Quotes About Influence

What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people's lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some would call it conditioning or even imprinting.

That is the rub of any conversion experience: We only realize how much we needed it when we are on the other side! That is why we need the tenacity of faith and hope to carry us across to most transformational experiences. When we can let others actually influence us and change us, our heart space is open.

Courthouses are good and necessary first half of life institutes. In the second half, you try instead to influence events, work for change, quietly persuade, change your own attitude, pray or forgive instead of taking things to court.

There is no such thing as a nonpolitical Christianity. To refuse to critique the system or the status quo is to fully support it—which is a political act well disguised.

There is only one thing more dangerous than the individual ego and that is the group ego.

In any situation, your taking or giving of energy is what you are actually doing.

a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect.

Max would conclude, that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money.

people are forever confusing will with power

THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about your father," Lincoln's mother had once explained when he was in high school, "is that you always have a choice. You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that's what my mother made me.

You can't make a writer without first making a reader, and that is what my mother made me.

Golf was not a game he'd ever particularly wanted to take up. Nobody he liked had ever played golf, and a lot of the people he disliked intensely played all the time.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.

From the movies that you watch to the songs on your radio. Down to the magazines placed ever so neatly in the grocery house, you know the ones with the movie stars. Since they wouldn't make any money if you already loved who you are. See there is no profit in saying you're already perfect and beautiful too.

Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.

When you gossip about another person, listeners unconsciously associate you with the characteristics you are describing, ultimately leading to those characteristics' being "transferred" to you. So, say positive and pleasant things about friends and colleagues, and you are seen as a nice person. In contrast, constantly complain about their failings, and people will unconsciously apply the negative traits and incompetence to you.

The message is that people are more likely to agree with you when they have already said something positive.

researchers discovered that people who have just consumed caffeinated drinks were more likely to be swayed by arguments about various controversial topics.55 In short, good evidence that there really is no such thing as a free lunch or an innocent cup of coffee.

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

absolute power is corrupting

George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright's own time, William Faulkner.

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.

You're trying to believe in yourself. And every time you try to find a way to live, your own mind stands in the way. You know why that is? It's because others have said you were bad and they made you live in bad conditions. When a man hears that over and over and looks about him and sees that his life is bad, he begins to doubt his own mind. His feelings drag him forward and his mind, full of what others say about him, tells him to go back