Robert Greene Quotes

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.

You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, by heading in a direction that others seem to fear.

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

Understand: people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself – your worth, your abilities, your potential. They will often disguise this as their objective opinion, but invariably it has a political purpose – they want to keep you down.

True genius, in strategy or anywhere, lies in self-control, self-mastery, presence of mind, fluidity of thought.

No moment is wasted if you pay attention and learn the lessons contained in every experience.

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

Win through your actions, never through argument.

The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.

Become who you are by learning who you are.

The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken.

I believe that everything happens for a reason, and what seems bad at first might in fact be something of a blessing.

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.

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.

Never whine, never complain, never try to justify yourself.

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

Hasty climbers have sudden falls.

People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires.

Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.

Boldness makes even the smallest animal dangerous

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

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.

Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous.

Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery.