltz Quotes
1. “Close scrutiny will show that most “crisis situations” are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.” – Maxwell Maltz
2. “Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward.” – Maxwell Maltz
3. “Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent.” – Maxwell Maltz
4. “Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.” – Maxwell Maltz
5. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
6. “You make mistakes. Mistakes don’t make you.” – Maxwell Maltz
7. “The ‘self-image’ is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.” – Maxwell Maltz
8. “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
9. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
10. “If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.” – Maxwell Maltz
11. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
12. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
13. “Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.” – Maxwell Maltz
14. “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
15. “Your most important sale in life is to sell yourself to yourself.” – Maxwell Maltz
16. “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
17. “You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.” – Maxwell Maltz
18. “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
19. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
20. “Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.” – Maxwell Maltz
21. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
22. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
23. “The most delightful surprise in life is to suddenly recognize your own worth.” – Maxwell Maltz
24. “Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.” – Maxwell Maltz
25. “The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.” – Maxwell Maltz
26. “We age not by years but by events and our emotional reactions to them.” – Maxwell Maltz
27. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
28. “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
29. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
30. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
31. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
32. “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
33. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
34. “A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.” – Maxwell Maltz
35. “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.'” – Maxwell Maltz
36. “If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever.” – Maxwell Maltz
37. “Happiness isn’t something that happens to you. It is what you yourself do and determine upon.” – Maxwell Maltz
38. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
39. “We simply must get it through our heads that holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue, but a vice.” – Maxwell Maltz
40. “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.” – Maxwell Maltz
41. “The greatest miracle you can hope for is self-acceptance.” – Maxwell Maltz
42. “The unhappiest 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.” – Maxwell Maltz
43. “It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed…. What matters is the successful attempt.” – Maxwell Maltz
44. “Self-discipline is the golden key; without it, you cannot be happy.” – Maxwell Maltz
45. “Self-esteem is as necessary to the spirit as food is to the body.” – Maxwell Maltz
46. “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
47. “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
Did you find these Dr Maxwell Maltz Quotes inspiring?
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