Quotes on Convincing

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

It's not about supplication, it's about power. It's not about asking, it's about demanding. It's not about convincing those who are currently in power, it's about changing the very face of power itself.

Let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself.

Partial knowledge is more triumphant than complete knowledge; it takes things to be simpler than they are, and so makes its theory more popular and convincing.

Success is the most convincing talker in the world.

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?

Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there's nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment - the present - has little meaning, if any.

She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.