''For your own good'' is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
Before you try to convince anyone else, be sure you are convinced, and if you cannot convince yourself, drop the subject.
Call the bald man, ''Boy;'' make the sage thy toy; greet the youth with solemn face; praise the fat man for his grace.
He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves.
He that winna be ruled by the rudder maun be ruled by the rock.
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.
If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.
If you can't get people to listen to you any other way, tell them it's confidential.
If you wish to win a man over to your ideas, first make him your friend.
If you would convince others, seem open to conviction yourself.
If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.
It is nobler to convert souls, than to conquer kingdoms.
Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves. If a person speaks with genuine earnestness the thoughts, the emotion and the actual condition of their own heart, others will listen because we all are knit together by the tie of sympathy.
More flies are caught with honey than with vinegar.
Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.