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1 " I wonder if that's how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.I don't want it to win. "
― Jasmine Warga , My Heart and Other Black Holes
2 " I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, " I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, " I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one. "
3 " When i tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do. "
― William Blake
4 " ...nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth. "
― Patrick Rothfuss , The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)
5 " The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy”—Ken Ammi "
― Charles Baudelaire
6 " There is nothing so convincing as a thing well done. "
7 " If you buy an egg thinking it's a goose's egg, and when it hatches it is actually a bird of paradise; no manner of convincing and reproach will turn the bird of paradise into a goose. Even if you make it go to goose church and goose school and eat goose feeds and only hang out with geese! In the end, it will still belong to paradise. "
― C. JoyBell C.
8 " The irony was that my real enemy had been there all along right in front of me. Smiling crookedly and convincing me we were friends. Trying to seduce me for the thrill of the chase. Chastising me for not trusting him that first year in the tower stairs at the Academy… Telling me he loved me. And then tossing me aside the second I jeopardized his dreams. I wasn’t what he had wanted all these years. I’d merely been a diversion in his pursuit of the crown.I never should have trusted a prince. "
― Rachel E. Carter , Apprentice (The Black Mage, #2)
9 " I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. " There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. " All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. "
10 " ...[M]oral instruction, although containing much that is convincing for the reason, ...accomplishes... little... [because] the teachers themselves have not got their own notions clear, and when they endeavor to make up for this by raking up motives of moral goodness from every quarter, trying to make their physic right strong, they spoil it. "
― Immanuel Kant , Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
11 " 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
12 " I had also read somewhere that if a man didn't truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job "
― Charles Bukowski , Ham on Rye
13 " You think it's easy to forget someone who made you look forward to tomorrow... And I hope you never experience convincing a paralyzed heart to keep on beating when it simply wants to die. "
― Alfa Holden , Abandoned Breaths
14 " People have been on earth in our present form for only about 100,000 years, and in so many ways we’re still ironing out our kinks. These turtles we’ve been traveling with, they outrank us in longevity, having earned three more zeros than we. They’ve got one hundred million years of success on their resume, and they’ve learned something about how to survive in the world. And this, I think, is part of it: they have settled upon peaceful career paths, with a stable rhythm. If humans could survive another one hundred million years, I expect we would no longer find ourselves riding bulls. It’s not so much that I think animals have rights; it’s more that I believe humans have hearts and minds- though I’ve yet to see consistent, convincing proof of either. Turtles may seem to lack sense, but they don’t do senseless things. They’re not terribly energetic, yet they do not waste energy… turtles cannot consider what might happen yet nothing turtles do threatens anyone’s future. Turtles don’t think about the next generation, but they risk and provide all they can to ensure that there will be one. Meanwhile, we profess to love our own offspring above all else, yet above all else it is they from whom we daily steal. We cannot learn to be more like turtles, but from turtles we could learn to be more human. That is the wisdom carried within one hundred million years of survival. What turtles could learn from us, I can’t quite imagine. "
― Carl Safina , Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur
15 " A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. "
― John Brockman , This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress
16 " The thing is, it's very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right "
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17 " We all have an unscientific weakness for being always in the right, and this weakness seems to be particularly common among professional and amateur politicians. But the only way to apply something like scientific method in politics is to proceed on the assumption that there can be no political move which has no drawbacks, no undesirable consequences. To look out for these mistakes, to find them, to bring them into the open, to analyse them, and to learn from them, this is what a scientific politician as well as a political scientist must do. Scientific method in politics means that the great art of convincing ourselves that we have not made any mistakes, of ignoring them, of hiding them, and of blaming others from them, is replaced by the greater art of accepting the responsibility for them, of trying to learn from them, and of applying this knowledge so that we may avoid them in future. "
― Karl Popper , The Poverty of Historicism
18 " For us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one. "
― Albert Einstein
19 " Everybody in the world ought to care for books, and if there are some who do not, why that is a perfectly convincing reason why books ought to be given to them, to be a rebuke to them and, perchance, to rescue them from the error of their ways. "
20 " When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111) "
― Joseph Campbell , Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor