"Rhetorician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the pantheist; Juvenal, who flayed with his pen; Plautus, who composed the best comedies of antiquity while turning a mill-wheel; Seneca the philosopher, of whom it is said that the noblest act of his life was his death; Quintilian the rhetorician; the immoral Sallust, who speaks so eloquently of virtue; the two Plinys; Suetonius and Varro—in a word, all the Latin letters from the time when they stammered their first word with Livius Andronicus until they exhaled their ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... of addressing a Dedication to your Lordship without calling to mind the well-known reply of the Spartan to a rhetorician, who proposed to pronounce an eulogium on Hercules. "Oh Hercules!" said the honest Spartan, "who ever thought of blaming Hercules?" In a similar manner the concurrence of public opinion has left to the panegyrist of your Lordship a very superfluous task. I shall, therefore, be silent on the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... matrimony than given them a relish for it.' But against these critics one honest man (whose name of Titus Castricus should not be forgotten by posterity), maintained that Metellus Numidicus could not have spoken more properly; 'For remark,' said he, 'that Metellus was a censor, not a rhetorician. It becomes rhetoricians to adorn, and disguise, and make the best of things; but Metellus, sanctus vir—a holy and blameless man, grave and sincere to whit, and addressing the Roman people in the solemn capacity of censor—was bound to speak the plain ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... method; but in this very lack of order—which shows that "browsing" instinct which Charles Lamb declared to be essential to a right feeling for literature—the charm of the book lies. This habit of straying, and his lack of style, prove Aelianus more of a vagabond in the domain of letters than a rhetorician. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... greater contrast possible than between so implacable, patient, reasonable—and above all things capable—a being as General Joffre and the rhetorician of Potsdam, with his talk of German Might, of Hammer Blows and Hacking Through? Can there be any doubt of the ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... exhort to this life and contest, which is, I protest, far above all contests here." You must remember that Callicles has been taunting Socrates with his lack of worldly wisdom and the certainty that in any court of justice he would be absolutely helpless because of his lack of knowledge of the rhetorician's art: "This way then we will follow, and we will call upon all other men to do the same, not that which you believe in and call upon me to follow; for that way, Callicles, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... Italian rhetorician who wrote in Greek, and whose extant works are valuable for the passages from prior authors which ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... another Burke was soon to illuminate this occidental hemisphere, by the blaze of his genius,—embodying in his own person half the wisdom of the whole nation of Rhode Island,—who should revive and indorse the dictum of the florid British rhetorician, and fix upon the name of the American merchant as fact, the fancy sketch first drawn by a brilliant but libellous imagination! Had it been otherwise, I am sure my friend would have been spared the toils and perplexities incident alike to the mercantile ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... the Established Church of Scotland has produced, Dr. John Caird is one of the most brilliant as a preacher, as a thinker, and as a rhetorician. During the comparatively short period of his ministry, he secured a world-wide fame for the eloquence and beautiful diction of his sermons, and although his pulpit appearances are now few and far between, they are sufficiently important to draw together larger congregations than ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... natural virtues, vices, and passions of man; and follow nature (saith he) therein, and thou shalt not err. The lawyer saith what men have determined. The historian what men have done. The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech; and the rhetorician, and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth the nature of a man's body, and the nature of things helpful, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... a member's son. I like, I say, a good debate, and have no objection to a due mixture of bores, which are a relief. I remember none of the giants of former days; but I have heard Canning. He was a consummate rhetorician; but there seemed to me a dash of commonplace in all that he said, and frequent indications of the absence of an original mind. To the last, he never got clear of 'Good God, sir!' and all the other hackneyed ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... remained utterly silent; and the ministry which his guidance had alone held together at once fell into confusion. The Earl's plans were suffered to drop. His colleagues lost all cohesion, and each acted as he willed. Townshend, a brilliant but shallow rhetorician whom Pitt had been driven reluctantly to make his Chancellor of the Exchequer, after angering the House of Commons by proposals for an increase of the land-tax, strove to win back popularity among the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... district being famous throughout Tuscany. He was little of person, red-haired, jolly-visaged, and the very best of good fellows; and therewithal, though learning he had none, he was so excellent and ready a speaker that whoso knew him not would not only have esteemed him a great rhetorician, but would have pronounced him Tully himself or, perchance, Quintilian; and in all the country-side there was scarce a soul to whom he was not either gossip or friend or lover. Being thus wont from time to time to visit ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... a trope; And when he happened to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by: Else when with greatest art he spoke, You'd think he talk'd like other folk, For all a rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to name his tools. But, when he pleas'd to show't his speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect: It was a party-coloured dress Of patch'd and pye-ball'd languages; 'Twas English ...
— English Satires • Various
... feebleness and futility of that boasted tongue, he tramples its grammars and its dictionaries under his feet, and makes new and unheard-of words and combinations of words on the spot for himself and for his subject. He heaps up a hyperbole the like of which no orator or rhetorician of Greece or Rome had ever needed or had ever imagined before. He takes sin, and he makes a name for sin out of itself. The only way to describe sin, he feels, the only way to characterise sin, the only way to aggravate sin, is just to call it sin; sinful sin; 'sin ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... greatest of all incorrigible romanticists. Something between a prophet, a charlatan, a rhetorician, and a spoiled child, he believes in God, in democracy, in innocence, in justice, and he has a noble and unqualified devotion to human heroism and the depths of the dangerous sea. He has that arbitrary, maniacal inventive ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... view, and his rhetorical training a style which mirrored both the terror of the times and his own emotion. More than any other Roman historian he desired to tell the truth and was not fatally biassed by prejudice. It is wrong to regard Tacitus as an 'embittered rhetorician', an 'enemy of the Empire', a 'detracteur de l'humanite'.[1] He was none of these. As a member of a noble, though not an ancient, family, and as one who had completed the republican cursus honorum, his sympathies ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... appointments confidently spoken of in the best-informed circles, we learn that Lord Vargrave is to have the place of ———. It will be a popular appointment. Lord Vargrave is not a holiday orator, a mere declamatory rhetorician—but a man of clear business-like views, and was highly thought of in the House of Commons. He has also the art of attaching his friends, and his frank, manly character cannot fail to have its due effect with the English public. In another column of our journal our readers ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gets up his case. No eminent man has ever done more than Burke to justify the definition of genius as the consummation of the faculty of taking pains. Labour incessant and intense, if it was not the source, was at least an inseparable condition of his power. And magnificent rhetorician though he was, his labour was given less to his diction than to the facts; his heart was less in the form than the matter. It is true that his manuscripts were blotted and smeared, and that he made so many alterations in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... influence enabled him to get an early introduction to public affairs, and he proceeded to train himself as a speaker, and a writer of speeches for others. He put himself under the teaching of a famous rhetorician, Iaenus, and profited by the discourses of Plato and Isocrates then in the height of their fame. He also was a great student of Thucydides, and copied his whole history, with his own hand, eight times. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... indite after others, than for Aelianus Montaltus, that famous physician, to write de morbis capitis after Jason Pratensis, Heurnius, Hildesheim, &c., many horses to run in a race, one logician, one rhetorician, after another. Oppose then ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... contemptible, it would seem clear that all the skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing. ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... a Roman by descent, but of provincial birth, being native to Cirta, in Numidia. Thence he migrated to Rome in the reign of Hadrian, and became the most famous rhetorician of his day. As a pleader and orator he was counted by his contemporaries hardly inferior to Tully himself, and as a teacher his aid was sought for the noblest youths of Rome. To him was entrusted the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montague was a brilliant rhetorician, and, therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial, prating pretender. But from the absence of show in Harley's discourses many people inferred that there must be much substance; and he was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... eight to four; and, if one go down, both would be six and Allah is all-knowing."[FN438] With this the philosopher put off his clothes and fled: whereupon the next contest took place, for she turned to the Olema present and said, "Which of you is the rhetorician that can discourse of all arts and sciences?" There came forward a sage hight Ibrahim bin Siyyr and said to her, "Think me not like the rest." Quoth she, "It is the more assured to me that thou wilt be beaten, for that thou art a boaster; and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... same bargain with me that was made by the famous sophist Protagoras of old with his pupil, that he should have the profits of the first cause I should win—certain that I would not, like his treacherous pupil Evathlus, employ the rhetorician's arms against himself, to cheat him out of his promised reward. My special pleader was not a mere man of forms and law rigmaroles; he knew the reason for the forms he used: he had not only a technical, but a rational knowledge of his business; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... find written under the letter A, until you come to the next letter, is taken from the Right Reverend Father David Roth, Lord Bishop of Ossory, and Vice Primate of all Ireland, a Man excellently well read in all parts of literature, an eloquent Rhetorician, a subtle Philosopher, a profound Divine, a celebrated Historian, a zealous chastizer of Vice, a steady Defender of Ecclesiastical Liberty, a constant Assertor of the Privileges of his Country, most devoutly compassionate upon ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... still mere boys, completely dependent upon their guardian, Pothinus, to whom the King left the care of the government, and their tutor, Theodotus, a clever but unprincipled rhetorician. These two men and Achillas, the commander of the troops, would gladly have aided Dionysus, the King's oldest male heir, to obtain the control of the state, in order afterwards to rule him, but the flute-player baffled their plans. You ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... freedman, was born at Athens. Of him, Capito Atteius [869], the well-known jurisconsult, says that he was a rhetorician among the grammarians, and a grammarian among the rhetoricians. Asinius Pollio [870], in the book in which he finds fault with the writings of Sallust for his great affectation of obsolete words, speaks thus: "In this work his chief assistant was a certain Atteius, a man ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... proposition, has with the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. But if there be little or no logical connection between these things, we shall soon see how the choice of such a title and topic of discourse opens the way for the rhetorician to make a most powerful appeal to the passions and to the prejudices of his readers. We say, of his readers, because it is evident that the speech was made for Buncombe, and not for the Senate of the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... us come to the orators. Isocrates, the eldest of those who have survived, is a mere scholastic rhetorician: for he was a timid man, and did not dare to confront the terrors of a stormy political audience; and hence, though he lived about an entire century, he never once addressed the Athenian citizens. It is true, that, although no bona fide orator—for ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... not solely intellectual, but is largely emotional. It uses every principle of public speaking, and every "form of discourse," to use a rhetorician's expression, but argument supplemented by special appeal is its peculiar quality. This we ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... And the Rhetorician almost immediately added, "Observe thou. Notaras has established himself within easy hearing of the two. He has actually invaded the space ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... about 300 B.C., is said to have made the first collection of these fables. Phaedrus, a slave by birth or by subsequent misfortunes, and admitted by Augustus to the honors of a freedman, imitated many of these fables in Latin iambics about the commencement of the Christian era. Aphthonius, a rhetorician of Antioch, A.D. 315, wrote a treatise on, and converted into Latin prose, some of these fables. This translation is the more worthy of notice, as it illustrates a custom of common use, both in these and in later times. The rhetoricians and philosophers were ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... life, bankers, merchants, lawyers, captains of industry in every walk; men trained in the wide experience and high responsibilities of public office; lynx-eyed rivals and opponents. Is this the scene, or were these the men, for the triumphs of the barren rhetorician and the sophist, whose words have no true relation to the facts? Where could general mental strength be better tested? As a matter of history most of those who have held the place of leading minister in the House of Commons ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... (for instance, Epicurean or Christian); it is above all things the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness, of repletion, of final unity—it is the "Sabbath of Sabbaths," to use the expression of the holy rhetorician, St. Augustine, who was himself such a man.—Should, however, the contrariety and conflict in such natures operate as an ADDITIONAL incentive and stimulus to life—and if, on the other hand, in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... million less than they did a century ago, taxes on articles of general consumption produce thirteen millions more. Robbery is a capital offence because the poor alone are tempted to it. Among the poor alone is all combination forbidden. Godwin was often an incautious rhetorician. He painted the present in colours of such unrelieved gloom, that it is hard to see in it the possibility of a brighter future. Mankind seems hopeless, and he has to ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Before the actual fighting, some personal descriptions of the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged with mediaeval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third century. And among these a great place is given ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... certainly does not belong to their school; nor, on the other hand, has he the plain homespun force of Swift and Cobbett. And yet readers who do not insist upon measuring all prose by the same standard, will probably agree that if Hazlitt is not a great rhetorician, if he aims at no gorgeous effects of complex harmony, he has yet an eloquence of his own. It is indeed an eloquence which does not imply quick sympathy with many moods of feeling, or an intellectual vision at once penetrating and comprehensive. It is the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... primarily, then, upon the mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the rhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications, allegories, and all the other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether he is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate examples of these various classes of figures, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... was born in Africa, and died at Rome in 370. He was a distinguished orator, grammarian, and rhetorician. His chief work was a treatise entitled "De Orthographia." He also wrote many theological ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Shores, to be planted in the waste Places of Gallia; where with their Husbandry, they may help the Roman Empire in time of Peace; and with their Bodies, supply its Armies in time of War—." And in another Panegyrick, by Eumenius the Rhetorician, we find this Passage, "Aut haec ipsa, &c. Or this Country, which was once overspread with the Fierceness of the Franks, more than if the Waters of their Rivers, or their Sea, had cover'd it;" ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... to exclaim again: but I went on, proleptically, as a rhetorician would say, before their voices would ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... Mort. Persecutor. c. 18. Were the particulars of this conference more consistent with truth and decency, we might still ask how they came to the knowledge of an obscure rhetorician. But there are many historians who put us in mind of the admirable saying of the great Conde to Cardinal de Retz: "Ces coquins nous font parlor et agir, comme ils auroient fait eux-memes a notre place." * Note: This attack upon Lactantius is unfounded. Lactantius ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... though Euphronius reproached his disciples severely, and desired them to compare their want of spirit with his own thirst for knowledge, which, when he was a young man, had taken him as far as Alexandria to hear a celebrated rhetorician. In the evening, however, two disciples came to him together, and professed their readiness to undertake the expedition, if promised a reward commensurate with ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... is the great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner only will, when that manner happens to be appropriate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the hands of a watch which does not go point right once in the twelve hours. Sometimes there is a scene of solemn debate. This a mere rhetorician may write as well as the greatest tragedian that ever lived. We confess that to us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems very nearly as good as Shakspeare could have made it. But when the senate breaks up, and we find that the lovers and their mistresses, the hero, the villain, and the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... place, then, Marius came down now from White-nights, to live in the house of his guardian or tutor, that he might attend the school of a famous rhetorician, and learn, among [46] other things, Greek. The school, one of many imitations of Plato's Academy in the old Athenian garden, lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove of cypresses, its porticoes, a house ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... Libanius, deploring the burning of the Temple of Apollo near Antioch, complains of the ingratitude of Vulcan to that God, who had formerly discovered to him the infidelity of his wife; a subject upon which St. Chrysostom seems to think that the rhetorician would have done better to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... a eunuch, and a heathen of Constantinople. His father sent him some time after to Nicomedia, to be instructed in the christian religion, by the bishop of Eusebius, his kinsman, but his principles were corrupted by the pernicious doctrines of Ecebolius the rhetorician, and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Wilkes stated that the complaints had been made "by no rhetorician," but by letter from the magistrates themselves (on whom he relied so confidently) to the state-council. The councillor added, rather tartly, that since his honest words of defence and of warning, had been "taken in so scoffing a manner," Sir William might be sure of not being troubled ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... as Victor Hugo does. Yes, for all his panoramic evocations of sea-effects, Pierre Loti does not touch the old eternal mystery of the deep, with its answer of terror and strange yearning in the heart of man, in the way this other touches it. The great rhetorician found a rhetoric here that put his eloquence to silence and he responded to it with sentences as sharp, as brief, as broken, as abrupt, as stinging and wind-driven, as the rushing waves themselves pouring over a half ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... A treatise on union ([Greek: peri homonoias]). The rhetorician Dionysius of Magnesia had been with Cicero during his tour ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... rhetoric of The Letter to a Noble Lord, the Reflections, and others. It has nothing so lively as the contrast between France and Algiers in its immediate predecessor. It may even seem, to those who have accustomed themselves to think of Burke wholly or mainly as a gorgeous rhetorician, rather tame as a whole. But if it does not soar, it never droops; it is admirably proportioned, admirably written, and admirably argued throughout, and it shows great knowledge and mastery of foreign politics—the point in which English statesmen have always been weakest. I may add that it seems ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... course of ages who has truly united the power of command with the power of thought and reflection, as there have been also many false combinations of these qualities. Some kind of speculative power is necessary both in practical and political life; like the rhetorician in the Phaedrus, men require to have a conception of the varieties of human character, and to be raised on great occasions above the commonplaces of ordinary life. Yet the idea of the philosopher-statesman has never been popular with ...
— The Republic • Plato
... inclined to refuse to see its owner; but I conquered my disgust, and I did well. The prelate, with his semi-clerical, semi-courtly air, made me a low bow. I calmly waited, so as to give him time to deliver his message. The famous rhetorician proceeded ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... declining to be held by the limitations of the lawyer, the historian, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the logician, the physician, the metaphysician is lifted up with the vigor of his own imagination; doth grow in effect into another nature in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth or quite anew, as the Heroes, Demi-gods, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... the inhabitants of Oea on the question of the erection of a statue in his honour. These facts may not improbably have led him to seek residence elsewhere. Be this as it may, when we next hear of him he is in Carthage, enjoying the highest renown as philosopher, poet, and rhetorician. It was during this residence at Carthage that he delivered the flamboyant orations of which fragments have been preserved to us in the Florida. A few of these excerpts can be dated. The seventeenth is written during the proconsulate ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... for a person who has held his peace too long. On the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison, bearing in his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had struck in, he halted in front of the first tree which he came to, harangued it and made very great efforts to convince it. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... received me in but a middling inn: Heliodorus the rhetorician, most learned in the Greek language, was my fellow-traveller: thence we proceeded to Forum-Appi, stuffed with sailors and surly landlords. This stage, but one for better travellers than we, being laggard we divided into two; the Appian way is less ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... stood here, To plead in the defence of an ill man, (Most equal Judge) or to accuse the innocent (To both which, I profess my self a stranger) It would be requisite I should deck my Language With Tropes and Figures, and all flourishes That grace a Rhetorician, 'tis confess'd Adulterate Metals need the Gold-smiths Art, To set 'em off; what in it self is perfect Contemns a borrowed gloss: this Lord (my Client) Whose honest cause, when 'tis related truly, Will challenge justice, finding in his Conscience ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... natural taste, he commenced the study of Philosophy under Philo the Academic, of whom we shall speak more particularly hereafter.[98] But his chief attention was reserved for Oratory, to which he applied himself with the assistance of Molo, the first rhetorician of the day; while Diodotus the Stoic exercised him in the argumentative subtleties for which the disciples of Zeno were so generally celebrated. At the same time he declaimed daily in Greek and Latin with some young noblemen, who were competitors with ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted Americans—and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during the last decades—to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... majestic youth." In his lecture-room utterances, there was an undue preponderance of rhetoric, declamation, and sentiment over logic, analysis, and philosophy. Yet he once said of himself, that he was "thoroughly logical and argumentative; not a rhetorician, as fools aver." Whether this estimate was right or wrong in the main may be a matter of question: we think it wrong. His genius, in our view, lay rather in pictorial passion than in ratiocination. At all events, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of a famous rhetorician, the Roman philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca was born at Corduba (Cordova), in Spain, about the beginning of the Christian era. While the date of his birth is a matter for conjecture, the circumstances of his death are notorious. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... economy of the Inns of Court; while numerous legal phrases and references hint that his comprehensive information was not at fault on legal matters. Leland says that he quitted the University "a ready logician, a smooth rhetorician, a pleasant poet, a grave philosopher, an ingenious mathematician, and a holy divine;" and by all accounts, when Geoffrey Chaucer comes before us authentically for the first time, at the age of thirty-one, he was possessed of knowledge and ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... express; he had no definite answer to give the Parliament who were petitioning him to take the title of king. He was anxious to gain time—he was talking against time—an art which we moderns only have thoroughly mastered. How could Cromwell, who was no great rhetorician, be otherwise than palpably confused, and dubious and intricate? Nothing can be clearer than that he himself leant towards the opinion of the Parliament, that it would be good policy to adopt the royal title. It was so connected with the old attachments and associations of Englishmen, it had so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... things to themselves; abandoned the desire to know and to comprehend many things; and as thou thyself advised me, have, trusting to my common sense, followed as far as I was able the voice within me in my own way. Now this rhetorician seemed to me to raise with great talent a firmly constructed fabric, which was at once self-based and self-supported, and stood as by an innate necessity. I missed in it completely, however, what most ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... sensibly. He frequently quotes the very words of his authorities; and his history thus acquires a charm such as very few ancient or modern military narratives possess. The anecdotes and expressions which he records we fairly believe to be genuine, and not to be the coinage of a rhetorician, like those in Curtius. In fact, in reading Arrian, we read General Aristobulus and General Ptolemy on the campaigns of the Macedonians, and it is like reading General Jomini or General Foy on the campaigns of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... of deep feeling, a cry in the darkness. The writer no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... weary of books relating to that momentous epoch. It is a "Biography of Camille Desmoulins," by Ed. Fleury—an octavo volume, lately issued at Paris. The author discusses the history of this famous pamphleteer and revolutionary rhetorician, as an advocate defends a client ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the glorification of the body, a representation of the full strength and beauty of developed manhood. The saint of the mediaeval mosaic represents the body in its extreme maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato, found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy Hellespont,' never makes them ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to shew why And tell what rules he did it by. Else, when with greatest art he spoke, You'd think he talk'd like other folk. For all a Rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... or reasoner, and not a rhetorician, in the common sense. He was a poet, who wrote chiefly in prose, but also in verse. His verse was usually rough, but sometimes finished and melodious; it was always extraordinarily concise and expressive. During his engagement to the lady who became his second wife, he wrote thus to her: ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... any one to speak of himself; the other, that it seems to be unreasonable to speak too deeply when giving explanations. Let the knife of my judgment pare away from the present treatise the unlawful and the unreasonable. One does not permit any Rhetorician to speak of himself without a necessary cause. And from this is the man removed, because he can speak of no one without praise or blame of those of whom he speaks; which two causes commonly induce a man to speak of himself. And in ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... ever the idea that Socialists were weak dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the leading spirit—a society which answered all charges of impracticable idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical negotiations to ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... be put forward that Mark Antony was by any means a paragon of virtue—a man who has been successively and successfully soldier, lawyer, politician, judge, rhetorician and diplomat is what he is. Rome was the ruler of the world; Caesar was the undisputed greatest man of Rome; and Mark Antony was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... youth. Then the necessity of trade with the Greeks caused the study of Rhetoric, so that not only in the deliberations of the senate and people, but in law, the ends might be better attained. Whatever effort the Roman government made to prevent the invasion of the Greek rhetorician was all in vain. The Roman youth sought for this knowledge, which was so necessary to them in foreign lands, e.g. in the flourishing school of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes. At last, even the study of Philosophy commended itself to the ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... necessary in Poetry for the Points of the Comparison to correspond with one another exactly, but that a general Resemblance is sufficient, and that too much Nicety in this Particular favours of the Rhetorician and Epigrammatist. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Sovereignty of the People such as filled the reverent and orderly mind of Burke with indignant astonishment. In Dr. Priestley the revolutionary party had an eminent man of science and a polemical writer of rare power. Dr. Price was a rhetorician whom any cause would have gladly enlisted as its champion. The Revolution Society, founded to commemorate the capture of the Bastille, corresponded with the leaders of the Revolution, and promised its alliance in a revolutionary compact. And, to add a touch ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... thinking himself alone amidst rocks and pitfalls and pitiless things, and suddenly a hand, a firm strong hand, had touched his own. And a voice within him bade him be of good courage. There was no magic trickery in that moment; he was still weak and weary, a discouraged rhetorician, a good intention ill-equipped; but he was no longer lonely and wretched, no longer in the same world with despair. God was beside him and within him and about him.... It was the crucial moment of ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the one purporting to be by M. Cicero against Sallust, and the other by Sallust against Cicero; but both are evidently unworthy of the character and style of the men whose names they bear, and are justly considered to be the production of some wretched rhetorician of the third or fourth century of the Christian era.[2] Such declaimers made use of all possible reports that were current respecting the moral weaknesses of the two men, and respecting an enmity between them, of which history knows nothing, and which is contradicted by our author himself, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely narrow survey of such ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... remember, by a frigidly ingenious rhetorician, who had never looked out of his study-window—does it not seem to mingle, in a trance of absolute simplicity, the peerless beauty of a Claude with the misery and ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... blame: the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and the quack. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... is that of a delirious rhetorician. One might fancy they had been composed as exercises, except for certain traits which mark the frenzy of genuine exaltation. Threats, imprecations, and blasphemies alternate with prayers, vows of fidelity and reminiscences of past delights in love. Samminiati bends ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the personality of Plato,—more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten in supposing, they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we cannot agree with him in also supposing that they are of any historical value, the rather as there is no early independent testimony by which they are supported or with which ...
— Charmides • Plato
... a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... men were suddenly caught and appalled by the awful phantom, which was yet so real, of a perishing nation. Turn from Bossuet's orations to Boisguillebert's Detail de la France; from the pulpit rhetorician's courtly reminders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity for the misery of the common people;[31] from Corneille and Racine to La Bruyere's picture of "certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burned ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... and matter-of-fact intellects. He likes to be balanced between opposing difficulties; to play with any symbol of worship without actually worshipping it; to prostrate himself sincerely at many shrines, and yet with a half smile on his lips. He cannot be a rhetorician in the ordinary sense of the word; he would have been hopelessly out of place on the floor of the senate, stirring men's patriotism or sense of right; for half his sympathy would always be with the Opposition. He could not have moved the tears or the devotional ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... you are slow in foreseeing its consequences; asking, if I may so say, for something different from the conditions under which we live, and yet comprehending inadequately those very conditions; very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a rhetorician than ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... had put everyone in vast good humour. You might wonder that his sweetly idyllic picture did not stir bitterness by contrast; it were to credit the English workman with too much imagination. Resonance of applause rewarded the sparkling rhetorician. A few of the audience availed themselves of the noise to withdraw, for the clock showed that it was close upon ten, and public-houses shut ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... dilogy. Associated Words: extempore, extemporaneous, extemporize, extemporization, impromptu, improvise, improvisation, brogue, aphasia, amnesia, oratory, elocution, rhetoric, oratorical, rhetorical, rhetorician, elocutionary, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... statesman, not to be discomfited in argument, or led wild by theory, but one who has already, in the councils and tribunals of the nation, reared his front to the dismay of the shallow conservative, to the exposure of the humanitarian incendiary, and the discomfiture of the antiquated rhetorician." ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formless ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... set out from Rome accompanied by Heliodorus, a rhetorician whom he calls by far the most learned of the Greeks, and that they found a middling inn at Aricia, the first stopping-place, on the Appian Way, sixteen miles out, at the foot ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Vinet: "He preached, confessed, consoled, and then he died." It does credit to his hearers that they valued him aright—a modest man of simple probity. He spoke, with downcast eyes and full harmonious voice, as a soul to souls; his eloquence was not that of the rhetorician; his words were grave and plain and living, and were pressed home with the force of their reality. He aimed never at display, but always at conviction. When the crowd at St. Sulpice was moved as he entered the church and ascended the pulpit, "Silence!" cried the Prince de Conde, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the dominant quality of his style, and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in hand, he is no longer the rhetorician, dealing in fine phrases, but the great seer, clothing his thoughts in words suitable and becoming. The most magnificent passages in his writings—the Conciliation is rich in them—owe their charm and effectiveness to this ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... the clock-tower of the square, is a marble tablet erected to the memory of the deputy Felice Cavalotti. We all remember Cavalotti, the last—with Imbriani—of the republican giants, a blustering rhetorician-journalist, annihilator of monarchs and popes; a fire-eating duellist, who deserved his uncommon and unlovely fate. He provoked a colleague to an encounter and, during a frenzied attack, received into his open mouth the point of his adversary's sword, which sealed up for ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... toilers that support it, there is a halo of glory. There is, however, a great deal said about the dignity of labor which is nothing more than oratorical commonplace—the meaningless froth of the rhetorician. There is no dignity about labor in itself. What is there about piling bricks on top of each other, or mixing mortar, or sewing blue denim into overalls, or trading earthen jars for nickel coin, that has ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... Mill, who gave his life to the study of sociological questions, is a failure in the House, while a Randolph Churchill, who confessedly found politics more exciting than any other form of sport, including even horse-racing, should be a success. As in Athens of old, the rhetorician is master of the field. Does it not seem ridiculous that a man shall be allowed to legislate who has not passed an examination in political philosophy, political economy, and universal history? As absurd as that men should be able to set up as critics merely ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... of study. From that time I have let many things be settled as they could, renounced much which I might have understood or learnt, and, following your counsels by trusting to my innate senses, that voice of the heart, I have gone forward in my own road as far as I was able. This rhetorician appeared to me to build his firmly-cemented edifice with great ability. It seemed to bear itself on its firm and solid foundation, and stood, as it were, on its own absolute necessity. Then I missed in ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso |
