Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am impressed when I go on the internet and see a lot of young people who've been influenced by the books, or I meet someone who tells me how it has changed their life. To me, that is much more real than sales figures.
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.
To be strategic in life is like any skill whether it's basketball or learning a language, it takes effort and practice and I think most people don't think that it's something that they could just do, you know, naturally.
As most people when I entered the work world, suddenly people are playing games, being manipulative, being a little bit nasty, you get tricked or you're kind of naive and you do something and people come steal your idea.
People want to feel united, they want to have that religious sense they want to feel like at a rave 10,000 people at the rave are feeling the same emotions, a very primal need that's not being fulfilled in the world today.
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.
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
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.
If you're just letting the time pass at your job, it's just dead time and you'll never get it back. If at that job you're learning and you're observing and you're seeing about people and connections, it's suddenly alive time.
Things like reading a book or learning a language, or taking a walk - they're not stimulating. Your mind has to sort of learn how to deal with that kind of stimulation on its own. So that's a very important form of adversity.
Our times might emphasize equality, which we then mistake for the need for everyone to be the same, but what we really mean by this is the equal chance for people to express their differences, to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Kati with an I was a New York Times Critics' Pick and I was really happy that it got a run uptown in Harlem at the Maysles Cinema, which is a great space but isn't necessarily the most well attended for a week-long screening.
With colleagues in the work environment, we fail to see the source of their envy or the reason for their manipulations; our attempts at influencing them are based on the assumptions that they want the same things as ourselves.
50 is a great person. I was a little intimidated when I met him for the first time in 2006. I didn't know what to expect. It ended up we got along really well. That's why we decided to do a book together, The 50th Law of Power.
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.
To succeed in the game of power, you have to master your emotions. But even if you succeed in gaining such self-control, you can never control the temperamental dispositions of those around you. And this presents a great danger.
Smooth functioning of social life has always depended on the recognition of certain basic limits to behavior. We cannot simply say or do anything we wish, or offend people, without paying consequences - isolation, ostracism, etc.
Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.
Remember: The best deceivers do everything they can to cloak their roguish qualities. They cultivate an air of honesty in one area to disguise their dishonesty in others. Honesty is merely another decoy in their arsenal of weapons.
When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.
The Nihilistic Troll might pretend to be acting in the service of some cause or leader, but don't be fooled. The cause and their supposedly strong convictions are simply a way to justify and provide cover for their abusive behavior.
If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes.
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.
The point of the adversity is to toughen your mind so that you can handle difficult circumstances in life. Your mind, toughen just like you toughen your body. So it really depends on what you need. It really depends on the individual.
The problem is the book business is changing so we're in a difficult moment now and if the business model is changing, I don't know if I'm going to have to look what's in store for me at that level but fortunately, I broke in earlier.
We started filming [with Brandy Burre ]and didn't really know, at first, what we were doing. Eventually, the thing just grabbed a hold of both of us and became what it is. But, yeah, we were very close before and we're even closer now.
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.
I hate the way war is seen as something inherently brutal and ugly. Yes, much of war brings out the worst part of our [people's] nature. But in war, all kinds of noble human traits have been developed, such as discipline, cohesion, pride.
There are things that you study, classes you've taken, activities you've done that feel right, that feel like they're in your power zone. So it doesn't take incredible amount of effort for you to do it - it just comes more naturally to you.
Everybody in life is struggling for power, and some people use morality and righteousness as a weapon, while others use different means, even passive aggression. From a distance, we are all fighting, and I am looking at this from a distance.
If I could simplify the whole game of power and strategy in one equation, it would all hinge on the capacity to see events around you exactly as they are. The closer your mind is to reality, the better your strategies, your responses in life.
Mastery is not a function of I.Q. or natural talent or wealthy parents who can send you to the best school, but rather the result of going through a learning process, fueled by the desire to grow and the persistence to push past any obstacles.
In the world today, we humans have become more self-absorbed, more tribal and tenacious in holding on to our narrow agendas; we have become consumed by the barrage of information inundating us; we are even more fickle when it comes to leaders.
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.
Often people become our friend or follower with an undercurrent of resentment in our having more success than they have. They secretly desire the opportunity to take us down a notch; they have a nose for any misstep on our part they can exploit.
Remember: your bosses prefer to keep you in dependent positions. It is in their interest that you do not become self-reliant, and so they will tend to hoard information. You must secretly work against this and seize this information for yourself.
In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we're planning what we'll say next, some exciting story of our own.
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.
By wit we search divine aspect above, By wit we learn what secrets science yields, By wit we speak, by wit the mind is rul'd, By wit we govern all our actions; Wit is the loadstar of each human thought, Wit is the tool by which all things are wrought.
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.
I don't want to promote paranoia. It's not like wow, everybody is after me. You know that's not going to be very powerful. A person like Stalin was like that and he was powerful, but it ended up completely destroying him because he couldn't trust anyone.
I have the point that everybody essentially have these unique set of DNA you have. There's something different about you genetically. You are unique is what I am trying to say - the combination of experiences and emotions you have felt are never repeated.
I think what happened with Brandy [Burre]is what happens with a lot of people. You make these decisions for comfort and stability, and then eventually those same things that are comforting and stable end up putting walls around you that you didn't expect.
It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.
Then grew a wrinkle on fair Venus' brow, The amber sweet of love is turn'd to gall! Gloomy was Heaven; bright Phoebus did avow He would be coy, and would not love at all; Swearing no greater mischief could be wrought, Than love united to a jealous thought.
When someone is not there all the time it gives us space to think about them. Your job in influence and persuasion is to get the other person to think about you or your product without you forcing yourself upon them or without you making them think about you.
If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.
I remember I was flying home to Los Angeles one day. I was talking to the woman next to me and the flight attendant tried to tell me I was sitting next to somebody that I should know. I didn't recognize her but it ended up being Beyonce's sister, Solange Knowles.
If you are armed with knowledge, if you are aware that certain dynamics are at play then you have options. You can play defense, you can ignore certain person and take the consequences perhaps with a game plan in mind and it goes on, you've increased your options.
I'd done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.