Quotes from Robert Greene

it is far easier to avoid creating envy in the first place than to get rid of it once it is there, ...

Daily Law: Adapt your inclinations. Avoid having rigid goals and dreams. Change is the law. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling—The Life's Task

Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power.

People with consummate acting skills can better navigate our complex social environments and get ahead.

If one person stops to see your beggarman laying bricks in the street, more will do the same. They will gather like dust bunnies. Then, given a gentle push, they will enter your museum or watch your show. To create a crowd you have to do something different and odd. Any kind of curiosity will serve the purpose, for crowds are magnetically attracted by the unusual and inexplicable.

People do not advertise their rigidity. You will only trip up against it if you try to introduce a new idea or procedure. Some in the group—the hyper-rigid—will become irritable, even panicky at the thought of any kind of change. If you press your case with logic and reason, you will tend to make them even more defensive and resistant.

Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education.

Emotions originate as physical arousal designed to capture our attention and cause us to take notice of something around us. They begin as chemical reactions and sensations that we must then translate into words to try to understand

Aprende a ejercer el hechizo del en- cantador apuntando a las debilidades primarias de la gente: vanidad y amor propio.

Some people do not become aware of inclinations or future career paths in their childhood, but instead are made painfully aware of their limitations.

The world is dying for bolder ideas, for people who are not afraid to speculate and investigate. Creeping conservatism will narrow your searches, tether you to comfortable ideas, and create a downward spiral—as the creative spark leaves you, you will find yourself clutching even more forcefully to dead ideas, past successes, and the need to maintain your status. Make creativity rather than comfort your goal and you will ensure far more success for the future.

pioneer a totally new field, known as neurobotics.

Your idea of power is wrong. You have mistaken aggressive action for effective action.

Perfect economy, then, does not mean hoarding your resources. That is not economy but stinginess—deadly in war. Perfect economy means finding a golden mean, a level at which your blows count but do not wear you out.

In other words, we do not have conscious access to the origins of our emotions and the moods they generate. Once we feel them, all we can do is try to interpret the emotion, translate it into language.

you must be careful not to let it annoy or distress you, but to look upon it merely as an addition to your knowledge

When it is time to ask for a favor or help, you must think first of appealing to people's self-interest in some way.

Cada cual tiene su suerte en las manos, como un escultor la materia que convertirá en figura. Pero con ese tipo de actividad artística es igual que con los demás: nacimos apenas con la capacidad de realizarla. La habilidad para hacer de ese material lo que queramos debe aprenderse y cultivarse atentamente. —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures. Alienating

For us, the split between our emotions and our cognition is a source of constant internal friction, comprising a second Emotional Self within us that operates beyond our will.

1658) REVERSAL

Drunk with success and sick with ambition, such empires expand to grotesque proportions and meet a ruin that is total. This

Animals feel fear for a brief time, then it is gone. We dwell on our fears, intensifying them and making them last well past the moment of danger, even to the point of feeling constant anxiety.

What is bloated beyond its proportions inevitably collapses. The mind must not wander from goal to goal, or be distracted by success from its sense of purpose and proportion.