Quotes About Influence

Who you are is speaking so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Imitation cannot go above its model.

The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet, time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Fame is proof that people are gullible.

The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck that turns the head.

Great men exist that there may be greater men.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their laws.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Speech is power; speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else's head?

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.

What's the use of an admirable form of government if political parties and moneyed interests control it? What's the use of our judicial system, if judges only quote precedents and ignore first principles? What's the use of a Supreme Court if it's swayed by the political winds of the hour?

Spiritual force is stronger than material force; thoughts rule the world.

The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with his tyranny, - is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forma, of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth.

for the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire.

There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.

De multe ori, viitorul unui om a depins de lectura unei c?r?i.