Robert Greene Quotes.
Remember: your bosses prefer to keep you in dependent positions. It is in their interest that you do not become self-reliant, and so they will tend to hoard information. You must secretly work against this and seize this information for yourself.
True genius, in strategy or anywhere, lies in self-control, self-mastery, presence of mind, fluidity of thought.
An elusive, enigmatic aura will make people want to know more, drawing them into your circle. Create such a power by hinting at something contradictory within you.
Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you’ve ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It’s a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.
Ethics and power are separate.
Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.
Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid and neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest.
If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.
What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.
As social animals we humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive.
Win through your actions, never through argument.
If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.
Compared to other animals, we humans enter the world remarkably weak and helpless. We remain relatively weak for many years before we can truly operate on our own.
Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others—that is too high a price to pay.
You can die from someone else’s misery — emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.
Let me spell it out: with the psychotic boss, nothing you do is ever quite right. They set traps, asking you to do things, and no matter how hard you think of accomplishing it in their way, it is wrong and you are to blame. This tends to instill a lot of fear in you.
When I say ‘Crush your enemy’, I don’t literally mean it.
