Top 100 Robert Greene Quotes
#1. In Mastery author Robert Greene argues that we all have the ability to push the limits of human potential.
Carmine Gallo
#2. Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.
Robert Greene
#3. Excuses satisfy no one and apologies make everyone uncomfortable
Robert Greene
#4. You must bear in mind that each law is circumstantial. It does depend on the circumstances.
Robert Greene
#5. It is time to reverse this prejudice against conscious effort and to see the powers we gain through practice and discipline as eminently inspiring and even miraculous.
Robert Greene
#6. Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire. La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680 OBSERVANCE
Robert Greene
#7. News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite.
Robert Greene
#8. You are like a hunter: your knowledge of every detail of the forest and of the ecosystem as a whole will give you many more options for survival and success.
Robert Greene
#9. Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent
Robert Greene
#10. Remember the following: Never take your position for granted and never let any favors you receive go to your
Robert Greene
#11. To the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough, God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him. THE HISTORIES, HERODOTUS, FIFTH CENTURY B.C. Indians
Robert Greene
#13. You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, by heading in a direction that others seem to fear.
Robert Greene
#14. I often daydream about the future, thinking of the world in 100, 200 years, imagining what it looks like, feels like. I hope that my books are like ghosts that will inhabit this future.
Robert Greene
#15. Be a flame of positive emotions and you will never be without a friend.
Robert Greene
#16. The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.
Robert Greene
#17. Learn to use the knowledge of the past and you will look like a genius, even when you are really just a clever borrower.
Robert Greene
#18. Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emperors crown themselves.
Robert Greene
#19. Compelling spectacles are not to reach a niche market, it could be for reaching a niche marketing but on a grand scale. This is for grand marketing.
Robert Greene
#20. Little about your work, tease and titillate with alluring, even contradictory comments, then stand back and let others try to make sense of it all.
Robert Greene
#21. You have the power to think differently about who you are. You have the ability to turn off the critical voice inside of you. That's not you. That's coming from the culture. That's coming from the outside of you. You've internalized the voice of your parents, your teachers, your friends.
Robert Greene
#22. Your ability to work with people directly affects your ability to get work done in the world.
Robert Greene
#23. So after that I had a new rule. If I'm hired by the plant engineer, I only go over his head if I'm in project failure mode. If the project is going to fail, then I'll go over his head. But as long as the project is going to come out, I never go over his head. Now, that's a rule I still follow today.
Robert Greene
#24. When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity ... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others
Robert Greene
#25. How can we explain such inclinations? They are forces within us that come from a deeper place than conscious words can express.They draw us to certain experiences and away from others.
Robert Greene
#26. Most people are perpetually locked in the present. Their decisions are overly influenced by the most immediate event; they easily become emotional and ascribe greater significance to a problem than it should have in reality.
Robert Greene
#27. Hide your intentions not by closing up (with the risk of appearing secretive, and making people suspicious) but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals-just not the real ones.
Robert Greene
#28. Boldness makes even the smallest animal dangerous
Robert Greene
#29. Mastery is not a question of genetics of luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desires that stirs you from within.
Robert Greene
#30. Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.
Robert Lane Greene
#31. Never be distracted by people's glamorous portraits of themselves and their lives; search and dig for what really imprisons them.
Robert Greene
#32. Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power
Robert Greene
#33. Ah! what is love! It is a pretty thing, As sweet unto a shepherd as a king, And sweeter too; For kings have cares that wait upon a crown, And cares can make the sweetest love to frown.
Robert Greene
#34. What will seduce a person is the effort we expend on their behalf, showing how much we care, how much they are worth. Leaving things to chance is a recipe for disaster, and reveals that we do not take love and romance very seriously.
Robert Greene
#35. When you have success, be extra wary. When you are angry, take no action. When you are fearful, know you are going to exaggerate the dangers you face.
Robert Greene
#36. Playing with appearances and mastering the arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.
Robert Greene
#38. You may think that what you'd like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasures, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed.
Robert Greene
#39. There is too little mystery in the world; too many people say exactly what they feel or want.
Robert Greene
#40. If, for example, you are miserly by nature, you will never go beyond a certain limit; only generous souls attain greatness.
Robert Greene
#41. Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair,Or but as mild as she is seeming so,Then were my hopes greater than my despair,Then all the world were heaven, nothing woe.
Robert Greene
#42. We happen to live in an era that is incredibly wrapped up in notions of political correctness; everything is seen through the lens of politics. But being political and politically correct is just another way of fighting, another form of power and strategy, an insidious means of manipulation.
Robert Greene
#44. True genius, in strategy or anywhere, lies in self-control, self-mastery, presence of mind, fluidity of thought.
Robert Greene
#45. The human tongue is a beast that few can master.
Robert Greene
#46. The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.
Robert Greene
#47. When you reveal the inner workings of your creation, you become just one mere mortal among others. What is understandable is not awe inspiring
Robert Greene
#49. Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention.
Robert Greene
#50. 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.
Robert Greene
#51. My goal for Actress is to have it play more traditional theaters.
Robert Greene
#52. 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.
Robert Greene
#53. When it comes to mastering a skill, time is the magic ingredient.
Robert Greene
#54. Learn to move fast and adapt or you will be eaten. The best way to avoid this fate is to assume formlessness. No predator alive can attack what it cannot see. OBSERVANCE
Robert Greene
#55. The pain is kind of challenge your mind presents - will you learn how to focus and move past boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?
Robert Greene
#56. In the opening stage of most careers any attention is what you want, any attention is good attention, even if it's bad attention.
Robert Greene
#57. 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.
Robert Greene
#58. Self absorption is anti-seductive; it is a sign of insecurity.
Robert Greene
#59. 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.
Robert Greene
#60. Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or
Robert Lane Greene
#61. The mighty lion toys with the mouse that crosses his path - any other reaction would mar his fearsome reputation.
Robert Greene
#62. His captivating speech came not from his grammar or vocabulary but from the joy he took in wielding them well.
Robert Lane Greene
#63. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.
Robert Greene
#64. 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.
Robert Greene
#65. To me, no matter what we do, we all strive for that experience.
Robert Greene
#66. Obviously there's Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon and all these other outlets. Fake It So Real is now on Fandor, and I think people have actually seen it there, which is fine.
Robert Greene
#67. Through continual exposure to people and by attempting to think inside of them we can gain an increasing sense of their perspective, but this requires effort on our part.
Robert Greene
#68. There is a popular saying in Japan that goes "Tada yori takai mono wa nai," meaning: "Nothing is more costly than something given free of charge." THE UNSPOKEN WAY, MICHIHIRO MATSUMOTO, 1988
Robert Greene
#69. 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.
Robert Greene
#70. While a friend expects more and more favors, and seethes with jealousy, these former enemies expected nothing and got everything. A man suddenly spared the guillotine is a grateful man indeed, and will go to the ends of the earth for the man who has pardoned him.
Robert Greene
#71. A lot of things in history are timing, and it's very peculiar because in retrospect things [and] people can look more brilliant or necessary than they actually were.
Robert Greene
#72. I also make movies that can be seen on a small screen, as I shoot on digital video. Hopefully they can be seen small and can live like that.
Robert Greene
#73. It is your own bad strategies, not the unfair opponent, that are to blame for your failures. You are responsible for the good and bad in your life.
Robert Greene
#74. Sometimes any emotion is better than the boredom of security.
Robert Greene
#75. Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages.
Robert Lane Greene
#76. 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.
Robert Greene
#77. A noble mind disdains to hide his head, And let his foes triumph in his overthrow.
Robert Greene
#78. In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society.
Robert Greene
#79. 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.
Robert Greene
#80. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.
Robert Greene
#81. for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, "grammar." And
Robert Lane Greene
#82. Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.
Robert Greene
#83. Life goes by very fast. And the worst thing in life that you can have is a job that you hate, that you have no energy in, that you're not creative with and you're not thinking of the future. To me, might as well be dead.
Robert Greene
#84. 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.
Robert Greene
#85. Only your hearts be frolic, for the time Craves that we taste of naught but jouissance.
Robert Greene
#86. When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.
Robert Greene
#87. Hip-hop, you can't really do that when you're in your 50s.
Robert Greene
#88. Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. They are more than ready to find their most cherished opinions contradicted by reality.
Robert Greene & Joost Elffers
#89. Do not fight them. Instead think of them the way you think of children, or pets, not important enough to affect your mental balance
Robert Greene
#90. Never whine, never complain, never try to justify yourself.
Robert Greene
#91. But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will tun wild and cause you grief.
Robert Greene
#92. I'd start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd.
Robert Lane Greene
#93. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it - and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
Robert Greene
#95. An ecosystem that has the maximum amount of diversity is the richest.
Robert Greene
#96. 12
Lose Battles, But Win The War: Grand Strategy
Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.
Robert Greene
#97. Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.
Robert Lane Greene
#98. The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.
Robert Greene
#99. 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.
Robert Greene
#100. The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.
Robert Greene
