Pathos Persuasive Quotes

I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be persuasive.

and sometimes this daily disappointment, this constant agony of hope deferred, would bring me to my knees by that door begging her to open to me, crying to her in every term of passionate endearment and persuasion that tortured heart of man could think to use.

In book two of his Rhetoric,2 Aristotle identified and explained three means of persuasion that a speaker may use: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is the logical argumentation and patterns of reasoning used to effect persuasion. Pathos includes the emotional involvement of both the speaker and the audience as they achieve persuasion. Ethos refers to the character of the speaker

When her parents screamed at each other in front of the whole family, in front of her cousins, she had learned not to care about the shame. This had been different. Rico saw her as strong. With Rico she got to be self-possessed, like her mother. Droll and humorous, like her father. She got to be a version of herself unstained by irreparable pathos, because he gave her the gift of not coloring his vision with sympathy like everyone else in her life. It had meant everything. Especially when all the stories of his childhood had felt so wholesome, his parents' love for each other and him so undamaged.

Goals. What does the persuader want to get out of the argument? Is she trying to change the audience’s mood or mind, or does she want it to do something? Is she fixing blame, bringing a tribe together with values speech, or talking about a decision? Ethos, pathos, logos. Which appeal does she emphasize—character, emotion, or logic? Kairos. Is her timing right? Is she using the right medium?

The concept of Kairos is, perhaps, much more fundamental than even ethos, pathos, and logos. It simply means biding your time. It means waiting to attempt persuading people until a time comes when persuasion is most likely to work. In business, for example,

HOW DO YOU USE ARISTOTLE’S COMPONENTS OF PERSUASION? Take one of your recent presentations and categorize the content into one of the three categories we just covered: Ethos (credibility), Logos (evidence and data), and Pathos (emotional appeal). How does your pathos stack up against the rest? If your emotional appeal is minimal, you might want to rethink your content before you give this presentation again, like adding more stories, anecdotes, and personal insights.