Quotes About Influence

Seven out of ten guests will go to a church website as a determinative factor in where they will choose to visit.

First John 4:9 says, "God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him" (The Message). What does it mean to "live through" someone? Jesus is reliable and, once you get to know him, irresistible. His love never fails, and that's the kind of power source that never runs out. His is the kind of light that never dims. Wouldn't it be great if it were obvious to anyone who knew us that we were living through Jesus? It can be.

One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.

Do not let the writer's authority or learning influence you, be it little or great, but let the love of pure truth attract you to read. Do not ask, 'Who said this?' but pay attention to what is said.

The celestial bodies are the cause of all that takes place in the sublunar world.

Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.

Whatever is received into something is received according to the condition of the receiver

Every agent makes its like

Concepts such as love, charity, obligation and tradition all helped to shape medieval attitudes to devotion, but perhaps the most powerful conditioning influence was fear;

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct historical shadows to the generation immediately following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.

People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.

Books may preach when the author cannot, when the author may not, when the author dares not, yes, and which is more, when the author is not.

Godly lives convince more than miracles themselves.

Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.

What is common to all of these examples is the way people's behavior depends on how many are behaving a particular way, or how much they are behaving that way—how many attend the seminar how frequently

We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.

Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.