Robert Greene
Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.Collection: Philosophy
Be as fluid as water, do not give your enemies anything solid to atackCollection: Giving
Everybody knows what they were kind of drawn towards or what they're gifted at and it's more of courage and looking at yourself and saying, "I'm going to try something and move back in that direction." So it's less of an intellectual problem and it's more of an emotional problem because as you get into your 30's and 40's you get addicted to a paycheck and a comfort and you delude yourself into thinking this is what my life is and you lack the guts to be honest with yourself and to make that change.Collection: Moving
You are facing death and danger and competition, but at any moment, you can decide to have a fearless mindset.Collection: Competition
When you have any kind of success in life, that's like the most dangerous moment that you're in because you're going to tend to think wow, I can just keep repeating what I've done. I'm a great person. People love me. All of the sudden they're giving me all of this attention. You get drunk on it and you lose your sense of balance and your sense of detachment. I know it's happened to me.Collection: Thinking
Nothing is given to you.Collection: Given
No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.Collection: Odds
If you're not careful people will judge you based on these appearances and they will pigeon hole you that this is the person that you are. Your shy, your aggressive, your this type or that type and you lose the control of the dynamic, they become the ones that determine who you are. A powerful person never loses control of the dynamic they are in someway in control.Collection: Powerful
Being the free woman who is sexy and out there is a performance in a way, and being the stay-at-home mom and wife is a performance in itself. All of those performances are living and force you to make decisions about who you really are. Women have to put those performances ahead of things sometimes. Men aren't perceived in the same way.Collection: Mom
The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.Collection: Character
You could have a lot of money at your fingertips, the finest education and intellectual knowledge, but if you are governed by fear none of that will matter. You will remain tied to dead ideas and stale strategies. You will not be able to adapt. You will lose what you have.Collection: Ideas
If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.Collection: Enemy
We must create our own world or we will die from inactionCollection: World
Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.Collection: People
People go into things for the wrong reasons.Collection: People
Be relentless in your pursuit for expansion.Collection: Expansion
The key to success in any kind of start up is your level of persistence. It's not so much your intellect. The Zuckerburg's, Pages and Brins, that succeed have such a level of belief in what they are doing that they will put up with the kind of crap that most people won't put up with, they are incredibly persistent and resilient.Collection: Persistence
All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely. (Sometimes they have learned this the hard way.) If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation: The enemy will recover, and will seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.Collection: Crush
There is a tremendous problem in modern culture. We have become used to everything coming to us with tremendous speed and ease. It is a culture where discipline and patience is almost impossible to develop.Collection: Discipline
The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.Collection: Keys
To succeed in the game of power, you have to master your emotions. But even if you succeed in gaining such self-control, you can never control the temperamental dispositions of those around you. And this presents a great danger.Collection: Self
The music business is just the worst as far as Machiavellian, sharky, evil games going on, as far as manipulation.Collection: Games
Religion humanizes this universe, makes us feel important and loved. We are not animals governed by uncontrollable drives, animals that die for no apparent reason, but creatures made in the image of supreme beingCollection: Animal
Actually learning ancient Greek was a brilliant practice of mine because you'd sit there and you'd read a sentence and sometimes it would take you a day, an entire day to figure out one sentence. But it really trains you to be analytical, to think in a certain way to try and interpret what something means. So I've been thinking like that my whole life and then I love Machiavelli and I love thinking about politics that way. So it's sort of all that put together and then the good luck to meet a man who is sort of interested in the same thing.Collection: Good Luck
The passive ironic attitude is not cool or romantic, but pathetic and destructive.Collection: Attitude
We have consciousness and rational powers but unless you're willing to spend the time to gain control of yourself, gain control of your emotions, to think deeply about what you want in a year or two, or where you want your business to be, you're going to be swept away by every new event that occurs in the course of the day or the week and the small amount of time that you plan, that you address to conscious planning, is never enough to overcome the constant tide of emotions and new things happening.Collection: Thinking
Whether people are making narrative cinema or experimental cinematic movie experiences, they all want the biggest screen possible and the quietest room and the most attention to every nuance and detail. Obviously, most people will not see the movie that way, but I can still hope for it, and I'd like to think we will be able to pull it off this time.Collection: Thinking
All masters want to appear more brilliant than other people.Collection: People
If you're in a subordinate position of some sort and pretty much all of us are at some point in our lives, your general tendency is to try and impress the people above you or person above you so well that they will like you, keep you or maybe promote you. In the process of doing that you are not aware that that person above has insecurities and if you try so hard they may see that you are after their job or that you are better than they are or they might envy the fact you are younger.Collection: Jobs
The whole concept of stage fright is fascinating. Actors get stage fright, but they wouldn't be on the stage in the first place if they just succumbed to it. There's this love/hate relationship with the spotlight.Collection: Hate
Nobody that I know really likes the feeling of having no power and not being able to influence people. But most of us aren't too conscious of what we are trying to do and get that control and that power so people end up sort of playing all kinds of unconscious manipulative games or they're sort of half aware, they have an idea of a strategy or goal they want to use and they think about it. But then in the heat of the moment, it kind of all flies out the window.Collection: Thinking
There's a real tension between it being a collaborative art process, which is almost like performance art of yourself, and, as we talk about the movie, it's kind of a mix between melodrama and cinéma vérité. This involves ideas about playing the role of yourself and the movie of your life and all these other things.Collection: Art
We are a social animal, power only exists in a social sense, we have to work in groups.Collection: Animal
There's spatial intelligence. they're, which end up being, people going into math or music. there's mechanical where you work well with your hands. There's an intelligence with language that would lead someone into writing. So it's not necessarily that you're six years old and you know you're going to be a lawyer Or you're going into tech startups or computers. It's something more elemental than that. It's that this is a skill, a way of thinking that comes naturally to me that I was drawn to and it was very clear in childhood.Collection: Writing
I am impressed when I go on the internet and see a lot of young people who've been influenced by the books, or I meet someone who tells me how it has changed their life. To me, that is much more real than sales figures.Collection: Real
I don't want to promote paranoia. It's not like wow, everybody is after me. You know that's not going to be very powerful. A person like Stalin was like that and he was powerful, but it ended up completely destroying him because he couldn't trust anyone.Collection: Powerful
I was working on other things and I wanted to make a film, and I had some ideas brewing in my head. Brandy's [ Burre] circumstance was such that I didn't really know what was going to happen. That was obviously a surprise, but I knew she was in her mid-to-late thirties and she was starting to really think about her life in a way that really appealed to me, appealed to the women that I know in my life.Collection: Thinking
I have the point that everybody essentially have these unique set of DNA you have. There's something different about you genetically. You are unique is what I am trying to say - the combination of experiences and emotions you have felt are never repeated.Collection: Unique
When you understand the fear then you can begin to move past it. So when I hear the people say it's innate, you can't learn it, I just want to hit them in the head.Collection: Moving
Hip-hop has a feeling element, it's not just about knowing music. It's not like classical music or jazz where you can go on raw energy.Collection: Knowing
Sadness of any sort is also seductive, particularly if it seems deep-rooted, even spiritual, rather than needy or pathetic—it makes people come to you.Collection: Spiritual
You want attention, you want to grab some of that airspace that exists out there in a world that's very difficult to get it because it's so competitive and to get it for more than a few seconds. Any attention is good and that can be what we would normally consider as bad attention so I wanted to make you aware of that dynamic.Collection: Attention
The problem with human beings is that they can't sit alone in a room for more than an hour.Collection: Rooms
Her seductive power, however, did not lie in her looks [...]. In reality, Cleopatra was physically unexceptional and had no political power, yet both Caesar and Antony, brave and clever men, saw none of this. What they saw was a woman who constantly transformed herself before their eyes, a one-woman spectacle.Her dress and makeup changed from day to day, but always gave her a heightened, goddesslike appearance. Her words could be banal enough, but were spoken so sweetly that listeners would find themselves remembering not what she said but how she said it.Collection: Clever
Understand: A person of power instills a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initative on his side.Collection: Fear
If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox way, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them.They will find away to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.Collection: Thinking
Be wary of friends—they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.Collection: Envy
In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can enver focus enough to learn.Collection: Media