Convincing Quotes (page 11)
There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.
Franz Kafka
One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.
Reinhold Niebuhr
I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.
Mark Twain
I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.... Unless you have a lotof passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about; otherwise, you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.
Steve Jobs
If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they...
Bertrand Russell
Once, walking with him, Paola had stopped and asked him what he was thinking about, and the fact that she was the only person in the world he would not be embarrassed to tell just what it was he had been thinking about at that moment convinced him, though a thousand things had already done so, that this was the woman he wanted to marry, had to marry, would marry.
Donna Leon
Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?.. It is if you become a part of nature. You suppress your presence as a human being, stay very still, and convince yourself that you are a tree or grass or flower. It takes time, but once the butterfly lets it guard down, you can become friends quiet naturally.
Haruki Murakami
I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this?
Socrates