"Demosthenes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that, when a boy, he burst into tears on hearing Herodotus read his History, and the impression made upon his mind was such as to determine the bent of his own genius. And Demosthenes was so fired on one occasion by the eloquence of Callistratus, that the ambition was roused within him of becoming an orator himself. Yet Demosthenes was physically weak, had a feeble voice, indistinct articulation, and shortness of breath—defects which he was ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... has suffered nothing to escape it, I never saw any man whose conversation impressed me with such an idea of his superiority over all others. As Rogers said the morning of his departure, 'this morning Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield, and a great many more went away in one post chaise.' He told us a great many details relating to the Queen's trial, and amongst other things (which I do not believe) his conviction that the Queen had never ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... liberty was the ruin of genuine oratory. Demosthenes flourished under a free government. The original goes on from this place to ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... first somewhat of a disappointment. You do not often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the same room with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the performance little to be admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are coming to the front. Among those named more and more frequently of late is T. C. DeLeon. The story is as full of plot as it can hold; and if action plays as large a part in fiction, as Demosthenes averred it did in oratory, "Juny" should be a ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... 20th of September, 1776, all the troops in Charleston were ordered to rendezvous without the gates of the city, to hear, as we were told, "Some great news." Soon as we were paraded, governor Rutledge ascended a stage, and in the forcible manner of a Demosthenes, informed, that Congress had dissolved all relation with England, by an open ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... warriors, or great poets, or orators of the most vehement and impassioned spirit. Such were Moses, Joshua, the heroic youth of Hebron, and his magnificent son; such, too, was Isaiah, a man, humanly speaking, not inferior to Demosthenes, and struggling for a similar and as beautiful a cause, the independence of a small state, eminent for its intellectual power, against the barbarian grandeur of a military empire. All the great things have been done by the little nations. It is the Jordan ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... human sight. The doom of tyrannies was thenceforth sealed. Satire and invective became potent as armies. The unseen hands of the Juniuses could launch the thunderbolts, and make the ministers tremble. One whisper from this giant fills the earth as easily as Demosthenes filled the Agora. It will soon be heard at the antipodes as easily as in the next street. It travels with the lightning under the oceans. It makes the mass one man, speaks to it in the same common language, and elicits a sure and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... other. Cobden had the calmness and confidence of the political philosopher, Bright had the passion and the fervour of the popular orator. Cobden did the reasoning, Bright supplied the declamation, but like Demosthenes he mingled argument with appeal. No orator of modern times rose more rapidly to a foremost place. He was not known beyond his own borough when Cobden called him to his side in 1841, and he entered parliament towards the end of the session of 1843 with a formidable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... might have been, Laurie studied to some purpose that year, for he graduated with honor, and gave the Latin oration with the grace of a Phillips and the eloquence of a Demosthenes, so his friends said. They were all there, his grandfather—oh, so proud—Mr. and Mrs. March, John and Meg, Jo and Beth, and all exulted over him with the sincere admiration which boys make light of at the time, but fail to win from the world by ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... admirable monuments were intended to represent. But it is not in the city of Constantine, nor in the declining period of an empire, when the human mind was depressed by civil and religious slavery, that we should seek for the souls of Homer and of Demosthenes. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... much?' JOHNSON. 'I don't believe it, sir. Burke has great knowledge, great fluency of words, and great promptness of ideas, so that he can speak with great illustration on any subject that comes before him. He is neither like Cicero, nor like Demosthenes, nor like any one else, but speaks ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... General, Nikias, had suffered disaster at Syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the Sicilians. But the assurances of safety which he had received were quickly proved false. He was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he was shamefully put to death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 120: Such would naturally result from the desirableness of securing unity of command. If Demosthenes had been in sole command of the Athenian armament in the harbour of Syracuse, and had been a basileus, with priestly authority, who can doubt that some such theory of the eclipse as that suggested by Philochorus ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... yonge men may lerne to beare them well and valyantly for drede of reproche. Better is it with worshyp to dye than with shame to lyue, albe hit that Demosthenes sayde: he that fleethe cometh ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... a legal term, and signified the line of defense adopted by the accused, when he transferred the charge brought against himself to some other person.—See Demosthenes in Timocr. ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... at this moment that President Boomer, who understood faculties as few men have done, quietly entered the room, laid his silk hat on a volume of Demosthenes, and proposed the vote of a degree of Doctor of Letters for Edward Tomlinson. He said that there was no need to remind the faculty of Tomlinson's services to the nation; they knew them. Of the members of the faculty, indeed, some thought that ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... school books, and declaimed by many an aspiring young Cicero. Most of them are, doubtless, as fictitious as Logan's celebrated speech, which was exalted by the great Jefferson almost to a level with the outbursts of Demosthenes, to be reduced again to very small proportions by the criticisms of ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. Many of the greatest men that have ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. His was talent, and uncommon talent, and to Jemmy Boswell ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... chamber-floor I sped. Harangued the book-case on each head; DEMOSTHENES and CICERO On hearing me had cried a go. Then I must own that I was nettled— Out of Court the case was settled. All my points were left unmade, And the fee ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... same time a certain Emmanuel of Constantinople seems to have been employed in England as a copyist. For Archbishop Neville he produced a Greek manuscript containing some sermones judiciales of Demosthenes, and letters of Aeschines, Plato, and Chion (1468).[1] Dr. Montague James has shown that this manuscript of Emmanuel is by the same hand as the manuscripts known as the "Ferrar group," which comprises "a Plato and Aristotle ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... disregarding the criticisms of the so-called masters of art, we of this century admire and wonder at the chefs- d'oeuvre of Greece and Rome. The mad cry of Aeschines docs not obscure the fame of Demosthenes; and in spite of Lucian, Caesar is, and will ever remain, the greatest man the world has ever produced. I guarantee that after your death you will be canonized, worshipped. I humbly entreat you not to hasten the time, but be content to have the apotheosis in your ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... the initiated over with clay or filth was common in Greek as in barbaric mysteries. Greek examples may be given first. Demosthenes accuses Aeschines of helping his mother in certain mystic rites, aiding her, especially, by bedaubing the initiate with clay and bran.(1) Harpocration explains the term used ((Greek text omitted)) thus: "Daubing the clay and bran on the initiate, to explain which they ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... spirited and consistent of any" of the deputies were the gentlemen from Virginia, among whom were Mr. Henry and Mr. R. H. Lee, said to be the Demosthenes and the Cicero of America. The latter, Mr. Adams liked much, a "masterly man" who was very strong for the most vigorous measures. But it seemed that even Mr. Lee was strong for vigorous measures only because he was "absolutely certain that the ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... Church, and to the patronage of the Medicis, a crowd of scholars who brought with them their manuscripts of Homer and the dramatists, of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism and its mysticism and piety, seized with avidity the revelation of the classical world which the scholars and their manuscripts brought. Human life, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... life, was so busy in virtue, so unblemished of fault, that he could not be overlooked by the managers of the quadrennial national performance, searching with Demosthenes' lantern for a man against whom nothing could be said. They called Eric from private life to ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... party,—"then there was Bouffon Le Grand—another extraordinary personage in his way. He grew deranged through love, and fancied himself possessed of two heads. One of these he maintained to be the head of Cicero; the other he imagined a composite one, being Demosthenes' from the top of the forehead to the mouth, and Lord Brougham's from the mouth to the chin. It is not impossible that he was wrong; but he would have convinced you of his being in the right; for he was ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day? If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in modern times; if they were not, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Athenian who, having proposed that the city should confer a crown of gold on Demosthenes, was accused by AEschines of violating the law in so doing, but was acquitted after an eloquent oration by Demosthenes ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... was so called by the Genoese from its extent and its prosperity. Demosthenes calls it "the granary ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... for her. Demosthenes De Grapion—he who, tradition says, first hoisted the flag of France over the little fort—seemed to think he ought to have a chance, and being accorded it, cast an astonishingly high number; but Epaminondas cast a number higher by one (which Demosthenes never ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... his dramatic compositions, obtained for him the name of the philosophic poet, and so loudly did fame proclaim his extraordinary excellence, that Socrates, who never before visited the theatre, went constantly to attend the tragedies of Euripides. Alexander admired him beyond all other writers—Demosthenes confessed that he had learned declamation from his works, and when Cicero was assassinated, the works of Euripides were found clutched ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... the poet he contrasts with the amplification of the orators, which strengthens the fabric of an argument by insistence and is especially "appropriate in perorations and digressions, and in all passages written for the style and for display, in writings of historical and scientific nature." Yet Demosthenes when moved by passion attains the sublimity of intensity and strikes like lightning.[31] Both in oratory and in poetry sublimity is attained by image-making, as when "moved by enthusiasm and passion, you seem to see the ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... coat-pocket; but, if our sojourner at Athens would understand how a tragic poet can write, he must betake himself to the theatre on the south, and see and hear the drama literally in action. Or let him go westward to the Agora, and there he will hear Lysias or Andocides pleading, or Demosthenes haranguing. He goes farther west still, along the shade of those noble planes, which Cimon has planted there; and he looks around him at the statues and porticos and vestibules, each by itself a work of genius and skill, enough to be the making ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... always abusing each other. Make yourself felt by other people. You will like it, if they don't. It will make a man of you. Fill your mouth with pebbles, and howl at the sea, if you cannot do anything else. It did Demosthenes no end of good, you know. You will have the satisfaction of ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... live. The political tract is very scarce; but we may safely affirm, that it contains some of the finest writing in the English language. Many of its passages can be paralleled only by the majestic periods of Milton's prose, or perhaps by the vehement and impassioned eloquence of Demosthenes. Its tone is one of sustained elevation, and in sententious moral and political wisdom it will bear a comparison with the greatest productions of Burke. We trust that this pamphlet will be republished. A collection and separate publication of all Mr. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... arguing, because much of the effect of their powers of reasoning, and of their wit, when they grow up, will depend upon the gentleness and good humour with which they conduct themselves. A woman, who should attempt to thunder like Demosthenes, would not find her eloquence increase her domestic happiness. We by no means wish that women should yield their better judgment to their fathers or husbands; but, without using any of that debasing cunning which Rousseau ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... metals into gold. The queen or bishop worried him in private about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among the stars. But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hired him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Orations. Cicero's Offices, Laelius, Cato Major, Paradoxes, Scipio's Dream, Letter to Quintus. Cicero On Oratory and Orators. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and The Commonwealth. Juvenal. Xenophon. Homer's Iliad. Homer's Odyssey. Herodotus. Demosthenes. 2 Vols. Thucydides. AEschylus. Sophocles. Euripides. 2 Vols. ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... been written than the Journal; and the critic who has dealt at the reputation of Boswell its heaviest blow has yet to confess, that Homer is no more the first of poets, Shakespeare the first of dramatists, Demosthenes the first of orators, than Boswell is the first ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... him near you when you read his book. You may take an unfair advantage of him, and reject his book, because you find the writer personally antipathetic. Or he may take an unfair advantage of you, and control you by his personal fascination. You remember the critic of Demosthenes, who remarked to him of a certain oration, "When I first read your speech, I was convinced, just as the Athenians were; but when I read it again, I saw through its fallacies." "Yes," rejoined Demosthenes, "but the Athenians heard it only once." A book ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... composed of upright and virtuous men, and John Rutledge was one of the most distinguished sons, to whom South Carolina has given birth. His eloquence was proverbial, both in congress, and at home. It was that of Demosthenes, concise, energetic, and commanding. There was something in his very manner, and the tone of his voice, that riveted the attention of his audience. They stood subdued before him. He swayed the councils of the state, he swayed the councils of the general who commanded the southern army: and if ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... on the page of history, and have been praised by the united voices of successive generations. We cannot hear, without an instinctive glow, of the cities of Rome, Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, and others which respectively produced a Cæsar, a Demosthenes, a Lycurgus, and an Archimedes; of the islands of Samos and Ægina, whence emanated the resplendent genius of a Pythagoras and a Plato; of the villages of Alopece and Andes, immortalized as having produced a ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... orator, "it would be in vain to attempt to give any one not present the faintest idea. It has been my fortune to hear some of the ablest speeches of the greatest living orators on both sides of the water, but I must confess I never heard anything which so completely realized my conception of what Demosthenes was when he delivered ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... which all thought and knowledge of similar kind were grouped,—a central point from which his mind radiated in all directions within the sphere of the subject. Could he read Plato and Aristotle without studying the course of ancient philosophy and its influence on the modern? or Demosthenes, without an investigation of the virtues and failings of Athenian statesmen? or Thucydides, without meditation on the causes of the desolation of empires and states? or Homer and Sophocles, without a quick comparison with Dante and Milton and Shakespeare? It ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... purse, that it is supposed two thirds of the contents have glided into his own pocket. This is the reason of the delay on Sir Arthur's part, which at present I do not wish to shorten. That this son of a grub catcher, a Demosthenes though he be, should prevail on such a father, if he were to go down as I hope he will, is but little probable. However, should the least prognostic of such a miracle appear, I have my remedy prepared. I will generously have a letter written to the senior overseer of the gravel ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... entering the campaign country beyond, his bands soon began the siege of Caesarea Mazaca, the greatest city of these parts, estimated at this time to have contained a population of four hundred thousand souls. Demosthenes, the governor of Caesarea, defended it bravely, and, had force only been used against him, might have prevailed; but Sapor found friends within the walls, and by their help made himself master of the place, while ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... not as the great man who determines to conquer difficulties, but rather as one who feels conscious of his own powers, and knows that they must show themselves sooner or later. Sheridan found himself labouring under the same natural obstacles as Demosthenes—though in a less degree—a thick and disagreeable tone of voice; but we do not find in the indolent but gifted Englishman that admirable perseverance, that conquering zeal, which enabled the Athenian to turn these very impediments to ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... in all the East. I was conducted by the lady Principal through every department. In one room an Arabic Professor was engaged at the black-board, instructing a class in studies pursued in that language. In another part of the same room, young ladies were reading to a lady-teacher an oration of Demosthenes in classic Greek. Another class was reading critically a portion of Milton's "Paradise Lost," and yet another was engaged in preparing a French lesson. With all these classes the lady sister spoke in the language under ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... think of all times coming; and how, whenever there should be any restlessness against the tyranny of materialism and dogma, a cry should go up for Plato.—So let Isocrates, the 'old man eloquent,'—let a many-worded not unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the God-world—attend to an Athens wherein the Gods were no longer greatly interested;—the great Star Plato should rise up into mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite apart from her; drawing from her ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the view of the fallen Jewish people. In Greece, the Cynic and Epicurean schools were only different phases of the same degeneration. "Thirst, for money, and nothing else, will be the ruin of Sparta!" (Cicero, De Offic, II, 22, 77.) See the magnificent description by Demosthenes, in which he shows the over-estimation of material things to be the principal cause of the decline of Athens, and in which he lays great stress on the fact, that Athens, on its decay, had a larger population, more wealth, ships, and evidences of external ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... write the History of his Life. Sophocles, AEschylus, and Socrates were distinguished for their military prowess among their contemporaries, though now only remembered for what they did in poetry and philosophy. Cicero and Demosthenes, the two greatest orators of antiquity, appear to have been cowards: nor does Horace seem to give a very favourable picture of his martial achievements. But in general there was not that division ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... world is, and will be, 'tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it may be in one's power to do good; riches being another word for power, towards the obtaining of which the first necessary qualification is impudence, and (as Demosthenes said of pronunciation in oratory) the second is impudence, and the third, still, impudence. No modest man ever did or ever will make his fortune. Your friend Lord H[alifa]x, R. W[alpo]le, and all other remarkable instances ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... became an artifice of politics. Themistocles, with a design of engaging the Athenians to quit Athens, in order to be in a better condition to resist Xerxes, made the Pythoness deliver an oracle, commanding them to take refuge in wooden walls. Demosthenes said, that the Pythoness philippised, to signify that she was ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Not Demosthenes himself, in his most impassioned appeal to the Athenians, more fitly matched moving words to urgent occasion than these two statesmen in the simple, restrained sentences, in which they warned the Commons of the ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... distinguished members of the Lower House, the box in which the managers stood contained an array of speakers such as perhaps had not appeared together since the great age of Athenian eloquence. There were Fox and Sheridan, the English Demosthenes and the English Hyperides. There was Burke, ignorant, indeed, or negligent of the art of adapting his reasonings and his style to the capacity and taste of his hearers, but in amplitude of comprehension and richness of imagination superior to every ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... rode home, "his Lordship will be surprised and gratified, I dare say, to find himself a perfect Demosthenes in the newspaper reports of to-morrow morning. Hems, coughs, stammerings, blowing of the nose, and ten-minute lapses of memory, all vanish in passing through the sieves and bolters of a report. What magicians the reporters are! What talents, what powers of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... power of depravity in enervating and enslaving the human mind; he therefore encouraged profusion, dissipation, and gambling, as being sure of meeting with little opposition from those who possessed such characters, in his projects of ambition—as Demosthenes declared in one of his orations.(21) Indeed, gambling had arrived at such a height in Greece, that Aristotle scruples not to rank gamblers 'with thieves and plunderers, who for the sake of gain do not scruple to despoil their best friends;'(22) and ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... with him to the Sistine Chapel. He has no feeling for art, and, being very true and earnest, could only do his best to try to admire Michael Angelo; but here and there, where he understood, the pleasure was expressed with a blunt characteristic simplicity. Standing before the statue of Demosthenes, he said: 'That man is persuaded himself of what he speaks, and will therefore persuade others.' She liked him exceedingly. For my part, I should join in more admiration if it were not for his having accepted money, but paid patriots are no heroes of mine. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... our students on the Latin models I recommend the Greek, especially Demosthenes . simplicity! This may be seen by a reference to Leopardi, who is perhaps the ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... between us; Still more attractions to combine, Beside these services of mine, I will throw in a very fine (It would do nicely for a sign) 600 Original Titian's Venus.' Another offered handsome fees If Knott would get Demosthenes (Nay, his mere knuckles, for more ease) To rap a few short sentences; Or if, for want of proper keys, His Greek might make confusion, Then just to get a rap from Burke, To recommend a little work On Public Elocution. 610 Meanwhile, the spirits made replies To all the reverent whats and whys, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... or, as some will say, too blind, to abandon their life-long devotion to 'Athens' or to 'Freedom' because the world considered such ideals out of date. They could look the ruined Athenians in the face, after the lost battle, and say with Demosthenes, 'Ouk estin, ouk estin hopos hemartete. It cannot be that you did wrong, it ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator, in a desperate effort to save his people from this man, delivered a set of orations denouncing Philip. These are the famous "Philippics," of which ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... given us a higher conception of Mr. Whittier's powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third stump-speaker among us were not a Demosthenes, we should have said Demosthenean) eloquence of his verse; but here we meet him in a softer and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The half-mystic tone of "The Shadow and the ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Old High-German, and Middle High-German are three distinct languages, each possessing its own grammar, each differing from the others and from Modern German more materially than the Greek of Homer differs from the Greek of Demosthenes. Even in Germany these languages are studied only by professional antiquarians and scholars, and they do not form part of the general system of instruction in public schools and universities. The study of Gothic grammar alone (where we still find ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Byzantine dialect was in the time of Philip, as we know from the decree in Demosthenes, rich in Dorisms."—Mueller ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... also a very ignorant class of oculists in Rome in the time of Nero, but at Marseilles Demosthenes Philalethes was deservedly celebrated, and his book on diseases of the eye was in use for several centuries. The eye doctors of Rome employed ointments almost entirely, and about two hundred seals have been discovered which had been attached ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... him; for wherever he went, people seemed to be pleased with him, as Squire Lee had declared they would be. His pleasant, honest face was a capital recommendation, and his eloquence seldom failed to achieve the result which eloquence has ever achieved from Demosthenes down to the ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... necessary to Burke's fame that the fame of others should be in any way impugned or depreciated. It is sufficient praise to say that Burke is one of the greatest orators the world has ever held. To argue that he is superior to Demosthenes on the {101} one hand, or to Cicero on the other, is to maintain an argument very much on a par with that which it amused Burke himself to maintain when he contended for the superiority of the "Aeneid" over the "Iliad." It is quite enough to be able to say well-nigh without fear of contradiction ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... decided on giving up the Aeschylus, it became more imperative to make sure of the Tacitus and Demosthenes, and he therefore went to Mr Grayson's rooms to get a library order which should entitle him to take from the Saint Werner's library any books that would be most likely to give him ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... were far less scholarly than those of Italy and France. At the same time they might well be proud of a queen who "could quote Pindar and Homer in the original and read every morning a portion of Demosthenes, being also the royal mistress of eight languages." With our knowledge of the queen's scholarship in mind we might look to her for such patronage of art and literature as would rival that of Lorenzo the Magnificent; but Elizabeth lacked the generosity ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... named. They inquired whether they should see them, and were answered in the affirmative, and were told, that if they were desirous, they might pay their respects to them, as they were courteous and affable. The novitiates then inquired after Demosthenes, Diogenes, and Epicurus; and were answered, "Demosthenes is not here, but with Plato; Diogenes, with his scholars, resides under Helicon, because of his little attention to worldly things, and his being ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... grave historical error), and Joseph II. reigns in his stead, exercising, I doubt not, over his factory-people the same ingenuity of torture which in old times nearly drove the fags to rebellion. He is a Demosthenes, they say, at vestries, and a Draco at the Board of Guardians; but in the centre of his broad face, marring the platitude of its smooth-shaven respectability, still burns angrily a dark red scar—Guy's sign-manual—which he ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... dryly, as his wife paused, "you have omitted one salient qualification of the modern woman: she is, preeminently an orator. Why, you, yourself, are a feminine Demosthenes—nothing less." But he abandoned, his tone of raillery, as he continued: "And so, what you've been doing—that's your idea ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... elements of thought a boy comes in contact with when he reads Caesar and Tacitus in succession, Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle". "See what is implied in having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes; what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human existence, on political society, on the relations of man to man, on human nature itself." There are various conceivable ways of counter-arguing these assertions, but the shortest is to call for the facts—the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Mettlelink and the pith of the great philosophers such as John Oliver Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Earl Spencer; the biting sarcasm of Hiny, the pathos of Peps, the oratorical master-strokes of such men as Gladstone, Demosthenes and Keir Hardie; the romance of Kipling, sir, of Bret Harte and Danty Rossini; the poetry of Kempis a Browning and of Elizabeth Thomas Barrett—all, all are there bound in Persian calf. Among these she seeks for solace. To these she ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... there, and her colossal statue. On the plain below were the temples of Theseus and Jupiter Olympus, and innumerable others. He stood where Socrates had stood four hundred years before, defending himself against the charge of atheism; where Demosthenes had pleaded in immortal strains of eloquence in behalf of Hellenic freedom; where the most solemn and venerable court of justice known among men was wont to assemble. There he made the memorable discourse, a few fragments only of which have come ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... stuck the spare clothes, with the rest of my riches, among the branches of a coolibah, out of the way of the wild pigs. The next moment, I was in the saddle, and Cleopatra, after perfunctorily illustrating Demosthenes' three rules of oratory:—the first, Action; the second, ditto, the third, ibid.—turned obediently toward the river, and was soon breasting the cool current, while, with one arm across the saddle, I ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... as with the athletic exercise of wrestlings in the throes of prophecy. The face, on the whole, is ugly, but not repellent; and, in spite of its great strength, it shows signs of feminine sensibility. Like the faces of Cicero and Demosthenes, it seems the fit machine for oratory. But the furnaces hidden away behind that skull, beneath that cowl, have made it haggard with a fire not to be found in the serener features of the classic orators. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... honorable man, to find that we have no information that the Athenian officers refused in a body to serve any longer under Themistocles, if he acted like that! There is a modern French writer who declares that if anyone considers Demosthenes a man of honor, his ignorance will excite a smile of pity; and that Cicero was not a man of honor either![1] In a certain passage in Plato's Laws[2] the philosopher speaks at length of [Greek: aikia] or assault, showing us clearly enough that the ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... his future associates, few of whom he had then ever seen, he wrote in his diary that the Virginians were said to "speak in raptures about Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, one the Cicero, and the other the Demosthenes, of the age."[103] ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... Athenian generals at this time was Demosthenes, [Footnote: To be carefully distinguished from the great orator, born about forty years after the date reached in this chapter (425 B.C.).] who in the previous year had greatly distinguished himself by a brilliant campaign in Aetolia. In the following summer he obtained permission to take ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... historical? What finer history than Titian's Paul III., Raphael's Leo X., Albert Duerer's head of himself? What finer than the Pericles, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, the Demosthenes of the Vatican, Chantrey's Scott, Houdon's Voltaire, Powers's Jackson?—Heroic? what more heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or Rauch's statue of Frederick the Great?—Poetical? What ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the noblest tribute which could be ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... whom, by the way, he is inoculating successfully wid his own ripe and flourishing ignorance. No, sir; nor like Gusty Gibberish, or (as he has been most facetiously christened by his Reverence, Father O'Flaherty) Demosthenes M'Gosther, inasmuch as he is distinguished for an aisy and prodigal superfluity of mere words, unsustained by intelligibility or meaning, but who cannot claim in his own person a mile and a half of dacent reputation. However, quid multis ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... can fall back on the eloquence of the world's greatest orator, we turn with gratitude to the greatest tribute ever spoken to the memory of those men to whom the world owes most. Demosthenes, in the finest height of his finest oration, vindicates the men of every age and nation who fight the forlorn hope. He was arraigned by his rival, AEschines, for having counselled the Athenians to pursue a course that ended in defeat, and he replies thus: ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Francis's Translation of Select Speeches from Demosthenes, which Lord Brougham naturally used a little in his own labors on that theme, there may be traced several peculiarities of diction that startle us in Junius. Sir P. had them from his father. And Lord Brougham ought not to have overlooked them. The same thing may be seen in the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... mite to sit on that throne and rule all that comes within its reach?" She directed his attention to the throne at the opposite end of the hall. "From its seat I calmly instruct gray-haired statesmen, weigh their wisdom and pass upon it as if I were Demosthenes, challenge the evils that may drive monarchs mad, and wonder if my crown is ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... it was not merely at hazard that he selected the statues of great men to adorn the gallery of the Tuileries. Among the Greeks he made choice of Demosthenes and Alesander, thus rendering homage at once to the genius of eloquence and the genius of victory. The statue of Hannibal was intended to recall the memory of Rome's most formidable enemy; and Rome ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... only Englishmen among the honoured score were Marlborough and Dampier.* (* Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat 1 267.) It is curious to find the adventurous ex-buccaneer in such noble company as that of Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, and George Washington, but the fact that he was among the selected heroes may be taken as another evidence of Bonaparte's interest in the men who helped to find out what the world was like. ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... he exactly followed the advice which Longinus gives to a great writer:—"Whenever you have a mind to elevate your mind, to raise it to its highest pitch, and even to exceed yourself, upon any subject, think how Homer would have described it, how Plato would have imagined it, and how Demosthenes would have expressed it; and when you have so done, you will then, no doubt, have a standard which will raise you up to the dignity of anything that human genius can aspire to." Mr. Hastings was calling upon himself, and raising his mind to the dignity of what tyranny could do, what unrighteous ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Canning to declare that Wordsworth's pamphlet was the finest piece of political eloquence which had appeared since Burke. And yet if we compare it with Burke, or with the great Greek exemplar of all those who would give speech the cogency of act,—we see at once the causes of its practical failure. In Demosthenes the thoughts and principles are often as lofty as any patriot can express; but their loftiness, in his speech, as in the very truth of things, seemed but to add to their immediate reality. They were beaten and inwoven into the facts of the hour; action seemed to turn, on ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... straight all your thoughts in black and white put, Not minding the if's, the be's, and the but, 30 Then read it all over, see how it will run, How answers the wit, the retort, and the pun, Your writings may then with old Socrates vie, May on the same shelf with Demosthenes lie, May as Junius be sharp, or as Plato be sage. 35 The pattern or satire to all of the age; But stop—a mad author I mean not to turn, Nor with thirst of applause does my heated brain burn, Sufficient that sense, wit, and grammar ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... for them as for men, they may, without failing in rational conduct, govern themselves by different principles, and tend towards a different result. It is as reasonable for a woman to concern herself respecting her personal attractions as it was for Demosthenes to cultivate his ...
— The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women • Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
... against Brasidas. When the commander Demosthenes won the battle of Sphacteria, Cleon claimed the honour of the victory and received a triumph. Then, since he regarded himself as a great warrior, he marched against Brasidas. The pitcher goes so often ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... you ask for and some more also, since what I write to satisfy the studious youth finds favour, it seems, with you also. [For it suited my purpose[147]—both because it was in his Philippics that your fellow citizen Demosthenes gained his reputation, and because it was by withdrawing from the mere controversial and forensic style of oratory that he acquired the character of a serious politician—to see that I too should have speeches that may properly be called consular. Of these ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... be shunned as one tenders the Name of a Wit and a fine Genius, and as one fears the Dreadful Character of a laborious Plodder: But notwithstanding this, the greatest Wits any Age has produced thought far otherwise; for who can think either Socrates or Demosthenes lost any Reputation, by their continual Pains both in overcoming the Defects and improving the Gifts of Nature. All are acquainted with the Labour and Assiduity with which Tully acquired ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... such were frequented by men not a whit less barbarous and bigoted than their modern representatives—nothing is a greater mistake than to suppose that the crowds of old Rome and Athens were more refined than our own ("Demosthenes, sir, was talking to an assembly of brutes"). For thirty centuries then, let us say, a deity has attracted the faithful to his shrine—Sant' Angelo has become a vacuum, as it were, which must be periodically filled up from the surrounding country. These pilgrimages ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... mouth-pieces, compelled to practise their tribunician eloquence from tombs until they can shower it from the height of rostrums, know no better than to give to the public parodies of Gracchus and Demosthenes. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... then world ... first time I had ever heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney ... the big beggar-man who had L15,000 a year, and, proh pudor! the favour of English ministers instead ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... mindless things, if they chance to kill a man; and if a man commits suicide, bury the hand that struck the blow afar from its body." This is mentioned quite as an every-day matter, evidently without thinking it at all extraordinary, only to point an antithesis to the honors heaped upon Demosthenes. /3/ As late as the second century after Christ the traveller Pausanias observed with some surprise that they still sat in judgment on inanimate things in the Prytaneum. /4/ Plutarch attributes the ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... profit by young orators and old politicians as examples of parliamentary politeness. It was the good-natured and wise Franklin that helped him to this. It is certain, too, that at some part of his earlier life he read translations of Demosthenes; for of all modern orators Henry Clay was the most Demosthenian. Calhoun purposely and consciously imitated the Athenian orator; but Clay was a kindred spirit with Demosthenes. We could select passages from both these orators, and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... religion forbids the admission of science and the arts among them. We should wish success to the object of the two empires, if they meant to leave the country in possession of the Greek inhabitants. We might then expect, once more, to see the language of Homer and Demosthenes a living language. For I am persuaded the modern Greek would easily get back to its classical models. But this is not intended. They only propose to put the Greeks under other masters; to substitute one set of barbarians ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... grow sharper and more defined. He has got his Latin, and, in getting it, read Virgil and Horace and Cicero, as his brothers did. But henceforth St. Augustine becomes his Cicero; and he already begins to suspect that the best service his Homer and Thucydides and Demosthenes have rendered him has been by enabling him to understand St. Chrysostom. What is Herodotus to the Lives of the Saints, or Livy to Baronius? Why should he waste his time on human nature in Tacitus, or follow, with Guicciardini, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in a waistcoat which was the admiration of all who beheld it, proposed the health of the bride; and proved indubitably that the best of oratory has its origin in the heart and not in the mind,—for Tom had never been regarded by his friends as a Demosthenes. He was interrupted from time to time by shouts of laughter; certain episodes in the early career of Mr. Austen Vane (in which, if Tom was to be believed, he was an unwilling participant) were particularly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to live for their style alone, outside their truths, like those of Cicero and Demosthenes, like the histories of Voltaire and Macaulay, like the essays of Pascal and Rousseau; and they will live, not only for both style and matter, but for the exalted patriotism which burns in them from first to last, for those sentiments which consecrate cherished institutions. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... was called Rhetoric, and of which the Sophists were the chief masters. Moreover, as Rhetoric was especially political in its nature, it presupposed or introduced the cultivation of History; and thus the pages of Thucydides became one of the special studies by which Demosthenes rose to be the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... place so favourable to them as Athens. They were allowed a greater liberty of speech;[018] they had their convivial meetings, their amours, their hours of relaxation, pleasantry, and mirth; they were treated, in short, with so much humanity in general, as to occasion that observation of Demosthenes, in his second Philippick, "that the condition of a slave, at Athens, was preferable to that of a free citizen, in many other countries." But if any exception happened (which was sometimes the case) from the general treatment described; if persecution took ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... scarcely less reputation. Besides this, to arm himself at all points for his proposed career, he read logic with Diodotus the Stoic, studied the action of Esop and Roscius—then the stars of the Roman stage—declaimed aloud like Demosthenes in private, made copious notes, practised translation in order to form a written style, and read hard day and night. He trained severely as an intellectual athlete; and if none of his contemporaries attained such splendid success, perhaps ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... read Locke, Say's Political Economy, Smith's Wealth of Nations, Plutarch, Josephus, Herodotus, Lingard, Hume and Smollett, Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Pope, Byron, Shakespeare, Boswell's Johnson, Junius, The Tattler, The Rambler, the English Reviews, French from text-books without a teacher and Rhetoric (Blair's full edition). Much of Blair's Rhetoric I studied carefully and with great benefit. Some of my papers ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... was boldly attempted, from Romeo and Juliet to Mother Goose's immortal melodies. The two clubs frequently met and mingled their attractions in a really entertaining manner, for the speakers made good actors, and the young actresses were most appreciative listeners to the eloquence of each budding Demosthenes. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... recovered almost its pristine force and strength, that the attention of its rulers was called to a small cloud on the distant horizon, which some were wise enough to see portended storm and tempest. The growing power of Macedon, against which Demosthenes was at this time in vain warning the careless Athenians, attracted the consideration of Ochus or of his counsellors; and orders went forth from the Court that Persian influence was to be used to check ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments—from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to Mr. Brougham. Our course is rather that of a good-humoured expose, the worst effect of which will be to raise a laugh at the expense of poor humanity, or a merited smile at our own dulness and mistaken ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... The orator who was then addressing the meeting, and who had waxed eloquent with his subject, now provoked considerable merriment by his ungraceful and involuntary gestures, clutching desperately at a chair, then taking a fresh hold of the table to steady himself. It well illustrated Demosthenes' famous rule for oratory, "Action! action! action!" But a more serious impression quickly prevailed among the audience, that it was high time to retire, and, like Longfellow's Arabs, they began to "silently steal away." The chairman ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... of Hudibras, occurs in a small volume of Miscellaneous Poems, by Sir John Mennis, written in the reign of Charles the Second, which has now become extremely scarce. The original of the couplet may, however, be traced to much higher authority, even to Demosthenes, who has the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... billie; True Campbells, Frederick an' Hay; An' Livingstone, the bauld Sir Willie: An' monie ithers, Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully Might ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... invited by Mr. Harris to a supper of some thirty persons, where we were the special guests. The manager toasted me, and I said something,—I trust appropriate; but just what I said is as irrecoverable as the orations of Demosthenes on the seashore, or the sermons of St. Francis to the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... had been published recently, insist that the work must have been written by an Englishman, as the allusion could apply to no one so well as him, who, having been a judge without law, and a translator of Demosthenes without Greek, had, to his other titles to public esteem, added that of being ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... the sound of words being unknown, they remain still as they originated, but another kind of sign, even after the art of reading is acquired, and do not become entities as with us. The "action, action, action," of Demosthenes is their only oratory, not the mere heightening of it, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... Latin tragedies are bad copies of the masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The Latin philosophy was borrowed, without alteration, from the Portico and the Academy; and the great Latin orators constantly proposed to themselves as patterns the speeches of Demosthenes and Lysias. ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "easily imitated style"; for, of the hundreds who have tried, how many, besides Franklin, have really succeeded in imitating it? We do not believe that Latin and Greek are an "obstructing nuisance," or that the student of Homer and Thucydides and Demosthenes and Plato and Aristotle and Caesar and Cicero and Tacitus is merely studying "the prattle of infant man," or "adding the ignorance of the ancients to the ignorance he was born with." We believe, on the contrary, that it was by such studies that Gibbon and Niebuhr and Arnold and Grote acquired their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... great orators of Greece and Rome, Demosthenes and Cicero, though each of them a leader (or as the Greeks call it a demagogue) in a popular state, yet seem to differ in their practice upon this branch of their art; the former who had to deal with ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Without some grandeur of design no man ever displayed such a countenance and port, handsome and sublime. In his intentness and earnestness, he did not suspect the liability of his expressions to the charge of a vindictiveness he was unconscious of in his own breast. It was like a philippic of Demosthenes; it was a Ciceronian oration against some Catiline, real or supposed. A poetic sort of revenge was all he meant to take, although his language to opponents, whom perhaps he sometimes mistook, may be subject to blame. Pity he was so devoid of humor to recommend ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... implicitly. He dresses and acts up to his assumed character with the skill of a man who, like the illustrious Charles Fox, has, though in private representations, practised the stage-play in which Demosthenes said the triple art of oratory consisted; who has seen a great deal of the world, and has that adaptability of intellect which knowledge of the world lends to one who is so thoroughly in earnest as to his end that he agrees to be sportive as to ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... noble songs of noble deeds of bravery or glory Are much enhanced if they're declaimed with stirring oratory. I love sonorous words that roll like billows o'er the seas; These I recite like Cicero or like Demosthenes. ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... (Pub. Econ. of Athens, book iv., chap. v.) contends, from a law preserved by Demosthenes, that the number of measures for the zeugitae was only one hundred and fifty. But his argument, derived from the analogy of the sum to be given to an heiress by her nearest relation, if he refused to marry her, is by no means convincing enough to induce us to reject the proportion ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... destroyed old laws or pulled down an old house to run up a tent, but his advice is completely ignored. New laws are made for every change in the weather, for every little daily incident in politics. We are getting used to this hand-to-mouth legislation. Like the barbarian warrior, of whom Demosthenes tells us, who always protected that portion of his person which had just received a blow, holding his shield up to his shoulder, when his shoulder had been struck, down again to his thigh when the blow fell there, the dominant faction only makes laws ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... letters. His boy, Edward the Sixth, was a fair scholar in both the classical languages. His daughter Mary wrote good Latin letters. Elizabeth began every day with an hour's reading in the Greek Testament, the tragedies of Sophocles, or the orations of Demosthenes. The ladies of the Court caught the royal fashion and were found poring over the pages of Plato. Widely as Henry's ministers differed from each other, they all agreed in sharing and fostering the culture around them. The panic of the scholar-group ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... bequests from his father, and his uncle the earl of Bath, he was chosen into parliament for Fowey. He soon after engaged in a joint translation of the Invectives against Philip, with a design, surely weak and puerile, of turning the thunder of Demosthenes upon ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... abilities his only talents; his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom—not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding through the painful subtilty ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... knew that from the beginning of oratory the orator's spontaneity was for the silence and solitude of the closet where he mused his words to an imagined audience; that this was the use of orators from Demosthenes and Cicero up and down. He studied every word and syllable, and memorized them by a system of mnemonics peculiar to himself, consisting of an arbitrary arrangement of things on a table—knives, forks, salt-cellars; inkstands, pens, boxes, or whatever was at hand—which ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... from the records of authentic history. Such is the inherent dignity of human nature, that there belong to it sublimities of virtues which all men may attain, and which no man can transcend: and though this be not true in an equal degree of intellectual power, yet in the persons of Plato, Demosthenes, and Homer, and in those of Shakespeare, Milton, and Lord Bacon, were enshrined as much of the divinity of intellect as the inhabitants of this planet can hope will ever take up its abode among them. But the question is not of the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... When Demosthenes was practising oratory, he sought the sea-shore; but Fitzgerald repaired instead to a piece of woods about half a mile distant. It was rather an ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... personal jealousy or party enmity, may have converted the innocent friendship of a great man for a noble youth into a connexion of another kind. Such accusations were brought against several of the leading men of Hellas, e.g. Cimon, Alcibiades, Critias, Demosthenes, Epaminondas: several of the Roman emperors were assailed by similar weapons which have been used even in our own day against statesmen of the highest character. (3) While we know that in this matter there is a great gulf fixed between Greek ...
— Symposium • Plato
... (Vol. iii., p. 141.).—For the information of your correspondent KENNETH R. H. MACKENZIE, I transcribe the title of the oration against Demosthenes, for which he makes inquiry, which was not "privately printed" as he supposes, but published last year by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... Dilemma employed by Demosthenes, from which the general nature of the argument may ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Mingault's notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through; one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little; all Thucydides; the Hellenics of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the Anthology; a little of Dionysius; several books of Polybius; and lastly Aristotle's Rhetoric, which, as the first expressly scientific treatise on any moral or psychological subject which ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... expect one of my age To speak in public on the stage; And if I chance to fall below Demosthenes or Cicero, Don't view me with a critic's eye, But pass my imperfections by. Large streams from little fountains flow, Tall oaks ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various |
