"Argumentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... represented only the first stage, the argumentative stage of the great contest. It was during this period, for example, that the Mariposa Newspacket absolutely proved that the price of hogs in Mariposa was decimal six higher than the price of oranges in Southern California and that the average decennial ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... chapter is penned. Nick names are as common as daisies in the Army and by this medium a large number of characters will be portrayed and the fate awaiting each one later recorded. To those who imagine that Death has set laws for claiming this or that type there will be ample argumentative data—but this is a factor upon which no scientific grounds can be used as a base for theories. Life ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... raw—boned, well—informed personage; a bit of a quiz on occasion, but withal a pleasant fellow. Mr Isaac Shingle, mine host, a sallow, sharp, hatchet—faced, small, but warm hearted and kind, as I often experienced during my sojourn in the west, only sometimes a little peppery and argumentative. Then came Mr Jacob Bumble, a sleek fat— pated Scotchman. Next I was introduced to Mr Alonzo Smoothpate, a very handsome fellow, with an uncommon share of natural good—breeding and politeness. Again I clapper—clawed, according to the fashion of the country, a violent shake of the paw being the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... round of the village, as such questions do. The servants of Oakley fed upon it. They held secret conferences in the kitchen, and grew loud and argumentative when they knew John Arthur was safely out of hearing. They bore themselves with an air of subdued, unobservant melancholy in his presence, and waxed important, mysterious and unsatisfactory, when in converse ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... he saw much ability and also a mind logical and argumentative, and he had fully resolved that the boy should be educated and trained for the legal profession. And the farmer "plodded his weary way homeward" each day buoyed up with the thought that he was doing his duty towards his family and ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing. But with the Catholic Question had come a slight wind of controversy to break the calm: the elderly rector had become occasionally historical and argumentative; and Mr. Spray, the Independent minister, had begun to preach political sermons, in which he distinguished with much subtlety between his fervent belief in the right of the Catholics to the franchise and his fervent belief in their eternal perdition. Most of Mr. Spray's hearers, however, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... people in books, so have a conscience about your choice in this just as much as with living friends. Some books are bad for any one; a great many more would do harm to you, but perhaps not touch an older person. When I was your age, many an argumentative book (which seems thin and empty to me now) might have upset my faith. Many an exciting, passionate book (which I now read with a calm and critical mind) would have filled my whole heart and soul! Be thankful if you are kept under direction ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... sympathy, her eagerness to learn, made her the perfection of a disciple, while not unnaturally he delighted in tracing the many similarities of character between himself and his child. Then, too, in his hard, argumentative, fighting life it was an unspeakable relief to be able to retire every now and then into a home which no outer storms could shake or disturb. Fond as he was of his sister, Mrs. Craigie, and Tom, they constituted rather the innermost circle ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... was a very interesting one, more especially the "conversational" portion, in which free discussion was solicited. This was opened by Hon. E. Rosewater, who spoke in response to a very general call. His address of half an hour in length was marked by apparent sincerity, and was a calm and argumentative presentation of objections, theoretical and practical, which occurred to him against the extension of the franchise to women. It was replied to by Mrs. Colby, in a running comment, which abounded in womanly wisdom and wit, and incessantly brought down the house. Our restricted ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... favourable impression on the Count than he had entertained from his prisoner's conduct during the preceding evening, when, rendered irritable by the feelings of his situation, he was alternately moodily silent or fiercely argumentative. The veteran soldier began at length to take notice of his young companion as a pretty fellow, of whom something might be made, and more than hinted to him that would he but resign his situation in the Archer Guard of France, he would undertake to have ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... some new thing, fell into quick talk with Fenwick; looked him meanwhile up and down, his features, bearing, clothes; noticed his North-Country accent, and all the other signs of the plebeian. And presently Fenwick, placed at his ease, began for the first time to expand, became argumentative and explosive. In a few minutes he was laying down the law in his Westmoreland manner—attacking the Academy—denouncing certain pictures of the year—with a flushed, confident face and a gesticulating hand. Watson observed ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Stine admitted. "My theories hold water and seem logical enough up to this point. But the magter are the exception, and I have no idea why. They are completely different from the rest of the Disans. Argumentative, blood-thirsty, looking for planetary conquest instead of peace. They aren't rulers, not in the real sense. They hold power because nobody else wants it. They grant mining concessions to offworlders because they ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... criticism does not admit of denial. My method of treating the question of Home Rule is necessarily lifeless when compared with the vehement rhetoric or heated eloquence which characterises public or parliamentary discussion; it is also true that the argumentative treatment of matters affecting actual life always bears about it a certain ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... Bible don't name 'whiskey' once," said the man called Tom, in an argumentative tone. "Low wines I'll gin ye up;" he made the discrimination in accents betokening much reasonable admission; "but nare time does the Bible name whiskey, nor yit peach ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... or pleader, is a bad note. The positive, practical mind of the judge has taken in at a glance and penetrated to the bottom of arguments, means and valid pretensions; he submits impatiently to metaphysics and pettifoggery, to the argumentative force and mendacity of words.—This goes so far that he distrusts oratorical or literary talent; in any event when he entrusts active positions or a part in public business then he takes no note of it. According to him, "the men who write well and are eloquent have no solidity of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... involves taxing raw materials, and must necessarily result in high and prohibitive duties, which will upset our foreign trade, and will be ruinous and disorganising to the whole business of the country. But Tariff Reformers are not going to frame their duties in order to suit the argumentative convenience of Mr. Asquith. They are going to be guided by wholly different considerations from that. It is curious that everybody opposed to Tariff Reform says that Tariff Reformers intend to tax raw material, ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... in one of her absurdly argumentative moments, "Anne should have married Peter, Cherry, Justin, and I, Martin. But the truth is, we didn't seem to give the matter ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... as you can, in mixed companies, argumentative, polemical conversations; which, though they should not, yet certainly do, indispose for a time the contending parties toward each other; and, if the controversy grows warm and noisy, endeavor to put an end to it by some genteel levity or joke. I quieted ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... him were, after an hour's acquaintance. His public life was as his private, open and sincere; he never had a sinister motive, and this relieved him from duplicity of conduct. His talents were of a high order: in debate, he was argumentative and explicit; never pretending to any of the arts of the orator; but logically pursued his subject to a conclusion; never verbose, but always perspicuous. As a lawyer, he was well read; and the analytical character of his mind appeared to have been formed ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... declaring their hostility to the Militia Bill, Lord John Russell rose at eleven o'clock and announced his determination to oppose the second reading of it.[32] His speech was one of his ablest—statesmanlike, argumentative, terse, and playful; and the effect he produced ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... Abstain from learned ostentation Absurd term of genteel and fashionable vices Advice is seldom welcome Affectation in dress Always look people in the face when you speak to them Ancients and Moderns Argumentative, polemical conversations As willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody Authority Better not to seem to understand, than to reply Cannot understand them, or will not desire to understand them Cardinal de Retz Cardinal Virtues, by first degrading them into weaknesses Cautious ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... "Fingal"—which seems to have been the favorite—was again turned into heroic couplets by Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the attestations of a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness of the originals; and by an argumentative introduction, in which the author quotes Dr. Blair's dictum that Ossian was the equal of Homer and Vergil "in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, and in native majesty of passion." National pride enlisted most ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... definiteness in his refusal; the shake of his head emphasized it too. Marr's role should have been the persuasive, the insistent, the argumentative, the cajoling; but Marr was distinctly out ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... as though it came by inheritance to the accompaniment of a position and a title, and of many other things that he had heard tell of before and profoundly disagreed with; but for once he was not argumentative. He let the Church speak to him and advise him to do the thing he was longing to do, and to leave that life which (without a word said on the matter) he was known to have been leading in the past. And when the Archbishop had quite done and taken ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... at St. Asaph. The two prelates were men of much the same stamp. Both were divines of great theological learning; but while Bull's great talents were chiefly conspicuous in his controversial and argumentative works, Beveridge was chiefly eminent as a student and devotional writer. His 'Private Thoughts on Religion and Christian Life,' and his papers on 'Public Prayer' and 'Frequent Communions,' have always ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... become argumentative. "I don't see where you get the idea. Colburn isn't that way, and back at school there wasn't a single boy that was anything ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... literature and art that they themselves could not forbear laughing. Wagner was greatly over-estimated, in her opinion; she asked for invertebrate music, the free harmony of the passing wind. As for her moral views, they were enough to make one shudder. She had got past the argumentative amours of Ibsen's idiotic, rebellious heroines, and had now reached the theory of pure intangible beauty. She deemed Santerre's last creation, Anne-Marie, to be far too material and degraded, because in one deplorable passage the author remarked ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... volume with the first two divisions. There then only remained to revise the book and write a preface. In addition to the prose argument I had in each chapter one or more allegories; because while it is easy clearly to express abstract thoughts in argumentative prose, whatever emotion those thoughts awaken I have not felt myself able adequately to express except in the other form. (The allegory "Three Dreams in a Desert" which I published about nineteen years ago was taken from this book; and I ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... be twisted to the point of dismemberment, so long as one kept to the text, and made no pretence of knowledge beyond it; contention within these bounds was lawful and honorable, and the daily food of these argumentative Christians who gave themselves to the work of combining intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery, with perpetual surprise at any indication that the two ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... 1802, the Concordat was celebrated with high solemnities; the Archbishop of Paris received the First Consul within the portals of Notre-Dame. It was the fitting moment for the publication of the Genie du Christianisme. Its value as an argumentative defence of Christianity may not be great; but it was the restoration of religion to art, it contained or implied a new system of aesthetics, it was a glorification of devout sentiment, it was a pompous manifesto of romanticism, it recovered a lost ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... various people. Nor could such a task be committed to any but superior men. Only such as have abilities that would win them distinction in England, are fit to cope with the difficulties of dealing with intellects quite as argumentative as, and even more subtle than, those of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the morning, we mused happily about our friends all tucked away in bed, sound asleep. There is one in particular on whom we thought with serene pleasure. It was charming to think of that delightful, argumentative, contradictory, volatile person, his active mind stilled in the admirable reticence of slumber. He, so endlessly speculatory, so full of imaginative enthusiasms and riotous intuitions and troubled zeals concerning humanity, lost in a beneficent ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... not gifted with an argumentative spirit. She looked anxiously in the face of her companion, and murmured some broken sentences about the Lord's Prayer and the Golden Rule, and wound up by saying hesitatingly, "How can we ask forgiveness ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... wild oats' theory are too tragically evident to need any argumentative refutation. The statistics of the prevalency of venereal diseases alone is sufficient; the results of these ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... assaults of enemies in future, they rested in their present position, providing only for a new edition of Reformation Principles Exhibited, with a continuance of the history to that date. It was urged, at the time, that the argumentative part of our Testimony should be hastened to completion, but without effect. As the apostate Assembly of Scotland, 1689, admitted unsound ministers, curates, &c., to seats in court; so, with the like politic design, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... he rode home, was, on the whole, better pleased with his visit than he had expected to be. He had been told that his letter was argumentative and true, and that in ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... is a pity that the old divines should have indulged, as they often did, in such images as this. Some readers in search of argumentative subtility, some in search of sound Christianity, some in search of pure English undefiled, have gone through with them; and their labours (however heavy) have been ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... take'n loan de young men her bed-cord, en w'iles de candy wuz a coolin' in de plates, dey could all go ter de branch en see Brer Tarrypin kyar out his projick. Brer Tarrypin," continued Uncle Remus, in a tone at once confidential and argumentative, "weren't much bigger'n de pa'm er my han', en it look mighty funny fer ter year 'im braggin' 'bout how he kin out-pull Brer B'ar. But dey got de bed-cord atter w'ile, en den dey all put out ter de branch. W'en Brer Tarrypin fine de place he wanter, he tuck one ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... that was home for her and her husband she began at once to set forth her new light. Jeems, who added to the family income by taking care of furnaces and doing odd jobs, was grizzled and hobbling of body, but argumentative of soul. ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... believe it to be—even now that I am through with the book—the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has always been my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings of a Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected from the outset the form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily to what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often no more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... later, Eveley was called away to the telephone by Nolan, wishing to know what time he should call for her and the moment she was out of hearing, the club went into noisy conference. Upon her return, the argumentative Russian announced that the vote had been changed, and he was unanimously ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... is a tolerable specimen of the conversations of Goldsmith and Johnson; the farmer heedless, often illogical, always on the kind-hearted side of the question, and prone to redeem himself by lucky hits; the latter closely argumentative, studiously sententious, often profound, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... on those subjects that interested him, but in general conversation, in the pleasant give-and-take of wit and anecdote, he did not feel so much at home as he had in his Cambridge days. His thoughts were too serious, and the tendency of his mind was argumentative. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... "Argumentative contention is not what he excels in; and he is never, I think, so happy as when he has an opportunity of exhibiting a mixture of philosophy and pleasantry, and especially when he can interpose anecdotes and references to the authority of the eminent characters ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... writers like Ellen Key, Selma Lagerloef, Sophie Elkau, Alfhild Agress, Hilma Stanberg, and others, holds a high position in Swedish letters. Ellen Key is an essayist of virile power and argumentative breadth, of superior intellect and unfailing erudition. She is a fearless and unfailing champion of free thought, individualism, and woman's emancipation. As was said of Madame de Stael, her writings are "the most masculine productions of the faculties of woman." ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... in society, but one that called aloud the act of the parties to make it perfect and complete. How he should communicate his intentions to get a favorable reply, he was at a loss to know; he knew not whether to address Esq. Valeer in prose or in poetry, in a jocular or an argumentative manner, or whether he should use moral suasion, legal injunction, or seizure and take by reprisal; if it was to do the latter, he would have no difficulty in deciding in his own mind, but his gentlemanly honor was at stake; so he concluded to ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... not like nonsense, and he never talks it. Both the form and the content of his criticism are intellectual. He is in the great English tradition—the tradition of Dryden and Johnson and Macaulay and Leslie Stephen; he has an argumentative prose-style and a distaste for highfalutin, and, where the unenlightened intellectualism of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, and the incorrigible common sense of Johnson, might have pitched these eminent men into the slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens that Mr. Brock, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... different examples, in any question of law where judges of the court disagree, as in the Income Tax Case, or in the Insular cases which decided the status of Porto Rico and the Philippines, both the majority opinion and the dissenting opinions of the judges are argumentative in form; though the majority opinion, at any rate, is in theory an exposition of the law. The real difference between argument and exposition lies in the difference of attitude toward the subject in hand: when we are explaining ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... letting it come?" demanded the mother, listlessly argumentative. "You had outgrown me and my ways altogether. It was nonsense to suppose that you would have been satisfied to come back and live here again, over the shop. I couldn't think for the life of me what I was going to do with you. But now your uncle has taken all that into his own ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... presidency was the question of railway commissions, both in national and State governments. In my professional capacity of general counsel, and in common with representatives of other railroads, I delivered argumentative addresses against them. The discussions converted me, and I became convinced of their necessity. The rapidly growing importance of railway transportation had created the public opinion that railway management should be under the control and supervision of some public body; that all passengers ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... been in camp under his walls the Maharajah had taken no more notice of Colonel Starr and his three hundred Midlanders than if they represented so many jungle bushes. To all Colonel Starr's messages, diplomatic, argumentative, threatening, there had come the same unsatisfactory response—the Maharajah of Chita had no word to say to the British Raj. And still the gates were shut, and still only the pipal-trees looked over the wall, and only the cannon ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... a moment," said she, assuming a tone argumentative. "Consider the embarrassment of my position. You ask me to be your wife. But if I consent, you give up your only chance of regaining your Italian patrimony—do you not? But a man should at least know what he is giving up. You should know what your patrimony consists of. You ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... Academic, of whom we shall speak more particularly hereafter.[98] But his chief attention was reserved for Oratory, to which he applied himself with the assistance of Molo, the first rhetorician of the day; while Diodotus the Stoic exercised him in the argumentative subtleties for which the disciples of Zeno were so generally celebrated. At the same time he declaimed daily in Greek and Latin with some young noblemen, who were competitors with him in the same race of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... calmly argumentative tone of voice as she and I walked up the path to the house, "didn't Mr. Haley talk to you just yesterday and tell you how wicked it is for you to use—use such strong words ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... war by Mr. G.B. Shaw in THE TIMES of Sunday appeals to me as a noteworthy specimen of what an artful literary genius can do in the way of argumentative cantankerousness. His chief grievance is British diplomacy as represented by Sir Edward Grey, upon whose devoted head he empties the vials ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... been much less loth to say, "There is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed him as the Christ, and who then became a monomaniac." We should have pointed out that his delusion is a very common delusion among the insane, and that such insanity is quite consistent with the retention of the argumentative cunning and penetration which Jesus displayed in Jerusalem after his delusion had taken complete hold of him. We should feel horrified at the scourging and mocking and crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin had been treated in that way when he also went ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... indeed. The art of conversing these French people carry to great perfection. It is not frivolous, though it is light and sparkling; it is still less argumentative, but it has the knack of bringing out different opinions and different views of them. We pity the French for their want of political liberty, but the social freedom they enjoy is some compensation.—— But what interested me ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... same mind. Modern science until lately had realised this ideal: it was an extension of common perception and common sense. We could trust it implicitly, as we do a map or a calendar; it was not true for us merely in an argumentative or visionary sense, as are religion and philosophy. Geography went hand in hand with travel, Copernican astronomy with circumnavigation of the globe: and even the theory of evolution and the historical sciences in the nineteenth century were continuous with liberal ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... spring from reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her reason had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's stamp;[41] finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always cold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference, provided only that decorum of appearance ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... continually saying "Ha! ha!" among the breezy trumpets of those hills, like the scriptural war-horse; the second with his gaze very imperfectly turned outward, but very fruitfully turned inward, frequently pausing with argumentative finger laid on his companion's breast, and smile half satirical half kindly as the flow of discourse revealed theological lacunae in my acquirements, which, I fear, irreparably and most unfairly ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... true, is this: Fanaticism, though cruel and bloodthirsty, is still a great and powerful passion, which stirs the heart of man, teaching him to despise death, and giving him an enormous motive power, which only needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit generally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-interest, in the meanness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all society, for ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... least successful of the many pronouncements written by Bernard Shaw on behalf of the Society. A subtle and argumentative criticism of Mr. Chamberlain's policy on one side and of the Free Trade rejoinder on the other is neither simple nor decisive enough for the general reader: and the alternatives advocated—reorganisation of the consular service ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... on gravely of the weather, and of the celebrated Doctor McQ——, who was expected to give us an argumentative sermon that morning, until my argument came floating in at the door like a calm little bit of thistledown, to which our previous conversation had been as the ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done. To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not lightly, or with ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... question had been put on several occasions, both in the company of the tempter and in the privacy of the domestic hearth, and both in the gayly suggestive and the pensively argumentative key. Why might they not, by means of a clever purchase in the stock market, occasionally procure some of the agreeable extra pleasures of life—provide the ready money for theatres, a larger wardrobe, trips from home, or a modest equipage? Why not take advantage of the friendly advice ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... of connected plot. But his great and abiding glory is that he revived the art, lost for centuries in England, of telling an interesting story in verse, of riveting the attention through thousands of lines of poetry neither didactic nor argumentative. And of his separate passages, his patches of description and incident, when the worst has been said of them, it will remain true that, in their own way and for their own purpose, they cannot be surpassed. The already noticed comparison of any of Scott's best verse-tales with Christabel, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... completely convincing, irrefutably argumentative, and unanswerably just, my lord," I put in; "but I must be permitted to hint that the validity of all laws is derived from the enactment; now the enactment, or, in the case of a treaty, the virtue of the stipulation, is not derived from the intention of the party who may happen to draw up ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... called age which seemed but the immortality of a more majestic youth." In his lecture-room utterances, there was an undue preponderance of rhetoric, declamation, and sentiment over logic, analysis, and philosophy. Yet he once said of himself, that he was "thoroughly logical and argumentative; not a rhetorician, as fools aver." Whether this estimate was right or wrong in the main may be a matter of question: we think it wrong. His genius, in our view, lay rather in pictorial passion than in ratiocination. At all events, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... age of twenty-four, and he continued to fill the first place in the councils of his country during most of the remaining period of his life, which terminated on the 23d of January, 1806, in the 47th year of his age. As a debater in the House, his speeches were logical and argumentative. The strength of his oratory was intrinsic, and his speeches were stamped with the inimitable marks of originality. This extract was taken from a. speech of the abolition of the slavetrade, in the House of Commons, 1792, which is regarded ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... superstitions and cruel wrongs involved in the course of this precious development, Mr. Parker tells us there was a necessity,—nothing less! It was necessary, no doubt for his logic, that he should say so; but, apart from his own argumentative exigencies, it is impossible even to imagine any necessity whatever. It was an "ordeal," it seems, through which man was obliged to pass. What is all this, but to acknowledge the ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... philosopher-poet is Dante. He is not only philosophical in the temper of his mind, but his greatest poem is the incarnation of a definite system of philosophy, the most definite that the world has seen. That conception of the world which in the thirteenth century found argumentative and orderly expression in the "Summa Theologiae" of Thomas of Aquino, and constituted the faith of the church, is visualized by Dante, and made the basis of an interpretation ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Argumentative battles were not the only troubles Cartwright had to encounter from Universalists. They came to his revivals, he says, to hoot and create disturbance. At one of these meetings two sisters, Universalists in belief, were present. They came to "make fun," ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... for obtaining a connected view and a critical understanding of the whole Bible. The Bible is like a dish of savory meats. There is almost every variety of style and matter. There is History, Biography, Argumentative and Didactic Essays, and Poetry. Although these various kinds of writing are contained in a great number of books, written by various authors, at different times, without concert, yet a remarkable unity of design runs through the whole. They all aim at the development of the plan of God's moral ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... had now elapsed since that minor schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the "isms" of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... elementary decencies of marriage. He gathered loose women into his house, and carried on orgies of debauchery in his wife's presence. To show what a pass things had come to, I may mention that Grigory, the gloomy, stupid, obstinate, argumentative servant, who had always hated his first mistress, Adelaida Ivanovna, took the side of his new mistress. He championed her cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a manner little befitting a servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels and drove all the disorderly ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... upon John Baptist with this inquiry, that little man briskly shook his head in the negative, and repeated in an argumentative tone under his breath, altro, altro, altro, altro—an infinite number ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... constables, sheriffs; counsel for the State and for the defendant; witnesses were subpoenaed, and a jury empaneled after much challenging. The witnesses were stupid and unreliable and contradictory, as witnesses always are. The counsel were eloquent, argumentative, and vindictively abusive of each other, as was characteristic and proper. The case was at last submitted and duly finished by the judge with an absurd decision and a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... doubt the ability of Shakespeare to have continued his existence, though some of his sallies are perhaps out of the reach of Dryden; whose genius was not very fertile of merriment, nor ductile to humour, but acute, argumentative, ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... hall, or on a bracket in the library; all of which points were debated with a breadth of survey, a richness of imagery, a vigor of discussion, that would be perfectly astonishing to any one who did not know how much two very self-willed argumentative people might find to say on any point under heaven. Everything in classical antiquity,—everything in Kugler's "Hand-Book of Painting,"—every opinion of living artists,—besides questions social, moral, and religious,—all mingled in the grand melee: because there is nothing in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... of others, 'endeared me to him.' Bentham declined one offer in 1788; but in 1790 he suddenly took it into his head that Lansdowne had promised him a seat in parliament; and immediately set forth his claims in a vast argumentative letter of sixty-one pages.[239] Lansdowne replied conclusively that he had not made the supposed promise, and had had every reason to suppose that Bentham preferred retirement to politics. Bentham accepted the statement frankly, though a short coolness apparently followed. The ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... not finish, but turned quickly away. This sign of emotion was not hidden from Mrs. Murray, and it heightened her anxiety. Lord only knew what the girl'd try to do once she got out of their sight! But where the intellectual and argumentative Smythe had failed, what could be expected of these simple mountain folk, who for all their sturdy independence were not a little awed by the superior poise and distinction of their visitor? Moreover, Marion was at this moment ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... not learned in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet; he must do more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade them to look over the book and at ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a jaunty show of spitting to one side. Haughtiness and determination were evident in his manner, and a certain very threatening assumption of argumentative calm that suggested an outburst to follow. But Pyotr Stepanovitch had no time to realise the danger, and it did not fit in with his preconceived ideas. The incidents and disasters of the day had quite turned his head. Liputin, at the top of the three steps, stared inquisitively ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... matter of sword in hand, there is yet another thing to be noted. Of duels we have sometimes spoken: how, in all parts of France, innumerable duels were fought; and argumentative men and messmates, flinging down the wine-cup and weapons of reason and repartee, met in the measured field; to part bleeding; or perhaps not to part, but to fall mutually skewered through with iron, their wrath and life alike ending,—and die as fools die. Long has this lasted, and still ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... this ancient warning in his mind, he conceived a sudden, violent, and passionate hatred for didactic works generally, and two books in particular-the very two, passages from which pedants, philosophers, ambassadors, and ministers had for centuries hurled at each other's heads alike in convivial, argumentative, and solemn moments. In other words, the Odes and the Book, together with Confucius' "Springs and Autumns," with its censorious hints for rulers, and all the other local Annals and Histories, were under anathema, But more detestable even than these were the new philosophical ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... getting at truth on most subjects is a dramatic process rather than an argumentative one. One gets at truth either in a book or in a conversation not so much by logic as by having different people speak. If what is wanted is a really comprehensive view of a subject, two or three ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... conjunction with the third, in scientific, philosophical, and partisan literature. All these principles, however, are usually mingled with one another. The work of fiction may have its scientific, historical, or argumentative side; whilst the textbook or treatise may be embellished ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... sympathetically restraining any approach to an argumentative tone, "your brother was practically a stranger to me, and to us all. My friends here, Captain Kelson and Mr. Gifford, met him casually at the railway station and drove with him to the Golden Lion in the town, where they all ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... old man, of the subsistence they have acquired with pain and difficulty, if he has but the least prospect of providing for himself by any other means: it is this pity which, instead of that sublime maxim of argumentative justice, Do to others as you would have others do to you, inspires all men with that other maxim of natural goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful, Consult your own happiness with as little prejudice ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... of Franklin which makes them pleasantly readable. Unlike some other apostles of "common sense" he is always courteous and of a friendly spirit; he seems to respect the reader as well as himself and, even in his argumentative or humorous passages, is almost invariably ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... has occasioned a great augmentation of Churches and Chapels, both for congregations of the establishment, and for dissenters. In consequence of urgent, and argumentative appeals by some truly pious and benevolent Christians, the legislature has granted a large sum for the purpose of aiding parochial committees, to build new churches or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... crossed the rail fence into the fields, and walked along peaceably together— Stoliker silent, as usual, with the grim confidence of a man who is certain of ultimate success, who has the nation behind him, with all its machinery working in his favor; Yates talkative, argumentative, and instructive by turns, occasionally breaking forth into song when the unresponsiveness of the ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... the conclusions of the late British commission. Satisfied that the latter have been reached in too hasty a manner and without a sufficient time having been expended upon comparative observations, they are cautioned by this example against committing a like error. In respect to the argumentative part of the report of the British commissioners, the duty of furnishing a prompt and immediate reply to such parts of it as rest upon the construction of treaties and the acts of diplomacy has been rendered far less important than it might at one time have appeared by the publication ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... threatening his case. He does not ask himself whether his opponent be not a man of wealth and influence, of whom it might be for his interest to speak with care and circumspection; but he devotes himself with a ready zeal to his cause, careless of aught but how he may best discharge his duty. His argumentative powers are of the highest order. He never takes before the court a position which he believes untenable. He has a quick and sure perception of his points, and the power of enforcing them by apt and pertinent ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... words "bears proportion" is in verse more accurate than most of the recent repeaters in prose. And this is not the only case of the kind in his argumentative poetry. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... clear and philosophical views of Frascatero were disregarded, and the talent and argumentative powers of the learned were doomed for three centuries to be wasted in the discussion of these two simple and preliminary questions: First, whether fossil remains had ever belonged to living creatures; and, secondly, whether, if this be admitted, all the phenomena could ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... have all these qualities, and in addition, that constant power to awaken the imagination, to carry an idea beyond its own horizon into a boundless world of imperishable literary significance, which power in argumentative prose is beauty. And how did Lincoln attain this? That he had been maturing from within the power to do this, one is compelled by the analogy of his other mental experiences to believe. At the same time, there can be no doubt who taught him the trick, who touched the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... fellows, full of good humour, cheerful, and untiring. The elder was disposed to be argumentative with his countrymen, but he could not quarrel. Nature had given him an uncontrollable stutter, and, if he tried to speak quickly, spasm seized his tongue, and he had to break into a laugh. Few men in China, I think, could be more curiously constructed than this coolie. He was all ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... life must be preserved among friends. We can never feel very safe with the man whose humor tends to bitter speaking or keen sarcasm, or with the man who flares up into hasty speech at every or no provocation, or with the man who is argumentative and assertive,— ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... and shaking his head more in sorrow than in anger). She's no reasonable, ye ken, John; she disna argue fair. I'm no complaining o' her mither, but it's a wee thing hard that the only twa women I've known to be really chatty an' argumentative with should ha' been just like that. An' me that ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... intercourse with a clergyman of the Dutch-Reformed Church, well-known in the Cape, and especially in the Transvaal—who, with his pleasant wife and daughter, was on his way back to South Africa after a brief trip to Europe. He was argumentative; so, you know, am I. He was also good-tempered, therefore ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... eager to make Mr. Bonteen understand how bad even then would be his condition. Mr. Bonteen was, of course, aware that he would have to pay very heavily for insuring his wife's life. He was piteous, argumentative, and at first gentle; but when Mr. Bonteen somewhat rashly told him that the evidence of a former marriage and of the present existence of the former wife would certainly be forthcoming, he defied Mr. Bonteen and his evidence,—and swore that if his claims were not satisfied, he would make use ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... al fresco infidels' meeting; and with what result? Though a vast population kept moving to and fro along that great highway there were never, I am sure, more than a hundred people gathered at the shrine of Mr. Ramsey. They laughed at his profanities, yes; but directly he dropped these, and grew argumentative, they talked, and had to be vigorously reduced to order. Gallio-like they cared for none of these things, and I am quite sure a good staff of working clergy, men like Mr. Body or Mr. Steele of St. Thomas's, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... is not only a strong book from the scientific and argumentative viewpoint, but is also unique in many ways. We wish everybody would and could read it, especially those who are enamored with Evolution."—PROF. L. S. KEYSER, ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... and then, though most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); I am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... chance I coveted has come," I muttered, and I watched her intently. She soon crushed the letter in her hand and came swiftly toward the arbor, with a face so full of deep and almost wild distress that my heart relented, and I resolved to be as gentle as I before had intended to be decisive and argumentative. I hastily changed my seat to the angle by the entrance, so that I could intercept her should she try to escape ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... floating like a dream-city upon the brimming tide, was not at all in the direction in which May had expected to find it; indeed, so fixed was her idea of its proper whereabouts, that she was within an ace of becoming argumentative on the subject. Her amusingly irrational attitude gave rise to some lively sparring between herself and Kenwick, who was at even more pains than usual to monopolise her attention, ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... as the greatest of English parliamentary orators; but his speeches to me are disappointing, although elaborate, argumentative, logical, and full of fancy and wit. They were too rhetorical to suit the taste of Lord Brougham. Rhetorical exhibitions, however brilliant, are not those which posterity most highly value, and lose their charm when the occasions which produced them ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... brightest words, because they own religion as their principle—sink into narrow asceticism. The glories of Christianity, in short, touch on no chord in the heart of the writer; his imagination remains unkindled; his words, though they maintain their stately and measured march, have become cool, argumentative, and inanimate. Who would obscure one hue of that gorgeous coloring in which Gibbon has invested the dying forms of Paganism, or darken one paragraph in his splendid view of the rise and progress of Mahometanism? But who would not have ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... is the most nervous of parents, and spends half his time calling on his children to be careful. The young thrush hopping about on the lawn knows nothing of cats and refuses to believe that they are dangerous. He is not afraid even of human beings. His parent becomes argumentative to the point of tears, but the young one stays where he is and looks at you with a sideways jerk of his head as much as to say: "Listen to the old 'un." You, too, begin to be alarmed at such boldness. You ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... man without a heart, and, if we were not touched by the original sincerity of the language, one would only see in this lapidary style the conventional precepts of a chimerical system or the aspirations of an impossible perfection." The Discourses are more illustrative, more argumentative, more diffuse, more human. In reading them one feels oneself face to face with a human being, not with the marble statue of the ideal wise man. The style, indeed, is simple, but its "athletic nudity" is well suited to this militant ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... been dealing with whole compositions; we now take up the study of paragraphs, sentences, and words. A paragraph in many respects resembles a whole composition. It may be narrative, descriptive, expositive, or argumentative. It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is constructed with regard to Unity, Mass, and Coherence. And as a whole composition treats a single theme, so a paragraph treats one division of a theme. It has been defined as a composition in miniature. A paragraph is a sentence or a group ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... you say, SOCRATES, is very nice, and clear, and logical, and conclusive, in an argumentative sense, and your attitude is very noble and high-and-mighty—I mean highminded and all that. And we're very grateful—but deeply disappointed that you couldn't say something quite different—in view of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 25, 1892 • Various
... these spurs against a package of smokin' tobacco I know what I mean," stoutly asserted the cowpuncher whose literary knowledge had been called in question, and then the talk ran along the familiar argumentative channels that had no ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... matter of these studies as treasures for a future day. It is the seven years of plenty with him; he gathers in by handfuls, like the Egyptians, without counting; and though, as time goes on, there is exercise for his argumentative powers in the elements of mathematics, and for his taste in the poets and orators, still while at school, or at least till quite the last years of his time, he acquires and little more; and when he is leaving ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... steps along the entrance hall of the St. Dunstan Club to the wide doorway that led into the first-floor library. He usually sought the library at this time of day; a little group of men, all of whom he knew well, were as a rule to be found there, and they were friendly, not overly argumentative, restful. Now he paused between the heavy portieres, partly drawn aside, and peered for a moment into the room. The light from the hall behind him made a pool of faint illumination at his feet, but beyond that there was only a brown darkness, scented with the smell of books in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... psychic nature, the web of emotions, desires, argumentative trains of thought, which cover up and obscure the truth by absorbing the entire attention and keeping the consciousness in the psychic realm. When hopes and fears are reckoned at their true worth, in ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... the double eagerness of a boy and an artist, sweeping one hand outward in an argumentative gesture. It was a gesture which seemed to submit in evidence all the palpitating colors of Capri sunning herself among her rocks: all the sparkle and glitter of the Bay of Naples spreading away to the nebulous line where Ischia bulked herself in mist against the horizon: all the majesty ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... the 7th of February, after which Lord Dartmouth moved, that the lords should concur in it; and on this motion the previous question was demanded. Another warm debate ensued. Lord Mansfield first rose, and, in a long and argumentative speech, he combated the arguments of those who maintained that the Americans were merely contending for exemption from taxation. He next minutely analysed the declarations of congress, and the acts of parliament of which they complained; in the course of which he insisted, that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... return, for Mr. Secretary was slow, captious, and argumentative, though the matter of the dispatch was only as to where the army should halt for a day's rest. At last Preston was decided on, and the dispatch written accordingly. I bowed myself out, jumped on the sorrel, and started for the ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... asserting that authority which would be his to the full to-morrow. He felt that there was a vein of rebellion in Elsa's character, and this he meant to drain and to staunch till it had withered to nothingness. It would never do for him—of all men—to have a rebellious or argumentative wife. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... (Woman's Great Learning), that famous classic of Japanese girlhood which teaches the submission of women and the superiority of men. It was a type which was becoming rare in her own country. Little Asako had nothing in common with the argumentative heroines of Bernard Shaw or with the desperate viragos of Ibsen, to whom Sadako felt herself spiritually akin. Asako must be a fool. She exasperated her Japanese cousin, who at the same time was envious ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Calvinistic Protestantism. Experience has so long shown that the human brain is a congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs that we do not pause to inquire how Dr. Cumming, who attributes the conversion of the unbelieving to the Divine Spirit, can think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by argumentative white lies. Nor do we for a moment impugn the genuineness of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of his conviction that the doctrines he preaches are necessary to salvation; on the contrary, we regard the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... agree with you—none of the apologies were received as valid. You might be warm, pathetic or sulky, fretful or patient, grave or serious in testifying your repugnance, but you were equally a doomed man; escape was impossible. Your host was in his turn eloquent,—authoritative,—facetious, —argumentative,—precatory,—pathetic, above all, pertinacious. No guest was known to escape the Leetle Anderson. The last time I experienced the laird's hospitality there were present at the evening meal the following catalogue of guests:—a Bond-street ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... been the discussion of controverted points of history and science, and wonderful is the forensic and argumentative ability which these debates have developed. They are getting to be positively interesting. The only drawback to them is, that in the absence of any decisive authority they never come to any satisfactory conclusion. We have now been discussing for sixteen ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... choosing them it is necessary to avoid the deep-browed argumentative fellows. I do not want Plato or Gibbon or any of the learned brotherhood by my bedside, nor the poets, nor the novelists, nor the dramatists, nor even the professional humorists. These are all capital fellows in their way, but let them stay downstairs. To the intimacy of the bedside I admit ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Once more argumentative hostility woke within me. I could not accept such an overwhelming idea as he suggested. So, with an attempt to argue of which I was even at the moment ashamed, I said, "She may have been placed ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... document, wherein the great initiator of the Latin race on this free continent was rebuked, the satisfaction shown by the public, ought to open the eyes of the sentimental French trio. They ought to understand, by this time, that Seward's argumentative dispatch, incomplete and below mark as it is, won applause, although it expresses only the hundredth of the patriotic ire bursting from the people's bosom. Otherwise the people would have at once found out all skillfully, cunningly, chameleon-like Seward dodges, which ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... had been taken of the three elaborate and argumentative petitions which, prepared by learned counsel in name of the relatives, had been addressed to the judges. They had not been answered because they were difficult to answer, and because it was not intended that the accused should have ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that the very timing of Scripture expressions, and the season of administering ordinances, have been argumentative to the promoting of the faith and way of justification by Christ, it has made think that both myself and most of the people of God look over the Scriptures too slightly, and take too little notice of that or of those many honours that God, for our good, has conferred upon Christ. Shall he be called ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that his evening address must be doctrinal and argumentative, when he became aware of steps in the drawing-room. Opening the door he found himself face to face with his Deacons. Before he could ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... body of Russian officers. These soldiers from the Steppes. These bearded men. These Russians. They sat silent and watchful. They applauded little. The programme left them cold. The Trick Cyclist. The Dashing Soubrette and Idol of Belgravia. The Argumentative College Chums. The Swell Comedian. The Man with the Performing Canaries. None of these could rouse them. They were waiting. Waiting. Waiting tensely. Every muscle taut. Husbanding ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... ears burn on Wednesday? I told him a great deal about you. We had been having one of our customary argumentative conversations, principally about marriage, more especially still about the horrors of false marriages, and this led me to tell him that the best friend I have on earth is infamously bound for the whole of her dear ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... an argumentative tone. "Let's talk about it, then. Let's have it out. You feel your position; granted. Mind you, I've always said you wouldn't have done so if it hadn't been for Gertrude Wayne. The world to-day has too much common sense to lay stress on a circumstance of that kind. Believe me, ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... have thought an improper manner of calling men into the kingdom of Christ; that had been more pathetic in their addresses, and more argumentative in their applications, they would have labored with more effect; that this plain and simple method is unworthy of God, and, not likely to ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... perfectly satisfied with this argumentative address, and bestowed a look of the most ardent affection on the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... most, Veronica," I replied—"I can remember it so well—was when they talked steadily for half an hour themselves, and then, when I would attempt with one sentence to put them right about the thing, turn round and bully-rag me for being argumentative." ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... read Plato because he liked his humour and his style, and did not trouble himself about anything further. Gibbon speaks of 'the philosophic maze of the writings of Plato, of which the dramatic is perhaps more interesting than the argumentative part.' That is quite a legitimate opinion, provided you do not undertake to judge philosophy in the light of it. The apparently serious rejection of geometrical truth in the Hermotimus may fairly suggest that ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... sophists; to these some young men paid great sums of money, for which they purchased a strong opinion of learning and wisdom, and of being stout disputants; but this sort of disputation spent much time in trifling squabblings, which were of no credit or profit. Now Socrates, using an argumentative discourse by way of a purgative remedy procured belief and authority to what he said, because in refuting others he himself affirmed nothing; and he the sooner gained upon people, because he seemed rather to be inquisitive after the truth as well ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... other hand, in God, there is a sure judgment of truth, without any discursive process, by simple intuition, as was stated in the First Part (Q. 14, A. 7); wherefore God's knowledge is not discursive, or argumentative, but absolute and simple, to which that knowledge is likened which is a gift of the Holy Ghost, since it ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... suddenly declared that he was sick of gallivanting about the fashionable world; sick of idleness—sick of the silly purposeless existence he led; and thereupon announced his intention of studying medicine seriously and as a profession. Mrs. Purling was at first aghast, then argumentative, finally indignant. But Harold remained inflexible, and she grew more and more wrathful. It led at length to something like a rupture between them. She received the news of his success in the schools with grim contempt, condescending ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... Church, as the interpreter of God's spirit, which is nothing more than a belief in the inspiration of the majority, or even a belief in the inspiration of a bureaucracy, is the prey of this delusion. The Protestant, too, with his legal creed, built up of texts and precedents, in which the argumentative dicta of Apostles and Evangelists are as weighty and important as the words of the Saviour Himself, falls under this delusion. I read the other day a passage from a printed sermon of an orthodox type, an acrid outcry against Liberalism ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... interest as an autobiography, but also because the narrative itself seems to throw the strongest possible light on the mainly-important question how far this defection of one of her greatest sons does really tend to weaken the argumentative position of the English Church in her strife with Rome. What has been said already will suffice to prove that in our opinion no such consequence can justly follow from it. We acknowledge freely the greatness of the individual loss. But the causes of that defection are, we think, clearly shown to ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a high relish for the very positive personality of this accomplished and argumentative woman, in whose intellect high noon seemed ever to reign, as twilight did in his own. He must have been struck with the glare of her understanding, and, mentally speaking, have scowled and blinked a good ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... support to this particular Mission for more than a quarter of a century. But the name of Sir Richard Brandon did not appear on the roll of contributors. He had not studied the "lower orders" much, except from a politico-economical-argumentative after-dinner-port-winey point ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... public school, having first eliminated as much youthfulness as is compatible with continued existence. Add some flattering masters, and a distaste for games. Season with the idea that he is born for a great career. Let him be, if possible, verbose and argumentative, and inclined to contradict his elders. Eliminate more youth and transfer hot to a University. Add more verbosity, and a strong extract of priggishness. Throw in a degree, and two speeches at the Union. Set ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... (resignation?) by giving my answer about Braithwaite. Though the sins of my General Staff have about as much to do with the real issues as the muddy water had to do with the death of the argumentative lamb, I begin by pointing out to the War Office wolf that "no Headquarters Staff ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... censured in Mitford. A sufficient portion however, is published, to authorise us in saying that it is not in point of narrative that the present author will obtain any advantage over his predecessors. It is in disquisition that he rejoices, and succeeds; it is the argumentative matter which excites and sustains him. His style seems to languish when the effort of ratiocination gives place to the task of the narrator. We fancy we see him resume the pen with listlessness, when nothing remains for the historian but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... "beyond the Alps" is, of course, the supreme example of this uncivilised force. One frequently encounters sceptical-minded Catholics, full of the very spirit of Montaigne—who died in the Catholic faith—but it is rare to meet a Protestant who is not, in a most barbarous sense, full of dogmatic and argumentative "truth." ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys |
