War & Peace Quote by Robert Collier

Collier sells you motivation the way a good publisher sells a book: not as a vague hope, but as a mechanism. The “first step” isn’t framed as courage or inspiration; it’s a trigger. Start, and your mind “mobilize[s] all its forces” like an army suddenly put on war footing. That militarized language is doing the heavy lifting. It flatters the reader with the promise that you already possess hidden reserves of competence and grit; the only thing missing is the ignition.

The subtext is classic early self-help pragmatism: action precedes confidence, not the other way around. Collier doesn’t argue that fear disappears. He implies fear becomes irrelevant once momentum takes over, because motion reorganizes perception. Problems get reclassified from “threats” to “tasks,” and the mind, now committed, starts scavenging for resources: ideas, allies, shortcuts, opportunities. “Within and without you” is an elegant expansion of agency. Your internal capacities wake up, and the external world allegedly rearranges itself in response to your commitment.

Context matters here: Collier, as a publisher, lived in a world where most projects die in the proposal stage. He’s preaching against procrastination and perfectionism, the twin sins of would-be creators and entrepreneurs. The slightly mystical promise that “all…will come to your assistance” also reads like a sales pitch for optimism - but it’s strategic optimism. By making the beginning feel like the only hard part, he lowers the barrier to entry. The intent isn’t to describe reality with scientific rigor; it’s to get you moving before your doubts can lawyer you into staying still.