Quotes About Influence

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. [ Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming, The Westminster Review, 1885. ]

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton.

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry—the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy—"Such as I am, she will shortly be.

Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse...

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are

I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could produce on others.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.

To many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a particular influence, subduing them into receptiveness.

Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.

For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms,–character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.

We cannot help the way in which people speak of us . . .

Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.

After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope.

Dorothea had little vanity, but she had the ardent woman's need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul.