How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie offers valuable insights for building meaningful relationships and improving interactions with anyone in life. The author encourages readers to show empathy, avoid criticism and focus instead on understanding others' perspectives.

Favorite quotes from the book:

Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

So the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

Tomorrow you may want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: “How can I make this person want to do it?”

"If there is any one secret of success," said Henry Ford, "it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own."

She didn't realize what everyone knows: namely, that the expression one wears on one's face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one's back.

"Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not."

"There is nothing either good or bad," said Shakespeare, "but thinking makes it so."

Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that.

For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

Always make the other person feel important.

Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn't ask for your opinion. He didn't want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.

As a result of all this, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument — and that is to avoid it.

Say about yourself all the derogatory things you know the other person is thinking or wants to say or intends to say — and say them before that person has a chance to say them.

Don't you have much more faith in ideas that you discover for yourself than in ideas that are handed to you on a silver platter?

J. Pierpont Morgan observed, in one of his analytical interludes, that a person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one.

The one major factor that motivated people was the work itself. If the work was exciting and interesting, the worker looked forward to doing it and was motivated to do a good job.

People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.

In short, if you want to improve a person in a certain aspect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics.