Convincing Quotes

They proved to me by convincing reasons that God does not exist; Afterwards I saw God, for he came and embraced me. And now what am I to believe- the reasoning of others or my own experience? Truth is what the soul has seen and experienced; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.

The media is convincing people that if you have that ‘next thing,’ that diamond, the right car, then you’d be happier.

The most dangerous thing, when you have a serious mental illness, is convincing yourself that you don’t have it. And you see it all the time. People get on medication, and they feel better, and they stop taking it. And some flirt with unreality on some levels. But it feels so convincing to them that it feels real.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

An atheist chaplain would be the perfect vehicle for convincing wounded warriors that they should end their lives because there’s nothing in the future and there’s nothing now, so why not just save money and kill themselves.

A lot of athletes have star quality, but they just can’t perform in front of a camera. So no matter how good-looking you are, no matter what kind of presence you have, you still have to be able to be a convincing performer to become a star.

The closer you get to reality, the harder it is to make it look convincing to the audience. That’s why I tend to make things [films] that are a little bit more caricature.

One of the biggest challenges I have with certain clients is convincing them to take a vacation – metaphorically. You’re dealing with egos, and with egos the answer to everything is “more me.” Sometimes the situation calls for less you.

It is nice that we finished the game today. At the end we finished the series with a convincing victory against Bangladesh. We came here without some key players but I must say our young players showed a lot of characters in the series which will help Sri Lanka cricket in the future.

It’s always a matter of convincing the insurance people. They seem to think that after a certain age, you’re just going to fall over or something.

I will give a million dollars for any convincing proof of a future life.

Many people – especially those people who earn livings by convincing editors and bookers that rich and influential strangers consider their thoughts and opinions interesting – have ideas about who should or should not run for president.

I think the fact that I’m so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman – I’ll kiss a frog if you like.

Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resembe what actually happens.

It’s always my goal to be more mature-sounding, more convincing, but also more experimental, and more challenging for myself. If it’s not a little bit harder every time I make a new track, then I’m being lazy.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’

What you were singing about was believable and convincing, that’s the key to a great singer.

It’s not always about convincing your parents of what you want to do, but just saying, ‘This is what I’m doing; this is what I love.’

Obama still has work to do with the vision thing. Convincing voters that he has a credible, practical plan to turn the nation around is a process, not a speech.

On Facebook, a lie can seem as convincing to some as an article from SPIEGEL or the Washington Post. That’s a problem. I can then like it and like it again and start creating my own media universe, both for me and for my friends, and so we become more and more fenced off from one another.

I am good at persuading people. In convincing the other, I try to start from their point of view so it’s easier for me to find a common denominator.

Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s example.

As great as you believe your new product or company is, the world got along just fine without you. The greatest competition every startup faces is convincing consumers that there is a better solution to the problems that vex them.

If you truly desire money so keenly that your desire is an obsession, you will have no difficulty in convincing yourself that you will acquire it. The object is to want money, and to be so determined to have it that you convince yourself that you will have it.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

…nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth.

I hope I’m always convincing when I act!

If you really look at the numbers at the entertainment industry, in comparison to the small number of Scientologists that are celebrities, the number wouldn’t even register. I think Scientology has done an amazing job convincing people that there is a great number of celebrities in the “Church.”

Half of figure skating is opinion, convincing judges.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis’s writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he’d gone through ten drafts.

I think I would be a good villain in a James Bond movie. They were fairly weak, the last half-dozen of villains in James Bond movies were not that convincing.

Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked.

The life of a character should be an unbroken line of events and emotions, but a play only gives us a few moments on that line – we must create the rest to portray a convincing life.

Although our package of skin and bones looks very convincing, it is a mask, an illusion, disguising our true self, which has no limitations.

Feminism justified female ‘victim power’ by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world.

Progress and Poverty was the most closely knit, fascinating, and convincing specimen of argumentation that, I believe, ever sprang from the mind of man.

So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It’s not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale.

Sooner I’d try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn’t already feel like doing.

We convince by our presence.

Never [enter] into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.

There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.

You rarely get a convincing lecture on playing to your strength from a bald guy with a ponytail.

Facebook deploys a political advertising sales team, specialized by political party and charged with convincing deep-pocketed politicians that they do have the kind of influence needed to alter the outcome of elections.

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

I don’t need to convince men that feminism is important, that just isn’t a goal of mine. I can’t even have that conversation of whether or not it’s important, because if someone asks me that… I don’t want to have a conversation with them until they grow up.

I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn’t.

Those who profess contempt for men, and put them on a level with beasts, yet wish to be admired and believed by men, and contradict themselves by their own feelings–their nature, which is stronger than all, convincing them of the greatness of man more forcibly than reason convinces them of his baseness.

The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs.

Many people struggle with losing weight and then regaining it. But there is no convincing evidence that the effort to lose weight actually promotes more weight gain in the long run.

I always admired Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk – but I don’t know if I’d be a very convincing hulk.

After convincing myself that was maybe you should at least help out your neighborhood, I really started to think about it later on in life.

Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don’t have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

I can’t dance like Hrithik Roshan. I don’t have the necessary glamour like some of the other actors do. They are able to sell themselves on that aspect. I do roles and films which are very realistic. So, in those films, if you don’t get into the skin of it, they won’t look convincing.

Wes Anderson’s mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

Unless we repeal the illegal Byrd amendment, American exports will be vulnerable to retaliation, and the U.S. will continue to face a difficult task convincing other countries to make their laws comply with international rules.

I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

Give people a convincing reason and they will lay down their very lives.

I’m always game for everything. What people don’t understand is that the networks are who you have to get to take a chance on you. I wanna do it all. The trick is convincing a network to do it with you.

Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the unity of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science.

From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.

The greatest trick the rich – and their cheerleaders on the right – ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn’t exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

It was mainly to do with Helen Hunt, to be honest. That’s what drew my attention to it. I was interested in the fact that she was going to be directing. I’d never met her but she projects a degree of intelligence and it was convincing t me that she’d be able to handle this sort of material very well.

Murder is an inherently evil act, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how convincing the rationalizations.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.

There are no rules. You can write a story, if you wish, with no conflict, no suspense, no beginning, middle or end. Of course, you have to be regarded as a genius to get away with it, and that’s the hardest part – convincing everybody you’re a genius.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it ismainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

But Johnson’s Churchill-lite shtick and Theresa May’s even less convincing Iron Lady routine are only even vaguely viable because they tap into a fantasy version of British history that has contaminated visions of our conceivable future.

No argument, no matter how convincing, will give courage to a coward

An Inconvenient Truth is so convincing that it makes opposers of the argument as credible as Holocaust deniers.

Haymitch said you’d take a lot of convincing.

I know some photographs that are extraodrinary in their power and conviction, but it is difficult in photography to overcome the superficial power or subject; the concept and statement must be quite convincing in themselves to win over a dramatic and compelling subject situation.

Tim Thornton’s portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can’t help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume.

This is the most elaborate and luxurious method of convincing others that you can cook. Take everybody out on your yacht until they’re green in the face. Then you can rave for weeks about your sauce marinara and no one will gainsay you.

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.

I always find that I have to be emotionally on my character’s side for it to be convincing.

In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people.

I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs, the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That’s not much to live on. I don’t have to tell you that.

If one cannot invent a really convincing lie, it is often better to stick to the truth.

But after a few minutes of convincing myself that I really wanted to go – telling myself that I love skating and that my coach is there waiting for me – I would get up and go. And my mother would always get up and eat breakfast with me!

A lot of shows where I’m playing a senator or a congressman or a doctor or a high-priced attorney, I do a number on myself. “I am a powerful attorney, or a doctor.” It’s a little convincing job I do on myself first to know I can walk out on the set and know that I can be this guy.

Then I sit down, work at it, because now I have a convincing feeling about what that place wants to be, you see? And it’s not just me. Me and my talent comes in taking that consensus and then making something wonderful out of it – a work of art.

Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can’t do that because you sort of know what’s going to happen. Because you’re the character.

I actually began my career by convincing my parents to let me be an actress when I was 12 with a PowerPoint presentation describing acting and my goals.

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

As far as chemistry is concerned, the audience is the best judge. Professionally, I am supposed to look as convincing as possible opposite my hero.

I’ve seen more convincing wigs on William Shatner.

What’s invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.

At a deep psychological level, convincing young people that they will get the respect, admiration, love that they are looking for through consumerism is a manipulation of a deep human instinct to want to belong.

Jesus was himself the one convincing and permanent miracle.

These repetitive words and phrases are merely methods of convincing the subconscious mind.

When we take the position that it is not only the programmer’s responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer’s activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.

No one is asking for an Oprah in Chief. Anyhow, Obama is too chilly by nature ever to be convincing as a human care package.

The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

He’s very alive in a scene. He’s a very good actor to act with. Even though through most of the picture he’s blind, there are many places early in the picture I got to be with him before he was blind. Like convincing him in the office to do the picture.

That prose is a verse, and verse is a prose; convincing all, by demonstrating plain – poetic souls delight in prose insane

Discipline is the long and arduous process of convincing the mind to abide by one’s conscience.

By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.

A God who is trying to convince people that He is a God is not a God! He is just a clown disguised as a God! No supreme power can be in need of convincing men!

What does the enemy have to gain by convincing you to never deal with your past because your mind will never make it all the way through? It is a lie from the pit of hell. Today, claim your healing in Christ. It is your right as His child.

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn’t a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

Photography has fooled the world. There’s no more convincing fraud. Its images are nothing but the expression of the invisible man working behind the camera. They are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.

Just through the process of trying to make the living and the dead feel real, all these little benefits came out. And these benefits turned out to be much more articulate statements of what I really believe. And somehow they were more convincing because they were arrived at at such length.

As a person, I take pleasure in receiving and sharing. As a perfumer, I like showing and convincing…. I’m quite simply following the trajectory of an artist, someone who seeks and, sometimes, finds.

A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.

Once people know that you can spend the money and that you’re willing to spend the money and that you’re set up to spend the money in politics, then your threat to spend the money is as convincing as actually spending it.

An argument frequently used by believers [is] to force unbelievers to soften their terms by accepting their opponents’ definition; “Atheist” means without a concept of God that is logically convincing, not with proof that God does not exist.

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.

To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions.

The Christianity which is shared is the Christianity which is convincing.

Certain people and groups seem invested in convincing black people that black people are liberal. We’ve traditionally been conservative, church-going people.

The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.

Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it’s convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.

People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.

I do spend – I feel like I spend about my first 20 minutes at any cocktail party convincing people that I’m not going to harm them in some way.

I’ve studied pathological liars, and anything they say, they believe, and that’s one of the reasons they’re so convincing, because they have no connection with the truth. It’s a dead issue. It’s like they’re color-blind to the truth. So anything that comes out of their mouths is their reality.

It feels bad to play a bad guy. I did George W. Bush for years, and I hated him. But you have to give full voice to the villains. You have to have really convincing villains, or it’s not worth anything as drama or comedy.

The woman is the man’s glory, and she naturally delights in the praises which are assurances that she is fulfilling her function; and she gives herself to him who succeeds in convincing her that she, of all others, is best able to discharge it for him. A woman without this kind of “vanity” is a monster.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

What the apartheid system was really good at doing was convincing groups to hate one another.

A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry documented deductions of the brain.

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong. To win a bloodless battle, the victory is long. A simple act of faith, reason over might. To blow up his children would only prove him right.

Speaking of Oscars, I would win overwhelmingly if the Academy gave an Oscar for faking orgasms. I have done some of my best acting convincing my partners I was in the throes of ecstasy.

The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.

One thing about beginning writers is that they don’t really always know their own strengths and weaknesses – you might think you’re bad at characterization, but that might really be because of some issue you’re having with another element, which is making it hard for you to express character in a convincing way.

What convinces is not necessarily true-it is merely convincing: a note for asses.

Every one of us is different in some way but for those of us who are more ‘different,’ we have to put more effort into convincing the less different that we can do the same thing as they can… just differently.

I had a hell of a time convincing people I was gay – which was so annoying!

I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.

History is not a catalogue but…a convincing version of events.

Convincing yourself doesn’t win an argument.

I don’t believe much in luck. I believe more in work, in convincing, in stubbornness and in capacity.

The Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people, worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells, of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives fragmentary but convincing evidence.

We are faced with the task of convincing a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient and you don’t have to delude yourself and frighten yourself with Iron Age fairy tales. This is a monumental task. I don’t think there is an intellectual struggle more worthy of our efforts.

Big successful corporations have established their own culture by the time you come along, so you have as high of a chance of changing their overall culture as you have of convincing the U.S. Marines to adopt the ‘long-haired look’ as their standard military haircut.

My diminished girth, in tailor phraseology, was hardly conceivable even by my own friends, or my respected medical adviser, until I put on my former clothing, over what I now wear, which is a thoroughly convincing proof of the remarkable change.

When you work with a good actor, there is this natural rapport and chemistry that develops over time. That chemistry helps your characters come alive and makes the story of the film that much more convincing.

Dealing with politically-engaged writers of color like Abdellatif LaГўbi and Rashid Boudjedra – who ran away from school aged sixteen to fight against the French in the Algerian war – first requires convincing an editor to take a chance on them, which very few like to do these days.

Let us, above all, be clear that, without a convincing program of debt relief to start the new millennium, our objective of halving world poverty by 2015 will be only a pipe dream.

Even though I’ve had 20-some country No. 1 records, I still have a hard time convincing a lot of these people in the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music that I love country music.

Theists give several ‘proofs’ of the existence of God. These are really just arguments, because if there were convincing proof just one would suffice.

The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation…..There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.

Tact is the art of convincing people that they know more than you do.

A translation needs to read convincingly. There’s no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

Dance and acting are different. One is about being as close to reality and convincing the camera of the emotion that you portray, the other is communicating subjects and legends of a different time.

Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.

Jon M. Chu is one of the most creative, convincing humans you’ll ever meet.

That’s not a convincing argument. Public sector jobs are cyclical. Teachers get fired when money is tight, then rehired when things get better. Manufacturing jobs, on the other hand, aren’t coming back. They’re relics of a past age.

It’s a powerful instrument, dynamite — nothing like it for a convincing argument!

Speak up, speak often and don’t worry about those that at this point cannot understand as they can never un-hear what we tell them.

Whilst our Hearts are violently set upon any thing, there is no convincing us that we shall ever be of another Mind.

I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest.

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I’m on form, I can sell anything.

In more than 20 years I’ve spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren’t doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That’s how good they were. It’s crazy hard to be convincing and real. It’s the most subtle, hardest thing there is.

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.

Human has always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment – the present – has little meaning, if any.

The Holy Ghost is manifested to men and women on the earth both as the power and as the gift of the Holy Ghost. The power can come upon a person before baptism; it is the convincing witness that Jesus Christ is our Savior and Redeemer.

In today’s roller-coaster economy, hyper-competitive, fear-based, flat and global world, convincing anyone to do anything at any time requires getting their attention, creating their intention and turning it to action.

I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

I really don’t want to go to work every day convincing myself of what I’m saying. I want the material to make me a better actor; then I try to return the favor to the material.

There is no such thing as a convincing argument, although every man thinks he has one.

The most important ‘speed’ issue is often not technical but cultural. It’s convincing everyone that the company’s survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.

We can lie to ourselves, saying we believe one thing, and sometimes we convince other’s it’s true, with the hope that by convincing others, we can convince ourselves. Wars are often waged not because of what we believe, but because of the things we want others to believe.

The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn’t seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as ‘faith’.

When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they’re familiar, they sound convincing. It’s important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I’ve already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.

my uncle … had the misfortune to be ever touched in his brain, and, as a convincing proof, married his maid, at an age when he and she both had more occasion for a nurse than a parson.

What is acting but lying and what is good lying but convincing lying?

Strong and convincing art has never arisen from theories.

I thought if I could create a convincing cat I could say and do anything I wanted on the human condition.

… it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.

Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition.

The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.

I’d rather concentrate on making my character more convincing than trying to prove my acting prowess.

I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.

If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.

The greatest trick that the devil ever pulled
Was convincing women that they looked
Better in their makeup

In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.

The pitch, timbre, volume, speed, and cadence of your voice, the speed with which you speak, and even the way you modulate pitch and loudness, are all hugely influential factors in how convincing you are and how people judge your state of mind and character.

And when is it ever convincing, the belief others have in your abilities? You know perfectly well they can’t see the mess inside you.

It is easier to produce a film on your own than convincing another person to come on board.

I remember thinking, ‘If I don’t love the woman that I look at in the mirror, I am never going to be successful.’ That was the moment I had to start convincing myself to look in the mirror and start saying, ‘I love you.’

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

When I was 12, I got a manager, but my mom was against it. It took a lot of convincing. But when I got a job at Manhattan Theatre Club, I think she saw how passionate I was about it and that I worked really hard – and now she’s super supportive.

Well, part of the trick of getting elected president, if you look at George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is convincing the other side, at least temporarily, not to hate and fear. And that, Trump is not going to able to do that

In films, you work for three to six months, and you’re out of the character. But for a daily soap, you don’t have that luxury. So the character has to be convincing. Otherwise, your mind is not in it, and you’re just working for money, which is a good amount in serials. But I want both: good acting and good money.

I don’t analyze what I’m doing. I’ve read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I’ve noticed something that I wasn’t aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I’m just very, very smart.

If you’re the handsome white guy, you tend to get cast as guys who are meant to be convincing in their jobs. What I’ve been fortunate enough to do, whether it’s playing a certified idiot on ’30 Rock’ or a weirdo in ‘Bridesmaids,’ is play against that in a lot of ways.

It’s maybe an unrecognized fact of academia that what you spend a lot of your time doing is convincing people of your vision and raising funds to support your research activity. So in that sense, transitioning to a startup wasn’t that big of a transition.

I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.

Style consists in maintaining a convincing reality all through a piece. It’s like wearing a garment that looks as if it might have been made for you even if it wasn’t.

I was an agnostic until I realized that I had to choose between God and fate. The idea that humanity and nature are the result of fate was not convincing at all. I find the presence of God everywhere.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements – the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.

Generally in the theatre, you spend some portion of the performance convincing people they have done the right thing in buying the ticket, that this is the play they want to watch.

As I grew older, I realised that Bruce Lee was an actor first and a martial artist second. If he wasn’t a convincing actor and didn’t have the emotion in his eyes before delivering a kick or a punch, it wouldn’t have made that much of an impact.

Earlier films were meant only for entertainment, but now filmmakers, who are products of these times, do not compromise on real stuff. That is why storytelling has become more convincing.

We twist ourselves into knots convincing people that Islam is peaceful and varied before we realize that, wait a second, you can be a Muslim while also recognizing that Islam doesn’t even explain half of your behaviors!

The most convincing argument against early parenthood is that you are in a relationship that is likely to fall apart before that child grows up.

I became a genius on ‘Ed,’ though I’m not sure it was very convincing.

Look at that! If you ever needed convincing that we live in the solar system, that we are on a ball of rock, orbiting around the Sun with other balls of rock, then look at that! That’s the solar system coming down and grabbing you by the throat.

Jerry Seinfeld is amazing in many ways, not the least of them his ability to find humor, and convincing us to find it, too, in the million-and-two details about modern life that under different circumstances might send us into paroxysms of rage.

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 your principal artists deliver convincing performances, the film’s quality is elevated.

The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.

Going door to door and talking to people, convincing them to vote – this is what I call Organizing 101.

I quite like convincing the person the broom is their favourite actress. They are talking to a broom and they think it’s Julia Roberts and they snog it. In Reading one guy took the broom into the wings and was getting amorous with it. I had a struggle to get it back. He was exhausted when he came out.

I support guns and I support the death penalty. Half of my interviews are convincing liberals they’re not liberal.

The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

And there are people that will stand in your corner and convince you to stand up for another round no matter what.

If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.

…and the funny thing was that people who weren’t entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

Sports executives are great at convincing themselves whatever they believe is right and simply has to be.

Nothing during the year is so impressively convincing as the vision Christmas brings of what this world would be if love became the daily practice of human beings.

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

I tell my children what I think myself: That religion is not necessarily convincing, but it is still interesting and not to be laughed at or denigrated.

I’ve always been very good at convincing people. For instance, if I arrive in an airport and I’m in economy, I can always convince the guy to put me in first class.

One of the main ways that leadership stays in power is by, in various ways, convincing people that they should just let those who are in government govern: ‘Trust us. Trust me. Just let us take care of things. Stay out of it.’ Your opinions don’t really matter. You are isolated. You are insignificant.

People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it’s a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry.

I don’t care about convincing the people who think I’m naive or an idiot.

That’s the problem with fiction — or the charm, if you want. Even mediocre plots have a way of sinking their hooks into you, until you find yourself concerned for the fates of characters who aren’t even fully convincing.

The only way I was allowed to play was by convincing bands to let me do a few songs while they set up. That went on for years.

I suppose […] that the most convincing way to fool an enemy would be to fool a friend.

Sometimes you’re talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.

You know, I had my mother and my father convincing me that he would be going back to Hollywood and he’d be back with the actresses and dating them and that he wasn’t serious about me at all. So I had him saying one thing to me and my parents telling me something else.

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

The biggest problem was convincing my father that organic food was worth eating. All he could think of was the nut loaf with yeast gravy that my mother made in the Seventies.

I often hear actors say during their interviews: ‘I want to play a crazy person, a murderer, or someone who’s on edge.’ But that question scares me. I mean, of course there are characters I’d like to play, but I can’t really say specifically who they are. It’s much too hard to play a convincing normal person as it is.

There is that definition of leadership that says, ‘Leadership is convincing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t have done because you’ve made them believe it’s the right thing to do.’ And a great speech can do that.