Quotes about Influence

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a possession for all time.

A materialist would argue that I'm a product of my circumstances. But I make my own circumstances. If I make a change in my dominant thoughts or motives, a change in my situation and surroundings will soon follow. Through my actions, I attract people and situations to match my mentality. As I am, so I act; and as I act, so I attract.

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.

Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better.

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.

The antidote to this abuse of formal government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual.

it's my responsibility to cultivate the man in my son. I can't be passive about that.

The people who change lives are the ones who point us away from the world's short-term perspective to God's long-term perspective. Life on earth is a dot, a brief window of opportunity; life in Heaven (and ultimately on the New Earth) is a line going out from that dot for eternity. If we're smart, we'll live not for the dot, but for the line.

The power of the words we speak is far greater than we realize. "Life and death is in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21).

Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.