Robert Greene

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure. Tacitus, c. a.d. 55-120

Friends often agree on tilings in order to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as to not offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each odier's jokes. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say that they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste in clothesmaybe they mean it, often they do not.

Strangely enough, it is your act of kindness tiiat unbalances everything.

Seducers know that the possibility of pleasure will make a person follow them, and the experience of it will make someone open up, weak to the touch. They also train themselves to be sensitive to pleasure, knowing that feeling pleasure themselves will make it that much easier for them to infect the people around them.

LEARN

HOW TO USE ENEMIES

JUDGMENT

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

Your enemies, on the other hand, are an untapped gold mine that you must learn to exploit.

clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop

them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your

Never do yourself what others can do for you.

Half of your mastery of power comes from what you do not do, what you do not allow yourself to get dragged into. For this skill you must learn to judge all things by what they cost you.

Nietzsche wrote, “The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.”