"Sophist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great and so high that she cannot put herself at the service of any other forces without derogation; for if she is no longer mistress and free, she is degraded. It is a case of Roman master debasing the Greek, his superior, and making him his purveyor—Graeculus, sophist, Laeno.... To the vulgar the intelligence is a sort of maid-of-all-work, and in this position she displays the sly, dishonest cleverness of her kind. Sometimes she is employed by hatred, pride, or self-interest, and then she flatters these little devils, dressing them up as Idealism, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... of Pausanias, king of Sparta, (who commanded the Greeks at the battle of Platea, and afterwards perished for an attempt to betray the Lacedaemonians), and Cleonice, is told in Plutarch's life of Cimon; and in the Laconics of Pausanias the sophist ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the praise of Philip on all occasions, and they insisted, in particular, on his eloquence, his beauty, and even his being able to drink a great quantity of liquor. Demosthenes, who could not bear to hear him praised, turned these things off as trifles. "The first," he said, "was the property of a sophist, the second of a woman, and the third of a sponge; and not one of them could do any credit to ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... one thing he was certain—much as he loved her (and at the thought his heart grew heavy with longing), his words on war had not been the idle declaimings of a sophist. There was a higher citizenship; the world was wrong to allow this war; and ignorance ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... of the two national dialects; and the Barbarians were ambitious of conversing in Latin, the military idiom even of the Eastern Empire. But they disdained the language and the sciences of the Greeks; and the vain sophist, or grave philosopher, who had enjoyed the flattering applause of the schools, was mortified to find that his robust servant was a captive of more value and importance than himself. The mechanic arts were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to popular ideas, the typical Sophist, but in fact differing ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... in support of erroneous views; and more false conclusions are drawn from them than from the subtlest arguments of the sophist. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... Christians and Mahommedans. Josephus[7] paraphrases the story more suo, and speaks of Balaam as the best prophet of his time, but with a disposition ill adapted to resist temptation. Philo describes him in the Life of Moses as a great magician; elsewhere[8] he speaks of "the sophist Balaam, being," i.e. symbolizing, "a vain crowd of contrary and warring opinions"; and again[9] as "a vain people"; both phrases being based on a mistaken etymology of the name Balaam. The later Targums and the Talmuds represent him as a typical sinner; and there ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... work dates in its present form from the lifetime or shortly after the death of Hadrian, but seems to be based in part on an earlier version by the sophist Alcidamas (c. 400 B.C.). Plutarch ("Conviv. Sept. Sap.", 40) uses an earlier (or at least a shorter) version than that which we possess [1118]. The extant "Contest", however, has clearly combined with the original document ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... those people can be found all over the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It is not anything fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century 'sophist' who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man, who looks ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... said, "You are contracting an unholy marriage."[30] For this speech he long lingered in prison, and paid the righteous penalty for his unseasonable babbling, and had to weep a long time for making others laugh. Theocritus the Sophist similarly cracked his jokes, and had to pay even a greater penalty. For when Alexander ordered the Greeks to furnish him with purple robes to wear at the sacrifices on his triumphal return from war against the barbarians, and his subjects ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... substance it intends. And inasmuch as we must needs infer From such belief our reasoning, all respect To other view excluded, hence of proof Th' intention is deriv'd." Forthwith I heard: "If thus, whate'er by learning men attain, Were understood, the sophist would want room To exercise his wit." So breath'd the flame Of love: then added: "Current is the coin Thou utter'st, both in weight and in alloy. But tell me, if thou hast it in ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... sophist. She knew better than the wretched creature whom she had bribed with money, how intensely wicked was the thing she was tempting her to do; but her jealousy maddened her, and her ambition could not let her halt in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... their own sake, and Sophists, who look at words and books for the sake of making an appearance before the world, and seek their happiness in what they hope to get from others: he takes Herder for an example of the Sophist, and Lichtenberg for the true Philosopher. It is true that we hear the voice of the Self-thinker, and not the mere Book-philosopher, if we may use for once those uncouth compounds, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... contemporary description of the life at Charles's court Alcuin is called "Flaccus" and is described as "the glory of our bards, mighty to shout forth his songs, keeping time with his lyric foot, moreover a powerful sophist, able to prove pious doctrines out of Holy Scripture, and in genial jest to propose or solve puzzles of arithmetic." As a theologian he was most famous for his books against Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of Toledo, on the subject of the Adoptianist heresy (see above, ch. ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... and they will thoroughly understand how firm and immovable is that Paracelsic Art against the triflings of the Sophists; though meanwhile that sophistical science has to have its ineptitude propped up and fortified by papal and imperial privileges.... So then, you wormy and lousy Sophist, since you deem the monarch of Arcana a mere ignorant, fatuous, and prodigal quack, now, in this mid age, I determine in my present treatise to disclose the honourable course of procedure in these ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... waded through whole seas of blood. Sore groan'd the land beneath his iron rod, Till rous'd at length Evander came from Greece, Like Freedom's Genius came, and sent the tyrant, Stript of the crown, and to his humble rank Once more reduc'd, to roam, for vile subsistence, A wandering sophist through ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... came to him that she was infinitely more fine, more beautiful, and more clever than Senta, and that her pure and fragrant freshness, her simple directness, her candid likes and dislikes, would make Ivy seem no more than a jaded sophist, a quoter of mere words, a worshipper of ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... probably alludes to such fires as those in which the Alexandrine and Palatine Libraries were destroyed. From envy's fiercer rage.—Probably he alludes to the writings of such men as Maevius (see note to line 34) and Zoilus, a sophist and grammarian of Amphipolis, who distinguished himself by his criticism on Isocrates, Plato, and Homer, receiving the nickname of Homeromastic (chastiser of Homer). Destructive war—Probably an allusion ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... appear that at Elis there were any of the actual contests in music and song which made the character of the Pythian games. But still it was a common exhibition for the cultivation of every art. Sophist, and historian, and orator, poet and painter found their ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and of More on the other the air became dark with a host of controversial tracts. [Sidenote: Controversial tracts] They are half filled with theological metaphysic, half with the bitterest invective. Luther called Henry VIII "a damnable and rotten worm, a snivelling, drivelling swine of a sophist"; More retorted by complaining of the violent language of "this apostate, this open incestuous lecher, this plain limb of the devil and manifest messenger of hell." Absurd but natural tactic, with a sure effect on the people, which relishes both morals and scandal! To prove that faith ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... Herodes Atticus gave the sophist Polemo above eight thousand pounds for three declamations. See Philostrat. l. i. p. 538. The Antonines founded a school at Athens, in which professors of grammar, rhetoric, politics, and the four great sects of philosophy were maintained at the public expense for the instruction of youth. The ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... at hand; and if the task of narrating our Peloponnesian war were assigned to the ghost of Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open it with a description of Charleston in terms of Epidamnus. Little matters of topography would not trouble such an one. To the sophist an island is an island, a river a river, a height a height, everywhere. Sphacteria would furnish the model for Morris Island; the Achelous would serve indifferently for Potomac or Mississippi, the Epipolae for Missionary Ridge, Plataea for Vicksburg, the harbor of Syracuse ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... exponents of this theory that according to such an account, each perceiver is relegated to a world peculiar to his own stand-point. His perception informs him concerning his own states as affected by things, rather than concerning the things themselves. Upon this ground the great sophist Protagoras is said to have based his dictum: Panto:n chre:mato:n metron anthro:pos,—"Man is the measure of all things." This is the classic statement of the doctrine of relativity. But we have now entered into the province of epistemology, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... "I am no sophist, and I am not in the habit of shifting my conscience. Yes or no," he insisted, with a return of his usual excitement, "did I leave the catacombs to arrange that unfortunate duel? Yes or no, did I yield to ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... walk from the post office"—or something with a real meaning like that. I claimed then and I claim now that he should have omitted the only and come out blunt with the truth. There are times in this world when the straight and bitter truth is better without any word-lace. This Wagner person was a sophist. So I said to him, now, as a man ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... continue to glitter for a while, but it will finally cease to exist. If the brain vampyrizes the heart, that is to say, if it absorbs the greater part of the life principle, which ought to go to develop love and virtue in the heart, man may become a great reasoner, a scientist, arguer, and sophist; but he will not become wise, and his intellect will perish in this life or in the state after death. We often see very intellectual people becoming criminals, and even lunatics are often very cunning. That which a man may call his own in the end, are not the thoughts ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... Not men of brains, but the men of aptitudes Not the indignant and the frozen, but the genially indifferent One is a fish to her hook; another a moth to her light One night, and her character's gone Passion added to a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess Policy seems to petrify their minds Rage of a conceited schemer tricked Respect one another's affectations To time and a wife it is no disgrace for a man to bend Uncommon unprogressiveness When duelling flourished on our land, frail women powerful Where heart weds mind, or nature joins ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... to delineate the Orator who differs equally from the Eloquence of the Philosopher, the Sophist, the Historian, and the Poet. He, then, is truly eloquent, (for after him we must search, by the direction of Antonius) who in the Forum, and in public debates, can so speak, as to prove, delight, and force the passions. To prove, is a matter of necessity:—to delight, is ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... of considering this aspect of life. One is the way of sentiment; the other is the way of faith. The sentimental way is trite enough. Saint, sage, sophist, moralist, and preacher, have repeated in every possible image, till there is nothing new to say, that life is a bubble, a dream, a delusion, a phantasm. The other is the way of faith: the ancient saints felt as keenly as any moralist could feel the brokenness ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... you that banter is the worst species of wit. We have indeed no correct idea what persons those really were whom Plato drags by the ears, to undergo slow torture under Socrates. One sophist, I must allow, is precisely like another: no discrimination of character, none of ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... owe the productions of Eschylus and Anacreon, whose muses were very chilly, till Bacchus warmed them. Aurelius, the sophist, composed his best declamations in his cups. Herodes, called Saginatus Orator, the fattened Orator, never talked better, than after drinking pretty plentifully. And according to Horace, this was the ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... philosophy which balances virtue and vice as it were on the point of a finger, and argues prettily on the way the two can be easily merged into each other, almost without perception. "If without perception, then without sin," says the sophist; "it is merely a question of balance." Certainly if generosity drifts into extravagance you have a virtue turned into a vice;—but there is one thing these spurious debaters cannot do, and that is to turn a vice into a virtue. That cannot be done, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Sophist, "The times are refined In sense to a wondrous degree; Your old-fashion'd faith does but fetter the mind, And it 's wrong not to seek to be free." Says the sage Politician, "Your natural share Of talents would raise ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... do not know that I am but repeating what I heard Hillel say in an argument he had one day in my presence with a sophist from Rome." ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Ideas has also been considered, not as a real criticism, but as an exuberance of the metaphysical imagination which enabled Plato to go beyond himself. To the latter part of the dialogue we may certainly apply the words in which he himself describes the earlier philosophers in the Sophist: 'They went on their way rather regardless of whether we ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... and infest With an unbidden presence the bright throng Of younger friends; yet must I do this wrong, And you forgive me." Lycius blush'd, and led The old man through the inner doors broad-spread; With reconciling words and courteous mien Turning into sweet milk the sophist's spleen. ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... onslaught—or, as he put it later, comparing the encounter with that between Socrates and Gorgias the Sophist—drenched with that woman's slop-pail of words and blinded for the moment, received his portion of mutton and drew aside, vanquished amid peals of laughter, of which he guessed only from its note that the allusion had been ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... disposition, he was more like Shakespeare than any other Englishman whom I can think of; but in Coleridge the poet soon disappeared, and a little later the philosopher in him faded into the visionary and sophist; he became an upholder of the English Church and found reasons in the immutable constitution of the universe for aprons and shovel-hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, though similarly endowed, was far more richly endowed: he had stronger passions and greater ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... to efface all the volumes which I could write in a century, or which the most laborious publicists of Germany ever carried to the fair of Leipsic, as an apology for monarchs and monarchy. Whilst I, or any other poor, puny, private sophist, was defending the Declaration of Pilnitz, his Majesty might refute me by the Treaty of Basle. Such a monarch may destroy one republic because it had a king at its head, and he may balance this extraordinary act by founding ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... shallow think for. Should we be so apt as we are now to compassionate the misfortunes, and to forgive the insincerity of Charles I., if his pictures had pourtrayed him in a bob wig and a pigtail? Vandyke was a greater sophist than Hume. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Contessina di Lira is desperately unhappy, and if nothing is done she may die. Young women have died of broken hearts before now. You have no right to endanger her life by risking failure. Answer me that, if you can, and I will grant you are a cunning sophist, but not a ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... the cardinal, the more so as at that time it was not known who would be pope, three aspirants having resigned their hoods for the benefit of Christianity. The cardinal, who was a cunning Italian, long bearded, a great sophist, and the life and soul of the Council, guessed, by the feeblest exercise of the faculties of his understanding, the alpha and omega of the adventure. He only had to weigh in his mind one little thought before he knew how to proceed in order to be able to hypothecate ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... as I was passing through the market place I heard a sophist from Cilicia say that there is only one God. He said it before ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... "Oh, you sophist! Did you not say that I wore my title upon my brow? Did you not tell me that I could not hide my majesty from the sons of men? But I forgive you, and the boy also. Let us drink his health while we enjoy his strawberries. Fill your glasses to the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... useful matter, but not in due time and place, "Much to the purpose, sir, elsewhere." King Charilaus, the nephew of Lycurgus, being asked why his uncle had made so few laws, answered, "Men of few words require but few laws." When one blamed Hecataeus the sophist because that, being invited to the public table, he had not spoken one word all supper-time, Archidamidas answered in his vindication, "He who knows how to ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... ambitious politician, the selfish time-server, the dark and subtle conspirator; and now it seemed, as if to exhaust the catalogue of his various parts in the human drama, he chose to exhibit himself in the character of the wily sophist, and justify, or seem to justify, the arts by which he had risen to wealth and eminence, and hoped even now to arise to ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... free-born. The earlier period of his existence, whether as a puny child or the miserable denizen of an uninformed and barbarous state, is one of vassalage and subserviency. He is not born free, he is not born rational, he is not born virtuous; he is born to become all these. And woe to the sophist who, with arguments drawn from the unconfirmed constitution of his childhood, would strive to render his imperfect, because immature, state of pupilage a permanent one! We are yet far below the level of which our nature is capable, and possess in consequence but ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... diffusiveness, local prejudice, a life spent on details, a lack of philosophy.—these are faults, but they are British faults, Anglo-Saxon faults. They scarcely limit affection or greatly diminish respect. De Quincey was a sophist, a rhetorician, a brilliant talker. There are men of that sort in every club, in every community. We forgive their eccentricity, their lack of fine humor, the most rigid logic, or the highest learning. We do not attempt to reply to them. It is enough if the stream of discourse ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... more patience inasmuch as he had drawn in advance on his friend Sir William for some portion of the heiress's fortune; and he readily allowed that he could not in the mean while have a better advocate than he found in Brandon. So persuasive, indeed, and so subtle was the eloquence of this able sophist, that often in his artful conversations with his niece he left even on the unvitiated and strong though simple mind of Lucy an uneasy and restless impression, which time might have ripened into an inclination ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Stranger, you speak of what is wanted when it is not wanted." Charilaus the cousin of Lykurgus, when asked why they had so few laws answered, that men of few words required few laws. And Archidamidas, when some blamed Hekataeus the Sophist for having said nothing during dinner, answered, "He who knows how to speak knows when to speak also." The following are some of those sarcastic sayings which I before said are not ungrateful. Demaratus, when some worthless fellow pestered him with ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... received her from the Egyptian ruler. Thus the Fairy Tale raised the Old Man of the Sea to the royal dignity, changing sovereignty from water to land. (Herodotus, II. 112-20.) Plato makes him typical of a sophist, Schlegel of a poet, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... be admitted are prejudicial to his interests: the more importance, therefore, he shall attach to these errors, the more fatal will be the consequences resulting from their adoption. Bacon, the illustrious sophist, who first brought philosophy out of the schools, had great reason when he said, "The worst of all things is deified error." Indeed, the mischiefs springing from superstition or religious errors, have been, and always will be, the most terrible in their consequences—the most extensive in ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... an Athenian Sophist, wife of Theodosius II., embraced Christianity, her name Athenais previously; was banished by her husband on an ill-founded charge of infidelity, and spent the closing years of her life in Jerusalem, where she became a convert to the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... insults offered by the mob to the imperial statues in the year 887. The friends of Demetrius, prudent and conservative persons, gathered around Hermas and made him welcome to their circle. Chief among them was Libanius, the sophist, his nearest neighbour, whose daughter Athenais had been the playmate of Hermas in the ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, long remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition went on—in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a movement which to the classic mind led backward; but from the wider standpoint of general development meant ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Touton katexei xristianon honta] Eus. l. 6, c. 3. 2. P. 273. 3. Theodoret l. 3. Hist. c. 6, and de Graecor. Affect. l. 10. Rufin. Chrys. 4. St. Chrysostom has given us the lamentation of Libanius, the celebrated heathen sophist, bewailing the silence of Apollo at Daphne; adding that Julian had delivered him from the neighborhood of a dead man, which was troublesome to him. 5. Ammianus Marcellinus, a heathen, and Julian's own historian, says b. 2, p. 225, that he caused all the bones of dead ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the rogue often has the contrary effect on the judges' minds to what he intended, while the same evidence if given by the honest man at once strikes them as perfectly true. And probably the audience have something of the same feeling about yourself and Prodicus; they think him a Sophist and a braggart, and regard you as a gentleman of courtesy and worth. For they do not pay attention to the argument so much as to ...
— Eryxias • An Imitator of Plato
... doctor another chance of achieving immortal fame by glueing it on again. No, I cannot think seriously of suicide by violent means. Of course, I might follow the example of one Antonios Polemon, a later Greek sophist, who suffered so dreadfully from gout that he buried himself alive in the tomb of his ancestors and starved to death. We have a family vault in Highgate Cemetery, of which I possess the key. . . . No, I should be bored and cold, and the coffins would get on ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... the mightiest interests were discussed—the subtle questions of the Academy propounded—the snares of the sophist exposed—the sublime thoughts and actions of heroes and demigods, embodied in the most glorious poetry, were daily exhibited to their view; while the wife, occupied solely with petty cares and trifling objects, without charms to win the love, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... might, thy grand in soul? Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were: First in the race that led to Glory's goal, They won, and passed away—is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, grey flits the ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... know! That fable of Prometheus and his theft, How mortals gained Jove's fiery flower, grows old {280} (I have been used to hear the pagans own) And out of mind; but fire, howe'er its birth, Here is it, precious to the sophist now Who laughs the myth of Aeschylus to scorn, As precious to those satyrs of his play, {285} Who touched it in gay wonder at the thing. While were it so with the soul,—this gift of truth Once grasped, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... hold that to witness a murder is the same thing as to commit one." And there was another duty almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau brought back to the degenerate society of a later age. In an impassioned discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle their own infants; and there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers, which gratefully record this proof of natural affection as a thing then unusual. In this matter too, what a sanction, what a ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... words concerning mnemotechnique, mnemonic, and anamnestic. The discovery of some means of helping the memory has long been a human purpose. From Simonides of Chios, to the Sophist Hippias of Elis, experiments have been made in artificial development of the memory, and some have been remarkably successful. Since the middle ages a large group of people have done this. We still have the figures ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... conscience astray with authority. There are gymnastics of untruth. A sophist is a forger, and this forger sometimes brutalizes ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... much scorn, though she herself is as keen an epicure and as suave a sophist, for that matter, as I know,—"I never denied that it was well for men to cheat themselves, through the art of their cooks, into believing that they are not brutes and beasts of prey—it is well exceedingly—for their vanity. Life is sustained only by the destruction of life. Cookery, the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... such contemptible, foolish apprentices as your harsh criticism would imply. Let me give you a contemporary example. M. Voltaire's whole technique of thought and writing entitles us to describe him as an Arch-Sophist. Yet no one will refuse the due meed of honor to his extraordinary talent. I would not myself refuse it, though I am at this moment engaged in composing a polemic against him. Let me add that I am not allowing myself to be influenced in his favor by recollection of the extreme civility he was good ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... devotion that had formerly animated Churchill. Horne was not altogether an admirable character, and his enthusiasm for Wilkes had hitherto awakened no corresponding enthusiasm on Wilkes's part. But Horne was invaluable at a crisis like the Middlesex election. He had the eloquence of a sophist; he had the strategy of a tactician; he was endowed with an unconquerable energy, an indomitable determination. He was exceedingly popular in his parish; he caught the mood of the popular party, and he happened to be on the right side. It would ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... genuineness of the dialogue will find in the Hippias a true Socratic spirit; they will compare the Ion as being akin both in subject and treatment; they will urge the authority of Aristotle; and they will detect in the treatment of the Sophist, in the satirical reasoning upon Homer, in the reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine that vice is ignorance, traces of a Platonic authorship. In reference to the last point we are doubtful, as in some of the other dialogues, whether the author is asserting or overthrowing the ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... appearance of qualities he does not possess, he is said to affect or feign, or to pretend to, the character he thus assumes. What a debater postulates he openly states and takes for granted without proof; what he assumes he may take for granted without mention. A favorite trick of the sophist is quietly to assume as true what would at once be challenged if expressly stated. What a man claims he asserts his right to take; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... persons might wish. Julian is even thought to have "written for publication," as Latin epistolers of distinction had undoubtedly done before him. Nevertheless it is pleasant to read the Apostate when he is not talking Imperial or anti-Christian "shop," but writing to his tutor, the famous sophist and rhetorician Libanius, about his travels and his books and what not, in a fashion by no means very unlike that in which a young Oxford graduate might write to an undonnish don. It is still pleasanter to find Synesius telling his friends about the very ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... own party and associates; and, like all satirists, for effect he often traduced character, as in the case of the virtuous Socrates. In an attack on the Sophists, in his play of the Clouds, he gives to Socrates the character of a vulgar Sophist, and holds him up to the derision of the Athenian people. But, as another has said, "Time has set all even; and 'poor Socrates,' as Aristophanes called him—as a far ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... He claimed the kingship, but repudiated the force. To his mind the absence of force resistance was characteristic of his whole undertaking. Instead, his power was based on the appeal and attractiveness of truth. When Pilate heard about "truth" he thought he had a sophist before him, one more builder of metaphysical systems, and expressed the skepticism of the man on the street: "What is truth?" But Jesus was not a teacher of abstract doctrine, whatever his expounders have made of him. His mind was bent on realities. If we substitute "reality" for "truth" ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... so long, and in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume, as disproportionate both in size and merit, and as discordant in its character. In the mean time I had gotten myself entangled in the old sorites of the old sophist,—procrastination. I had suffered my necessary businesses to accumulate so terribly, that I neglected to write to any one, till the pain I suffered from not writing made me waste as many hours in dreaming about it as ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... bind himself to a definite statement concerning any train. It is only the inartistic who hold that black is black and white is white, unconditionally, irretrievably; and who have invented the proverb "He'd say black's white" to express the Sophist in excelsis. It must be true, as Ruskin contends, that not one man in fifteen thousand has ever observed anything, else how account for this wide-spread fallacy? The "wit of one," instead of crystallising this "wisdom of the many," should have flatly contradicted it. For, take two blackboards ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... try and set down here the really happy memories which I have of Spring Grove they would be three. The first was the revelation of Greece which was afforded me by Homer and Plato. The surging music and tremendous themes of the poet, the sweet persuasion of the sophist were a wonder and delight. I remember even now the thrill with which I heard my form-master translate for us the prayer with which the Phaedrus closes: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place...." Beloved Pan! My knowledge of Pan ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... passing hour? To answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who, when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: "But who then has found fault with him?" I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these scruples ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... or ignominy, easily supported his character to the last; and if his death, however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was any thing more than a vain sophist. He invented, it is said, the theory of morals. Others, however, had before put them in practice; he had only to say what they had done, and reduce their examples to precepts. Aristides had been just before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas gave up his life for his country before ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... but ignorance" [Twelfth NIght]. 492. Scholar.— N. scholar, connoisseur, savant, pundit, schoolman[obs3], professor, graduate, wrangler; academician, academist[obs3]; master of arts, doctor, licentitate, gownsman; philosopher, master of math; scientist, clerk; sophist, sophister[obs3]; linguist; glossolinguist, philologist; philologer[obs3]; lexicographer, glossographer; grammarian; litterateur[Fr], literati, dilettanti, illuminati, cogniscenti[It]; fellow, Hebraist, lexicologist, mullah, munshi[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... men agreed that it was utterly inapplicable to human affairs. The theorist railed at the folly of the world, instead of confessing his own; and the men of practice unjustly blamed philosophy, instead of condemning the sophist. The causes which the politician has to consider are, above all others, multiplied, mutable, minute, subtile, and, if I may so speak, evanescent; perpetually changing their form, and varying their combinations; losing their nature, while they keep ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died. Let not, then, your good be evil spoken of.' Isn't that precisely what you were doing of the good in those church-members, Eurie? Now a sophist would possibly say that the argument of Paul had reference to food offered to idols, and not to dancing; but I think here is a chance for us to exercise that judgment and common sense which we are so fond of ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... selfish point of view. But the advantage would be hers also. Did he not desire her happiness? He tried to think so, but after all was ashamed to play the sophist with himself. The letter he carried in his pocket told the truth. He had but to think of her as married to Robert Narramore and the jealous fury of ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... below, Is to believe that we are so. Some few in knowledge find relief; I place my comfort in belief. 290 Some for reality may call; Fancy to me is all in all. Imagination, through the trick Of doctors, often makes us sick; And why, let any sophist tell, May it not likewise make us well? This I am sure, whate'er our view, Whatever shadows we pursue, For our pursuits, be what they will, Are little more than shadows still; 300 Too swift they fly, too swift and strong, For man to catch or hold them long; But ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... of indecision is so called from the hypothetical ass of Buridan, the Greek sophist. Buridan maintained that "if an ass could be placed between two hay-stacks in such a way that its choice was evenly balanced between them, it would starve to death, for there would be no motive why he should choose the one and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he were bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a noble and a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the "Troades," is a pettifogging sophist, who pleads her cause to Menelaus with rhetorical artifice. In the "Helena," again, Euripides quite deserts the Homeric traditions, and adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She remained in Egypt, and Achaeans and Trojans fought for a mere shadow, formed by the Gods ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not reproach those who pretended ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... he was haled before the disciplinary committee of the faculty. Litton happened to be on that committee. Teed made the best fight he could. He showed himself a Greek—in argument at least—and, like an old sophist, he tried to prove, first, that he was not on the campus with the girl and never had spooned with her; second, that if he had been there and had spooned with her it was too dark for them to be seen; and third, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... was, as we are informed by Diogenes Laertius, first used by Plato; and in the Phaedrus, Sophist, Republic, bk. vii., and elsewhere, we find that by Dialectic he means the regular employment of the reason, and skill in the practice of it. Aristotle also uses the word in this sense; but, according ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man At the sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, Where man in the bush with ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... state, and that Pantheist was consequently permitted to spread, under the protection of Prussia, his senseless doctrine of deified humanity, the same formerly proclaimed by Anacharsis Cloote in the French Convention. When too late, the gross deception practiced by this sophist was perceived: his disciples threw off their troublesome mask, with Dr. Strauss, who had been implicated in the Zurich disturbances, at their head, openly renounced Christianity, and, at Halle, led by Ruge, the ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Provence of the twelfth, and Italy of the sixteenth,—were not enduring. Man in these lacks some checks. After sudden outbursts of genius and creativeness, he wanders away in the direction of license and egotism; the degenerate artist and thinker makes room for the sophist and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... young Roman went to Athens. There we find Horace at about nineteen years of age, learning Greek, and attending the schools of the philosophers; those same Stoics and Epicureans whom a few years later the first great Christian Sophist was to harangue on Mars' Hill. These taught from their several points of view the basis of happiness and the aim of life. Each in turn impressed him: for a time he agreed with Stoic Zeno that active duty is the highest good; then lapsed ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... philosopher, sometimes suggesting the sophist and a little the rhetorician, but full of ideas, eloquent, affecting, "the most tragic" (that is, the most pathetic) of all the acting dramatists, as Aristotle observed, the most modern, too, and the one we best understand, has been the ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... good was beside me through that long passage—we were two weeks—the stronger because it was unconscious, the stronger, I think, too, that it rested on no intellectual basis, but was wholly and purely spiritual—as the confidence of a child might hold a man to his duty where the arguments of a sophist would have no effect. As I say, I went through a great deal. My mind was a battle-field for the powers of good and evil during those two weeks, but the man who was leading the forces of the right never knew it. The outcome was that as soon as I landed I took my ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Bimbisara, one of the then most powerful rulers in the valley of the Ganges. He was favourably received by the raja; but though asked to do so, he would not as yet assume the responsibilities of a teacher. He attached himself first to a brahmin sophist named Alara, and afterwards to another named Udraka, from whom he learnt all that Indian philosophy had then to teach. Still unsatisfied, he next retired to the jungle of Uruvela, on the most northerly spur of the Vindhya range of mountains, and there for six years, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... in soul? Gone—glimmering through the dreams of things that were: First in the race that led to glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away:—is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon, and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, gray ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... friend.[1173] Garrick was so diffused, he had no man to whom he wished to unbosom himself. He found people always ready to applaud him, and that always for the same thing: so he saw life with great uniformity.' I took upon me, for once, to fight with Goliath's weapons, and play the sophist.—'Garrick did not need a friend, as he got from every body all he wanted. What is a friend? One who supports you and comforts you, while others do not. Friendship, you know, Sir, is the cordial drop, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... thinking of Socrates and the people of Athens here. If so, this is a quasi-apology for the Athenian bons peres de famille who condemned Socrates. Beautiful story of the sophist teacher's ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... demand for crude theory and unsound philosophy, rather than none at all. It is a sort of repetition of the "Quid novi?" of the Areopagus, and it must have an answer. Men must be found who can treat, where it is necessary, like the Athenian sophist, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... malaria, whatever it met with on its way that had any connection with religion, morals, or venerable social customs. Besides Voltaire, who presided over this coterie, at least in spirit, the daily company included Diderot, an enthusiast by nature and a cynic and sophist by profession; D'Alembert, a genius of the first order in mathematics, though less distinguished in literature; the malicious Marmontel, the philosopher Helvetius, the Abbe Raynal, the furious enemy of all modern institutions; the would-be sentimentalist ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... dawns! Bind me Hortensia, firmly, to yon chesnut tree, stout smith; but do not harm her. We too have mothers!" he added with a singular revulsion of feeling at such a moment. "For you, my beauty, we will have you consoled by a warmer lover than that most shallow-pated fool and sophist, Arvina. Come! I say come! no one shall harm you!" and without farther words, despite all her struggles and remonstrances, he bound a handkerchief tightly under her chin to prevent her cries, wrapped her in ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... sophist victorious within him was done in a flash, as Evan measured his qualities beside this young man's, and without a sense of lying, said: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sophist, you will always come first. But it is not permitted that any loyal gentleman devote every hour of his life to sighing and making sonnets, and to the general solacing of a maid's loneliness in this dull little Deptford. Nor would you, I am sure, ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... that "thought is only the relation of the thinking subject to the object thought of, and that the thinking subject, the soul, is nothing more than the sum of the different moments of thinking." It is no wonder that that Sophist who was the author of such doctrines should be condemned to death to satisfy the clamours of a populace who had not advanced sufficiently into the depths of this secondary, this higher philosophy, and that it ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... distinction at court, and a royal carriage conveyed him to his lodgings. The banquets of the Acropolis became distinguished for simplicity, and the royal pupil commenced at once in taking lessons in geometry. The old courtiers were alarmed, and disgusted. "A single Athenian sophist," they said, "with no force but his tongue and reputation, has achieved the conquest of Syracuse." Dionysius seemed to have abdicated in favor of Plato, and the noble objects for which Dion labored ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... thing it is to love evil courses! For this old man, having loved them, wishes to withhold the money that he borrowed. And he will certainly meet with something today, which will perhaps cause this sophist to suddenly receive some misfortune, in return for the knaveries he has begun. For I think that he will presently find what has been long boiling up, that his son is skilful to speak opinions opposed to justice, so as to overcome all with whomsoever he holds converse, even ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... the Reader remember, that "there is one thing in the world more contemptible than the slave of a tyrant—it is the dupe of a SOPHIST." ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... there a heart that music cannot melt? Ah me! how is that rugged heart forlorn! Is there, who ne'er those mystic transports felt, Of solitude and melancholy born? He needs not woo the Muse; he is her scorn. The sophist's rope of cobweb he shall twine; Mope o'er the schoolman's peevish page; or mourn, And delve for life, in Mammon's dirty mine; Sneak with the scoundrel fox, or grunt with ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... head with a most fertile imagination, which gave him an extraordinary advantage in arguing; for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. He could, when he chose it, be the greatest sophist that ever wielded a weapon in the schools of declamation; but he indulged this only in conversation; for he owned he sometimes talked for victory[24]; he was too conscientious to make errour permanent and pernicious, by deliberately writing it. He was conscious of his superiority. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta;' how it then passed into Hermotimus, 'where no sooner it was missing, but with one Pyrrhus of Delos [20] it learned to go a-fishing;' [21] how thence it did enter the Sophist of Greece, Pythagoras. After having been changed ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... a most fertile imagination, which gave him an extraordinary advantage in arguing: for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could, when he pleased, be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and, from a spirit of contradiction and a delight in shewing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity; so that, when there was an audience, his real opinions could seldom be gathered from his talk[1298]; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... assurance, that whenever I should begin to make money by my profession, he would accept of remuneration. He jestingly said, that he would make the same bargain with me that was made by the famous sophist Protagoras of old with his pupil, that he should have the profits of the first cause I should win—certain that I would not, like his treacherous pupil Evathlus, employ the rhetorician's arms against himself, to cheat him out of his promised reward. My special ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... fallen into my Hands, and which pretends to great Antiquity, tho' by Reason of some modern Phrases and other Particulars in it, I can by no means allow it to be genuine, but rather the Production of a Modern Sophist. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won't do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful. They can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... beloved incurs the fate of Jonah is eminently despicable: but then he was countryman ex hypothesi of Mourzoufle, not of Villehardouin. The "battailous" spirit of the West is not to be expected in a Byzantine sophist. Whether something of its artistic and literary spirit is not to be detected in him is a more doubtful question. For my part, I cannot read of Hysmine without being reminded of Nicolette, as I am never reminded in other parts of the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... can believe them, they have also reached the point at which no man of high character will profess them; and from, that moment until they are formally disestablished, they stand at the door of every profession and every public office to keep out every able man who is not a sophist or a liar. A nation which revises its parish councils once in three years, but will not revise its articles of religion once in three hundred, even when those articles avowedly began as a political compromise ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... rhetorical pieces (The Tyrannicide, The Disinherited, Phalaris) are declamations on hypothetical cases which might serve either for (3) or (4); and The Hall, The Fly, Dipsas, and perhaps Demosthenes, suggest (4). A common form of exhibition was for a sophist to appear before an audience and let them propose subjects, of which he must choose one and deliver an impromptu ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... the price, and diminished the measure, of wheat. In the school of Psellus, and after the example of his mother, the son of Eudocia made some proficiency in philosophy and rhetoric; but his character was degraded, rather than ennobled, by the virtues of a monk and the learning of a sophist. Strong in the contempt of their sovereign and their own esteem, two generals, at the head of the European and Asiatic legions, assumed the purple at Adrianople and Nice. Their revolt was in the same months; they bore the same name of Nicephorus; but the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Sophist murmured low, and "LYCIUS' arms were empty of delight," LAMIA had fled! Would that some sage cool head, some modern APOLLONIUS, with the might Of sense magnanimous, would banish thus the bestial Lamia of our later day, Whose fascination draws a noble nation ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various
... there should be some agreement, and that, for a time at least, certain opinions should prevail; and if philosophy had failed to secure this agreement, rhetoric, at least, was effectual; and, with the Sophist, rhetoric was "the art of making the worst appear the better reason." All wisdom was now confined to a species of "word jugglery," which in Athens was dignified ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Sacra Historia, preserved in a fragment of Q. Eunius, was collected by Hieronymus Columnar (6) Hemitheon of the Sybaritic books, (7) Musaeus, the Iyrist; (8) Niko, the Samian girl; (9) Philaenis, the poetess of Amatory Pleasures, in Athen. viii. 13, attributed to Polycrates the Sophist; (10) Protagorides, Amatory Conversations; (11) Sotades, the Mantinaean who, says Suidas, wrote the poem "Cinaedica"; (12) Sphodrias the Cynic, his Art of Love; and (13) Trepsicles, Amatory Pleasures. Amongst the Romans we ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... his categorical affirmation of a right of force, notified him that they decidedly disapproved of his new publication. "You see," triumphantly cried those whom he had always combated, "this man is only a sophist." ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... excellent style, love, and love only can teach." Thus did the Sophist discourse. What mortal, alas! ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... male side to AEsculapius, and on the female side to Hercules. He is said to have received his medical education from his father and from Herodicus, and to have been taught philosophy by Gorgias, the Sophist, and by Democritus, whom he afterwards cured of ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... case, however interesting the conversation may be, it cannot be said to possess a dramatic interest. I shall make this clear by alluding to a more tranquil species of dialogue, not adapted for the stage, the philosophic. When, in Plato, Socrates asks the conceited sophist Hippias, what is the meaning of the beautiful, the latter is at once ready with a superficial answer, but is afterwards compelled by the ironical objections of Socrates to give up his former definition, and to grope about him for other ideas, till, ashamed at last and irritated ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Homer extends it so far as to the budding of the beard, Plato himself has remarked this as rare: and the reason why the sophist Bion so pleasantly called the first appearing hairs of adolescence 'Aristogitons' and 'Harmodiuses'—[Plutarch, On Love, c.34.]— is sufficiently known. I find it in virility already in some sort a little out of date, though not so much as in ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... The allegory of a sophist is always screwed; it crouches and bows like a snake, which is never straight, whether she go, creep, or lie still; only when she is dead, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... manner of systematic history, and in this he stood above his Jewish predecessors. He learnt from them also the arts of mixing false with true, of invention, of exaggeration, of the suggestion of the bad and the suppression of the good motive. He was a sophist rather than a sage, and circumstances compelled him to be a court chronicler rather than a national historian. And while he acquired something of the art of historical writing from his models, he lost the intuitive synthesis of the Jewish attitude, which saw the working ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... Melos, surnamed the Atheist, poet and sophist, flourished in the second half of the 5th century B.C. Religious in his youth and a writer of hymns and dithyrambs, he became an atheist because a great wrong done to him was left unpunished by the gods. In consequence of his blasphemous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... may not suit his higher blood.—Ach, Himmel! Ned," cried he, laughing, "it pleased me, though, to see how adroitly he contrived to twist that new reading out of the bon homme Francois. It was quite in the style of St. Augustine, and would have delighted that ex-sophist hugely; for, great as he was, and self-denying as he was, he always had a hankering after the dialectic flesh-pots. How he would have rubbed his hands, when Clarian wanted to persuade us that the herb Pantagruelion was no other than Haschish, the expander of souls!—Hollo! yonder goes the lad ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... one of these five modes unequivocally; or indeed of the first four, since the fifth, on such a supposition, would vanish. But it is not in the nature of bad reasoning to express itself thus unambiguously. When a sophist, whether he is imposing on himself or attempting to impose on others, can be constrained to throw his sophistry into so distinct a form, it needs, in a large proportion ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... denied him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,—'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Africanus or Hannibal was the greater, Piccinino through the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army; the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks, praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to posterity. Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for the use of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... a young man is represented as meeting a friend Hippocrates, who was on his way to Protagoras, a sophist from Abdera who had just arrived at Athens. Socrates shows first that his friend has no idea of the seriousness of his action in applying for instruction to a sophist whose definition ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... while waiting for some adequate excitement, for some worthy opportunity, squanders on trifles a genius before which may yet be humbled the sword of Pompey and the gown of Cicero. Perhaps he may now be disputing with a sophist; perhaps prattling with a mistress; perhaps" and, as he spoke, he turned away, and resumed his lounge, "strolling ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... their differences of opinion, and thereupon pretends to have refuted the theory they agree in supporting. This is an argumentum ad scholam, and pushes too far the demand for consistency. In fact it recoils upon the sophist; for there is no sense in quoting men against one another, unless both (or all) are acknowledged to speak with the authority of learning and judgment, and therefore the general doctrine which they hold in ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... and proceeds to lay down practical rules for their application to different branches of knowledge. As in the Republic he supposes the philosopher to proceed by regular steps, until he arrives at the idea of good; as in the Sophist and Politicus he insists that in dividing the whole into its parts we should bisect in the middle in the hope of finding species; as in the Phaedrus (see above) he would have 'no limb broken' of the organism of knowledge;—so in the Philebus he urges ...
— Philebus • Plato
... another party of men, or three or four parties at once, like foreign porters at a landing, who seize on the baggage of the perplexed stranger, and thrust half a dozen cards into his unwilling hands. Our youth is plied by the hangers-on of professor this, or sophist that, each of whom wishes the fame or the profit of having a houseful. We will say that he escapes from their hands,—but then he will have to choose for himself where he will put up; and, to tell the truth, with all the praise I have already given, and the praise I shall have to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... "Moncada, you are a sophist," said Kennedy. "Possibly I am wrong in this discussion," retorted Caesar, "but the feeling I have is right. Artists irritate me; they seem to me like old ladies with a flatulency that prevents ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... with his pale face, lymphatic complexion, glassy eye, and forehead checkered with a Napoleon-like lock. He was then, and has remained ever since, the most exact personification of a pasteboard man of genius lighted by histrionic foot-lights. He was a compound of the dandy, the sophist, and the agitator. His talents lay in making people believe him in possession of ideas, when he had none,—just as speculators disseminate the illusion of their capital, when in reality they are worse than bankrupt. He began what others have since completed,—that is, he made ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... up amid the religious influences of Delphi, he becomes an idealist and a dreamer of fine dreams. He goes to Athens, takes part in politics, is banished and sold into slavery. At Smyrna he is bought by the sophist Hippias, who tries to convert him to a sensualistic philosophy. He falls in love with the beautiful hetra Dana, but on learning the story of her other loves, he leaves Smyrna in disgust and goes to Syracuse, where he has divers adventures at the court of the tyrant Dionysius. At last, finding ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... avarice, cunning, cruelty, and falsehood,—but THOU hast been even beneath MY contempt! 'Twas scarcely worth my while to fool thee, thou wert so easily fooled! ... 'Twas idle sport to rouse thy passions, they were so easily roused! Poet and Perjurer, . . Singer and Sophist! Thou to whom the Genius of Poesy was as a pearl set in a swine's snout! ... thou wert not worthy to be my dupe, seeing that thou camest to me already in bonds, the dupe of thine own Self! Niphrata loved thee,—and thou didst play with and torture her more unmercifully ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... ahead of his own intelligence; neither will any take from him the persuasions which correspond to his mental condition. A good logical pose may sometimes serve to lower the crest of an obstreperous sophist, as boughs of one species of ash are said to quell the rattlesnake; but with both these sinuous animals the effect is temporary, and the quality of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... reasoning faculties. For, swayed as these were by her sentiments and desires, they proved themselves most fertile in generating flattering illusions and artful sophisms. George Sand was indeed a great sophist. She had always in readiness an inexhaustible store of interpretations and subterfuges with which to palliate, excuse, or even metamorphose into their contraries the most odious of her words and actions. It is not likely that any ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks |
