"A good symbol is the best argument,..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.”
“Only poetry inspires poetry.”
“...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.”
More on Communication
“...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.”
“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.”
“When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that 'a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.'”
More on Persuasion
“If husbands could realize what large returns of profit may be gotten out of a wife by a small word of praise paid over the counter when the market is just right, they would bring matters around the way they wish them much oftener than they usually do. Arguments are unsafe with wives, because they examine them; but they do not examine compliments. One can pass upon a wife a compliment that is three-fourths base”
“A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.”
“Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.”