The Warrior Poet Way Quotes

“The worst enemy we face in life is always ourselves. You are the biggest obstacle between where you are now and the courageous life you are capable of living,”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“As long as a man trades his warrior instinct for entertainment, his soul will not be satisfied. He will be perpetually bored, searching for a way to kill time and quell his longings. A man who’s consumed by his mission, however, who knows what life is about and his part to play, doesn’t need a distraction. His life is the adventure.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“No one on their deathbed asks for bank statements, trophies, or mementos. They ask for family and friends.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Living for a higher purpose and investing in people is all you can hope to fulfill you. That’s it. That’s where we find a truly meaningful life.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“To be a good man, you must become a paradox: strong but self-controlled, violent but gentle, ready to go to war one minute and prepared to give piggyback rides the next. This kind of man is fierce in word and deed while remaining compassionate and humble. He is fully soldier, fully lover, whole man.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“You’re bored, not exhausted; apathetic, not overwhelmed. You’ve got to get your ambition back. Otherwise, the slightest problem or mishap is going to derail you. Part of learning to dance is building up the muscles to take those basic steps.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“To dance well with life, we have to get some of our gusto back. We need to push ourselves harder than we think we can go. It may sound counterintuitive, but this is necessary. I know you’re tired, worn out, and frustrated. The good news is that you were built for this and may not even know it.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“We must summon the part of us that our society hasn’t completely squashed with the hammer of political correctness. We’ve been lulled into pursuing our “sensitive” side so much that it has become, for many men, their only side. Men need to wake up to their true identities as warriors. This is the only way we win in any fight. Yes, a man needs to know when to be gentle, but gentleness alone will not keep tyranny and evil at bay. It’s going to take warriors to defend what we’ve built and hold dear.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Today, we live in a society that has lost its sense of what it means to be masculine. King David would write heart-wrenching poems and hold deep and vulnerable friendships with other men, yet still turn on a dime to stack bloody Philistine bodies when it was time for war. He had a deep devotion to God, which he would credit as the source for his strength, giving him the courage needed to fight against the evils of his day.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Those who love freedom must be ready to defend it.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. —THOMAS JEFFERSON”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Progressives seem to look around and see fence posts erected by tradition, and in their rage against the wisdom of the past, they seek to tear down any boundaries or limitations they see—even ones that may be good for us. But you can’t tear down a fence post until you understand why it was put up in the first place.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Millennials have some solid qualities, but, oh man, do we harbor some terrible flaws. Philosophically, we seem to be largely oblivious. Unless you were homeschooled, you probably never had a logic or rhetoric class or anything to do with philosophy until midway through college—which is way too late of a start, in my opinion.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“The more you can place yourself in that voluntary hardship, the more you inoculate yourself against the crises that will eventually inevitably come up.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Today, our culture tends to celebrate victims over heroes. We praise weakness and a lack of discipline while villainizing aggression and strength.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

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― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“This is what every tyrant tries to do: take the people’s guns, control their speech and ideas through the media, and reprogram the nation’s youth.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“On the battlefield, it’s pretty simple: you work hard, give your all to the mission, and the team takes care of you. We all take care of one another, in fact; our very lives depend on it. But it doesn’t work the same way in the civilian world.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“I wanted danger and adventure, a life of poetry and purpose that required waging war for what really mattered while celebrating the good things in life.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant taste of death but once. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Trauma is a real thing and ought to be dealt with. Depending on its level of severity, you will want to seek professional help, but there is only so much you can clean up by focusing on the past. Every man who is living for something greater than himself is oriented toward the future. We all need something to look forward to.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“I know of no other way to live a long and healthy life than to make sure that you know your limits, set healthy boundaries, and decide to be content with how the chips fall. If you’re living only to please those making their demands on you, you’re going to end up feeling exhausted, frustrated, and defeated. If you’re reading this book (and you are), then you likely care about being better today than you were yesterday. You want to grow. That’s good! Keep going.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Ambition can be healthy, but it can also easily devolve into something unhealthy, making you greedy, selfish, and narrow-minded. You’ve got to say no even to yourself, and this is called self-discipline. You have only so much to give, and if you try to exceed what’s possible, you won’t be able to support the people you love for long.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Consider that your boss will always want a little more tomorrow based on what you can deliver today. That’s just the nature of work. But you can easily dig yourself an early grave if you don’t know your limits. Be careful here; many men give too much to work and deprive the rest of their lives as a result.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“When you vicariously live through the heroes on your screens and get your taste of victory from a favorite sports team, your ambition is being robbed.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“When you treat your wife the way you treat the guys, you lose her. Contrary to the current messaging of our backward culture, a woman is different from a man. She needs you to be the warrior on the battlefield of life and a poet in the home. Learning to strike this balance is difficult but, again, worth it.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“What love needs to grow, more than incredibly romantic gestures or grand displays of courage, is commitment. Plain and simple. Keep pursuing your muse, that woman who captured your heart in a single moment and refused to let go. You must never stop the chase, even when it looks like you’ve gotten what you sought. Commit to a lifetime pursuit of her, and she will always take you deeper than you could go on your own.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“My purpose is to love and serve Jesus Christ with every ounce of my being. From this source comes a love for people, a motive for protecting them, as well as a deep and fulfilling worldview, not to mention the ground rules for all relationships. The warrior needs more than war to live a happy life. So I ask: What are you living for? What will you fight for? Are you ever concerned that even as you fight, you could lose the reason you do it all? What then? We need a purpose, and that purpose must be bigger than ourselves or the love of our lives. The warrior is helped by a muse in their journey toward purpose, because she can serve as a means of drawing out who he really is as well as urging him to climb higher.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“The opposite can happen, as well. We can be better men. We can learn to love truth and wisdom. When enough little lights grow into a mighty flame, we can be a beacon for good in a world that has lost its mind. But we’re going to have to get tough and bold and understand that such a stand will cost us something personally. But it will be worth it.”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well

“Maybe our grandparents and parents, our forebears, actually had some really good points.” Look at the marriages of our great-grandparents compared to those from more recent generations and you can immediately surmise that they understood some stuff we simply don’t. Namely, commitment, fidelity, and honor. Why is it so crazy to consider that something new is not always necessarily better?”
― John Lovell, The Warrior Poet Way: A Guide to Living Free and Dying Well