Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.
Maxwell MaltzRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Opportunity does not come to those who wait; it needs to be actively pursued and created.
This quote emphasizes that opportunity is not a passive event that simply happens; rather, it requires active engagement and preparation from individuals. Maxwell Maltz encourages us to recognize that we are the creators of our own opportunities, and by developing our abilities and self-image, we can effectively pursue our destinies with confidence and self-respect.
Themes
OpportunityDestinySelf-ImageMotivationConfidence
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about entrepreneurship, to inspire students to create their own paths towards success.
More from Maxwell Maltz
All quotes →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.'
Maxwell MaltzRead
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 MaltzRead
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 MaltzRead
Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.
Maxwell MaltzRead
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible.
Maxwell MaltzRead
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