Influence is not government. [ George Washington ]
I am a part of all that I have met. [ Tennyson ]
Men are what their mothers made them. [ Emerson ]
The sacred influence of light appears. [ Milton ]
Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]
Woman's influence embraces the whole of life. [ Alexander Walker ]
Not one false man but does uncountable mischief. [ Carlyle ]
Here shall the Press the People's right maintain,
Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain;
Here Patriot Truth her glorious precepts draw,
Pledged to Religion, Liberty, and Law. [ Joseph Story ]
How shall I speak thee, or thy power address,
Thou god of our idolatry, the Press?
By thee, religion, liberty, and laws,
Exert their influence, and advance their cause:
By thee, worse plagues than Pharaoh's land befell.
Diffused, make earth the vestibule of hell;
Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise,
Thou ever bubbling spring of endless lies,
Like Eden's dread probationary tree.
Knowledge of good and evil is from thee! [ Cowper ]
If woman lost us Eden, such as she alone restore it! [ Whittier ]
It is by women that nature writes on the hearts of men. [ Sheridan ]
He raised a mortal to the skies; She drew an angel down. [ Dryden ]
Race and temperament go for much in influencing opinion. [ Lady Morgan ]
Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another. [ George Eliot ]
Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described. [ Thoreau ]
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
A woman is more influenced by what she divines than by what she is told. [ Ninon de Lenclos ]
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us. [ Bovee ]
No reproof or denunciation is so potent as the silent influence of a good example. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Influence is exerted by every human being from the hour of birth to that of death. [ Chapin ]
The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
It is a maxim that no man was ever enslaved by influence while he was fit to be free. [ Johnson ]
Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting. [ Ouida ]
For everything divine and human, virtue, fame and honor, now obey the alluring influence of riches. [ Horace ]
Humility is a virtue of so general, so exceeding good influence, that we can scarce purchase it too dear. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
The imagination exercises a powerful influence over every act of sense, thought, reason, - over every idea. [ Latin Proverb ]
There is no such thing as good influence. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Astronomy has revealed the great truth that the whole universe is bound together by one all-pervading influence. [ Leitch ]
The most fruitful and elevating influence I have ever seemed to meet has been my impression of obligation to God. [ Daniel Webster ]
Avoid law suits beyond all things; they influence your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property. [ La Bruyere ]
Flowers are sent to do God's work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
The influence of custom is incalculable; dress a boy as a man and he will at once change his own conception of himself. [ Bayle St. John ]
Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence. [ Hume ]
A passion for flowers is, I really think, the only one which long sickness leaves untouched with its chilling influence. [ Mrs. Hemans ]
We should treat children as God does us, who makes us happiest when He leaves us under the influence of innocent delusions. [ Goethe ]
It is astonishing the influence foolish apothegms have upon the mass of mankind, though they are not unfrequently fallacies. [ Sydney Smith ]
Contrast increases the splendour of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power. [ John Ruskin ]
Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun; the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying influence from the want of a body. [ Colton ]
Carried away by the irresistible influence which is always exercised over men's minds by a bold resolution in critical circumstances. [ Guizot ]
Every man who strikes blows for power, for influence, for institutions, for the right, must be just as good an anvil as he is a hammer. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]
A wise man shall overrule his stars, and have a greater influence upon his own content than all the constellations and planets of the firmament. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement. [ Napoleon I ]
Slander and detraction can have no influence, can make no impression, upon the righteous Judge above. None to thy prejudice, but a sad and fatal one to their own. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
There is but one misfortune for a man, when some idea lays hold of him which exerts no influence upon his active life, or still more, which withdraws him from it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has a commencement, will never, through all ages, have an end. [ Aughey ]
The blossom cannot tell what becomes of its odor; and no man can tell what becomes of his influence and example, that roll away from him, and go beyond his ken in their perilous mission. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Women overrate the influence of fine dress and the latest fashions upon gentlemen; and certain it is that the very expensiveness of such attire frightens the beholder from all ideas of matrimony. [ Abba Goold Woolson ]
There is nothing of which men are more liberal than their good advice, be their stock of it ever so small; because it seems to carry in it an intimation of their own influence, importance, or worth. [ Young ]
Greatness of mind is not shown by admitting small things, but by making small things great under its influence. He who can take no interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great. [ John Ruskin ]
We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence. [ Bovee ]
There is to the poetical sense a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers, that now and then, from the influence of mood or circumstances, reasserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood, or the spell of love. [ H. T. Tuckerman ]
The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action. [ Macaulay ]
There is no power like that of oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day. [ Henry Clay ]
Processions, cavalcades, and all that fund of gay frippery, furnished out by tailors, barbers, and tire-women, mechanically influence the mind into veneration; an emperor in his nightcap would not meet with half the respect of an emperor with a crown. [ Goldsmith ]
O mothers! reflect upon the power that your Maker has placed in your hands; there is no earthly influence to be compared with yours; there is no combination of causes so powerful in promoting the happiness or misery of our race, as the instructions of home! [ J. S. C. Abbott ]
The true greatness and the true happiness of a country consist in wisdom; in that enlarged and comprehensive wisdom which includes education, knowledge, religion, virtue, freedom, with every influence which advances and every institution which supports them. [ Henry Giles ]
Ask men of genius how much they owe to their mothers, and you will find that they attribute almost all to them and their influence; and if we could only guage the mental capacity of the wives of great men, we might perhaps learn why genius is so seldom hereditary. [ Lord Kames ]
It is a beautiful self-denial for the affluent to set an example of neatness, plainness, and simplicity. Such an influence is peculiarly salutary in our state of society, where the large class of young females, who earn a subsistance by labor, are so addicted to the love of finery. [ Mrs. Sigourney ]
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life. [ R. L, Stevenson ]
Music has certainly a powerful influence on the passions, and produces happy effects upon the human heart and mind when cultivated moderately; but when it becomes the general prevailing passion of a nation, or, as it were, gets dominion over them, it unquestionably produces not effeminacy merely, but a hateful depravity of manners. [ S. F. Bradford ]
Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is an humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble. [ E. P. Whipple ]
Under the influence of music we are all deluded in some way; we imagine that the performers must dwell in the regions to which they lift their hearers; we are reluctant to admit that a man may blow the most soul-animating strains from his trumpet and yet be a coward; or melt an audience to tears with his violin, and yet be a heartless profligate. [ H. W. Hillard ]
We speak of persons as jovial, as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star and the happiest augury of all. A gloomy person was said to be saturnine, as being born under the planet Saturn, who was considered to make those who owned his influence, and were born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself. [ Trench ]
By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages. [ Hazlitt ]
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out. [ Robert Louis Stevenson ]
The perfection of an art consists in the employment of a comprehensive system of laws, commensurate to every purpose within its scope, but concealed from the eye of the spectator; and in the production of effects that seem to flow forth spontaneously, as though uncontrolled by their influence, and which are equally excellent, whether regarded individually, or in reference to the proposed result, [ John Mason Good ]
The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect. [ Emerson ]
The mother, under whose sole influence the child is for years, from whom it acquires its tastes and character, should not only be educated, but educated in the most thorough manner, and have her mind stored with varied learning, so that she may be able to answer the multitude of questions that will be put to her by her inquisitive child on art, science, literature, and religion, and thus to stimulate his curiosity, and awaken his mind. [ E. B. Ramsay ]
Consistent characters are those which in social intercourse are easy, sure, and gentle. We do not clash with them, and they are never wanting nor contradictory to themselves; their stability incites confidence, their frankness induces self-surrendering openness. We feel at ease with them, we are not offended at their superiority, doubtless we admire them less, but we also hardly dream of feeling envious of them, and they seem almost to disdain malignity by the peaceful influence of their presence. [ Degerando ]
If we wish to know the political and moral condition of a state, we must ask what rank women hold in it; their influence embraces the whole of life; a wife! - a mother! - two magical words, comprising the sweetest source of man's felicity; theirs is a reign of beauty, of love, of reason, - always a reign! a man takes counsel with his wife, he obeys his mother; he obeys her long after she has ceased to live; and the ideas which he has received from her become principles stronger even than his passions. [ Aime Martin ]