“Whether it's trying to convince others that something is more true, more virtuous, or more desirable--all communication is rhetoric in action.”
“Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.”
“Arrogance is trying to convince others you're more than who they know you are.”
“It's more complicated than that." TL in "The Rhetoric of Religion”
“The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.”
“For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.”