Skip to content

Book

The 48 Laws of Power

Robert Greene

← All highlights
  • The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent. (Location 568)
  • Machiavelli said, it is better to be feared than loved. Fear you can control; love, never. (Location 2195)
  • The danger for most people comes when they feel threatened. In such times they tend to retreat and close ranks, to find security in a kind of fortress. In doing so, however, they come to rely for information on a smaller and smaller circle, and lose perspective on events around them. (Location 3143)
  • 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. (Location 3161)
  • effects of isolation on the human mind: a loss of proportion, an obsession with detail combined with an inability to see the larger picture, a kind of extravagant ugliness that no longer communicates. (Location 3176)
  • You need to be permeable, able to float in and out of different circles and mix with different types. (Location 3183)
  • To see if you are dealing with such a type, test them first—make, say, a mild joke at their expense. A confident person will laugh; an overly insecure one will react as if personally insulted. (Location 3315)
  • You can never be sure who you are dealing with. A man who is of little importance and means today can be a person of power tomorrow. We (Location 3327)
  • Be convinced, that there are no persons so insignificant and inconsiderable, but may, some time or other, have it in their power to be of use to you; (Location 3370)
  • Ask for the moon and you will be surprised how often you get it. (Location 5253)
  • Your fears of the consequences of a bold action are way out of proportion to reality, and in fact the consequences of timidity are worse. (Location 5433)
  • Your value is lowered and you create a self-fulfilling cycle of doubt and disaster. (Location 5434)
  • The time of a child is long and slow, with vast expanses; the time of an adult whizzes by frighteningly fast. Time, then, depends on perception, which, we know, can be willfully altered. This is the first thing to understand in mastering the art of timing. If the inner turmoil caused by our emotions tends to make time move faster, it follows that once we control our emotional responses to events, time will move much more slowly. (Location 6816)
  • Freud noticed that patients who had spent years in psychoanalysis without improvement would miraculously recover just in time if he fixed a definite date for the end of the therapy. Jacques Lacan, the famous French psychoanalyst, used a variation on this tactic—he would sometimes end the customary hour session of therapy after only ten minutes, without warning. After this happened several times, the patient would realize that he had better make maximum use of the time, rather than wasting much of the hour with a lot of talk that meant nothing. The deadline, then, is a powerful tool. (Location 6886)
  • Anger only cuts off our options, and the powerful cannot thrive without options. Once you train yourself not to take matters personally, and to control your emotional responses, you will have placed yourself in a position of tremendous power: Now you can play with the emotional responses of other people. (Location 7664)
  • The worth of money is not in its possession, but in its use. (Location 7763)
  • that after bad weather, good weather must follow, and that during the good weather houses must be built for shelter in times of need. (Location 8195)
  • There is a kind of stubborn stupidity that recurs throughout history, and is a strong impediment to power: The superstitious belief that if the person before you succeeded by doing A, B, and C, you can re-create their success by doing the same thing. This cookie-cutter approach will seduce the uncreative, for it is easy, and appeals to their timidity and their laziness. But circumstances never repeat themselves exactly. (Location 8313)
  • She never learned to charm or please other people, to become attuned to their individual psychologies. She never had to work to get her way, to use calculation or cunning or the arts of persuasion. And like everyone who is indulged from an early age, she evolved into a monster of insensitivity. (Location 8628)
  • To let a momentary thrill or an emotional victory influence or guide your moves will prove fatal. When you attain success, step back. Be cautious. When you gain victory, understand the part played by the particular circumstances of a situation, and never simply repeat the same actions again and again. (Location 9673)
  • good luck is more dangerous than bad luck. Bad luck teaches valuable lessons about patience, timing, and the need to be prepared for the worst; good luck deludes you into the opposite lesson, making you think your brilliance will carry you through. (Location 9769)
  • The first psychological requirement of formlessness is to train yourself to take nothing personally. Never show any defensiveness. (Location 10019)