Emotional Persuasion Quotes

You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

Logic can convince but only emotion can motivate.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

Since when was an emotional argument won by logic?

It is surprising to see what superficial, inconsequential reasonings satisfy the most part of mankind. A piece of wit, a jest, a simile, or a quotation of an Author, passes for a mighty argument.... This weakness and effeminacy of mankind in being persuaded where they are delighted, have made them the sport of orators, poets, and men of wit.

...you may be able to sway people's heads. But you can't sway their hearts.

The only way to win the war is to move people's hearts and minds.

Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.

Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.

Passion persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.

The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case.

With truths of a certain kind, it is not enough to make them appear convincing: one must also make them felt. Of such kind are moral truths.

When the heart is won, the understanding is easily convinced.

The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.

Most people go not by argument, but by sympathies.

In a post-modern culture we need an apologetic that is felt and seen because if post-moderns are not feeling it, they are not believing it.

Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs.

But a desperate heart will seduce the mind.

[F]or women, like tradesmen, draw in the injudicious to buy their goods by the high value they themselves set upon them.... They endeavor strongly to fix in the minds of their enamoratos their own high value, and then contrive as much as possible to make them believe that they have so many purchasers at hand that the goods--if they do not make haste--will all be gone.

Our kindness may be the most persuasive argument for that which we believe.

Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.

We communicate with passion and passion persuades.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.