Daniel Jay Millman (b.1946) is an American author and lecturer in the personal development field. Millman was born in Los Angeles, California, to Herman and Vivian Millman, and he has an older sister Diane. Much of his early life included active pursuits such as modern dance and martial arts, and then trampoline, tumbling, and gymnastics. During his senior year at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, Millman won the United States Gymnastics Federation national title on the trampoline and was voted Senior Athlete of the Year. While a freshman at U.C. Berkeley, he won the 1964 Trampoline World Championships in London, and earned All-American honors and won an NCAA Championship in vaulting and a USGF championship in floor exercise. He represented the United States in the 1966 Maccabiah Games, winning four gold medals in gymnastics. He was voted Senior U.C. Berkeley Athlete of the Year, graduating with a B.A. degree in Psychology in 1968. At some point in time, he fractured his leg in a motorcycle crash.
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Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness—if you had little time left to live—you would waste precious little of it! Well, I’m telling you…you do have a terminal illness: It’s called birth. You don’t have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason—or you will never be at all.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Action
To be authentic literally means to be your own author.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Love
When you begin your transcendental training, focusing your best efforts, without attachment to outcomes, you will understand the peaceful warrior’s way.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Attitude, Peace, Effort
Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it’s greedy or loving.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Money
Someday, in the moment of death, your whole life will pass before you. In a few fractions of a second—because time no longer applies—you will see many incidents from your life in order to learn. You will review your life with two questions in your consciousness: Could I have shown a little more courage in these moments? Could I have shown a little more love? You will see where you let fear stop you from expressing who you are, how you feel, or what you need. You will see whether you were able to expand into these moments, just a little, to show love, or whether you contracted.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Love, Courage, Fear, Death, Sin, Life, Action, Questions, Lies
In the real world, those of us who are most productive, successful, and satisfied focus not on fixing feelings or manipulating thoughts, but on what needs to be done—and then doing it—no matter what thoughts or feelings arise.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Purpose, Doing, Thoughts, Feelings, Success
Don’t be like the preacher who thought about praying while making love with his life and thought about love while praying.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Yin, Love, Life
There are times to let things happen, and times to make things happen. Now is that time. You will either make things happen, watch what happens, or wonder what happened.
—Dan Millman
When you sit, sit. When you stand, stand. Whatever you do, don’t wobble.
—Dan Millman
You haven’t yet opened your heart fully, to life, to each moment. The peaceful warrior’s way is not about invulnerability, but absolute vulnerability—to the world, to life, and to the Presence you felt. All along I’ve shown you by example that a warrior’s life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is a warrior’s sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Love, Death, Peace, Life
If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Wisdom, Change, Life, Death
If you desire to dig a well to reach water, your efforts are more fruitful if you dig one 100-foot-deep hole than if you dig ten holes each 10 feet deep.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Desire, Effort
Life is brief—a flash of lightning, a snap of eternity’s fingers.
—Dan Millman
Do you have the courage for it? Do you have the love? If you have enough of one, you will develop the other.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Love, Courage
Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Yin, Choice
Act happy, feel happy, be happy, without a reason in the world. Then you can love, and do what you will.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Happiness
Faith means living with uncertainty – feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Faith
As a peaceful warrior, I would choose when, where and how I would behave. With that commitment, I began to live the life of a warrior.
—Dan Millman
Topics: War, Peace, Commitment, Live, Life
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is…The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Attitude, Perception, Stress, Life
Simplicity has power. Founding our life on constructive, positive behavior is the simplest, most direct, and powerful approach I’ve ever found—simple, but not easy.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Simplicity, Life, Power
It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living—but neither is the unlived life worth examining.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Action, Life
When running up a hill, it is all right to give up as many times as you wish—as long as your feet keep on moving.
—Dan Millman
There are no ordinary moments.
—Dan Millman
Responsibility is a grace you give yourself not an obligation.
—Dan Millman
Every positive change—every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness—involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Courage, Growth
The warrior is here, now.
—Dan Millman
Don’t wait until you die to learn the warrior’s way. Do it now, each night, just before you drift off to sleep. As you review your day, consider these two questions of courage and love. Learn from each day, so that each day you can show a little more courage and a little more love. Then, as incidents occur, you may rise to the occasion and look back at the end of your life and feel good about the way you lived.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Questions, Courage, Love, Life, Good, Live, Sleep, War
People rarely fail; they only stop trying.
—Dan Millman
Avoid fragmentation: Find your focus and seek simplicity. Purposeful living calls for elegant efficiency and economy of effort—expanding the minimum time and energy necessary to achieve desired goals.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Goals, Desire, Effort, Purpose, Simplicity
When we feel stuck, going nowhere—even starting to slip backward—we may actually be backing up to get a running start.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Growth, Courage
Find the heart of it. Make the complex simple, and you can achieve mastery.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Mastery
While you fear missing a meal, you aren’t fully aware of the meals you do eat.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Gratitude, Appreciation, Blessings
Willpower is the key to success. Successful people strive no matter what they feel by applying their will to overcome apathy, doubt or fear.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Success, Action, Doubt, Power, People, Fear
As poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore reminds us, “We cannot cross the sea merely by staring at the water”. Simplicity has power. And living on purpose comes to this: Just do it. How much simpler can we get?
—Dan Millman
Topics: Power, Purpose, Simplicity
Moderation? It’s mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It’s the devil’s dilemma. It’s neither doing nor not doing. It’s the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It’s for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation…is lukewarm tea, the devil’s own brew.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Risk, Fear, Courage
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