Top 500 Robert Greene Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Nothing is more infuriating than being paid no attention. In the process of seduction, you may have to pull back at times, subjecting your target to moments of doubt. But prolonged inattention will not only break the seductive spell, it can create hatred.”

— Robert Greene

452. “The gods of power frown on the frivolous; they give ultimate satisfaction only to those who study and reflect, and punish those who skim the surfaces looking for a good time.”

— Robert Greene

453. “This kind of feigned naturalness has countless applications in daily life, where nothing is more dangerous than looking smarter than the next person; the Natural pose is the perfect way to disguise your cleverness. But if you are uncontrollably childish and cannot turn it off, you run the risk of seeming pathetic, earning not sympathy but pity and disgust.”

— Robert Greene

454. “Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don’t worry about people’s reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will.”

— Robert Greene

455. “What money should buy is not lifeless objects but power over people.”

— Robert Greene

456. “Your targets cannot idealize you if they know too much about you, if they start to see you as all too human. Not only must you maintain a degree of distance, but there must be something fantastical and bewitching about you, sparking all kinds of delightful possibilities in their mind.”

— Robert Greene

457. “Daily Law: Think back on the moments when you felt deeply and personally connected to an activity. Think about the pleasure it brought you. In such activities are signs of your true purpose. Mastery, I: Discover Your Calling – The Life’s Task.”

— Robert Greene

458. “The Vulture. Of all the creatures in the jungle, he has it the easiest. The hard work of others becomes his work; their failure to survive becomes his nourishment. Keep an eye on the Vulture – while you are hard at work, he is circling above. Do not fight him, join him.”

— Robert Greene

459. “If you need inspiration, find the part of the target that most irritates you and use it as a springboard for some therapeutic conflict. The more real your cruelty, the more effective it is.”

— Robert Greene

460. “Act before it becomes impossible to disentangle one strand of misery from another, or to see how the whole thing started.”

— Robert Greene

461. “50 Cent is a master player at power, a kind of hip-hop Napoleon Bonaparte.”

— Robert Greene

462. “The game you want to play is different: to instead find a niche in the ecology that you can dominate.”

— Robert Greene

463. “Always make those above you feel comfortably superior.”

— Robert Greene

464. “One of the most potent weapons in the battle for information, then, is giving out false information. As Winston Churchill said, “Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

— Robert Greene

465. “Every time I bestow a vacant office I make a hundred discontented persons and one ingrate. Louis XIV, 1638-1715.”

— Robert Greene

466. “Thus for my own part I have more than once been deceived by the person I loved most and of whose love, above everyone else’s, I have been most confident. So that I believe that it may be right to love and serve one person above all others, according to merit and worth, but never to trust so much in this tempting trap of friendship as to have cause to repent of it later on. BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE, 1478-1529.”

— Robert Greene

467. “The problem in trying to prove a point or gain a victory through argument is that in the end you can never be certain how it affects the people you’re arguing with: They may appear to agree with you politely, but inside they may resent you.”

— Robert Greene

468. “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

469. “We have a continual desire to communicate our feelings and yet at the same time the need to conceal them for proper social functioning.”

— Robert Greene

470. “There is nothing to be gained by insulting a person unnecessarily. Swallow the impulse to offend, even if the other person seems weak. The satisfaction is meager compared to the danger that someday he or she will be in a position to hurt you.”

— Robert Greene

471. “Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content, The quiet mind is richer than a crown...”

— Robert Greene

472. “Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil. Power is a game – this cannot be repeated too often – and in games you do not judge your opponents by their intentions but by the effect of their actions.”

— Robert Greene

473. “Second, you must convince yourself of the following: people get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions in life.”

— Robert Greene

474. “Our continual connection to social media makes us prone to new forms of viral emotional effects. These are not media designed for calm reflection. With their constant presence, we have less and less mental space to step back and think.”

— Robert Greene

475. “Impatience, on the other hand, only makes you look weak. It is a principal impediment to power. Power.”

— Robert Greene

476. “It is the height of stupidity to believe that in the course of your short life, your few decades of consciousness, you can somehow rewire the configurations of your brain through technology and wishful thinking, overcoming the effect of six million years of development. To go against the grain might bring temporary distraction, but time will mercilessly expose your weakness and impatience.”

— Robert Greene

477. “Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly, you cannot prepare for and respond to it with any degree of control. Anger.”

— Robert Greene

478. “Making money or being successful should be a natural result of this ideal and not the goal itself.”

— Robert Greene

479. “The lesson is simple: it may be too late to be spoiled by a parent, but it is never too late to make other people spoil you. It is all in your attitude. People are drawn to those who expect a lot out of life, whereas they tend to disrespect those who are fearful and undemanding.”

— Robert Greene

480. “The secret enemy, though, will react with anger. Any strong emotion and you will know that there’s something boiling under the surface. Often the best way to get people to reveal themselves is to provoke tension and argument.”

— Robert Greene

481. “Forgetting our objectives. – During the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every profession is chosen and commenced as a means to an end but continued as an end in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 1844.”

— Robert Greene

482. “When you are faced with deficiencies instead of strengths and inclinations, this is the strategy you must assume: ignore your weaknesses and resist the temptation to be more like others.”

— Robert Greene

483. “If you lead the sucker down a familiar path, he won’t catch on when you lead him into a trap.”

— Robert Greene

484. “We want to learn the lesson and not repeat the experience. But in truth, we do not like to look too closely at what we did; our introspection is limited. Our natural response is to blame others, circumstances, or a momentary lapse of judgment.”

— Robert Greene

485. “Your mind is the starting point of all war and all strategy. A mind that is easily overwhelmed by emotion, that is rooted in the past instead of the present, that cannot see the world with clarity and urgency, will create strategies that will always miss the mark.”

— Robert Greene

486. “Establishing your differences with the mentor is an important part of your self-development, whether he is of the good or bad parent type.”

— Robert Greene

487. “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. War demands the utmost in realism, seeing things as they are. The more you can limit or compensate for your emotional responses, the closer you will come to this ideal.”

— Robert Greene

488. “According to Freud, seduction begins early in life, in our relationship with our parents. They seduce us physically, both with bodily contact and by satisfying desires such as hunger, and we in turn try to seduce them into paying us attention. We are creatures by nature vulnerable to seduction throughout our lives.”

— Robert Greene

489. “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

490. “What does it matter if another player, your friend or rival, intended good things and had only your interests at heart, if the effects of his action lead to so much ruin and confusion?”

— Robert Greene

491. “Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love. – NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.”

— Robert Greene

492. “And at the core of this intensity of effort is in fact a quality that is genetic and inborn – not talent or brilliance, which is something that must be developed, but rather a deep and powerful inclination toward a particular subject.”

— Robert Greene

493. “A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons – money, fame, attention, and so on. If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we are hoping to fill with the false love of public approval.”

— Robert Greene

494. “Van Gogh didn’t paint for money either. He only sold two paintings in his whole lifetime. Robert:.”

— Robert Greene

495. “To help yourself to cultivate serendipity, you should keep a notebook with you at all times. The moment any idea or observation comes, you note it down. You keep the notebook by your bed, careful to record ideas that come in those moments of fringe awareness – just before falling asleep, or just upon waking.”

— Robert Greene

496. “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

497. “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.”

— Robert Greene

498. “We force ourselves to step outside our inner chamber of habitual thoughts and connect to the world, to other people, to reality.”

— Robert Greene

499. “What if we could find out what causes us to lie about who we are, or to inadvertently push people away?”

— Robert Greene

500. “The more you are in contact with others, the more graceful and at ease you become. Isolation, on the other hand, engenders an awkwardness in your gestures, and leads to further isolation, as people start avoiding you.”

— Robert Greene