Quotes from Robert Greene

If you lose contact with this inner calling, you can have some success in life, but eventually your lack of true desire catches up with you. Your work becomes mechanical. You come to live for leisure and immediate pleasures. In this way you become increasingly passive, and never move past the first phase. You may grow frustrated and depressed, never realizing that the source of it is your alienation from your own creative potential.

it is hard to be angry or defensive with someone who seems to agree with your opinions and tastes. Charmers may appear to be weaker than their targets but in the end they are the more powerful side because they have stolen the ability to resist.

The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds. Our attention and thoughts become diffused. Our lack of intensity makes it hard for the brain to jolt into a higher gear. The connections do not occur. For this purpose you must always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured.

Remember, your own image and presence are materials you can control.

When people choose between talk about the past and talk about the future, a pragmatic person will always opt for the future and forget the past.

But I don't consider history to be a field. It's just all the stuff that's happened so far. You have to call it a field so people who study what happened in the past can get a job teaching blank. But it doesn't seem to me that it's a subject.

a state of balance—a clear understanding of why we feel the way we do, conscious of our impulses so that we can think without being secretly compelled by our emotions.

It is estimated that over 65 percent of all human communication is nonverbal but that people pick up and internalize only about 5 percent of this information.

what if we could look within and see the source of our more troubling emotions and why they drive our behavior, often against our own wishes?

So often we think that power has changed people, when in fact it simply reveals more of who they are.

The spider has no need to chase for food, or even to move. It quietly sits in the corner, waiting for its victims to come to it on their own, and ensnare themselves in the web.

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. –Carl Jung

The Laws of Human Nature, 1: Master Your Emotional Self—The Law of Irrationality

His mind, he decided, worked best when he had several different projects at hand, allowing him to build all kinds of connections between them.

Lola pushed aside the sentries and entered his room anyway. In the process, the front of her dress somehow got torn (perhaps by her, perhaps by one of the sentries), and to the astonishment of all, most especially the king, her bare breasts were brazenly exposed. Lola was granted her audience with Ludwig. Fifty-five hours later she made her debut on the Bavarian stage; the reviews were terrible, but that did not stop Ludwig from arranging more performances.

WHEN ASKING FOR HELP, APPEAL TO PEOPLE'S SELF-INTEREST, NEVER TO THEIR MERCY OR GRATITUDE

Not just pain, but bullshit. Avoiding bullshit.

I leaped headlong into the Sea and thereby became better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore and…took tea and comfortable advice.

When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know. —Socrates

For a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed sometimes I do happen to tell the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find. Niccolò Machiavelli, in a letter to Francesco Gnicciardini, May 17, 1521

This game of constant duplicity most resembles the power dynamic that existed in the scheming world of the old aristocratic court.

Daily Law: Embrace your strangeness. Identify what makes you different. Fuse those things together and become an anomaly.

You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your job if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the advantage of others.

intensity defeats extensity every time. When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come.