#influence

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.... ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#age

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays. ↗

— Soren Kierkegaard

#function #god #influence #nature #prayer

Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first. ↗

— Megan Whalen Turner

#influence #psychology #change

You can't change nature, son!" "Change IS nature, dad, the part we can influence. And it all starts when we decide. ↗

— Kitty Richards

#influence #nature #ratatouille #change

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#change #inertia #influence #willpower #change

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. ↗

— Robert F. Kennedy

#influence #justice #kindness #make-a-difference #oppression

Both friend and enemy reside within us. One lives by the rule of compassion, the other by the rule of hard knocks. Though potential influence of either extreme is inevitable, our actions bear witness to the one we embrace. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#compassion #enemy #extreme #friend #hard-knocks

Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to. ↗

— Alan Keightley

#influence #truth #experience

I love Tina Turner. I'm one of Tina Turner's biggest fans. Tina Turner was a big influence on me to become a singer. A role model and in a way she gave me back my confidence in choosing my material. ↗

— Bonnie Tyler

#become #big #big influence #biggest #choosing

People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human. ↗

— Carson McCullers

#different #eyes #face #human #influence