Quotes About Influence

most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we've made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

Anna Karenina was the first time I allowed a book and its world into my house.

In reality, the only true model of a successful woman was the Divine Sarah.

In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent.

I leave no trace of wings in the air, but I am glad that I had my flight

The greatest changes in a woman's nature are wrought by love; in a man's, by ambition.

No king or emperor in the world had the power to keep captive this nonentity

it occupies more and more space in society, and at last becomes its ruling force.

When this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation, becomes all-powerful at the cost of the harmony of the higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity

the personal man is eliminated to a phantom, everything becomes a revolution of policy

And the idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anæsthetics that man has invented.

My mom, who's been in the restaurant business for 40 years, is the number-one influence in my life. But I look up to a lot of people in the industry. Tops on my list is Mario Batali. My mom and Mario taught me the same lesson: Food is love.

What I notice is that most of us can intellectualise what we see on social media platforms – we know that these images and narratives that are presented aren't real, we can talk about it and rationalise it – but on an emotional level, it's still pushing buttons. If those images or narratives tap into what we aspire to, but what we don't have, then it becomes very powerful.

Your words are so powerful that they can break hearts or fill them with joy. Your words have the ability to comfort a wounded soul or shatter someone's confidence. Your words can act as your messengers of hope or a salve for a broken human being.

Using fear to build political capital is a tactic as old as politics.

The important people in our lives leave imprints. They may stay or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart. There's no getting over that.

when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they'd gone to such trouble to attain (freedom).

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes.

You have to forget about the boys,' he said. 'For a while at least... They'll devour you... They can't help it. It's in their nature. They'll take it all until there's nothing left.

What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

It was her own capacity for story telling that made her see her own hand in what happened around her.

sea lo que sea lo que queramos pensar de nosotros mismos, no somos sino el resultado del trato que hemos recibido por parte de los demás.

History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.

which goes to show, he said, that we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. Maybe it's only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root.