"Rhetoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wilderness of prejudice and ridicule for forty years feel a peculiar tenderness for the young women on whose shoulders we are about to leave our burdens. Although we have opened a pathway to the promised land and cleared up much of the underbrush of false sentiment, logic and rhetoric intertwisted with law and custom, which blocked all avenues in starting, yet there are still many obstacles to be encountered before the rough journey is ended. The younger women are starting with great advantages ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... know at the outset what this book does not attempt to do. It does not, save to the extent that its own special purpose requires, concern itself with the many and intricate problems of grammar, rhetoric, spelling, punctuation, and the like; or clarify the thousands of individual difficulties regarding correct usage. All these matters are important. Concise treatment of them may be found in THE CENTURY HANDBOOK OF WRITING and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and sour; it never appeals to the affections, but it scatters denunciations, and rules by terror. Scepticism is proud and self-sufficient. It refuses to believe in mysteries and deals in rhetoric and sophistry, and flatters the vanity, by exalting human reason. My poor lost flock will see the change, and I fear, feel it too. Besides, absence is a temporary death. Now I am gone from them, they will forget my frailties and infirmities, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... restored, and the man was made to understand, by the use of forcible figures and rhetoric, that Tennessee's offense could not be condoned by money, his face took a more serious and sanguinary hue, and those who were nearest to him noticed that his rough hand trembled slightly on the table. He hesitated a moment as he slowly returned the ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... the start. The Peace Society has the argument its own way. The bloody field, the mangled dying, hoof-trampled into the reeking sod, the groans, and cries, and curses, the wrath, and hate, and madness, the horror and the hell of a great battle, are things no rhetoric can ever make lovely. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Bob led in prayer, and what the old man lacked in grammer and rhetoric was fully made up for in fervency ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... it was indeed a strange experience to realize that this boy of so great talent and promise was being educated in the knowledge of the affairs of men. I have not set forth his accomplishments, tricked out with rhetoric so as to exceed the truth; of which, in sooth, my relation falls short." Cardan next draws a figure of Edward's horoscope, and devotes several pages to the customary jargon of astrologers; and, under ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... possession of the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid their differences before the Spartans (cir. 600-580 B.C.). Each party quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale (Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited Iliad, II. 558: "Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the Athenians were posted." Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that the Athenians ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... road which could lead only to their overthrow; and for their own sake, and for the sake of the institution itself of which he meant to be an illustrious ornament, he not only supported the Manilian proposition, but supported it in a speech more effective than the wildest outpourings of democratic rhetoric. ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... himself. If she elected to be at all wifely and cling to her husband in his misfortune, then he would assert the sovereign, and as readily gore her as he would Napoleon if, in his patriarchal wisdom, he judged national interests were at stake. His spirit-crushing rhetoric had a real ultra-monarchical ring about it. But it was meant for other ears and a purpose other than that of making his daughter shudder. So far as she was concerned, he might have saved himself any anxiety on that score. She bowed her head in conformity, and swiftly cast her amorous eyes ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... encouraged education by supporting at least three teachers in every town of any considerable importance. They taught rhetoric and oratory and explained the works of the great writers. The Romans, who had no marked literary or artistic ability, had adopted the culture of the Greeks. This was spread abroad by the government teachers so that an educated man was pretty sure to find, ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the person; the regulation of the family; and the government of the state. These form the steps of a climax, the end of which is the kingdom tranquillized. Pauthier calls the paragraphs where they occur instances of the sorites, or abridged syllogism. But they elong to rhetoric, and not to logic. 6. In offering some observations on these steps, and the writer's treatment of them, it will be well to separate them into those preceding the cultivation of the person, and those following it; and to 1 Cl. Text, ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... arguments make themselves felt as though in mechanical involuntary protest. But their force and vitality was gone. Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery fallible man of genius—so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free and temperate criticism—the rector knew, in a sort of dull way, that his choice was made. The one picture carried reason and imagination with it; the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we descend from the airy height of Nationalist rhetoric to the prosaic region of fact, we find that the rates of the City of Belfast amount to about L342,000; of this sum, Roman Catholic ratepayers pay less than L18,000. There are nine hundred Roman Catholics in the employment of the Corporation, and they ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... took the end of a different bench, and rather stiffly sat gazing into the shadowy severity of the big room. Sounding from the front of the Court House they heard rather vaguely the deep-chested, sonorous rhetoric of ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... title. Sometimes that title has been created by an Act of Parliament, and sometimes it is a title recognised by the general laws and customs of the realm, but a legal title it has got to be. Titles are never matters of rhetoric, nor are they jure divino, or conferred in answer to prayer; they are strictly legal matters, and it is the very particular business of courts of law, when properly invoked, to recognise and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... scattered over Salamanca fagots each of which contained innumerable sticks that his opponents used later to beat him with. Lastly, he had the misfortune, as it proved later, to differ profoundly on exegetical points from a veteran Professor of Latin, Rhetoric, and Greek.[36] This was Leon de Castro, a man of considerable but unassimilated learning, an astute wire-puller and incorrigible reactionary whose name figures in the bibliographies as the author of a series of commentaries on Isaiah—a performance which has ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... liberator and saviour of my country," rejoined Steele, in a characteristic burst of his amazingly fervent rhetoric. "Yes, you, in the discharge of your ethereal functions as the moral regenerator of Ireland, may forgive him; but, revered leader, I also have functions of my own to perform; and I tell you that, as Head Pacificator of Ireland, I can never forgive ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the use of these apparently troublesome words must be sought in text-books on grammar and rhetoric, where the subject will be found treated with a more particular attention, and at greater length, than is possible in a book of the character of this. Briefly and generally, in the first person, a mere intention is indicated by ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... was twenty-four years old, and able to bear arms. The war was put up to our generation. I don't know what for; the sins of our fathers, probably. Certainly not to make the world safe for Democracy, or any rhetoric of that sort. When I was doing stretcher work, I had to tell myself over and over that nothing would come of it, but that it had to be. Sometimes, though, I think something must.... Nothing we expect, but something unforeseen." ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... frequently happens with Du Bois-Reymond's articles, for he knows too well how to conceal the weakness of his argument and evidence, and the shallowness of his thought, by striking images and flowery metaphors, and by all the phraseology of rhetoric in which the versatile French nature is so superior to our sober German one. It is all the more important that we should not let ourselves be dazzled by these seductive tricks, and particularly by adduced facts ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... was her duty not to endanger herself for the sake of a little excitement or amusement. Violet could only shut her eyes to restrain the burning tears, and listen, without one word in vindication, until Lady Elizabeth had exhausted her rhetoric, and, rising, with some coolness told her she still hoped that she would think better of it, but that she wished ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... uproar being at once converted to applause, he invited Chromatistes, the leader of the Sedition, into the centre of the hall, to receive in the name of his followers the submission of the Hierarchy. Then followed a speech, a masterpiece of rhetoric, which occupied nearly a day in the delivery, and to which ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... on his wife, and the significant speech passed him as unheeded as had the colonel's rhetoric. She was looking very handsome and slightly flushed, with a proud light in her eyes that he had never seen before. Absorbed in the discussion, she seemed to be paying little attention to Captain Pinckney as she rose ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... that I do not greatly admire the English style of the gentleman who composes the War Office placards that one sees at railway stations in the north. These are meant to allure country labourers to join the army, but the following piece of fatuous rhetoric must surely act rather as a deterrent than otherwise:—"Are you, the descendants of those who conquered India and carried the colours of the Gordon Highlanders through the Peninsula and at Waterloo, content to sit at home, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... if he wanted to, without personal defilement. And since the way of the world is that a man who has won the first of his contentions can win all the rest with half the ease, he persuaded them with a hurricane of black man's rhetoric to do what Arabs ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... knots under the porticoes, eagerly discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... dumb rhetoric is more ridiculous than your talking impertinence, as an ape is a much more ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... current sentiments of that time on the subject of slavery? It will be seen that they are of the most radical type. I am not aware that Wendell Phillips or Wm. Lloyd Garrison ever claimed that the negro race was equal in its capacity for improvement to the white race. While its rhetoric was more chaste, they certainly never denounced the system in more vigorous ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... fetched by Jupiter into heaven, Hephaestion dear to Alexander, Antinous to Adrian. Plato calls beauty for that cause a privilege of nature, Naturae gaudentis opus, nature's masterpiece, a dumb comment; Theophrastus, a silent fraud; still rhetoric Carneades, that persuades without speech, a kingdom without a guard, because beautiful persons command as so many captains; Socrates, a tyranny, "which tyranniseth over tyrants themselves;" which made Diogenes belike call proper ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim—to prefer the concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the definite to the vague—as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say on it. The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke (prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by setting a passage from Burke's speech "On Conciliation with ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... is shown by the long "Address to the President of the United States on the subject of his Address," published in 1802, and called out by Jefferson's inaugural, then six months old. The principles laid down in that address, in the midst of much fine rhetoric, had begun to be shown in practice, and Webster employs argument and invective to lay bare the falseness of Jefferson's professions. His longest and sharpest attack is upon the policy pursued by the President ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... desired effect. It proved utterly unintelligible to his younger listeners, with the exception of the few offensive terms, already sufficiently distinguished, and though Ellen better comprehended the meaning of the herald, she appeared as little moved by his rhetoric as her companions. At those passages which he intended should be tender and affecting, the intelligent girl, though tortured by painful feelings, had even manifested a disposition to laugh, while to the threats she turned an utterly ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... throat at last, and I was just reaching for the balm of Gilead with my other hand to give him a dose that would have done him for one while! Ah, it's too bad, too bad! Well! well! But—haw! haw! haw!—didn't Gerrish tangle himself up beautifully in his rhetoric? I guess we shall fix Brother Gerrish yet, and I don't think we shall let Brother Peck off without a tussle. I'm going to try print on Brother Gerrish. I'm going to ask him in the Hatboro' Register—he doesn't advertise, and the editor's as independent as ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... primed in the morning by the sorcerer. The process of priming consists in kneeling on the orator's shoulders and tugging at the hair of his head with might and main, which is clearly calculated to promote the flow of his rhetoric. If none of the hair comes out in the sorcerer's hands, a masterpiece of oratory is confidently looked forward to in the afternoon. When the speech, for which such painful preparations have been made, is at last over, the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... rhetoric, must, in all probability, have retired in confusion, if Amene had not taken his part, and said to Zobeide and Safie, "My dear sisters, I conjure you to let him remain; I need not tell you that he will afford us some diversion, of this you perceive he is capable: I assure you, had ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... were sneered at by the Royal, and the antiquaries avenged themselves by their obstinate incredulity at the prodigies of the naturalists; the student of classical literature was equally slighted by the new philosophers; who, leaving the study of words and the elegancies of rhetoric for the study merely of things, declared as the cynical ancient did of metaphors, "Poterimus vivere sine illis"—We can do very well without them! The ever-witty South, in his oration at Oxford, made this poignant reflection on the Royal Society—"Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos, et seipsos." ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... speaking was "beautifully terrible." As a stump-speaker Col. Gibson was then without a rival in the West. His oratory was an irresistible fascination, and no audience could ever grow tired of him. The speeches of Mr. Bingham were always admirable. His rhetoric was singularly charming. He was an artist in his work, but seldom repeated himself, while gathering fresh inspiration, and following some new line of thought at every meeting. After our work was done in the ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... korekti, ekzameni. Revival revivigo. Revive revivigi. Revocable nuligebla. Revocation nuligo. Revoke nuligi. Revolt ribelo. Revolution revolucio. Revolve turnigxi, pivoti. Revulsion antipatio. Reward premio, rekompenco. Rhapsodist rapsodiisto. Rhapsody rapsodio. Rhetoric parolarto, retoriko. Rhetorical elokventa, retorika. Rheumatic reuxmatisma. Rheumatism reuxmatismo. Rhinoceros rinocero. Rhomb rombo. Rhombus rombo. Rhubarb rabarbo. Rhyme rimi. Rhythm ritmo. Rib ripo. Ribald malcxasta, dibocxa. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... "opposing party" will not take the trouble to point out—even to observe—that the "debasing sentiments" and "criminal views" uttered in speech and platform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric. Doubtless an American politician, statesman, what you will, could go into a political convention and signify his views with simple, unpretentious common sense, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... worker from Hispania," he thundered with persuasive rhetoric, "his age but two dozen years, his skill unequalled on either bank of the Tiber ... A tunic worked by him is softer than the fleeciest wool, and the sheath of a dagger becomes in his hands as hard as steel.... Good health and strength, two thousand sesterces were ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to indulge in rhetoric and to dwell upon the magnificence of some of the more luxurious houses of the wealthy Romans; to describe their ostentation of rich marbles in pillar, wall, or floor—the white marbles of Carrara, Paros, and Hymettus; the Phrygian marble ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... invalid clergyman stood up and prayed, and read a chapter of God's Word, after which he preached—ay, preached in a way that drew tears from some, and hearty exclamations of thankfulness from others. It was not the power of rhetoric or of eloquence though he possessed both, so much as that mighty power, which consists in being thoroughly and intensely earnest in what one says, and in using a natural, ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... bold step to gather the disciples in 'the school of Tyrannus.' He was probably a Greek professor of rhetoric or lecturer on philosophy, and Paul may have hired his hall, to the horror, no doubt, of the Rabbis. It was a complete breaking with the synagogue and a bold appeal to the heathen public. Ephesus must have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... All this rhetoric, impatient friend—and be a friend still, whether writer, reviewer, or unauthorial—serves at my most expeditious pace, opposing notions considered, to introduce what is (till to-morrow, or perhaps the next coming minute, but at any rate for this flitting instant ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... United States in stipulating for their protection. I felt the force of what Judge Grier had expressed in his opinion in the case of The United States vs. Sutherland, in the 19th of Howard, that the rhetoric which denounced the grants as enormous monopolies and princedoms might have a just influence when urged to those who had a right to give or refuse; but as the United States had bound themselves by a treaty to acknowledge and protect all bona fide titles granted by the previous ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... rhetoric and declamation teach economy in words; show the pupils by illustration and example how much better they look when their ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... accomplishments chiefly, and a classical scholar, if unacquainted with modern science and literature, is hopelessly ignorant. "If any one," said Hegius, the teacher of Erasmus, "wishes to learn grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, history, or holy scripture, let him read Greek;" and in his day this was as true as it is false and absurd in our own. In the Middle Ages, Latin was made the groundwork of the educational system, not on account of any special value it may have ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Cassiodorus established there a brotherhood, which, for a time at least, must have been a formidable rival to that of S. Benedict. A library held a prominent place in his conception of what was needed for their common life. He says little about its size or composition, but much rhetoric is expended on the contrivances by which its usefulness and attractiveness were to be increased. A staff of bookbinders was to clothe the manuscripts in decorous attire; self-supplying lamps were to light nocturnal workers; sundials ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he was a man.' The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of Miracles; for he ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... really infidels in their hearts, and have nothing like what we can call a belief of the eternal duration of their souls. For let us consider on the one hand what divines have displayed with such eloquence concerning the importance of eternity; and at the same time reflect, that though in matters of rhetoric we ought to lay our account with some exaggeration, we must in this case allow, that the strongest figures are infinitely inferior to the subject: And after this let us view on the other hand, the prodigious security of men in this particular: I ask, if these people really believe what is inculcated ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... her, but she tasted the compliment which ignored her social eclipse. Redgrave's conversation generally kept on the prosaic levels—studiously polite, or suavely cynical. It was a new experience to see him borne on a wave of rhetoric; yet not borne away, for he spoke with an ease, a self-command, which to older ears would have suggested skill rather than feeling. He had nothing of the ardour of youth; his poise and deliberation were quite in keeping with the two score years that ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... rival as queen, then, but as woman. As regards education, she could sustain comparison with advantage; for if she had less charm of mind, she had more solidity of judgment: versed in politics, philosophy, history; rhetoric, poetry and music, besides English, her maternal tongue, she spoke and wrote to perfection Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish; but while Elizabeth excelled Mary on this point, in her turn Mary was more beautiful, and above all ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... words. I remember a young wife who had to part with her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and die. When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... impatient for the return of the time when he might enjoy it. He would invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of such expression as it was not possible to misinterpret. If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth, and pull at it with all his force. Thus Puss might be said to be perfectly tamed; the shyness of his nature was done away, and on the whole it was visible, by many symptoms which ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... these dismantled stories of Rome, and we should be presented with the spectacle of one continuous city, stretching its labyrinthine pomp to the shores of the Adriatic." This is so far from being meant as a piece of rhetoric, that, on the very contrary, the whole purpose is to substitute for a vague and rhetorical expression of the Roman grandeur one of a more definite character—viz., by presenting its dimensions in a new form, and supposing the city to be uncrested, as it were; its ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... year 1897 one man sent an article of sixty-eight closely typewritten pages of legal cap, asking that she give it a careful reading, revise it, and send it where it would be published; and no postage stamps accompanied this nervy request. A woman whose grammar and rhetoric were most defective announced that she had written a book called "The Intemperate Life of my Father;" also two stories and a play. She would send all of them to Miss Anthony, to 'fix up just as if they were her own and ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... vista of vast and successful future speculation. A few days after, Abner Dean of Angel's received a letter from him, stating that he was going to Visalia to buy horses. "I am satisfied," wrote Plunkett, with that elevated rhetoric for which his correspondence was remarkable,—"I am satisfied that we are at last developing the real resources of California. The world will yet look to Dow's Flat as the great stock-raising centre. In view of the interests involved, I have deferred my departure for a month." ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... fashion of more intellectual states to extol the institutions of which they saw only from afar and through a glass the apparent benefits, without examining the concomitant defects. An Athenian might laud the Spartan austerity, as Tacitus might laud the German barbarism; it was the panegyric of rhetoric and satire, of wounded patriotism or disappointed ambition. Although the ephors made the government really and latently democratic, yet the concentration of its action made it seemingly oligarchic; and in its ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... give a hollow groan and sink under the table when this awful polemical rhetoric began. To his unbounded surprise Mrs Quantock answered ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... but self-love in disguise? As if the fruit or the flower not only depends on a root as one of the conditions among others of its development, but is itself actually the root! Apart from the error in logic, what an error in rhetoric, to single out the formula best calculated to fill a doctrine with odious associations, and then to make that formula the most prominent feature in the exposition. Without any gain in clearness or definiteness or firmness, the reader is deliberately misled towards a form that is ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... all he said: there he began To shew the fulness of his heart; there ended. Some short excursions of a broken vow He made indeed, but flat insipid stuff; But, when he made his loss the theme, he flourished, Relieved his fainting rhetoric with new figures, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Billfinger, being charged with a kind of rhetoric, makes speeches every time we stop. We explained to such citizens as we happened to step on that we were celebrating the dawn of our own private brand of liberty, and to please enter such inhumanities as we might commit on ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... certain circumstances one canister is worth a flood of rhetoric. Till to-morrow, then, Comrade Jarvis. I am ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... name Restoring what has been lent us, wit usury and accession Revenge more wounds our children than it heals us Revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties Reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms Rhetoric: an art to flatter and deceive Rhetoric: to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble Richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow Ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them Right of command appertains ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... influence than in his actual work. Some of his Odes—among which his great address to Louis XIII on the rebellion of La Rochelle deserves the highest place—are admirable examples of a restrained, measured and weighty rhetoric, moving to the music not of individual emotion, but of a generalized feeling for the beauty and grandeur of high thoughts. He was essentially an oratorical poet; but unfortunately the only forms of verse ready to his hand were lyrical forms; so that his genius never found a ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... and finding himself puzzled concerning the sense of a passage in the books of the Rhetoric of Cicero, which he was to explain the next day to his scholars, was much disquieted when he went to bed, and could hardly get to sleep. During his sleep he fancied he saw St. Augustine, who was then at ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... that has come down to us, dealing with the whole question of the power of the dead to appear to those whom they love in dreams, is undoubtedly Quintilian's Tenth Declamation. The fact that the greatest teacher of rhetoric of his day actually chose it as a subject for one of his model speeches shows how important a part it must have played in the feelings of educated Romans of the time. The story is ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... Figures of Rhetoric.—A special characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is the rarity of similes. In Homer they are frequent, but Anglo-Saxon verse is too abrupt and rapid in the succession of images to employ the expanded simile. The long poem of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of me; to have is to have; for it is a great figure in Gladstonian rhetoric, that votes being deducted from one Party and added to another, by putting the one Out do put the other In; for all your writers do consent that ipse is he: now you are not ipse, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... conceives to be impracticable, except to that extent to which it is accomplished by a sound system of Logic; including under that title, a portion—that which relates to the "Laws of Evidence"—of what is sometimes treated under the head of "Rhetoric." But the full and complete accomplishment of such an object would confer on Man the ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... to be overpowered by the forcible rhetoric of the squire; and it being agreed that Western should close with Allworthy that very afternoon, the lover departed home, having first earnestly begged that no violence might be offered to the lady by this haste, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... centuries has been amusing herself on all public occasions with Fourth of July rhetoric against kings, and in praise of tyrannicides. Rome for centuries has been cherishing in her heart what she calls a love of Freedom,—to scourge your slaves, steal from your provincials, and waste your substance ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... supper,—he, the American, who had repeatedly drunk Frenchmen and Englishmen under the table—could be transformed into a sentimental, stagey idiot by a single glass of wine? He was conscious, too, of asking himself these very questions in a stilted sort of rhetoric, and with a rising brutality of anger that was new to him. And then everything swam before him, and he seemed to ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... no very great violence to include rhetoric, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, ritual, and every form of decorative art in the category of language and to bring them under the same general laws, since even philosophy may to a large extent be treated in the same way. Christ has not commissioned ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Mephistopheles. This rhetoric of thine to me Hath a somewhat bombastic savor. Any small scrap of paper's good. Thy signature will need a single drop ...
— Faust • Goethe
... something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, Euphues ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... in which he now came to operate, General Pope did not confine himself to these flourishes of rhetoric. He proceeded to inaugurate a military policy in vivid contrast to General McClellan's. His "expatriation orders" directed that all male citizens disloyal to the United States should be immediately arrested; the oath of allegiance ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... by Min and Landis were nearest her own. She stopped there first. She found the girls busy, Landis at the study-table, putting the last touches to a composition for the following day's rhetoric. Min was sitting on a low chair by the window, sewing braid on the bottom of a dress-skirt. Unconsciously, Elizabeth gave the article in Min's hand a second glance, and recognized it as the skirt Landis generally ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... among the officers and men in the field, but you hear it on all sides now, uttered with a sincerity and earnestness that is peculiarly impressive. The new style of saying "good-bye" has at least the merit of being no longer a perfunctory piece of rhetoric. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... out of use with the disuse of ink-horns. It would be very easy to multiply instances where the word is employed in our old writers. It most frequently occurs in Wilson's "Rhetoric," where is inserted an epistle composed of ink-horn terms; "suche a letter as Wylliam Sommer himself could not make a better for that purpose. Some will thinke, and swere it too, that there never ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... These public bodies were jointly to nominate seven professors, who should lecture successively, one on every day of the week, on the seven sciences of Divinity, Astronomy, Music, Geometry, Law, Medicine, and Rhetoric. The salaries of the lecturers were defrayed by the profits arising from the Royal Exchange, and were very liberal. The wisdom of my patron is shown by the sciences he directed should be taught. He considered Divinity to be the most important, and after that, holding as I know he did in great ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... that fed the fire—small blame to them that heard The "bhoys" get drunk on rhetoric, and madden at the word— They knew whom they were talking at, if they were Irish too, The gentlemen that lied in Court, they ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... [28] According to the judgment of the most impartial critics, the superficial learning of Augustin was confined to the Latin language; [29] and his style, though sometimes animated by the eloquence of passion, is usually clouded by false and affected rhetoric. But he possessed a strong, capacious, argumentative mind; he boldly sounded the dark abyss of grace, predestination, free will, and original sin; and the rigid system of Christianity which he framed or restored, [30] has been entertained, with public applause, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Charles Fox, during a visit to La Grange not long before his death. And Fox, it will be remembered, had exerted all his eloquence to induce the English Government to demand the liberation of Lafayette from Olmuetz,—an act which called down upon him at the time the bitterest invectives of party rhetoric, but which the historian of England now records as a bright page in the life of one of her greatest men. Ah, how different would our record be, if we could always follow our instinct of immortality, and in all our actions look thoughtfully ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... he still thinks that the British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding. English life seems to him to suffer from a lack of edifying rhetoric (which he calls moral tone); English behavior to show a want of respect for womanhood; English pronunciation to fail very vulgarly in tackling such words as world, girl, bird, etc.; English society to be plain spoken to an extent which stretches occasionally to intolerable ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... 1559, about three years after his father's death, Tycho was sent to the University of Copenhagen, to study rhetoric and philosophy, with the view of preparing for the study of the law, and qualifying himself for some of those political offices which his rank entitled him to expect. In this situation he contracted no fondness for any particular study; ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... the rest was not so easy, for Nora, who loathed history, was obliged to take ancient history to complete her history group, the other girls having wisely completed theirs the previous year. Jessica wanted to take physical geography, Anne rhetoric, and Grace boldly announced a hankering ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... I ask is," said Mr. Spinks, connecting into one thread the two subjects of discourse, as became a man learned in rhetoric, and beating with his hand in a way which signified that the manner rather than the matter of his speech was to be observed, "how did Mr. Maybold know she could play the organ? You know we had it from her own lips, as far as lips go, that she has never, first ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... latter. So, if languages are your choice, and mathematical study your aversion, take hold of the odious task with steady and sturdy endeavor, and you will soon convert it into a pleasure. The same is true of grammar, of geography, of history, of composition, of rhetoric, of mental and moral science, of elocution,—of every branch. If you are wise, you will give your chief attention in school to those branches for which you feel the least inclination, and in which you find it most difficult to excel. You ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... measure of bliss, I dare say; but in one throb, the singer's heart, as it leaps in exultation at the loud delight of her applausive thousands, must out-enjoy them all. Let me lay these poor little artificial flowers of rhetoric at the feet of the divine singer, as a faint token of gratitude and ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... few days' illness he kicked, is a vulgar way of putting it and analogous to the English slang idiom. The Emperor becomes a guest on high, riding up to heaven on the dragon's back, with flowers of rhetoric ad nauseam; Buddhist priests revolve into emptiness, i.e., are annihilated; the soul of the Taoist priest wings ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... CHAPIN, whose effective elocution and brilliant rhetoric attract crowds to his ordinary discourses at the Universalist Church in Murray-street, has in the press of Mr. J. S. Redfield, a volume upon "Womanhood, Illustrated by the Women of the New Testament"—not treating of these characters in the offensive style ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... but vivid impression was received from all our writers of history, philosophy, and rhetoric that the Scottish element was something really valuable in itself, was something which even Englishmen were forced to recognise and respect. If we ever admitted the beauty of Ireland, it was as something which might be loved by an Englishman but which could hardly be respected even by an Irishman. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... together.[136] Fithian speaks of him as a good scholar, even in classical learning, and a remarkable one in English grammar. Frequently the gentlemen of this period spent much time in the study of such matters as astronomy, the ancient languages, rhetoric, ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... honour and service." Bruno and Notger of Liege (974-1005) undertook to reform their clergy and to encourage intellectual culture. Under their guidance, Liege became once more a great centre of learning. Besides theology, grammar, rhetoric and poetry, music and mathematics were taught in the city, which could boast of being a "Northern Athens." The movement reached Cambrai and Utrecht, and one of the most important chronicles of the time, Sigebert's De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis—a first attempt towards ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... profession—belongs to the community of letters. Nay, he need not use his pen at all. The speeches of great orators are among the most treasured features of any national literature. The orations of Mr. Grattan are the text-books in the schools of rhetoric in the United States. Mr. Bright, under this aspect of him, holds a foremost place among the men of ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... and the body are one, indissoluble. Soul is body, and body is soul. Love is the God-like instinct of procreation. You think sexual attraction is something to be ignored, and in its place you put a bloodless sentimentality—the vulgar rhetoric of a penny novelette. If I marry a woman, it is that she may be the mother of children. Passion is the only reason for marriage; unless it exists, marriage is ugly and beastly. It's worse than beastly; the ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... progress, for material advancement, for moral and social betterment, is stifled, that everybody may have breath to shout for a flapping trouser's leg worn by a degraded old sot. All that your Southern statesmen have had to give a people who were stripped to the bone is fulsome rhetoric about the Wounded Warrior of Wahoo, or some other inflated nonentity, whereupon the mesmerized population have loyally fallen on their faces and shouted, 'Praise the Lord.' And all the while they were going through this wretched ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... chiseled on my stone the words: "His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him That nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man." Those who knew me smile As they read this empty rhetoric. My epitaph should have been: "Life was not gentle to him, And the elements so mixed in him That he made warfare on life In the which he was slain." While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... register, improvising, modulating from one minor key to another in a cobweb of silver harmony spun pale and low from a minimum of technical attention. For once Bernard had struck home. "The shot that broke your arm broke your life." Stripped of Bernard's rhetoric, was ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... uncorrupted, pray! And, when it must be given away, See it be given with a sense Of most uncanvassed innocence. Alas!—but few there be that know't— How grave a thing it is to vote! For most men's votes are given, I hear, Either for rhetoric or—beer. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... thought of this, and the cloakroom move did not disconcert him. He seized on one of the most reverend of the Senate walruses, one festooned with the very seaweed of Senate tradition, and, casting him, as it were, on the coals of his hot rhetoric, proceeded to roast him exhaustively. The cloakroom walruses smelled the odor of burning blubber and returned eagerly to their cakes of ice, for there is nothing so pleasing to your true walrus as the spectacle of a brother walrus being grilled. It was in time understood that if ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... remove all doubt as to why 'twas called bleeding Kansas. John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief's costume, drew crowds away from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones. While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes, and when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers, eloquent, about chilblains and hyperaesthesia of the cranium, Jeff couldn't hand out the Indian ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... (knowing the fact) when you were a boy, did you examine your own opinions? and did you not then, as you do all things now, do as you did do? and when you were become a youth and attended the rhetoricians, and yourself practised rhetoric, what did you imagine that you were deficient in? And when you were a young man and engaged in public matters, and pleaded causes yourself, and were gaining reputation, who then seemed your equal? And when would you have submitted to any man examining and ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... which the above is a fair specimen were not very remarkable for literary merit or political wisdom. For the most part they were simply bits of bombastic rhetoric couched in doggerel rhyme, and they have consequently been long since consigned to well-merited oblivion—so completely that it is now difficult to obtain copies of them.* They have, however, an historical interest, because they express in a more or less exaggerated ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the rhetoric in the world, the plastic art teaches those who study it the gradation of proportions, the fusion of planes, in a word, harmony. The ancient races, through the very fact of their existence, left the mark ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... government, had for its object the extinction of individual rights and the deification of capital. Church and state united in the unholy effort to Crush the masses, and intriguing politicians, by dint of dazzling rhetoric and plausible promises, lured the people on to secure their own downfall at the polls. The only remedy for this Lyon saw in the elevation of the masses. 'It is the greatest political revolution yet to be effected,' he says, 'to bring the laboring man to know that honest industry ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the jury," Anstey commenced in his clear, mellow tones, "I do not propose to occupy your time with a long speech. The evidence that has been laid before you is at once so intelligible, so lucid, and so conclusive, that you will, no doubt, arrive at your verdict uninfluenced by any display of rhetoric either on my part or on the part of the learned ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... no notice of the interruption, being carried away by the torrent of his own rhetoric, but he had not allowed for the persistence of the interrupter. The jock got slowly to his feet, and announced that he wanted satisfaction. 'If ye open your dirty gab to blagyird honest men, I'll come up on the platform ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... parties, if not to countenance its own sentiments, at least to condemn those advocated by its opponents,[169] and thus to perform the office of an umpire.[170] From this necessity, then, of being prepared on all sides for attack,[171] it became as much a school of rhetoric as of philosophy,[172] and was celebrated among the ancients for the eloquence of its masters.[173] Hence also its reputation was continually varying: for, requiring the aid of great abilities to maintain its exalted and arduous post, it ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... He went through Watts' 'Logic' last winter, but having no taste for that study, or rather an aversion to it, he is not so well skilled in that as in some other parts of learning. About a year ago he went through so much of rhetoric as is contained in the 'Preceptor,' but suppose he has forgot the most of it. Upon the whole, though he may not, perhaps, be so well versed in some parts of learning as the class which he proposes to enter, yet if he applies himself to his studies with proper diligence, he will be rather ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... Gibbon had taken the stilted tone of the old French tragedy for his model, rather than the crisp and nervous prose of the best French writers. We are constantly offended by a superfine diction lavished on barbarous chiefs and rough soldiers of the Lower Empire, which almost reproduces the high-flown rhetoric in which Corneille's and Racine's characters address each other. Such phrases as the "majesty of the throne," "the dignity of the purple," the "wisdom of the senate," recur with a rather jarring monotony, especially when the rest of ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... quietly talking over a matter of law with the judge, or a matter of fact with the jury, like men of business as they are, and shunning, as they would a rattlesnake, all clap-trap arguments, figures, flowers, and the obsolete embroidery of rhetoric? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... altogether certain what a broad principle is, we quite naturally greet with an anguished yawn an argument that seems to involve the reading of more government reports, more statistics, more curves and more graphs. For all these are in the first instance just as confusing as partisan rhetoric, and much ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... even if that of God be not. The motionless figures about one subtly penetrate one's consciousness, though not through the senses. They testify to their belief in God when they do not speak better than they could with rhetoric or eloquence. It is the influence of many, not of one; yet of certain leaders who are the organs of this impression, and of the human entity made of many who in communion become one. The self-control of it breathes power, and principle, and courage. One would expect a Quaker meeting to exert ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... rose to eloquence, an eloquence inspired by the hunger of his soul after truth eternal, and the love he bore to his brethren who fed on husks—an eloquence innocent of the tricks of elocution or the arts of rhetoric: to have discovered himself using one of them would have sent him home to his knees in shame and fear—an eloquence not devoid of discords, the strings of his instrument being now slack with emotion, now tense with vision, yet even in those discords shrouding the essence ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... ingenious writers have assured us, that, having slain a bull at the altar, he caught the blood in a large bowl, and, drinking it off, fell suddenly dead upon the ground. For this species of death had a tragical air, and might be described with all the pomp of rhetoric; whereas the ordinary way of dying afforded no opportunity for ornament. As it will, therefore, suit your purpose, that Coriolanus should resemble Themistocles in every thing, I give you leave to introduce the fatal bowl; ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Phippeny, with that absence of mere rhetoric characteristic of people whose solid work is done otherwise ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-29), was a man of culture and literary tastes. He published his lectures on rhetoric, delivered during his tenure of the Boylston Professorship at Harvard in 1806-9; he left a voluminous diary, which has been edited since his death in 1848; and among his experiments in poetry is one of considerable merit, entitled The Wants ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... 'Kritiker og Portraite' (Critiques and Portraits), and a useful comment in Boyesen's 'Scandinavian Literature.' When not perverted by his translators, it is perhaps better suited than any other to the comprehension of children. His syntax and rhetoric are often faulty; and in the 'Tales' he does not hesitate to take liberties even with German, if he can but catch the vivid, darting imagery of juvenile fancy, the "ohs" and "ahs" of the nursery, its changing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... times, Javelle tried to write a book, a great and learned book on rhetoric, he could never finish it. For seven years he laboured at preparing it, collecting notes, seeking corroborative evidence. His Alpine climbing had taught him the elusiveness of isolated peaks of knowledge. He saw that rhetoric is ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... sophists; and this family resemblance may be traced in the Ion. The rhapsode belongs to the realm of imitation and of opinion: he professes to have all knowledge, which is derived by him from Homer, just as the sophist professes to have all wisdom, which is contained in his art of rhetoric. Even more than the sophist he is incapable of appreciating the commonest logical distinctions; he cannot explain the nature of his own art; his great memory contrasts with his inability to follow the steps of the argument. And ...
— Ion • Plato
... time he perhaps talked not quite so much. When his 'set' was formed, the currents of argument and rhetoric had once more free course, but they were beginning to flow less turbidly. His nature, as we know, was not merely vehement; he had the instincts of a philosophical inquirer, and his intellect speedily outgrew the stage of callowness. When he came ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... study very hard; he spent two years in the fourth form, managed to get through the third in one twelvemonth, then spent two more in the second, and was nearly twenty when he reached the rhetoric class. He had grown into a tall, fair youth, with whiskered cheeks and a budding moustache. He came over to Les Peuples every Sunday now, instead of his mother going to see him; and as he had been taking riding lessons for some time past, he hired a horse and accomplished ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... followed by a sudden sense of shame that he had ever thus publicly bared his feelings, and then by the illogical but irresistible conviction that it was false and stupid. The few phrases she had pointed out appeared as cheap and hollow rhetoric amid the surroundings of their social tete-a-tete over the luncheon-table. There was small danger that this heady wine of woman's praise would make him betray himself; there was no sign of gratified authorship in his voice as he quietly laid down the paper and said dryly: "I am ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... some time mere figures of rhetoric," replied Petronius, carelessly. "But since Greek rhetoricians taught us, it is easier for me even to say Hera ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... confound the plainest truths, and with arguments to color the most unjustifiable pretensions. The splendid and popular class was composed of the advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric. Careless of fame and of justice, they are described, for the most part, as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, and of disappointment; from whence, after a tedious series ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... skilfully grouped, and ticketed with such and such a name. No one sees a man within. As biographies they will not be remembered, but as instances of labored learning, of careful special pleading, and of brilliant rhetoric. Elsewhere, however, he has descended from philosophy, and not been above the pedantry of detail. And he has given us, in consequence, charming lives,—successful, in fact, just so far as he has followed in the footsteps of the old Greek. Yet who would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... way what I shall try to do roughly—that is, formulate some rules or establish principles by which we, who are not endowed with genius, may so gauge our work as to avoid doing that which is truly bad. No great author was ever made by studying grammar, rhetoric, language, history, or by imitating some ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... some middle and participating natures. That we are the breath and similitude of God, it is indisputable, and upon record of holy Scripture; but to call ourselves a microcosm, or little world, I thought it only a pleasant trope of rhetoric, till my near judgment and second thoughts told me there was a real truth therein: for first we are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kind of being not yet privileged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too eloquent rhetoric. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... capabilities of the sentient to the insentient, as a mere figure to express the hopes of men with regard to the perfecting of the insentient for the comfort of men, were a violence as unfit in rhetoric as in its own nature. Take another part of the same utterance: 'For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now:' is it not manifest that to interpret such words as referring to the mere imperfections of ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... doing it, while the mere act of dropping a ballot in a box is about the simplest, shortest, and cleanest that can be done. Last winter Senator Frelinghuysen, repeating, I am sure thoughtlessly, the common rhetoric of the question, spoke of the high and holy mission of women. But if people, with a high and holy mission, may innocently sit bare-necked in hot theatres to be studied through pocket-telescopes until midnight by any one who chooses, how can their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... thoughts in so beautiful a form that they become desirable and adorable; and what the average man believes to-day is what the idealist has believed half a century before. He must take his chance of fame; and his best hope is to eschew rhetoric, which implies the consciousness of opponents and auditors, and just present his dreams and visions as serenely and beautifully as he can. The statesman has to argue, to strive, to compromise, to convert if he can, to ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... so attractive, that Mr. Lloyd was wont to call him St. John, the beloved disciple, because his name was John, and everybody who knew him loved him. It was not merely by the elders of his congregation, who could fully appreciate the breadth and soundness of his scholarship, the richness of his rhetoric, and the warmth of his eloquence, but by the younger members also, who loved his sunny smile, and hearty laugh, that Dr. Chrystal was little short ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... speaker, although he had not the same weight, deepened the impression the other had made by his brilliance and rhetoric. He too told the story of the English Ambassador in Berlin who was asked whether England would go to war ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... half-an-acre of parchment. Nay, I hope to see the time when that there is indeed some progress made in, shall be wholly affected; and by the improvement of the noble art of tautology, every Inn in Holborn an Inn of Court. Let others think of logic, rhetoric, and I know not what impertinence, but mind thou tautology. What's the first excellence in a lawyer? Tautology. What's the second? Tautology. What's the third? Tautology; as an old pleader said ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... therein on the studies being completed—sometimes, even, it flows into it before the term is over. After 1806,[6166] the anticipated conscriptions take youths from the benches of the philosophy and rhetoric classes. After 1808, ministerial circulars[6167] demand of the lycees boys (des enfants de bonne volonte), scholars of eighteen and nineteen who "know how to manoeuvre," so that they may at once be ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Constantius was most anxious for peace, as a dangerous war threatened with the Alemanni, one of the most powerful tribes of Germany. He seems to have hoped that, if the unadorned language of the two statesmen failed to move Sapor, he might be won over by the persuasive eloquence of the professor of rhetoric. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... fluent popular preacher, clutched by a powerful logician, and put into a witness-box to be thoroughly cross-examined. The one quality I can discover in his articles is a certain dexterity in evading plain issues and covering inconsistencies by cheap rhetoric. The best suggestion to be made on his side would be that he was so weak an advocate that he could not ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Here were collected many of the beauties, and a few of the fine gentlemen of the day. It may have been that they lost little by not attending to the preacher. So Jack thought from what he could catch of the discourse, little of which he could understand, so full of flowers of rhetoric was it. Most of his neighbours were, at all events, flirting and ogling all through the service, and as they entered and took their seats all courtesied and bowed to their acquaintance, as if they had been at a theatre. Jack could not help feeling thankful ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... philosophy, as history, as rhetoric, as metre, as rhythm, as politics, it is positively enormous. The whole poem is a wonderful poem, and I wish I had space for it here. It is patriotic and it is written about as badly as a poem could conceivably be written. It is a mournful pleasure to think that ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... when he was employed in setting people by the ears. His spirits, usually dull, then rose into the utmost gaiety and good-humour. When the doubtful battle flagged, he by his art would instantly restore it. When, for instance, Tom's repulsed battalions of rhetoric fled from his mamma's fire, a few words of apt sneer or encouragement on Wood's part would bring the fight round again; or when Mr. Hayes's fainting squadrons of abuse broke upon the stubborn squares of Tom's bristling obstinacy, it was Wood's delight to rally the ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wealth not excepted, the most offensive is the pride of ancestry when found in company with sordid and ignoble vices, greediness, mendacity, knavery and impudence; and such was the pride of Seymour. Many, even of those who were well pleased to see the ministers galled by his keen and skilful rhetoric, remembered that he had sold himself more than once, and suspected that he was impatient to sell himself again. On the very eve of the opening of Parliament, a little tract entitled "Considerations on the Choice of a Speaker" was widely circulated, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Moldavian and Wallachian provinces for Poland, and that only four divisions of your Majesty's troops remain on the Danube. What is now taking place is a new proof that repetition is a powerful figure of rhetoric. Your Majesty has so often been told that I have a grudge against you, that your confidence has been shaken. The Russians quit a frontier where they are necessary, to go to a point where your Majesty has only friends. Nevertheless I had to think also of my affairs, and consider ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... at Athens.] A citizen of Athens, named Aristion, whose mother was an Egyptian slave, and who was the son or adopted son of one Athenion, had been sent by the Athenians as ambassador to Mithridates. He had been a schoolmaster and teacher of rhetoric, and professed the philosophy of Epicurus. He gained the ear of Mithridates, and sent home flaming accounts of the king's power, and of his intention of restoring the democracy at Athens. The Athenians sent some ships ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... corroboration of this opinion, to Dr. Campbell, who in his "Philosophy of Rhetoric," says: "I know no style to which darkness of a certain sort is more suited than to the prophetical: many reasons might be assigned which render it improper that prophecy should be perfectly understood before it be accomplished. Besides, we are certain that a prediction may be very dark before ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... dormitory for the students, and a college hall. Libraries, laboratories, and recreational facilities were usually conspicuous by their absence. In fact, as the curriculum consisted almost exclusively of philosophy, Greek, Latin, rhetoric, and a little mathematics, there was no great need of much equipment. The classics were taught by the intensive grammatical method; in philosophy there was a great deal of dialectical disputation; rhetoric was studied as an aid to ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... tramp, the tenor of the article was a protest against the maltreatment of the tramp. Cutting the taxpayers to the pits of their purses threw them open to sentiment, and then in I tossed the sentiment, lumps and chunks of it. Trust me, it was excellently done, and the rhetoric—say! Just listen to the tail of ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... deserving to be called human. Next, the facts are disputed. I can only refer readers to the authorities cited. They speak for tribes in many quarters of the world, and the witnesses are laymen as well as missionaries. I am accused, again, of using a misleading rhetoric, and of thereby covertly introducing Christian or philosophical ideas into my account of "savages guiltless of Christian teaching." As to the latter point, I am also accused of mistaking for native opinions the results of "Christian teaching." One or other charge must fall ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... mountains.' The poor tinker, considering these passages in their literal import, imagined they were meant as tests to try whether the believer possessed faith or not. He was a stranger to the rules of Hebrew rhetoric; nor did he consider that they were addressed to the apostles, who had the power to work miracles. He had no idea that the removing a mountain, or planting a sycamore tree in the sea, were figures of speech conveying to us the fact that, aided by faith, mountainous difficulties might ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... said Dick, "and now that your burst of rhetoric is over let's go on and catch our fish. Will you also use your romantic science of mathematics in fishing? By the way, what has become of that little algebra book ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... conveyance, necessity, we suppose, is the lot of the owner, but the lawyer fattens: To have and to hold are words of singular import; they charm beyond music; are the quintessence of language; the leading figure in rhetoric. But how would he fare if land was never conveyed? ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... corporation of Harvard College elected Mr. Adams Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory on the Boylston foundation. After modifications of the statutes, which he suggested, were adopted, he accepted, and immediately entered upon a course of preparatory studies, reviving his knowledge of the Greek, and making researches ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Each bird that flutters through the leaves, Each beast, each fish that green lake cleaves, The curious deeds Devotion paints In missals and in lives of saints, And every olden subtle trick Of grammar, logic, rhetoric. But most on chivalry I turned A torrent eagerness, and burned To hear of wrong repaired, or read The working of some famous deed, Like those I dreamt that I could do When what I set myself was through: ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... upon the student, that possess a cultural rather than a technical value. From oral lessons in language in the lower classes, the students advance to a modicum of technical grammar in the middle of the course, and hence to the rhetoric of the Senior year. Moreover, an unusually large amount of written composition is insisted upon, the compositions being used not merely to discipline the student in chaste feeling, consecutive thinking, and efficient expression, but also to sharpen his powers of observation and ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... in a wretched state of health, being constantly attacked by various extraordinary diseases. He describes himself as not growing at all, and as resembling a very delicate and pale wax taper. In 1760 he passed in the class of rhetoric, and succeeded, moreover, in recovering his Ariosto, but read very little of it, partly from the difficulty he found in understanding it, and partly because the continued breaks in the story disgusted him. As to Tasso, he had never even heard his name. He obtained a few of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... grammar, even of rhetoric, on occasion. She knew there was no such word as "git", but she was seeking to symbolize her idea in sound. As she closed her teeth, each little pearl meeting a pearly rival, her "git" had something of the force ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... money, interest, balance of trade, commerce, and taxation; and a personal friendship existed between Hume and Adam Smith dating back as far as 1748, when the latter was lecturing in Edinburgh on rhetoric. The extent of Cantillon's acquirements and Adam Smith's possible indebtedness to him have been but lately recognized. In a recent study(26) on Cantillon, the late Professor Jevons has pointed out that the former anticipated many of the doctrines later ascribed to Adam Smith, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... were not used to hearing rhetoric of this sort, had nothing to say in reply; they only asked him if he wanted anything to eat. "I would gladly eat a bit of something," said Don Quixote, "for I feel it would come very seasonably." The day happened to be a Friday, and in the whole inn there was ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its course by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey of St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence, his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... he came amid general execration, and departed amid universal regret. I had heard Mr. Douglas before, but never when he gave any evidence of the wonderful power which he exhibited on this occasion. With few tricks of rhetoric, with no extraordinary bursts of eloquence, he accomplished all the results of the most impassioned oratory. The qualities of a great debater—unshaken presence of mind, tact in adapting himself to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... itself, is likely to leave the mind in a state of relative imbecility. It is not that the writing of men who got their early drill too exclusively, or even predominantly, in the sciences lacks the graces of rhetoric—that would be comparatively a small matter—but such men in the majority of cases, even when treating subjects within their own field, show a singular inability to think clearly and consecutively, so soon ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche |
