Maxwell Maltz - Collected Quotes

"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, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"An idea accepted as true from any source can be every bit as powerful as hypnosis." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"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, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"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, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"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, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"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, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"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 tthought. 'You’ supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)