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Robert Greene

Robert Greene Quotes

American author

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Famous Robert Greene Quotes

“When you hold yourself back, you incur not anger but a kind of respect. You instantly seem powerful because you make yourself un-graspable, rather than succumbing to the group, or to the relationship, as most people do. As your reputation for independence grows, more and more people will come to desire you, wanting to be the one who gets you to commit. The moment you commit, the magic is gone. You become like everyone else. People will try all kinds of underhanded methods to get you to commit.”

PowerRespectCommitment
Book:The 48 Laws Of Power
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“Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity--precisely the time when you need strength. What best equips you to cope with tthe heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness.No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for ii -- to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it.”

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Book:The 33 Strategies Of War
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“The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.”

PowerStrategyChessFlexibilityMobilityGoFluidity
Book:The 48 Laws Of Power
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