Robert Greene

you have more to fear from friends than from enemies

Be wary of friends—they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy.

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.

if he stabbed an opponent in the back, it was with a velvet glove on his hand and the sweetest of smiles on his face.

Life in the court was a never-ending game that required constant vigilance and tactical thinking. It was civilized war.

Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”

The arrow shot by the archer may or may not kill a single person. But stratagems devised by a wise man can kill even babes in the womb