782 Quotes by Robert Greene

Whistleblowers get fired and shot or crack up. You have to decide what you want to do. Do you want a career, or do you want to be an advocate? And where I’ve been an advocate, I do it not in my backyard. If I’m going to fight, I don’t do it in the backyard. In other words, I can get more done by not doing it in the backyard. I can train my students in the right way to do things.

You destroy an enemy when you make a friend of him.

Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil.

Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others – that is too high a price to pay.

As the great physicist Max Planck put it, scientists “must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.

One thing I designed, I’ve done a lot of work on improving kosher slaughter. They need to make a head holding device that would go on the end of the conveyer. A normal kosher head holding device, the thing is like a cradle that lifts up the head. If I have it on the end of a conveyer, how do I make this work?

Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings. You develop patience. Boredom no longer signals the need for distraction, but rather the need for new challenges to conquer.

Always try to lower the other side’s sense of urgency. Make your enemies think they have all the time in the world; when you suddenly appear at their border, they are in a slumbering state, and you will easily overrun them. While you are sharpening your fighting spirit, always do what you can to blunt theirs. PART.

Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers.