Alain de Botton Quotes

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

One of your jobs as a speechwriter is to transform the bureaucratic into the poetic.

Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic; since both are conversant with subjects of such a nature as it is the business of all to have a certain knowledge of, and which belong to no distinct science. Wherefore all men in some way participate of both; since all, to a certain extent, attempt, as well to sift, as to maintain an argument; as well to defend themselves, as to impeach.

Metaphors convince at once or not at all.

[M]ere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

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.

Nobody has a magic lamp which can tell you in advance whether what you say will be effective in persuading an audience.

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

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.

We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire

Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable …

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

Political speeches are a particularly low form of rhetoric.

As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you've got it right.