Robert Greene Quotes

Twere sin to stain fair Venus' courts with blood

Hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time.

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.

The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.

The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history-the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen

Never take your position for granted and never let any favors you receive go to your head.

One can never expect critics to behave in any predictable way.

A lot of the things that involve power on the highest levels sometimes involve the darker side of human psychology. People can be very passive aggressive or they can be aggressive and they can conceal their intentions. There's this world that exists that nobody writes about or describes it's like a dirty little secret or taboo.

Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.

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.

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.

If you're just letting the time pass at your job, it's just dead time and you'll never get it back. If at that job you're learning and you're observing and you're seeing about people and connections, it's suddenly alive time.

Everything changes. This is the key to feeling powerful, but also to being creative in the world.

I believe that everybody was born with a kind of uniqueness. There is never going to be somebody else with the same DNA as you, with the same experiences. There is something that you were meant to do as an individual. You have some kind of creative skill. It can either be creating your own business in some level, being a writer, an artist, whatever, or it can even be working within a company, but from within that company you're creating something.

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.

It looks like I had the most irrelevant education than anybody in the planet could have.

Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent

A few years ago, for my birthday, Sean Price Williams said, "I'll give you one free day of shooting." He shot Kati with an I and co-shot Fake It So Real. While we've always worked together, I didn't want him to do it for free, so he cashed in his birthday chip and came for this one day.

Only your hearts be frolic, for the time Craves that we taste of naught but jouissance.

Nothing is given to you.

Understand: you are one of a kind. Your character traits are a kind of chemical mix that will never be repeated in history. There are ideas unique to you, a specific rhythm and perspective that are your strengths, not your weaknesses. You must not be afraid of your uniqueness and you must care less and less what people think of you.

As a writer you know you don't have to deal with a lot of the crap that most people deal with, the political things. Every couple of years when your book comes out then you have to go into these fights with the publisher and the publicist and that's it.

To a large extent, the political walls are crumbling.

You're not going to be persistent and tenacious enough if you don't love what you're doing. If it's not something that excites you, that appeals to you deep down inside.

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.

The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.

You can't disengage yourself from that game if you are completely unaware of what people out there might be doing, you're just going to be tripped up, you're going to find yourself continually at a disadvantage.

The wrong way to look at your university life is to say it's like job training, unless you're going into something very specific.

The combination of experiences and emotions you have felt are never repeated.

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.

For the future, the motto is, "No days unalert."

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think.

Always say less than necessary.

I really do think you shoot for that beautiful experience of showing your movie in a crowd or room full of people, or even just one person who happens to go to a matinee screening.

I've always been intrigued by fighter pilots and strategy because it occurs in like, milliseconds, you know.

There is almost a touch of condescension in the act of hiring friends that secretly afflicts them. The injury will come out slowly: A little more honesty, flashes of resentment and envy here and there, and before you know it your friendship fades. The more favors and gifts you supply to revive the friendship, the less gratitude you receive.

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.

Mastery is not a question of genetics of luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desires that stirs you from within.

There are people that don't need to run towards adversity. They grew up in circumstances where it's forced upon them. Other people lead, pushier lives. So there are all kinds of forms of adversity in the world.

Ethics and power are separate. Ethics and morality. I think life would be miserable if there weren't some kind of code that people operated by, but history is full of many, many people who have gotten power by very unethical means, and people who were very ethical, who get no power, people who have the most brilliant, lovely, wonderful, nice intentions and bring about horrible things in the world because they don't know how to play the power game.

A mind content both crown and kingdom is.

When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.

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.

Nothing is stable in the realm of power, and even closest of friends can be transformed into the worst of enemies.

I'm the kind of person that wants to analyze and I think having a background in, strangely enough, in like literature and languages, I'm always analyzing things.

There was writing and foreign languages. I always had an ease with foreign languages. So the both are related, both language related kind of mind.

Your work is the single greatest means at your disposal for expressing your social intelligence.