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1 " Most true is it that 'beauty is in the eye of the gazer.' My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me. "
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre
2 " When it shall be desired to enlighten man, let him always have truth laid before him. Instead of kindling his imagination by the idea of those pretended goods that a future state has in reserve for him, let him be solaced, let him be succoured; or, at least, let him be permitted to enjoy the fruit of his labour; let not his substance be ravaged from him by cruel imposts; let him not be discouraged from work, by finding all his labour inadequate to support his existence, let him not be driven into that idleness that will surely lead him on to crime: let him consider his present existence, without carrying his views to that which may attend him after his death: let his industry be excited; let his talents be rewarded; let him be rendered active, laborious, beneficent, and virtuous, in the world he inhabits; let it be shown to him that his actions are capable of having an influence over his fellow men, but not on those imaginary beings located in an ideal world. "
― Baron d'Holbach
3 " We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity. "
― Wendell Berry , The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
4 " If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe -no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside us as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that's just what we do find inside us. "
― C.S. Lewis , The Case for Christianity
5 " Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. "
― Henry David Thoreau , Walden
6 " Social context trumps reason and social context drives your behaviors with an influence akin to an invisible force. We naturally adapt our behaviors to the context. "
― Dragos Bratasanu , Engineering Success: The True Meaning of Leadership and Team Building
7 " It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows. "
― Graham Greene , Journey Without Maps
8 " Since graduating from HMS my greatest satisfaction has unequivocally been my family. My main disappointment is that I have wasted too much time in personal pursuits and been less of an influence for good than I might have been. "
9 " Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. (Wakefield) "
― Nathaniel Hawthorne
10 " The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value. "
― Thomas Henry Huxley , The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
11 " Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own. "
― Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray
12 " I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. "
― Dashiell Hammett
13 " it's doesn't matter how long you spend the time writing words , the only thing that matter , is for how long your words will have an influence on their reader . "
― Mahdi Khmili
14 " Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection: you are called to a deep interior life perhaps even to mystical prayer, and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others. And if you cannot do so by word, then by example.Yet if this sublime fire of infused love burns in your soul, it will inevitably send forth throughout the Church and the world an influence more tremendous than could be estimated by the radius reached by words or by example. "
― Thomas Merton , The Seven Storey Mountain
15 " He watched over word and thought and deed as jealously as if her clear eyes were to pass judgement on it... She held over him the unconscious influence that every girl, whose ideals are high and pure, wields over her friends; an influence that would endure as long as she was faithful to those ideals and which she would certainly lose if she were ever false to them. "
― L.M. Montgomery , Anne of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables #2)
16 " The collective consciousness of the people we associate with on a daily basis has an influence on our consciousness. Which holds us back from our true potential. Even if we believe that we are fully aware of our thoughts, feelings and emotions. The bigger picture will only present itself as we continue to grow. "
17 " Worldliness is actually a spirit, an atmosphere, an influence permeating the whole of life and human society, and it needs to be guarded against constantly and strenuously. "
― Billy Graham , Billy Graham in Quotes
18 " Most people don't accept that they are an influence either improving or damaging others. "
― Richelle E. Goodrich , Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year
19 " Beauty is an influence based off of judgment. "
20 " I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don't have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me. "
