"Rhetoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the same time; a paragraph, and a lash between; which in those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... possibly have only been placed there as a flower of rhetoric or as a word to complete the verse, raised a great uproar, which would doubtless have greatly amused the poet if he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and so did his son, who was intended to be an orator. A great professor used to come and give them lessons, and I used to stand and listen, by which means I picked up a considerable quantity of what is called rhetoric. In what I last said, I was aiming at what I have heard him frequently endeavouring to teach my governors as a thing indispensably necessary in all oratory, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... we desire a certain state of affairs, that often tends to cause a real desire for it. This is due partly to the influence of words upon our emotions, in rhetoric for example, and partly to the general fact that discomfort normally belongs to the belief that we desire such-and-such a thing that we do not possess. Thus what was originally a false opinion as to the object of a desire acquires ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... studying, but in hearing, while seated unnoticed at my desk, the conversation of Mr. Brace with the older classes. There, from hour to hour, I listened with eager ears to historical criticisms and discussions, or to recitations in such works as Paley's Moral Philosophy, Blair's Rhetoric, Allison on Taste, all full of most ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... 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 secrecy, caution, vigilance, and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... and a few historians, the far greater part of the other eminent men of letters, both of Greece and Rome, appear to have been either public or private teachers; generally either of philosophy or of rhetoric. This remark will be found to hold true, from the days of Lysias and Isocrates, of Plato and Aristotle, down to those of Plutarch and Epictetus, Suetonius, and Quintilian. To impose upon any man the necessity of teaching, year after year, in any particular ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... accurate to a scientific reasoner, but which have as much truth as one can demand from an epigram. And besides many sayings which share in some degree their merit, there are occasional passages which rise, at least, to the height of graceful rhetoric if they are scarcely to be called poetical. One simile was long famous, and was called by Johnson the best in the language. It is that in which the sanguine youth, overwhelmed by a growing perception of the boundlessness of possible attainments, is compared to the traveller crossing the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... is practical eloquence,—the perfect pantomime of rhetoric; and, when your eyes have recovered the dazzling shock of the encounter, you shall see William of Deloraine lying on the green sward, with the Baron's spear-head sunk a foot within his bosom. Nothing, in short, can be more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... purpose being to foster eloquence rather than discover truth. Hence, we have the word "sophistry," which means fallacious reasoning. And yet, in the words of Schwegler, "It cannot be denied that Protagoras also hit upon many correct principles of rhetoric, and satisfactorily established certain grammatical categories. It may in general be said of the Sophists that they gave the people a great profusion of general knowledge; ... that they called out investigations in ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Meaning that her husband gave her this commission in order to prevent her from committing suicide. (4) See Book VIII., line 547. (5) See line 709. (6) This passage is described by Lord Macaulay as "a pure gem of rhetoric without one flaw, and, in my opinion, not very far from historical truth" (Trevelyan's "Life and Letters", vol. i., page 462.) (7) "... Clarum et venembile nomen Gentibus, et multum nostrae quod profuit urbi," quoted by Mr. Burke, and applied to Lord Chatham, in his Speech on ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... being pleased with the vivacity of Mademoiselle, resolved to leave no argument untried, which he thought might prevail on her to be the companion of their intended voyage; and he made no doubt but her example, added to the rhetoric of Montraville, would persuade Charlotte to go ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... supposed some of his gang had stolen him: to which Mr. Carew very calmly replied, What was he to his dog, or what was his dog to him? if he would make him drink it was well, for he was very dry: at last, with the use of much rhetoric, he got a cup of small drink; then, taking leave of him, he went to the Red Lion, in the same parish, where he staid some time. In the mean time down ran the parson to my Lord Clifford's, to acquaint him that Mr. Carew was in the parish, and to advise ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more musical in maturity than in childhood. Time is a severe alembic of youthful joys, no doubt; we exhaust book after book and leave Shakespeare unopened; we grow fastidious in men and women; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we fancy we have heard before; we have seen the pictures, we have listened to the symphonies: but what has been done by all the art and literature of the world towards describing one summer day? The most exhausting effort ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... rhetoric and your politeness are thrown away; your apology avails nothing. If your situation in life is a sedentary one, your amusements, your recreations, at least, should be active. You ought to walk or ride; or, if the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... received two or three more letters of the same kind, each enclosing in its loose husk of rhetoric a smaller kernel of fact. By dint of patient interlinear study, Ann Eliza gathered from them that Evelina and her husband, after various costly experiments in boarding, had been reduced to a tenement-house flat; that living in St. Louis was more expensive than they had supposed, and that Mr. Ramy ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... one beardless gentleman would call another beardless gentleman his "honourable friend," and appeal "to the sense of the House," and address himself to "Mr. Speaker;" and how they would all juggle the same tricks of rhetoric as their fathers were doing in certain other debates in a certain other House. And it was curious, too, to mark the points of resemblance between the two Houses; and how the smaller one had, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Manners, Religion, and Politics of present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about Napoleon and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for its connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian sugar. It was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind that on 13th May 1796 the editor of the Watchman was compelled to bid farewell to his few ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... could not have received his suggestion for a colour scheme from the tinted leaves of autumn for they are dull in comparison. He may have had a hint from the glowing sunsets that in that western land fill earth and sky with a glory so transcendent that mere rhetoric is a profanation. More likely is it that when free and unrestrained he roamed over plain and hill his soul became enamoured with the dazzling array of colours, beyond the genius of the proudest palette, to be found in the marvellous formations that surround the great geysers of the Yellowstone, ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... compliment to a public speaker that the audience should discuss what he says rather than his manner of saying it; more complimentary that they should remember his arguments, than that they should praise his rhetoric. The orator should seek to conceal himself behind his subject. If he presents himself in every speech he is sure to become monotonous, if not offensive. If, however, he focuses attention upon his subject, he can find an infinite number of themes and, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... out life for one's self, one came to perceive a width and sanctity in the choice of work—whether rhetoric or art, theology or sculpture, hydraulics or manufacture—but to work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a good blacksmith more than a lady ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... 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 His Church to teach science or philosophy, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... fierce planets' daughter whose hair is always on fire, and with Grammar that is the moon's daughter, I have shut their ears to the imaginary harpings and speech of the angels; and I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the light star and out of the amorous star, you have been my spearman and my catapult! Oh! my swift horseman! Oh! my keen darting arguments, it is because of you that I have overthrown the hosts of foolishness! [An ANGEL, in a dress the color of embers, ...
— The Hour Glass • W.B.Yeats
... almost any person of moderate pretensions by the largeness of his ideas; and, of late years, his father had not pretended to hold an argument with him, for Simon always overwhelmed him by the force and elegance of his rhetoric. He spoke familiarly of great men ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... immediate relations with his fellows. The sophists, learned in tradition, and skilled in disputation, but for the most part entirely lacking in originality, are the new prophets. As teachers of rhetoric and morals, they represent the practical and secular spirit of their age; while in their avoidance of speculation, and their critical justification of that course, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... from time to time made descents on the district, to sow the good seed, as it were, by the wayside. But next day came a frost, a killing frost. The Northerners are too mathematical. They have taken Lord Bacon's advice. They "weigh and consider." They want logic, and will not be content with mere rhetoric. They require demonstrations, and have opinions of their own. Before accepting a theory they turn it round and round, and test it with the square, the level, and the line. They care nothing for oratory unless there is sense at the back of it. They know that ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... words of common speech and primitive origin, but words drawn from Low Latin and of administrative connotation. Barnes achieves this triumph in words with perfect ease. He can use a word like "parish" not, as Crabbe did, for purposes of pure narration but in a passage of heightened rhetoric: ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... plane-trees in the Agora, and gathered in 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 only another ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 1836 to 1840, and many of his early writings were signed "Augustus Dunshunner." In 1844 he joined the editorial staff of Blackwood's, to which for many years he contributed political articles, verse, translations of Goethe, and humorous sketches. In 1845 he became Professor of Rhetoric and Literature in the University of Edinburgh, a place which he held until 1864. About 1841 he became acquainted with Theodore Martin, and in association with him wrote a series of light papers interspersed with burlesque verses, which, reprinted from Blackwood's, became ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... 'commonplace, threadbare pulpit rhetoric.' Yes! Do you live as if it were true? It will never be too threadbare to be dinned into your head until it has passed into your lives ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... not count. As an emotional outlet for the oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the Crime now and then: the Crime being the murder of a State and the carving of its body into three pieces. There was really nothing to do but to drop a few tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave. But the spirit of the nation refused to rest therein. It haunted the territories of the Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion where strangers are making themselves ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... girls who could successfully pass the entrance examinations to the medical department of the University of Michigan, in arithmetic, algebra, rhetoric, general and United States history, physics, and Latin, was a revelation to the people of America, and their college career was watched ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... hideous pamphleteer understood this well; and therefore he adopted vague insinuations, that allowed of no possible refutation, a method which, we may remark by the way, has not been without imitators. Marat exclaimed every day: "Let Bailly send in his accounts!" and the most powerful figure of rhetoric, as Napoleon said, repetition, finally inspires doubts in a stupid portion of the public, in some feeble, ignorant, and credulous minds in the Council of the Commune; and the scrupulous magistrate wished, in fact, to send in his accounts. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... become for some time mere figures of rhetoric," replied Petronius, carelessly. "But since Greek rhetoricians taught us, it is easier for me even to ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... to consider this question in the light of rhetoric and made no reply. He wasn't going to give Estelle away by saying there was nothing the matter with her, and on the other hand a lie would have been pounced upon and torn to pieces. "Marriage don't seem to have agreed with either of you ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... fervent and unstudied tribute to Mr. Leo Fritter, candidate for the United's Presidency. Though the editorial is bestrewn with slang and distinctly familiar in construction, it produces upon the reader an impression of absolute sincerity and intensity of feeling which more elaborate rhetoric might fail so forcibly to convey. Great as is the tribute, however, we feel that Mr. Fritter is worthy of it, and must congratulate him on having such support. Our own efforts for his election, appearing in The Conservative, seem slight ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... from being elected members. But his intention, being so evident, rather put the commons more upon their guard. Enow of patriots still remained to keep up the ill humor of the house; and men needed but little instruction or rhetoric to recommend to them practices which increased their own importance and consideration. The weakness of the court, also, could not more evidently appear, than by its being reduced to use so ineffectual an expedient, in order to obtain an influence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... their intentions; and therefore, in their first visits, the one appeared in state, and the other was the spokesman. But they found the ladies in England of a far different taste from those who had rendered them famous in France: the rhetoric of the one had no effect on the fair sex, and the fine mien of the other distinguished him only in a minuet, which he first introduced into England, and which he danced with tolerable success. The English court had been too long accustomed to the solid wit of Saint Evremond, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... is naturally favourable to logical ideas. The man of reflection will attribute, as far as possible, validity and reality to these alone. Platonism remains the classic instance of this way of thinking. Living in an age of rhetoric, with an education that dealt with nothing but ideal entities, verbal, moral, or mathematical, Plato saw in concretions in discourse the true elements of being. Definable meanings, being the terms of thought, must also, he fancied, be the constituents of reality. And with that directness and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... lively contest—rhetoric and corruption on both sides reinforced by terrorism, to which the Allies' military authorities in Macedonia, and their Secret Service at Athens, whose efficiency had been greatly increased by the dismissal of many policemen obnoxious ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... pulpit trembled like a leaf with the passion of the preacher's convictions and the energy of his utterance. On had gone the stream of rhetoric, the denunciations, the satire, the tremendous assertions of God's mind and purposes. The lash that was wielded was far-reaching; all the vices of the age—irreligion, blasphemy, drunkenness, extravagance, vainglory, loose living—fell under ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... it had become the fashion to send youths to Athens to study Grammar, Rhetoric, and Philosophy there. There was no great philosopher there, but they studied the history of philosophy. There was also no religion, for no one believed on the gods of the State, although, from old habit, ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... German 83 per cent. Algebra and Geometry 88 " " English Literature 57 " " Rhetoric 57 " " History 55 " " Domestic Economy,—including sewing, cooking and household economies 4 " " If only barely four per cent. of the girls in our high schools are studying subjects which directly contribute to their efficiency as home-makers, what are the prospects for worthy parenthood ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... the second hour of the school. This is devoted to the study of the languages. The Latin, French, and English classes recite at this time. By English classes I mean those studying the English as a language, that is, classes in Grammar, Rhetoric, and Composition. The hour is divided as the first hour is, and the bell is rung in the same way, that is, at the close of each half hour, and also five minutes before the close, to give the classes notice that the time for ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... day something more of Laura's own story began to appear in the newspapers, colored and heightened by reporters' rhetoric. Some of them cast a lurid light upon the Colonel's career, and represented his victim as a beautiful avenger of her murdered innocence; and others pictured her as his willing paramour and pitiless slayer. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... eye." He lacked imagination absolutely, and worked slowly, laboriously, his method one of excessive complication. He began with a shadow, then a touch, superimposing tone upon tone, modelling his paint somewhat like Monticelli, but without a hint of that artist's lyricism. Sober, without rhetoric, a realist, yet with a singularly rich and often harmonious palette, Cezanne reported faithfully what his ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... time she had not yet attained her thirtieth year; she was not merely her 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, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... skin—"Think no more of such folly— thou wilt anger me. That a doting graybeard like Khosrul should trouble the peace of Al-Kyris the Magnificent, ... by the gods— the whole thing is absurd! Let me hear no more of mobs or riots, or road-rhetoric,—my soul abhors even the suggestion of discord. Tranquillity! ... Divinest calm, disturbed only by the flutterings of winged thoughts hovering over the cloudless heaven of fancy! ... this, this alone is the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the Scotch churches is taken off in The Tale of a Tub, sect. xi:—'Neither was it possible for the united rhetoric of mankind to prevail with Jack to make himself clean again.' In Humphry Clinker (Letter of Aug. 8) we are told that 'the good people of Edinburgh no longer think dirt and cobwebs essential to the house of God.' Bishop Horne (Essays and Thoughts, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... established in the monasteries where the schools were held, the professors in rhetoric frequently gave their pupils the life of some saint for a trial of their talent at amplification. The students, at a loss to furnish out their pages, invented most of these wonderful adventures. Jortin observes, that the Christians used to collect out of Ovid, Livy, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 'Morning Intelligence' next day skimmed lightly over the leader on organ-boys in their ordinary casual fashion, without even thinking what hopes and fears and doubts and terrors had gone to the making of that very commonplace bit of newspaper rhetoric. For if the truth must be told, Edie's first admiring criticism was perfectly correct, and Ernest Le Breton's leader was just for all the world exactly the same as ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... my certificate of admission to Radcliffe last July, I have been studying with a private tutor, Horace, Aeschylus, French, German, Rhetoric, English History, English Literature and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... vote in a grog-shop, nor to have his head broken while he is 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. This method of handling the subject cannot impose on the good sense of the people of America. It may display the subtlety of the writer; it may open a boundless field for rhetoric and declamation; it may inflame the passions of the unthinking, and may confirm the prejudices of the misthinking: but cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; ...
— The Federalist Papers
... interior. Joseph, more of a painter than ever, was delighted with the turn of events, and entreated his mother to let him go to Monsieur Regnauld, promising to earn his own living. He declared he was quite sufficiently advanced in the second class to get on without rhetoric. Philippe, a captain at nineteen and decorated, who had, moreover, served the Emperor as an aide-de-camp in two battles, flattered the mother's vanity immensely. Coarse, blustering, and without real merit ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... to the same ends, why, they being retained, should it be rejected, especially considering how difficult often it may be to distinguish those forms of discourse from this, or exactly to define the limits which sever rhetoric and raillery. Some elegant figures and trophies of rhetoric (biting sarcasms, sly ironies, strong metaphors, lofty hyperboles, paronomasies, oxymorons, and the like, frequently used by the best speakers, and not seldom even by sacred writers) do ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... strove, with all my power, where'er she came, To soothe her grief, yet gave it not a name. At length a few sad bitter tears she shed. And on both hands reclined her aching head. 'Twas then my time the conqueror to prove, I summon'd all my rhetoric, all my love. "Jennet, you must not think to pass through life "Without its sorrows, and without its strife; "Good, dutiful, and worthy, as you are, "You must have griefs, and you must learn to bear." Thus I went on, trite moral truths to string,— All chaff, mere chaff, ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... was intent on 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[21] method; and soon after I procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... of the difference of their eloquence in their orations: methinks I may say thus much of them. That Demosthenes did wholly employ all his wit and learning (natural or artificial) unto the art of rhetoric, and that in force, and vertue of eloquence, he did excel all the orators in his time: and for gravity and magnificent style, all those also that only write for shew or ostentation: and for sharpness and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... others of forming verbal conceits. Hence, we find that the disciples were first called Christians at Antioch, no doubt, derisively,[30] and in Julian's time they had a cant saying that they had suffered nothing from the X or the K (Christ or Constantius). A celebrated school of rhetoric was established here, and no doubt some of the effusions penned at this time, abounded with ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Copperfield, as Mr. Micawber, was, as his son was always most willing to testify, a kind, generous man; but he was improvident to the last degree; and when in difficulties which would have made melancholy any other man, he was able, by the mere force of his rhetoric, to lift himself above circumstances or to make himself ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... serious stumbling block to the novice is the dialect story. If you have an idea of trying that style of composition, let me warn you: Don't! Dialect stories never were very artistic, for they are a paradoxical attempt to make good literature of poor rhetoric and worse grammar. They have never been recognized or written by any great master of fiction. They are a sign of a degenerate taste, and their production or perusal is a menace to the formation and preservation of a good literary style. They are merely ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Pascal, and the manner in which he defines his own attitude in relation to what he considered the two great lines of thought opposed to Christianity. When we are in possession of his own statements, we may find that much of the indignant rhetoric of M. Cousin is beside the question, and that, although Pascal was certainly no Cartesian, and has used some strong and rash expressions about the weakness of human reason, neither is he a sceptic in any usual sense. He has, in fact, defined his ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... may not have been a gifted soldier. History is silent on the point. But the surviving records of the court-martial with which we are concerned go to show that he was certainly not a gifted speaker. His vocabulary was limited, his rhetoric clumsy, and Major Carruthers denounces his delivery as halting, his very voice dull and monotonous; also his manner, reflecting his mind on this occasion, appears to have been perfectly unimpassioned. He had been ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... to read. "My adored mother, even in this lowest circle of hell all hearts are not closed to pity, and I have been given the hope that these last words of farewell may reach you...." My eyes ran on over pages of plaintive rhetoric. "Embrace for me my adored Candida...let her never forget the cause for which her father and brother perished...let her keep alive in her breast the thought of Spielberg and Reggio. Do not grieve that I ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... was the general title of a didactic work containing rules for medicine, husbandry, and rhetoric (e.g. 'Rem tene, verba sequentur'). Cf. Quint. iii. 1, 19, 'Romanorum primus, quantum ego quidem sciam, condidit aliqua in hanc materiam (rhetoric) M. Cato ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... it in, cram it in— Children's heads are hollow; Rap it in, tap it in— Bang it in, slam it in Ancient archaeology, Aryan philology, Prosody, zoology, Physics, climatology, Calculus and mathematics, Rhetoric and hydrostatics. Stuff the school children, fill up the heads of them, Send them all lesson-full home to the beds of them; When they are through with the labor and show of it, What do they care for it, what do they ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... one vast cafe. Conversation in France was at its zenith. There were less eloquence and rhetoric than in '89. With the exception of Rousseau, there was no orator to cite. The intangible flow of wit was as spontaneous as possible. For this sparkling outburst there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... little his desire to talk to her. We are used to French sentiment about the mother; it is a commonplace of French eloquence, and we have often smiled at it as mere sentimental platitude; but in these letters we see a son's love for his mother no longer insisted upon or dressed up in rhetoric, but naked and unconscious, a habit of the mind, a need of the soul, a support even to the weakness of the flesh. Such affection with us is apt to be, if not shamefaced, at least a little off-hand. Often it exists, and is strong; but it is seldom so constant an element in all joy and sorrow. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... which a Boswell of the time might have given us. But Cicero's personality as a man of letters seems especially to require elucidation. His letters lose their chief charm if the character of the man be not known, and the incidents of his life. His essays on rhetoric—the written lessons which he has left on the art of oratory—are a running commentary on his own career as an orator. Most of his speeches require for their understanding a knowledge of the circumstances of his life. The treatises ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... rough paths smooth. His philosophy is easily comprehended and readily applied. His words need no interpretation; they are the words of the people, the language of the masses. If He were a teacher of rhetoric He would surpass all other teachers because the art of discourse reaches its maximum in His sentences. The learned sometimes speak over the heads of their hearers, using words that are unusual and long-drawn-out. Jesus talked to the multitude and they not only understood Him but "the common ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if his range was narrow, he is master there. "Within that circle none durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize—an empire resting not on violence, but on justice ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... French, and that this half was his superficial half. At the bottom of his soul, though not perhaps at the bottom of his heart, he was Italian, and of the great race which in every science and every art seems to win the primacy when it will. The French, through the rhetoric of Napoleon III., imposed themselves on the imagination of the world as the representatives of the Latin race, but they are the least and the last of the Latins, and the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin Zola owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wit. The great increase of public business, since then, has necessarily made a considerable change in this respect. Not only has the time of the Legislature become too precious to be wasted upon the mere gymnastics of rhetoric, but even those graces, with which true Oratory surrounds her statements, are but impatiently borne, where the statement itself is the primary and pressing object of the hearer. [Footnote: The new light that as been thrown on Political Science may also, perhaps, be assigned as a reason for this ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... have I to do with all this?" cried the Judge. "I have never been acquainted with Jacek—have not even seen him; I had scarcely heard of his riotous life, since I was then studying rhetoric in a Jesuit school, and later served as page with the Wojewoda. They gave me the estate and I took it; he told me to receive Zosia, and I received her and cared for her, and am planning for her future. I am weary enough of all this old wives' ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... 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 DESK BOOK OF GOOD ENGLISH, both of ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... vigilance to observe how the plea in justification or excuse takes effect, and, if they perceive it does not succeed, what address in sliding into a different one. What quickness to avail themselves of any mistake, or apparent concession, in the examiner or reprover. What copious rhetoric in exaggeration of the cause which tempted to do wrong, or of the great good hoped to be effected by the little deviation from the right,—a good surely enough to excuse so trifling an impropriety. What facility of placing between themselves and the censure, the recollected example of some good ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... boom of the first cannon trained on the island fortress deserves all the rhetoric it has inspired. Who was immediately responsible for that firing which was destiny? Ultimate responsibility is not upon any person. War had to be. If Sumter had not been the starting-point, some other would have been found. Nevertheless the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... London and the Mercers' Company. 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, ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... clinched the argument with half a dozen quotations from syntax or Greek grammar, he uniformly came down upon the father for a coat, the cloth of which was finer in proportion to the web of logic he wove during the disputation. Whenever he seated himself in the chair of rhetoric, or gave an edifying homily on prayer, with such eloquence as rendered the father's admiration altogether inexpressible, he applied for a pair of smallclothes; and if, in the excursiveness of his vigorous imagination he travelled ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... herself of precisely the same arguments, and insists on the self-same topics which Portia addresses to Shylock in her celebrated speech; but how beautifully and how truly is the distinction marked! how like, and yet how unlike! Portia's eulogy on mercy is a piece of heavenly rhetoric; it falls on the ear with a solemn measured harmony; it is the voice of a descended angel addressing an inferior nature: if not premeditated, it is at least part of a preconcerted scheme; while Isabella's pleadings are poured from the abundance of ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... are controlled by the greatness of our object. Thus, if a man should go to see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the Appian Way at dawn, he will not care very much for the niggling of pedants about this or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about this or that beautiful picture. If a thing in his way seem to him frankly ugly he will easily treat it as a neutral, forget it and pass it by. If, on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... hear me from the pulpit," he said; "there you cannot answer me." The preacher—if I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself to him—has his hearer's head in chancery, and can administer punishment ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to without a word of comment or a ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and everyone in Court hung upon his words. The silence was profound, and each listener's eager attention grew in intensity as he proceeded to detail the peculiar power of fascination—snake-like, he called it—possessed by the plaintiff. Without any assistance from turgid rhetoric, or indignant denunciation, he depicted it in a manner so simple, yet so direct, that his audience shivered in response. Then, with consummate art, he played upon their sensibilities by picturing the simple homeliness of Amy Johnson's happy family ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... 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 ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... preparing for the Maronite college at Ain Warka, the most noted seminary on the mountains. He entered the college at the age of sixteen, and remained nearly three years, applying himself diligently to rhetoric, and to natural and theological science, all of which were taught in ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... and parliaments are ever ready to rescind their votes. Find a man who, totally destitute of genius, possesses nevertheless considerable talents; who has official aptitude, a volubility of routine rhetoric, great perseverance, a love of affairs; who, embarrassed neither by the principles of the philosopher nor by the prejudices of the bigot, can assume, with a cautious facility, the prevalent tone, and disembarrass ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are also in transition. We have avoided both the acts and the rhetoric of the cold war. When we have differed with the Soviet Union, or other nations, for that matter, I have tried to differ quietly and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... him). Is it like this for her here always? A woman, with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman's soul can live on ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... "this good Duchess, so French and so Neapolitan at once, half Vesuvius, half school-girl, whom nothing must prevent us from honoring and loving." The chivalric and sentimental rhetoric of the time, the elegies of the poets, the noble prose of Chateaubriand, the tearful articles of the royalist journals, have condemned her to appear forever solemn and sublime. It was sought to confine her youth between a tomb and a cradle. ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... use of books). Za-Zk Production. Za Authorship. Zb Rhetoric. Zd Writing. Zh Printing. Zk Binding. Zl Distribution (Publishing and Bookselling). Zp Storage and Use (Libraries). Zt Description (Zt Bibliography; Zx Selection of reading; Zy Literary history; Zz ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... fellowship if verbal exhortations and arguments could have done it. The only kind of fresh attempt, which after the failure of those two experiments could fairly lay claim to universal sympathy, was one which should withdraw the proposed politico-social rearrangement from the domain alike of rhetoric and of empiricism and substitute a thorough systematic reform covering all the aspects of international intercourse, including all the civilized peoples on the globe, harmonizing the vital interests of these and setting up adequate machinery to deal with the needs of this enlarged and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... entreaties and plausible excuses from Douglas, his aunts at length consented to withdraw, and he then exerted all the rhetoric he was master of to reconcile his bride to the situation love and necessity had thrown her into. But in vain he employed reasoning, caresses, and threats; the only answers he could extort were tears and entreaties to be taken ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... his hands hanging over his knees, his lips moving without sound, under the sentences his brain was forming. This habit of silent rhetoric represented a curious compromise between a natural impetuosity of temperament, and the caution of scientific research. His wife watched him ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rhetoric and grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world.... Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... one by one to their assistance, and much objurgation and ornamental rhetoric floats freely through the atmosphere. Presently, the coach is got on its wheels again by united effort, and it is found to be none the worse for the accident. In truth, its builder seems to have had an eye to such casualties as that we ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... quietly at home, even assuring her that it 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
... want of passion in the orderly lines of type; and I suppose we may take the capitals as a mere substitute for the great voice with which he would have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips. Indeed, as it is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic canon, thus to support and accentuate in conclusion ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... many "Whereases." Captain Kendrick, listening intently, found the path of his understanding clogged by them and tangled by Miss Elvira's flowers of rhetoric. He gathered, nevertheless, that the "little group of ladies resident at the Fair Harbor, having been reared amid surroundings of culture, art and refinement" were, naturally, desirous of improving their present surroundings. Also that a "truly remarkable ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... several recent attempts on similar themes, by its freedom from the ambitious and disgusting pretension of dressing up the severe simplicity of the Oriental writers in the tawdry and finical robes of modern rhetoric. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... one's thought. True, it does not bestow imagination, a delicate flower blossoming none knows how and unable to thrive on every soil; but it arranges what is confused, thins out the dense, calms the tumultuous, filters the muddy and gives lucidity, a superior product to all the tropes of rhetoric. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... lost if it seem to threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric? I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... 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
... the prince's charge (and that very largely) fine professors and readers, that is to say, of divinity, of the civil law, physic, the Hebrew and the Greek tongues. And for the other lectures, as of philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and the quadrivials (although the latter, I mean arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, and with them all skill in the perspectives, are now smally regarded in either of them), the universities themselves do allow competent stipends to such ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... of this is little more than the tumid rhetoric of the cloister; for all the assumptions that have been raised of the physical degeneracy of the people are quite unsupported by any real historical evidence. M. Guizot considers it unjust and cruel to view their humble supplications, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... many sentences of excited rhetoric. Borrow forgot while he wrote that he had a book to review—a book, moreover, issued by the publishing house which issued the periodical in which his review was to appear. And this book was a book in ten thousand—a veritable mine of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... adorned by great historians and philosophers. Herodotus and Thucydides have never been surpassed as historians, while the Sophists who succeeded the more earnest philosophers of a previous age, gave to Athenian youth a severe intellectual training. Rhetoric, mathematics and natural history supplanted speculation, led to the practice of eloquence as an art, and gave to society polish and culture. The Sophists can not indeed be compared with those great ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... client with subtleties to 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 of years, they were at length dismissed, when their patience and fortune ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise, poets witty, the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, moral grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend: Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought {19} out by fit studies: like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... the tumult intervenes. After more rhetoric he takes Andromache and Molossus under his protection and cows Menelaus, who leaves for Sparta on urgent business. When her father departs, Hermione fears her husband's vengeance on her maltreatment of ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... something else. Then if Mr. Dean fitted out a laboratory, his daughter would have the pleasure of working in it all by herself. She would show a certain person what it meant to cast aside a lifelong friendship. Oh, yes, Marjorie was anxious for her to take English literature. She would take rhetoric instead. She would go still further. If when classes assembled she found herself in the same geometry section with her chum she would make an excuse and change to another period of recitation. The frown deepened on her smooth forehead as she jotted down her ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... part, and, whether we consider the merits of the original or of the translation, the world has but little to regret in the loss. Aristaenetus is one of those weak, florid sophists, who flourished in the decline and degradation of ancient literature, and strewed their gaudy flowers of rhetoric over the dead muse of Greece. He is evidently of a much later period than Alciphron, to whom he is also very inferior in purity of diction, variety of subject, and playfulness of irony. But neither of them ever deserved to be wakened from that sleep, in which the commentaries ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... wording, which really requires a fuller rhetorical study than can here be ventured. It is, however, of the utmost importance that you should be aware of precisely how wording bears upon force in a sentence. Study "The Working Principles of Rhetoric," by John Franklin Genung, or the rhetorical treatises of Adams Sherman Hill, of Charles Sears Baldwin, or any others whose names may easily be learned ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... these last words, he seemed to rise before me, pale as the night when the camellias told their story and he knew his offering was accepted. These words, in their humility, were clearly something quite different from the usual flowery rhetoric of lovers, and a wave of feeling broke over me; it was ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac |
