Francis de Sales Quotes

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

Use your logick, and then your rhetorick. Rhetorick without logick, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet I confess more are taken with rhetorick than logick, because they are catched with a free expression, when they understand not reason. Logick must be natural, or it is worth nothing at all: Your rhetorick figures may be learned.

No matter what stage of life you are graduating from or entering, learning how to build and state your case is something every person in the world should know how to do.

Few things concentrate the mind more efficiently than the necessity of saying what you mean. It brings you face to face with what you are talking about, what you are actually proposing. It gets you away from the catch phrases that not merely substitute for thought but preclude it.

I enjoyed debate on the floor but it's not really debate in the same way.

Debates require a lot of hard work and preparation. If you try to wing it, it shows.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Crystal-clear thinking is one of the things we look for - not a fancy slide pitch, but crystal-clear thinking.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

Look, I debate for a living so I don't need to learn any lessons from amateurs.

The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.

I like people who are minimalist with their words. Jack Nicholson thinks a lot then says something, and it's always spot on. Nelson Mandela is the same.

The power of real debate is in the language and intellectual honesty of the debaters, alongside the engagement of spectators.

Minimalism has a connotation of being reductive, and not in the best way. 'Brevetist' is a better term. I'm trying to be as concise as possible and still getting across to the reader. When information is delivered in that way, it is very satisfying to me.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

It really is true that an orator is simply a good man who speaks well.

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

And I used to assemble the family to hear because I thought that they were so good that even from the point of view of enjoyment people shouldn't miss them, and I got every word of his that I could, and I could see by hard argument there was only the one way for it.

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.

He who frames the question wins the debate.