“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others” – Balise Pascal, French scientist and philosopher. Brain Pickings uses this as the centre of a piece about how you can’t change some bastard’s mind but you can get them to look at things differently without wanting to throttle you.
Nearly half a millennium before modern psychologists identified the three elements of persuasion — attunement, buoyancy, and clarity — French physicist, philosopher, inventor, and mathematician Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623–August 19, 1662) intuited this mechanism as he arrived at a great truth about the secret of persuasion: Pascal came to see that the surest way of defeating the erroneous views of others is not by bombarding the bastion of their self-righteousness but by slipping in through the backdoor of their beliefs.
Read the full piece.