"Sophist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the air became dark with a host of controversial tracts. [Sidenote: Controversial tracts] They are half filled with theological metaphysic, half with the bitterest invective. Luther called Henry VIII "a damnable and rotten worm, a snivelling, drivelling swine of a sophist"; More retorted by complaining of the violent language of "this apostate, this open incestuous lecher, this plain limb of the devil and manifest messenger of hell." Absurd but natural tactic, with a sure effect on the people, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Prometheus and his theft, How mortals gained Jove's fiery flower, grows old {280} (I have been used to hear the pagans own) And out of mind; but fire, howe'er its birth, Here is it, precious to the sophist now Who laughs the myth of Aeschylus to scorn, As precious to those satyrs of his play, {285} Who touched it in gay wonder at the thing. While were it so with the soul,—this gift of truth Once grasped, were this our soul's gain safe, and sure To prosper as the body's gain is wont,— Why, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... fear thou wilt be a sophist before thy hundred years are ended," said her brother with a soft ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Phidias; of AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to popular ideas, the typical Sophist, but in fact differing ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... it; at least most of them do so. Moreover, their law-giver persuaded them that they were all brethren, and that when once they come out and reject the Greek gods, they should then worship that crucified sophist and live according to his laws. Therefore they despise all things and hold everything in common, having received such ideas from others, without any sufficient basis for their faith. If, then, any impostor ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... collected by Hieronymus Columnar (6) Hemitheon of the Sybaritic books, (7) Musaeus, the Iyrist; (8) Niko, the Samian girl; (9) Philaenis, the poetess of Amatory Pleasures, in Athen. viii. 13, attributed to Polycrates the Sophist; (10) Protagorides, Amatory Conversations; (11) Sotades, the Mantinaean who, says Suidas, wrote the poem "Cinaedica"; (12) Sphodrias the Cynic, his Art of Love; and (13) Trepsicles, Amatory Pleasures. Amongst the Romans we have Aedituus, Annianus (in Ausonius), Anser, Bassus Eubius, Helvius Cinna, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... not appear that at Elis there were any of the actual contests in music and song which made the character of the Pythian games. But still it was a common exhibition for the cultivation of every art. Sophist, and historian, and orator, poet and painter found their ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the imperial statues in the year 887. The friends of Demetrius, prudent and conservative persons, gathered around Hermas and made him welcome to their circle. Chief among them was Libanius, the sophist, his nearest neighbour, whose daughter Athenais had been the playmate of Hermas in ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and pride of man, At the Sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone—glimmering through the dreams of things that were: First in the race that led to glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away:—is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon, and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... believe that there is a virtue in imprecations Not men of brains, but the men of aptitudes Not the indignant and the frozen, but the genially indifferent One is a fish to her hook; another a moth to her light One night, and her character's gone Passion added to a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess Policy seems to petrify their minds Rage of a conceited schemer tricked Respect one another's affectations To time and a wife it is no disgrace for a man to bend Uncommon unprogressiveness When duelling flourished on our land, ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... like fresh cured lepers; for it would be tempting the devil to try and oust the cardinal, the more so as at that time it was not known who would be pope, three aspirants having resigned their hoods for the benefit of Christianity. The cardinal, who was a cunning Italian, long bearded, a great sophist, and the life and soul of the Council, guessed, by the feeblest exercise of the faculties of his understanding, the alpha and omega of the adventure. He only had to weigh in his mind one little thought before he knew how to proceed in order ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... Think, then, of one who would fain be an Atheist, conversing with the "sound, healthy children of the God of heaven!" To his reason, which is his solitary pride, arguments might in vain be addressed, for he exults in being "an Intellectual All in All," and is a bold-browed sophist to daunt even the eyes of Truth—eyes which can indeed "outstare the eagle" when their ken is directed to heaven, but which are turned away in aversion from the human countenance that would dare to deny God. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... she did not, as we have said, long remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition went on—in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a movement which to the classic mind led backward; but from the wider standpoint of general development meant advance. For the path of culture is always the same in the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... aggravated by a powerful imagination and excellent reasoning faculties. For, swayed as these were by her sentiments and desires, they proved themselves most fertile in generating flattering illusions and artful sophisms. George Sand was indeed a great sophist. She had always in readiness an inexhaustible store of interpretations and subterfuges with which to palliate, excuse, or even metamorphose into their contraries the most odious of her words and actions. It ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... meaning of glory is equally notorious. He called it wisdom. We call it craft—the glory of the sophist, who could prove or disprove anything for gain or display; the glory of the successful adventurer, whose shrewdness made its market out of the stupidity and vice of the barbarian. But this is not the glory of Christ, for St. John saw ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... society, that there should be some agreement, and that, for a time at least, certain opinions should prevail; and if philosophy had failed to secure this agreement, rhetoric, at least, was effectual; and, with the Sophist, rhetoric was "the art of making the worst appear the better reason." All wisdom was now confined to a species of "word jugglery," which in Athens was dignified as "the art ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... purse with her first lover. For three days or more they were, it would seem, to journey together, alone together: the prosecution of his duty imposed it on him. Sooth to say, Weyburn knew that a spice of passion added to a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess; but he fancied an absolute reliance on Aminta's dignity, and his respect for her was another barrier. He begged the landlady's acceptance of two shillings for her boy's purchase of a boat, advising her to have him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and mischief-maker in the great struggle going on, giving to it those elements of darkness, disgrace, and treason which, unfortunately, are always to be found in the greatest struggles for freedom and right, and which, when history is written, give such grounds to the carper, the sophist, and skeptic to ridicule the noblest efforts of humanity. Such are the self-called Conservatives in this great battle—men hindering and impeding the great cause, eagerly grasping at every little premature advance—as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... him a most extraordinary advantage in arguing; for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could when he pleased be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and from a spirit of contradiction, and a delight in showing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity: so ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... good thing, Miles, no doubt," continued this tempting sophist, "to have money at use, and a large farm, and a mill, and such things; but many a ship nets more money, in a single voyage, than your whole estate would sell for. Those that begin with nothing, too, they tell me, are the most apt to succeed; and, if we go ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... hear this: 'But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died. Let not, then, your good be evil spoken of.' Isn't that precisely what you were doing of the good in those church-members, Eurie? Now a sophist would possibly say that the argument of Paul had reference to food offered to idols, and not to dancing; but I think here is a chance for us to exercise that judgment and common sense which we are so fond of ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... dexterity to make his argument appear conclusive. But all men agreed that it was utterly inapplicable to human affairs. The theorist railed at the folly of the world, instead of confessing his own; and the men of practice unjustly blamed philosophy, instead of condemning the sophist. The causes which the politician has to consider are, above all others, multiplied, mutable, minute, subtile, and, if I may so speak, evanescent; perpetually changing their form, and varying their combinations; losing their nature, while they keep their name; exhibiting the most different ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... Wellington has a genius for military affairs, so had Sir William Follett for advocacy—and genius of a very high order, as will be testified by all those before whom, or on whose behalf, he exhibited it—alike by clients or judges—as by opponents. If he were a very subtle sophist himself, he was himself one on whom no sophistry could impose. It fled before the penetrating glance of his aquiline eye. Faculties such as his must have secured him eminence in any pursuit or walk in life to which he might have devoted himself; particularly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... of the conspiracy, but he models some of the speeches of Cicero on the Roman orator's actual words. In "Poetaster," he lifts a whole satire out of Horace and dramatises it effectively for his purposes. The sophist Libanius suggests the situation of "The Silent Woman"; a Latin comedy of Giordano Bruno, "Il Candelaio," the relation of the dupes and the sharpers in "The Alchemist," the "Mostellaria" of Plautus, its admirable ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... "Oh, you sophist! Did you not say that I wore my title upon my brow? Did you not tell me that I could not hide my majesty from the sons of men? But I forgive you, and the boy also. Let us drink his health while we enjoy ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... and, according to tradition, could trace his ancestors on the male side to AEsculapius, and on the female side to Hercules. He is said to have received his medical education from his father and from Herodicus, and to have been taught philosophy by Gorgias, the Sophist, and by Democritus, whom he afterwards ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... character he thus assumes. What a debater postulates he openly states and takes for granted without proof; what he assumes he may take for granted without mention. A favorite trick of the sophist is quietly to assume as true what would at once be challenged if expressly stated. What a man claims he asserts his right to take; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... superseded composition in verse, the greater facility of style naturally led to more detailed narratives, and the sophist who would have been a poet in the time of Callimachus, became a writer of prose romances in the final period of Greek literature. The first ascertained beginning of this style of light reading, which occupies so large a space in the catalogues of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 1789" the Abbe's played a role which has not been duly recognised.] They ascribed evils of civilisation to inequality arising from the existence of private property, but Morelly rejected the view of the "bold sophist" Rousseau that science and art were to blame. He thought that aided by science and learning man might reach a state based on communism, resembling the state of nature but more perfect, and he planned an ideal constitution in his romance of the Floating Islands. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato ...
— The Republic • Plato
... So the Sophist murmured low, and "LYCIUS' arms were empty of delight," LAMIA had fled! Would that some sage cool head, some modern APOLLONIUS, with the might Of sense magnanimous, would banish thus the bestial Lamia of our later day, Whose fascination draws a noble nation To sordid ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various
... friend Sir William for some portion of the heiress's fortune; and he readily allowed that he could not in the mean while have a better advocate than he found in Brandon. So persuasive, indeed, and so subtle was the eloquence of this able sophist, that often in his artful conversations with his niece he left even on the unvitiated and strong though simple mind of Lucy an uneasy and restless impression, which time might have ripened into ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... clever sophist this you speak of, who is able to compel those who have no wisdom to be rightly wise. But (for thou art arguing too refinedly on no suitable occasion) I fear, O father, lest thy tongue be talking at random through ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... "Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O'er erring deeds and thoughts a heavenly hue Of words, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... been even beneath MY contempt! 'Twas scarcely worth my while to fool thee, thou wert so easily fooled! ... 'Twas idle sport to rouse thy passions, they were so easily roused! Poet and Perjurer, . . Singer and Sophist! Thou to whom the Genius of Poesy was as a pearl set in a swine's snout! ... thou wert not worthy to be my dupe, seeing that thou camest to me already in bonds, the dupe of thine own Self! Niphrata loved thee,—and thou didst play with and torture her more unmercifully than wild beasts ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... said, "Stranger, you speak of what is wanted when it is not wanted." Charilaus the cousin of Lykurgus, when asked why they had so few laws answered, that men of few words required few laws. And Archidamidas, when some blamed Hekataeus the Sophist for having said nothing during dinner, answered, "He who knows how to speak knows when to speak also." The following are some of those sarcastic sayings which I before said are not ungrateful. Demaratus, when some worthless fellow pestered him with unreasonable ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... discourse upon some useful matter, but not in due time and place, "Much to the purpose, sir, elsewhere." King Charilaus, the nephew of Lycurgus, being asked why his uncle had made so few laws, answered, "Men of few words require but few laws." When one blamed Hecataeus the sophist because that, being invited to the public table, he had not spoken one word all supper-time, Archidamidas answered in his vindication, "He who knows how ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... France, with sophist cunning fraught, Essay'd that field which force had fail'd to gain, And proudly question'd, by success untaught, Britannia's ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... sixteenth,—were not enduring. Man in these lacks some checks. After sudden outbursts of genius and creativeness, he wanders away in the direction of license and egotism; the degenerate artist and thinker makes room for the sophist and the dilettant." ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of Socrates and the people of Athens here. If so, this is a quasi-apology for the Athenian bons peres de famille who condemned Socrates. Beautiful story of the sophist teacher's last injunction ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... the Christian teachers had adopted the habits and manners of the philosophic school. They assumed the dress of the pompous sophist, and delivered the plain doctrines of the gospel ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... never wanting in support of erroneous views; and more false conclusions are drawn from them than from the subtlest arguments of the sophist. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... not think any philosophy can work such a miracle. I know that you, dear sophist, will soon console yourself with other girls. Don't think me jealous; I should abhor myself if I thought I was capable of so vile a passion, but I should despise myself if I was capable of seeking ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... from the style to an examination of the subject, we trace a connection with the later rather than with the earlier dialogues. In the first place there is the connexion, indicated by Plato himself at the end of the dialogue, with the Sophist, to which in many respects the Theaetetus is so little akin. (1) The same persons reappear, including the younger Socrates, whose name is just mentioned in the Theaetetus; (2) the theory of rest, which Socrates has declined to consider, is resumed by the Eleatic ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... so great and so high that she cannot put herself at the service of any other forces without derogation; for if she is no longer mistress and free, she is degraded. It is a case of Roman master debasing the Greek, his superior, and making him his purveyor—Graeculus, sophist, Laeno.... To the vulgar the intelligence is a sort of maid-of-all-work, and in this position she displays the sly, dishonest cleverness of her kind. Sometimes she is employed by hatred, pride, or self-interest, and then she flatters these little devils, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... and therefore substance it intends. And inasmuch as we must needs infer From such belief our reasoning, all respect To other view excluded, hence of proof Th' intention is deriv'd." Forthwith I heard: "If thus, whate'er by learning men attain, Were understood, the sophist would want room To exercise his wit." So breath'd the flame Of love: then added: "Current is the coin Thou utter'st, both in weight and in alloy. But tell me, if thou hast it ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... blood.—Ach, Himmel! Ned," cried he, laughing, "it pleased me, though, to see how adroitly he contrived to twist that new reading out of the bon homme Francois. It was quite in the style of St. Augustine, and would have delighted that ex-sophist hugely; for, great as he was, and self-denying as he was, he always had a hankering after the dialectic flesh-pots. How he would have rubbed his hands, when Clarian wanted to persuade us that the herb Pantagruelion was no other than Haschish, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... reason why, when the first step has been taken, they should not take the second too; what more would it cost them? Since they are certain they do not think, why do they dare to affirm that they feel?] in vain will he perplex me with his cunning arguments; I merely regard him as a dishonest sophist, who prefers to say that stones have feeling rather ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... in its present form from the lifetime or shortly after the death of Hadrian, but seems to be based in part on an earlier version by the sophist Alcidamas (c. 400 B.C.). Plutarch ("Conviv. Sept. Sap.", 40) uses an earlier (or at least a shorter) version than that which we possess [1118]. The extant "Contest", however, has clearly combined with the original document much other ill-digested matter on the life and descent of Homer, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... despised, even if he could have displayed; a demand for crude theory and unsound philosophy, rather than none at all. It is a sort of repetition of the "Quid novi?" of the Areopagus, and it must have an answer. Men must be found who can treat, where it is necessary, like the Athenian sophist, de omni scibili, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... may we not ascribe to the outbursts of the "realists" and the claptrap of the heroes of the passing hour? To answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who, when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: "But who then has found fault with him?" I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these scruples are still sounding in the ears of not a few in this gathering; ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... being in advance of his age. He had the notion of which the modern geometry has made so much, that of {60} a circle being the polygon of an infinitely great number of sides. He could make no use of it, but the notion itself made him a sophist in the eyes of Aristotle, Eutocius,[125] etc. Geber, an Arab astronomer, and a reputed conjurer in Europe, seems to have given his name to unintelligible language in the word gibberish. At one time algebra was traced to him; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Athens to teach in the university as self-appointed professor, or sophist, according to the fashion of that time, it was not to instruct Athenian youth in music or geometry or astronomy, but to teach them the art of being good citizens,—[Greek: Ten politiken technen, kai poiein andras agathous politas.] That was his profession. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... State universities there were eight professors out of more than one hundred who were unbelievers or skeptics, and in one of the youngest there were but three known skeptics among more than eighty professors. Even this small number should not be possible, because one "anti-Christian sophist or a velvet-footed infidel" may work moral and religious disaster to the young in any college. "A college," remarks President Gates, "must be either avowedly and openly Christian, or by the very absence of avowed Christian influence it will be strongly and decidedly ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... between the threatened results of the violation of traditional codes and the actual results. He may then come to the cynic's conclusion that morality is a myth and a delusion, and, in the words of the Sophist in Plato's Republic, "justice is merely the right of the stronger." Men in whom reflection or social sympathy extends not very far may, as they frequently do, stop at this point. These are the worldly wise; ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... since pleasure's joy's parent, and joy begets mirth, Should the subtlest casuist or sophist on earth Contradict me, I'd call him an ass and a calf, And boldly insist once for all, That the only criterion of pleasure's to laugh, And sing tol de rol, loi de ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... "You are a sophist, I fear," I said, smiling. "See, here is Miss Martina B. Cadwallader advancing upon us. Stern virtue is on every line of ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... men, or three or four parties at once, like foreign porters at a landing, who seize on the baggage of the perplexed stranger, and thrust half a dozen cards into his unwilling hands. Our youth is plied by the hangers-on of professor this, or sophist that, each of whom wishes the fame or the profit of having a houseful. We will say that he escapes from their hands,—but then he will have to choose for himself where he will put up; and, to tell the truth, with all the praise I have already ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... is that Power? Some moon-struck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown 3245 Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and worshipped was his own, His likeness in the world's vast mirror shown; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... themselves on their intellectuality, as a certain kind of spurious philosophy which balances virtue and vice as it were on the point of a finger, and argues prettily on the way the two can be easily merged into each other, almost without perception. "If without perception, then without sin," says the sophist; "it is merely a question of balance." Certainly if generosity drifts into extravagance you have a virtue turned into a vice;—but there is one thing these spurious debaters cannot do, and that is to turn a vice into a virtue. That ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the author dilates on the goodman Anselme. He says: "This good man possessed a moderate amount of knowledge, was a goodish grammarian, a musician, somewhat of a sophist, and rather given to picking holes in others." Some of Anselme's conversation is also given, and after beginning by describing in glowing terms the bygone days which he and his contemporaries had seen, and which he stated ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... than the shallow think for. Should we be so apt as we are now to compassionate the misfortunes, and to forgive the insincerity of Charles I., if his pictures had pourtrayed him in a bob wig and a pigtail? Vandyke was a greater sophist than Hume. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as we are informed by Diogenes Laertius, first used by Plato; and in the Phaedrus, Sophist, Republic, bk. vii., and elsewhere, we find that by Dialectic he means the regular employment of the reason, and skill in the practice of it. Aristotle also uses the word in this sense; but, according to Laurentius Valla, he was the first to use Logic too in a similar ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Christian. In a contemporary description of the life at Charles's court Alcuin is called "Flaccus" and is described as "the glory of our bards, mighty to shout forth his songs, keeping time with his lyric foot, moreover a powerful sophist, able to prove pious doctrines out of Holy Scripture, and in genial jest to propose or solve puzzles of arithmetic." As a theologian he was most famous for his books against Felix of Urgel and Elipandus ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... communicated the familiar knowledge of the two national dialects; and the Barbarians were ambitious of conversing in Latin, the military idiom even of the Eastern Empire. But they disdained the language and the sciences of the Greeks; and the vain sophist, or grave philosopher, who had enjoyed the flattering applause of the schools, was mortified to find that his robust servant was a captive of more value and importance than himself. The mechanic arts were encouraged and esteemed, as they tended to satisfy the wants of the Huns. An architect ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... reached the point at which no man of high character will profess them; and from, that moment until they are formally disestablished, they stand at the door of every profession and every public office to keep out every able man who is not a sophist or a liar. A nation which revises its parish councils once in three years, but will not revise its articles of religion once in three hundred, even when those articles avowedly began as a political compromise dictated by Mr Facing-Both-Ways, is a ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... do not know that I am but repeating what I heard Hillel say in an argument he had one day in my presence with a sophist from Rome." ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... and that no other weapons could have been used to pierce the superstitious prejudice with which the works of certain painters are shielded from the attacks of reason. My answer is that given long ago to a similar complaint, uttered under the same circumstances by the foiled sophist:—"[Greek: (Hos d'estin ho anthropos; hos apaideutos tis, os ouio phaula onomata onomazein tolma en semno pragmati.) Toioutos tis, o Hippia, ouden ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... When the sophist Sidonius, delivering a long panegyric on himself, said that he was acquainted with all the tenets of the philosophers: "If Aristotle calls me to the Lyceum, I obey; if Plato to the Academy, I come; Zeno to the Stoa, I take up my abode there; if Pythagoras calls, I am silent:" Demonax jumped ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sad truth that bargains are met with more frequently in our youth than in our age. The sophist may argue that age begets philosophy, and that philosophy contemns all worldly things; yet certain it is that the book-hunter, one of the most philosophical of beings, remains on the look-out for bargains to the very end of his career. Nevertheless, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... katexei xristianon honta] Eus. l. 6, c. 3. 2. P. 273. 3. Theodoret l. 3. Hist. c. 6, and de Graecor. Affect. l. 10. Rufin. Chrys. 4. St. Chrysostom has given us the lamentation of Libanius, the celebrated heathen sophist, bewailing the silence of Apollo at Daphne; adding that Julian had delivered him from the neighborhood of a dead man, which was troublesome to him. 5. Ammianus Marcellinus, a heathen, and Julian's own historian, says b. 2, p. 225, that ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Such has been for a season the trial of her children at various eras of her history. It was the state of things during the dreadful Arian ascendancy, when the flock had to keep aloof from the shepherd, and the unsuspicious Fathers of the Western Councils trusted and followed some consecrated sophist from Greece or Syria. It was the case in those passages of medieval history when simony resisted the Supreme Pontiff, or when heresy lurked in Universities. It was a longer and more tedious trial, while the controversies lasted with the Monophysites of old, and with the Jansenists ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Protagoras teaches, and that "he is the criterion of existence;" that "thought is only the relation of the thinking subject to the object thought of, and that the thinking subject, the soul, is nothing more than the sum of the different moments of thinking." It is no wonder that that Sophist who was the author of such doctrines should be condemned to death to satisfy the clamours of a populace who had not advanced sufficiently into the depths of this secondary, this higher philosophy, and that it was only by flight that he could save himself from the punishment awaiting the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... double-dyed purple[222] of the priesthood, you will see before long that the great men will be not only those who have made no false step,[223] but even he who did make a mistake, Cato. For, as to myself, if your comrade Publius will let me, I think of playing the sophist: if he forces me, I shall at least defend myself, and, as is the trick of my trade, I ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... once conceived, could not be rejected. He was no coward or sophist to argue himself out of danger. He laid no flattering unction to his soul that he had done his best while another way remained untried. For this type of man may be half-hearted and a coward in little matters, ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... these five modes unequivocally; or indeed of the first four, since the fifth, on such a supposition, would vanish. But it is not in the nature of bad reasoning to express itself thus unambiguously. When a sophist, whether he is imposing on himself or attempting to impose on others, can be constrained to throw his sophistry into so distinct a form, it needs, in a large proportion of cases, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that Jonson here translates a prose love-letter of Philostratus, the Greek sophist, may detract from the originality but not the ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... whether Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater, Piccinino through the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army; the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks, praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to posterity. Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich in descriptions ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... because it was unconscious, the stronger, I think, too, that it rested on no intellectual basis, but was wholly and purely spiritual—as the confidence of a child might hold a man to his duty where the arguments of a sophist would have no effect. As I say, I went through a great deal. My mind was a battle-field for the powers of good and evil during those two weeks, but the man who was leading the forces of the right never knew it. The outcome was that as soon as I landed I took my passage back on the next ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... f(3) A sophist of the island of Ceos, a disciple of Protagoras, as celebrated for his knowledge as for his eloquence. The Athenians condemned him to death as a corrupter of youth in ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... statesman, not a doctrinaire; a profound lawyer, not a splitter of legal hairs; a political economist, not an egotistical theorist; a practical politician, who constructs, modifies, restrains, without disturbance and destruction; a resistless debater and consummate master of statement, not a mere sophist; a humanitarian, not a defamer of characters and lives; a man whose mind is at once cosmopolitan and composite of America; a gentleman of unpretentious habits, with the fear of God in his heart and the love of mankind exhibited in every act ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... instrument by which we rule ourselves; but worship not a mechanical device, and call not a means an end! Admirable means, but oh, the sorry end! Therefore we'll have no usurping Praetorian, no juggling sophist, no bailiff extravagant and unjust, no spendthrift squandering on idleness that which would pay just debts! A ruler! There's no halo about a ruler's head. The people—the people are the sacred thing, for they are the seed whence the future is to spring. He who betrays ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... necessity and chance, which is only partially impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We may observe by the way, that the principle of the other, which is the principle of plurality and variation in the Timaeus, has nothing in common with the 'other' of the Sophist, which is the principle of determination.) The element of the same dominates to a certain extent over the other—the fixed stars keep the 'wanderers' of the inner circle in their courses, and a similar principle of fixedness or order appears to regulate the bodily constitution ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... Tyrannicide, The Disinherited, Phalaris) are declamations on hypothetical cases which might serve either for (3) or (4); and The Hall, The Fly, Dipsas, and perhaps Demosthenes, suggest (4). A common form of exhibition was for a sophist to appear before an audience and let them propose subjects, of which he must choose one and deliver ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... as I was passing through the market place I heard a sophist from Cilicia say that there is only one God. He ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... life, and of which fortune gives an abundant supply, he used without arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not reproach those who pretended ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... sophist victorious within him was done in a flash, as Evan measured his qualities beside this young man's, and without a sense ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a sophist is always screwed; it crouches and bows like a snake, which is never straight, whether she go, creep, or lie still; only when she is ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... intellect. She knew her thoughts as we know each other's faces; and opinions, with most of us so vague, shadowy, and shifting, were in her mind substantial and distinct realities. Some persons see distinctions, others resemblances; but she saw both. No sophist could pass on her a counterfeit piece of intellectual money; but also she recognized the one pure metallic basis in coins of different epochs, and when mixed with a very ruinous alloy. This gave a comprehensive quality to her mind most imposing and convincing, as it enabled her to show ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... that is authentic about the Graeco-Egyptian Sophist or man of letters, Athenaeus, author of the 'Deipnosophistae' or Feast of the Learned, except his literary bequest. It is recorded that he was born at Naucratis, a city of the Nile Delta; and that after living at Alexandria he migrated to Rome. His date is presumptively fixed in the early ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... laid hold, With terrors did enwrap them; To lie against God's word them told, With cunning would entrap them: From Louvaine too, to see the game And in his crust nets take them, Many a sophist gathered came: The Spirit fools did make them— Their cunning could ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... consent, he will be in a hole; threatened with loss of Irish Vote. You will be in a dilemma, as you cannot then side with him against me, the real friend of Ireland; whilst I shall be confirmed in my position as the only possible Leader of the Party. If, on the contrary, this unrivalled sophist is drawn into anything like a declaration that will satisfy you in the face of the Irish People, he will be hopelessly embarrassed with his English friends; I shall have paid off an old score, and can afford to retire from the Leadership, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... selfish point of view. But the advantage would be hers also. Did he not desire her happiness? He tried to think so, but after all was ashamed to play the sophist with himself. The letter he carried in his pocket told the truth. He had but to think of her as married to Robert Narramore and the jealous fury of natural ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... of the sophists of whom tradition says that he was the object of persecution owing to his religious views. The trial of Socrates, however, really belongs to the same category when looked at from the accusers' point of view; Socrates was accused as a sophist. But as his own attitude towards popular religion differed essentially from that of the sophists, we cannot consider him in this connexion. Protagoras's trial itself is partly determined by special circumstances. In all probability it took ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... married his sister Arsinoe, Sotades said, "You are contracting an unholy marriage."[30] For this speech he long lingered in prison, and paid the righteous penalty for his unseasonable babbling, and had to weep a long time for making others laugh. Theocritus the Sophist similarly cracked his jokes, and had to pay even a greater penalty. For when Alexander ordered the Greeks to furnish him with purple robes to wear at the sacrifices on his triumphal return from war against ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,—'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into Charon's boat and go ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... proceeded successfully, till my poem grew so long, and in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume, as disproportionate both in size and merit, and as discordant in its character. In the mean time I had gotten myself entangled in the old sorites of the old sophist,—procrastination. I had suffered my necessary businesses to accumulate so terribly, that I neglected to write to any one, till the pain I suffered from not writing made me waste as many hours in dreaming about it as would have sufficed for the letter writing of half a life. But there is something ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... to Cambridge: the young Roman went to Athens. There we find Horace at about nineteen years of age, learning Greek, and attending the schools of the philosophers; those same Stoics and Epicureans whom a few years later the first great Christian Sophist was to harangue on Mars' Hill. These taught from their several points of view the basis of happiness and the aim of life. Each in turn impressed him: for a time he agreed with Stoic Zeno that active duty is the highest good; then lapsed into the easy doctrine of Epicurean ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... free-thinking Sophist, "The times are refined In sense to a wondrous degree; Your old-fashion'd faith does but fetter the mind, And it 's wrong not to seek to be free." Says the sage Politician, "Your natural share Of talents would raise ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... commissioners chosen for that purpose; but this last judicial effort to save him only tended to secure his ruin. When confronted with his judges, Biron appeared to have lost all consistency of character; the soldier was sunk in the sophist; he argued vaguely and inconsistently; and compromised his own cause by the very clumsiness of the efforts which he made to clear himself. Unaware of the revelations of La Fin, when he was confronted with him he declared ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... at the unsocratic plane. True, Max Meltzer had neither the grain nor the leisure of a sophist, a capacity for tenses or an appreciation of Kant. He had never built a bridge, led a Bible class, or attempted the first inch of the five-foot bookshelf. But on a two-figure salary he subscribed an annual donation to a skin-and-cancer hospital, wore non-reversible collars, ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... the Contents of a little Manuscript lately fallen into my Hands, and which pretends to great Antiquity, tho' by Reason of some modern Phrases and other Particulars in it, I can by no means allow it to be genuine, but rather the Production of a Modern Sophist. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Pausanias, king of Sparta, (who commanded the Greeks at the battle of Platea, and afterwards perished for an attempt to betray the Lacedaemonians), and Cleonice, is told in Plutarch's life of Cimon; and in the Laconics of Pausanias the sophist in his description ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... no sophist like pride. Look at the case on its merits. On the one side a disappointment for Miss Cameron. I don't doubt she's counting on coming, but at worst a worldly disappointment. And the very grievous humiliation for you of writing to tell her that ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... transcendental world, and proceeds to lay down practical rules for their application to different branches of knowledge. As in the Republic he supposes the philosopher to proceed by regular steps, until he arrives at the idea of good; as in the Sophist and Politicus he insists that in dividing the whole into its parts we should bisect in the middle in the hope of finding species; as in the Phaedrus (see above) he would have 'no limb broken' of the organism of knowledge;—so in the Philebus he urges ...
— Philebus • Plato
... with the Varangian guard. He had been all day playing the part of the ambitious politician, the selfish time-server, the dark and subtle conspirator; and now it seemed, as if to exhaust the catalogue of his various parts in the human drama, he chose to exhibit himself in the character of the wily sophist, and justify, or seem to justify, the arts by which he had risen to wealth and eminence, and hoped even now to arise to ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the cross, see! prostrate fall The mummeries that long enthralled our isle; So perish error! and wide over all Let reason, truth, religion ever smile: And let not man, vain, impious man defile The spark heaven lighted in the human breast; Let no enthusiastic rage, no sophist's wile Lull the poor victim into careless rest, Since the pure gospel page can ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... animated Churchill. Horne was not altogether an admirable character, and his enthusiasm for Wilkes had hitherto awakened no corresponding enthusiasm on Wilkes's part. But Horne was invaluable at a crisis like the Middlesex election. He had the eloquence of a sophist; he had the strategy of a tactician; he was endowed with an unconquerable energy, an indomitable determination. He was exceedingly popular in his parish; he caught the mood of the popular party, and he ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... benevolence of the tyrant. It is, I believe, one of the great classics in ethical theory; and although its full meaning will not appear until we deal directly with the problem of government, I must allude to it here for the sake of the principle involved. The sophist of the dialogue, one Thrasymachus, attempts to overthrow Socrates's conclusion that virtue is essentially beneficent, by pointing to the case of the tyrant, who is eminent and powerful, as every one would wish to be, but who is at the same time wholly unscrupulous. He ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... From the sad retreats That hold thee, smothered with excess of sweets, Shade of a shadow, spectre of a dream, Glance thy wan eye across the Stygian stream! The slipshod dreamer treads thy fragrant halls, The sophist's cobwebs hang thy roseate walls, And o'er the crotchets of thy jingling tunes The bard of mystery scrawls his crooked "runes." Yes, thou art gone, with all the tuneful hordes That candied thoughts ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dialogue will find in the Hippias a true Socratic spirit; they will compare the Ion as being akin both in subject and treatment; they will urge the authority of Aristotle; and they will detect in the treatment of the Sophist, in the satirical reasoning upon Homer, in the reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that vice is ignorance, traces of a Platonic authorship. In reference to the last point we are doubtful, as in some of the other ...
— Lesser Hippias • Plato
... of itinerant, mountebank, conjurer, cheat, sophist, and sorcerer, heaped upon the teachers of Christianity; sometimes to account for the report or apparent truth of their miracles, sometimes to explain their success. Our Lord was said to have learned his miraculous power in Egypt; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... hand; and if the task of narrating our Peloponnesian war were assigned to the ghost of Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open it with a description of Charleston in terms of Epidamnus. Little matters of topography would not trouble such an one. To the sophist an island is an island, a river a river, a height a height, everywhere. Sphacteria would furnish the model for Morris Island; the Achelous would serve indifferently for Potomac or Mississippi, the Epipolae for Missionary Ridge, Plataea ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... arrident amici ridet mundus, in English, this man his cronies they cocker him up, they flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, meanwhile the world thinks him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... friends, but no friend.[1173] Garrick was so diffused, he had no man to whom he wished to unbosom himself. He found people always ready to applaud him, and that always for the same thing: so he saw life with great uniformity.' I took upon me, for once, to fight with Goliath's weapons, and play the sophist.—'Garrick did not need a friend, as he got from every body all he wanted. What is a friend? One who supports you and comforts you, while others do not. Friendship, you know, Sir, is the cordial drop, "to make the nauseous draught ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might—thy grand in soul? Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were— First in the race that led to Glory's goal; They won, and passed away. Is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, gray ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Greece; those people can be found all over the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It is not anything fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century 'sophist' who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man, who looks ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... it is not my taste.' And that was the true attitude of his mind; but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and wrangle over by the hour. It was no wonder if he loved the Greeks; he was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been a sophist and met Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and done battle with him staunchly and manfully owned his defeat; and the dialogue, arranged by Plato, would have shown even in Plato's gallery. He seemed in ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... [Footnote: Vol. iii. pp. 441-452.] and you will own as much. But there is no need to look abroad. Words of our own out of number, such as 'barbarous,' 'benefice,' 'clerk,' 'common-sense,' 'romance,' 'sacrament,' 'sophist,' [Footnote: For a history of 'sophist' see Sir Alexander Grant's Ethics of Aristotle, 2nd ed. vol. i. p. 106, sqq.] would prove the truth of the assertion. Let us take 'sacrament'; its history, while it carries us far, will yet carry us by ways ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the mightiest interests were discussed—the subtle questions of the Academy propounded—the snares of the sophist exposed—the sublime thoughts and actions of heroes and demigods, embodied in the most glorious poetry, were daily exhibited to their view; while the wife, occupied solely with petty cares and trifling objects, without charms to win the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... even the Sophists were far from being such contemptible, foolish apprentices as your harsh criticism would imply. Let me give you a contemporary example. M. Voltaire's whole technique of thought and writing entitles us to describe him as an Arch-Sophist. Yet no one will refuse the due meed of honor to his extraordinary talent. I would not myself refuse it, though I am at this moment engaged in composing a polemic against him. Let me add that I am ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... wine we owe the productions of Eschylus and Anacreon, whose muses were very chilly, till Bacchus warmed them. Aurelius, the sophist, composed his best declamations in his cups. Herodes, called Saginatus Orator, the fattened Orator, never talked better, than after drinking pretty plentifully. And according to Horace, this was the ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... domineering woman. They were born into the misty morning twilight of the medieval renaissance, of an age when intellectual curiosity was awakening, when philosophy, the sciences and Latin literature were studied with a lively but uncritical enthusiasm, when the rhetorician and the sophist were the uncrowned kings of intelligent society. The philosophy was little more than school-logic, derived at second or third hand from Aristotle, the science a grotesque amalgam of empiricism and tradition. The Latin classics, apart from their use as a source of tropes and commonplaces, ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... simples a balm for wounded pride, I did not really deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher. And all the while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until my sexton's mood, confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almost entirely to the company of mental bats and owls. The danger of it all was that though I was yet youthful, and should ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... "The sophist of Abdera said that coitus is a slight fit of epilepsy, judging it to be an incurable disease." (Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, bk. ii, chapter x.) And Coelius Aurelianus, one of the chief physicians of antiquity, said that "coitus is a brief epilepsy." Fere has pointed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... frequented in the spring; for hither at this time of year abundance of people resort, solacing themselves in the mutual enjoyment of all those pleasures the place affords, and at spare hours pass away the time in many useful and edifying discourses. When Callistratus the Sophist lived here, it was a hard matter to dine at any place besides his house; for he was so extremely courteous and obliging, that no man whom he invited to dinner could have the face to say him nay. One of his best humors was to pick ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... sophist, you will always come first. But it is not permitted that any loyal gentleman devote every hour of his life to sighing and making sonnets, and to the general solacing of a maid's loneliness in this dull little Deptford. Nor would you, ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... conception of. They know no other influence than corruption and reckon all their probabilities from precedent. A new case is to them a new world, and while they are seeking for a parallel they get lost. The talents of Lord Mansfield can be estimated at best no higher than those of a sophist. He understands the subtleties but not the elegance of nature; and by continually viewing mankind through the cold medium of the law, never thinks of penetrating into the warmer region of the mind. As for Lord ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... a sophist," said Kennedy. "Possibly I am wrong in this discussion," retorted Caesar, "but the feeling I have is right. Artists irritate me; they seem to me like old ladies with a flatulency ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... canvassed the State. They are addressed to thinking men everywhere. Free from all trickery, strictly impartial, relying entirely upon the soundness of his premises for success,—for elegance of diction he had not, and he was too honest even to become a sophist,—these papers manifest at once the true patriot and the intelligent man. Thousands of adherents the Republican cause had in 1860, but not one more indefatigable or more heartily in earnest than Lyon. Outside ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and therefore it takes the designation of substance; and from this belief we needs must syllogize, without having other sight, wherefore it receives the designation of evidence."[3] Then I heard, "If whatever is acquired below for doctrine, were so understood, the wit of sophist would have no place there." Thus was breathed forth from that enkindled love; then it added, "Very well have the alloy and the weight of this coin been now run through, but tell me if thou hast it in thy purse?" And I, "Yes, I have it so shining and so ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... enabled an ignorant man to appear to know as much as one who was thoroughly master of his subject. Some of the people demanded what he had to say of the gods, since he had spoken so ably of men. With an unpleasant mixture of derision and feigned humility, the sophist replied, that he left such vast subjects to be discussed by the immortal Socrates. He forthwith left the Agora, and many a loud laugh and profane jest followed his departure. When such doctrines can be uttered without exciting indignation, ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... as a new star had appeared in the skies, so a new flower had blossomed on the earth, at the moment of his death. This was the lotos, of a peculiar red colour, which the people of Lower Egypt used to wear in wreaths upon his festival. It received the name Antinoeian; and the Alexandrian sophist, Pancrates, seeking to pay a double compliment to Hadrian and his favourite, wrote a poem in which he pretended that this lily was stained with the blood of a Libyan lion slain by the Emperor. As Arrian compared his master to Achilles, so Pancrates flattered him with allusions ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the Dialogues of Plato, is put into the mouth of Socrates, who describes a conversation which had taken place between himself and the great Sophist at the house of Callias—'the man who had spent more upon the Sophists than all the rest of the world'—and in which the learned Hippias and the grammarian Prodicus had also shared, as well as Alcibiades and Critias, both of whom said a few words—in the presence ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... found, Whom love of knowledge to the burning bound Led unawares; and there Plotinus' shade, Who dark Platonic truths in fuller light display'd: He, flying far to 'scape the coming pest, Was, when he seem'd secure, by death oppressed; That, fix'd by fate, before he saw the sun, The careful sophist strove in vain to shun. Hortensius, Crassus, Galba, next appear'd, Calvus and Antony, by Rome revered, The first with Pollio join'd, whose tongue profane Assail'd the fame of Cicero in vain. Thucydides, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... confidence—that you have not thought it worth while to be single-minded in your relation to me. From a personal point of view there is more that I might say, but perhaps that is damning enough, and I have no desire to be abusive. It is on my conscience to add, moreover, that I find you a sophist, and your sophistry a little vulgar. I find you compromising with your ambitions, which in themselves are not above reproach from any point of view. I find you adulterating what ought to be the pure stream of ideality with ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... shone like the day," London inscription, translated by M. Fr. LENORMANT, in his Histoire ancienne, vol. ii. pp. 228-229. See also a text of Philostratus in his life of Apollonius of Tyana, (i. 25). The sophist who seems to have founded his description of Babylon on good information, speaks of a "great brick edifice plated with bronze, which had a dome representing the firmament and shining ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... sight. The real sting of the comedy from which we have quoted lies in the assumption, adopted throughout the play, that the atheist is also necessarily anti-social and immoral. The physicist, in the person of Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the one hand he is represented as teaching the theory of material causation, on the other the art of lying and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending the school is to learn how not to pay his debts; the achievement of his son ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... doctrine of Ideas has also been considered, not as a real criticism, but as an exuberance of the metaphysical imagination which enabled Plato to go beyond himself. To the latter part of the dialogue we may certainly apply the words in which he himself describes the earlier philosophers in the Sophist: 'They went on their way rather regardless of whether we understood them ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... easy to fix upon any ideal, not only from the multifariousness of the details, but, above all, from the elusiveness of the standard. We might agree upon an ideal of human beauty, but hardly upon the ideal of anything else. The sophist in the Hippias Major was prepared to define the beauty of a maiden, or of a mare; but he was confounded when it was required that the beauty of a pipkin should be deducible from the same principle, and yet worse when it was shown to involve ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... The self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction—he, who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence. 1538 BYRON: Ch. Harold, Canto ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... scourge and maddening hour Exalt the bad, the good debase; When first to scourge the sons of earth, Thy sire his darling child designed, Gallia received the monstrous birth, Voltaire informed thine infant mind. Well-chosen nurse, his sophist lore, He bade thee many a year explore, He marked thy progress firm though slow, And statesmen, princes, leagued with their inveterate foe. Scared at thy frown terrific, fly The morals (antiquated brood), Domestic virtue, social joy, And ...
— English Satires • Various
... good fashion, at the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta;' how it then passed into Hermotimus, 'where no sooner it was missing, but with one Pyrrhus of Delos [20] it learned to go a-fishing;' [21] how thence it did enter the Sophist of Greece, Pythagoras. After having ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... remember, that "there is one thing in the world more contemptible than the slave of a tyrant—it is the dupe of a SOPHIST." ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... censure, he spared the vices of his own party and associates; and, like all satirists, for effect he often traduced character, as in the case of the virtuous Socrates. In an attack on the Sophists, in his play of the Clouds, he gives to Socrates the character of a vulgar Sophist, and holds him up to the derision of the Athenian people. But, as another has said, "Time has set all even; and 'poor Socrates,' as Aristophanes called him—as a far loftier ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... conduct on board ship when his beloved incurs the fate of Jonah is eminently despicable: but then he was countryman ex hypothesi of Mourzoufle, not of Villehardouin. The "battailous" spirit of the West is not to be expected in a Byzantine sophist. Whether something of its artistic and literary spirit is not to be detected in him is a more doubtful question. For my part, I cannot read of Hysmine without being reminded of Nicolette, as I am never reminded in other parts of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "the venerable goat attempted to subdue me by the force of argument; and, to do him justice, I must say that his philosophy, if not very rational, was at least very profound. He went over the entire field of moral subtleties, and proved himself an excellent sophist. He argued that as nature had given me passions, I was justified in gratifying them, despite the opinions of the world and the prohibitions of decent society. Much more he said that I have forgotten; but the drift of his remarks was, that as I had admitted him to be the most charming and ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... disposition, he was more like Shakespeare than any other Englishman whom I can think of; but in Coleridge the poet soon disappeared, and a little later the philosopher in him faded into the visionary and sophist; he became an upholder of the English Church and found reasons in the immutable constitution of the universe for aprons and shovel-hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, though similarly endowed, was far more richly endowed: he had stronger ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... connoisseur, savant, pundit, schoolman[obs3], professor, graduate, wrangler; academician, academist[obs3]; master of arts, doctor, licentitate, gownsman; philosopher, master of math; scientist, clerk; sophist, sophister[obs3]; linguist; glossolinguist, philologist; philologer[obs3]; lexicographer, glossographer; grammarian; litterateur[Fr], literati, dilettanti, illuminati, cogniscenti[It]; fellow, Hebraist, lexicologist, mullah, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the theory of Certitude. But the question, far from being a new or modern speculation, is as old as Philosophy itself, and has been perpetually reproduced in every age of intellectual activity. Plato discusses it, chiefly in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Parmenides; it was agitated by Pyrrho, Enesidemus, and Sextus Empiricus, with that peculiar subtlety which belonged to the mind of Greece; and in more recent times it has reappeared in the writings of Montaigne and Bayle, Huet ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... accounts of the weakness of Scripture when it is treated only as external history, or as words, texts, and phrases. "Scripture," he says, in the exact words and figures of the German Humanist, "is a Sealed Book which the greatest Sophist may be most acquainted with. It is like the Pillar of fire and cloud that parted between the Israelites and Egyptians, giving a clear and comfortable light to all those that are under the manuduction and guidance thereof [i.e. those ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... neither; for whereas Homer extends it so far as to the budding of the beard, Plato himself has remarked this as rare: and the reason why the sophist Bion so pleasantly called the first appearing hairs of adolescence 'Aristogitons' and 'Harmodiuses'—[Plutarch, On Love, c.34.]— is sufficiently known. I find it in virility already in some sort a little out of date, though not so ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... for immortality in soul and body, had a foolish contempt of death, and suffered themselves to be persuaded that they were brethren, because, having abandoned the Greek gods, they worshipped the crucified sophist, living according to his laws."(141) Peregrinus, when a Christian, soon rises to the dignity of bishop, and is worshipped as a god; and when imprisoned for his religion is visited by Christians from all quarters. Afterwards, expelled the church, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... go," he said, half speaking to himself, "how should I go to tell her that she is not yet a Christian, and bid her swear by Jupiter, because that is her god, in order that she may escape imprisonment and death? Am I to do the part of a heathen priest or infidel sophist? O Caecilius, how am I forgetting your lessons! No; I will go on no such errand. Go, I will, if I may, Jucundus, but I will go on no conditions of yours. I go on no promise to try to get her out of prison anyhow, poor child. I will not go to make her ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman |
