Robert Greene
You're always feeling powerless in life. If you're in an abusive relationship or working for what we call a psychotic boss sometimes the only option is to leave because you're emotions get so entangled with these manipulative people that staying there you're just helpless because they're good at passive aggressive games and you're not, so you have to leave.Collection: Games
There is something I call social intelligence. You can do a lot in life on your own and you can do all kinds of stuff, but if you're really bad with people, if you're really naive or aggressive and push people away, if you don't know the political environment you're in, it invalidates all the things you know. You're not going to get anywhere.Collection: People
If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes.Collection: Mistake
Mastery is not a function of I.Q. or natural talent or wealthy parents who can send you to the best school, but rather the result of going through a learning process, fueled by the desire to grow and the persistence to push past any obstacles.Collection: School
Never take your position for granted and never let any favors you receive go to your head.Collection: Favors
If you want to be powerful in life you have to enjoy the process. You have to get pleasure out of making the thing that you're making. There has to be that kind of purpose behind it. If your purpose is simply gaining power, if that becomes your end in life then you end up sort of destroying yourself because you lose the sense of detachment that's very necessary.Collection: Powerful
It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause by yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others — playing people against one another, making them pursue you.Collection: People
Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatterCollection: Sheep
Some people are a little bit better than others, some people are great, some people are superior. It depends on the level of effort.Collection: People
Few are born bold. Even Napoleon had to cultivate the habit on the battlefield, where he knew it was a matter of life and death. In social settings he was awkward and timid, but he overcame this and practice boldness in every part of his life because he saw its tremendous power, how it could literally enlarge a man(even one who, like Napoleon, was in fact conspicuously small).Collection: Men
Any titles, money, or privilege you inherit are actually hindrances. They delude you into believing you are owed respect.Collection: Believe
If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.Collection: Mistake
If I could simplify the whole game of power and strategy in one equation, it would all hinge on the capacity to see events around you exactly as they are. The closer your mind is to reality, the better your strategies, your responses in life.Collection: Reality
Most people have no sense of self-awareness. They're not aware of what they really want. They knew it when they were younger but then as they get older they listened to parents, they listened to peers and they think that, for instance, money is the most important thing when it really isn't.Collection: Thinking
If you're really driven and you want something deep, hard enough in life, you're going to get it.Collection: Want Something
The human tongue is a beast that few can master.Collection: Tongue
One could draw up all different kinds of adversity depending on what your weakness is.Collection: Adversity
The worst thing is to sit and whine and complain and obsess about money as if that were the only sign of your worth as a human.Collection: Complaining
News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite.Collection: Black And White
Here in Beacon, I feel like this was the worst year yet. The entire town, like a lot of winter towns, just kind of holed up in the winter.Collection: Winter
I don't know that Brandy [Burre] would ever categorize herself as being trapped, but I felt like I saw her being trapped. When she's cleaning the room and she puts the labels on the toys, that was something that my wife, who's also friends with Brandy, was very adamant that we try to capture. My wife said that showed to her Brandy's creative outlet because she can't be creative in the ways that she used to be or that she maybe wants to be in the future.Collection: Wife
If you're in your early twenties, don't put so much importance on the money, on the raise. Getting an extra thousand dollars a year is okay, but the real thing is the responsibility and the power and the experience that you're learning.Collection: Real
If you have millions and millions of dollars, you're living in a totally different world. You don't feel it anymore and you've got to feel it.Collection: Different
When I think about the new film, I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.Collection: Thinking
I think what happened with Brandy [Burre]is what happens with a lot of people. You make these decisions for comfort and stability, and then eventually those same things that are comforting and stable end up putting walls around you that you didn't expect.Collection: Wall
My goal for Actress is to have it play more traditional theaters.Collection: Play
Kati with an I was a New York Times Critics' Pick and I was really happy that it got a run uptown in Harlem at the Maysles Cinema, which is a great space but isn't necessarily the most well attended for a week-long screening.Collection: Running
Only your hearts be frolic, for the time Craves that we taste of naught but jouissance.Collection: Time
Your work is the single greatest means at your disposal for expressing your social intelligence.Collection: Mean
Movie theaters barely make any money. A movie can make a couple of thousand dollars, or could get lucky and make ten or fifteen thousand dollars, but theatrical releases don't really sustain the work. For me, it's the best sort of advertisement for anything else you'd want to do.Collection: Couple
In some ways, the documentary form is a kind of trap and so is societal norms.Collection: Documentaries
One can never expect critics to behave in any predictable way.Collection: Way
Creative Endeavors are by their nature uncertain.Collection: Creative
Still uncertain as to our identity, we think that what matters in the work world is gaining attention and making friends. And these misconceptions and naïveté are brutally exposed in the light of the real world.Collection: Real
On woman Nature did bestow two eyes, Like Hemian's bright lamps, in matchless beauty shining, Whose beams do soonest captivate the wise And wary heads, made rare by art's refining.Collection: Wise
Set a beggar on horse backe, they saie, and hee will neuer alight.Collection: Horse
Then grew a wrinkle on fair Venus' brow, The amber sweet of love is turn'd to gall! Gloomy was Heaven; bright Phoebus did avow He would be coy, and would not love at all; Swearing no greater mischief could be wrought, Than love united to a jealous thought.Collection: Jealousy
Sovereign of beauty, like the spray she grows;Compass'd she is with thorns and canker'd bower.Yet, were she willing to be pluck'd and worn,She would be gather'd, though she grew on thorn.Collection: Sovereign
In the opening stage of most careers any attention is what you want, any attention is good attention, even if it's bad attention.Collection: Careers
Deceiving world, that with alluring toysHast made my life the subject of thy scorn,And scornest now to lend thy fading joys,T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn;How well are they that die ere they be born,And never see thy sleights, which few men shunTill unawares they helpless are undone!Collection: Men
Hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time.Collection: Time
My greatest wish is that a certain way of looking at the world, a way I show in all of my books, gets into my readers' heads, and slowly alters their perception.Collection: Book
An ecosystem that has the maximum amount of diversity is the richest.Collection: Ecosystems
We're close friends [with Brandy Burre]. We're neighbors. I actually lived two houses over from her for a while and then we were traveling one day and she was looking at the house we currently live in - which was between us - and she's like, "You guys should move here! It's bigger and better!"Collection: Moving
Be Royal in your Own Fashion: Act like a King to be treatedCollection: Fashion
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.Collection: Selfish
If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode. You can just as easily see a crises or problem as a challenge, an opportunity to prove your mettle, the chance to strengthen and toughen yourself, or a call to collective action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative into a positive purely by a mental process that will result in positive action as well.Collection: Opportunity
When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.Collection: Powerful