Guy Kawasaki Quotes

When you know what a man wants you know who he is, and how to move him.

If you can learn to understand people how they think, what they feel, what inspires them, how they're likely to act and react in a given situation- then you can motivate and influence them in a positive way.

Personally I don't believe in bad people. I think there's always a reason for people acting badly.

You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

We all think that we are uniquely complex, that no one can see what we are thinking - yet we also believe that we have the rare ability to read others. This fascinates me at the moment.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

With women, you always have to make an educated decision to figure out what they're thinking. It's not one that's necessarily sympathetic, always. Of course, we're all human beings, but the gender thing is big thing. And a great thing.

I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.

My job is all about getting inside another person's mind and thoughts.

If you worry less about what people think of you, you can pick up an astonishing amount of information about them. You no longer leave conversations wondering what just happened. Other people's minds and motives are finally revealed.

It is an old, old adage that if you want someone to do something, get them to believe it is their idea. Humanity is mind controlled and onlyslightly more conscious than your average zombie. Far fetched? No, no. I define mind control as the manipulation of someone's mind so that they think, and therefor act, the way you want them to.

I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.

You can't tell what a man is like or what he is thinking when you are looking at him. You must get around behind him and see what he has been looking at.

You're always running into people's unconscious.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

I think a smart woman can sell the average man anything.

It's a sad comment on humans that none of them are tolerable to one who can read their minds

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

I think acting has made me very in tune with human behavior and myself as well.

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.

Those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights.

I am ever fascinated by the human experience and by, actually, human beings.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

There should be a name for this, for the process whereby one knows one is being yanked and concedes it has been done successfully - that one is grateful to have been spun. In the theater, it is called the willing suspension of disbelief. That's what allows the play to make an impact on the audience: they have to be able to make believe that what's happening on the stage is really happening. Maybe to a degree it is a requirement for all political participation, all effective political communication, too.

You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.