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Sophist   Listen
noun
Sophist  n.  
1.
One of a class of men who taught eloquence, philosophy, and politics in ancient Greece; especially, one of those who, by their fallacious but plausible reasoning, puzzled inquirers after truth, weakened the faith of the people, and drew upon themselves general hatred and contempt. "Many of the Sophists doubdtless card not for truth or morality, and merely professed to teach how to make the worse appear the better reason; but there scems no reason to hold that they were a special class, teaching special opinions; even Socrates and Plato were sometimes styled Sophists."
2.
Hence, an impostor in argument; a captious or fallacious reasoner.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sophist" Quotes from Famous Books



... communicated the familiar knowledge of the two national dialects; and the Barbarians were ambitious of conversing in Latin, the military idiom even of the Eastern Empire. But they disdained the language and the sciences of the Greeks; and the vain sophist, or grave philosopher, who had enjoyed the flattering applause of the schools, was mortified to find that his robust servant was a captive of more value and importance than himself. The mechanic arts were encouraged and esteemed, as they tended to satisfy the wants ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... some discussions with Antiphon the sophist (1) deserve record. Antiphon approaches Socrates in hope of drawing away his associates, and in their presence thus ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon

... king of Sparta, (who commanded the Greeks at the battle of Platea, and afterwards perished for an attempt to betray the Lacedaemonians), and Cleonice, is told in Plutarch's life of Cimon; and in the Laconics of Pausanias the sophist in his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... sad retreats That hold thee, smothered with excess of sweets, Shade of a shadow, spectre of a dream, Glance thy wan eye across the Stygian stream! The slipshod dreamer treads thy fragrant halls, The sophist's cobwebs hang thy roseate walls, And o'er the crotchets of thy jingling tunes The bard of mystery scrawls his crooked "runes." Yes, thou art gone, with all the tuneful hordes That candied thoughts in amber-colored words, And in the precincts of thy late abodes The clattering verse-wright ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Sallust's account of the conspiracy, but he models some of the speeches of Cicero on the Roman orator's actual words. In "Poetaster," he lifts a whole satire out of Horace and dramatises it effectively for his purposes. The sophist Libanius suggests the situation of "The Silent Woman"; a Latin comedy of Giordano Bruno, "Il Candelaio," the relation of the dupes and the sharpers in "The Alchemist," the "Mostellaria" of Plautus, its admirable opening scene. But ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... fell upon Antioch after the 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 Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke

... since pleasure's joy's parent, and joy begets mirth, Should the subtlest casuist or sophist on earth Contradict me, I'd call him an ass and a calf, And boldly insist once for all, That the only criterion of pleasure's to laugh, And sing tol de rol, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... 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 Franois. 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... commodity of life, and of which fortune gives an abundant supply, he used without arrogance and without excusing himself; so that when he had them, he enjoyed them without affectation, and when he had them not, he did not want them. No one could ever say of him that he was either a sophist or a [home-bred] flippant slave or a pedant; but every one acknowledged him to be a man ripe, perfect, above flattery, able to manage his own and other men's affairs. Besides this, he honored those who were true philosophers, and he did not reproach those who pretended to be philosophers, nor yet ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius

... or even problems. He has such scepticism as is the misfortune of his age; but he has this dignified and courageous quality, that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He is not a paradox-monger; he is a wild logician, far too simple even to be called a sophist. He understands everything in life except its paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted. Lastly, he is not ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... 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 ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... 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 for Hampton ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve

... In the beginning each Sophist teacher was a free lance, and taught what he would and in the manner he thought best. Many of them made extraordinary efforts to attract students and win popular approval and fees. Plato represents the Sophist Protagoras as saying, with reference to a youth ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... incongruous annotators, and wherever they perceive the broadest margin about the text, they furnish it with a monstrous alphabet, or their unchastened pen immediately presumes to draw any other frivolous thing whatever that occurs to their imagination. There the Latinist, there the sophist, there every sort of unlearned scribe tries the goodness of his pen, which we have frequently seen to have been most injurious to the fairest volumes, both as to utility and price. There are also certain thieves who ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... 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 passage back on the next ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... 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], Sanskritish; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... not appear that at Elis there were any of the actual contests in music and song which made the character of the Pythian games. But still it was a common exhibition for the cultivation of every art. Sophist, and historian, and orator, poet and painter found their mart in ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... "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 brim, and having done ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... voluntarily devote themselves to it; at least most of them do so. Moreover, their law-giver persuaded them that they were all brethren, and that when once they come out and reject the Greek gods, they should then worship that crucified sophist and live according to his laws. Therefore they despise all things and hold everything in common, having received such ideas from others, without any sufficient basis for their faith. If, then, any impostor or trickster who knows how to manage things came among ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... brightness? But it is still much greater that he should have effected by the same labour the emergence of sacred truth itself out of that Cimmerian darkness, even though divinity is not yet quite free from the dirt of the sophist school. If that should occur one day, it will be owing to the beginnings made in our times.' The philologist Budaeus believed even more firmly than Erasmus that faith was a ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... the commissioners chosen for that purpose; but this last judicial effort to save him only tended to secure his ruin. When confronted with his judges, Biron appeared to have lost all consistency of character; the soldier was sunk in the sophist; he argued vaguely and inconsistently; and compromised his own cause by the very clumsiness of the efforts which he made to clear himself. Unaware of the revelations of La Fin, when he was confronted with him he declared him to be a man of honour, his relative, and his very good ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... nevertheless desirable, for the good of society, that there should be some agreement, and that, for a time at least, certain opinions should prevail; and if philosophy had failed to secure this agreement, rhetoric, at least, was effectual; and, with the Sophist, rhetoric was "the art of making the worst appear the better reason." All wisdom was now confined to a species of "word jugglery," which in Athens was dignified ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... been concealed in domestic or literary retirement. Perhaps he may be one, who, 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, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... 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 speeches, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... 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

... eminent authority dealt with it. "There exists a certain class of mind," he commences, "allied perhaps to the Greek sophist variety, to which ignorance of a subject offers no sufficient obstacle to the composition of a treatise upon it." It may be rash to suggest that this type of mind is well developed in philosophers of the Spencerian ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... "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 ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... 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

... sophist Sidonius, delivering a long panegyric on himself, said that he was acquainted with all the tenets of the philosophers: "If Aristotle calls me to the Lyceum, I obey; if Plato to the Academy, I come; Zeno to the Stoa, I take up my abode there; if Pythagoras ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... am stretched beneath the pines, When 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 bush with ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... as Bodinus de Periodis saith of such an one, arrident amici ridet mundus, in English, this man his cronies they cocker him up, they flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, meanwhile the world thinks him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist. * * ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... sophist, Warburton, thought fit to talk of the polluted streams of the Alexandrian school, without knowing any thing of the source whence those streams are derived? Or was it because some heavy German critic, who knew nothing ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... goldy-locked Euphorbus who was killed, in good fashion, at the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta;' how it then passed into Hermotimus, 'where no sooner it was missing, but with one Pyrrhus of Delos [20] it learned to go a-fishing;' [21] how thence it did enter the Sophist of Greece, Pythagoras. After having been changed ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... and residence of 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, attended by five faithful ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... 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 men to be taken away ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... 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 advance. For the path of culture is always ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... 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 the necessity of filling up all the intermediate ...
— Philebus • Plato

... a Greek of the 4th century B.C. Brought 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 ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... tell her that she is not yet a Christian, and bid her swear by Jupiter, because that is her god, in order that she may escape imprisonment and death? Am I to do the part of a heathen priest or infidel sophist? O Caecilius, how am I forgetting your lessons! No; I will go on no such errand. Go, I will, if I may, Jucundus, but I will go on no conditions of yours. I go on no promise to try to get her out of prison anyhow, poor child. I will not go to make her sacrifice to a false god; I go to ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... join himself to the Christians, "miserable men" (as he calls them), "who, hoping for immortality in soul and body, had a foolish contempt of death, and suffered themselves to be persuaded that they were brethren, because, having abandoned the Greek gods, they worshipped the crucified sophist, living according to his laws."(141) Peregrinus, when a Christian, soon rises to the dignity of bishop, and is worshipped as a god; and when imprisoned for his religion is visited by Christians from all quarters. Afterwards, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... the Hebrews, is said to have been the production of this writer."(579) The most interesting notice we have of Tatian's work is from the pen of Theodoret. After explaining that Tatian the Syrian, originally a Sophist, and next a disciple of Justin Martyr [A.D. 150], after Justin's death aspired to being a heretical leader,—(statements which are first found in Irenaeus,)—Theodoret enumerates his special tenets. "This man" (he proceeds) "put together the so-called Diatessaron ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... Athena! where, Where are thy men of might—thy grand in soul? Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were— First in the race that led to Glory's goal; They won, and passed away. Is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, gray ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... 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, were this our soul's ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... be a sophist before thy hundred years are ended," said her brother with a soft pinch ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... disadvantage of being in advance of his age. He had the notion of which the modern geometry has made so much, that of {60} a circle being the polygon of an infinitely great number of sides. He could make no use of it, but the notion itself made him a sophist in the eyes of Aristotle, Eutocius,[125] etc. Geber, an Arab astronomer, and a reputed conjurer in Europe, seems to have given his name to unintelligible language in the word gibberish. At one time algebra was traced to him; but very absurdly, though I have heard it suggested that algebra ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... with a most fertile imagination, which gave him a most extraordinary advantage in arguing; for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could when he pleased be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and from a spirit of contradiction, and a delight in showing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity: so that when there was an audience, his real opinions ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... would be written the word RECREANT! Every taunt, every reproach, every note of exultation at restored light and freedom, would recall to them how their hearts failed them in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And what shall we say to him—the sleep-walker, the dreamer, the sophist, the word-hunter, the craver after sympathy, but still vulnerable to truth, accessible to opinion, because not sordid or mechanical? The Bourbons being no longer tied about his neck, he may perhaps recover his original liberty of speculating; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various

... outrun his deliberate understanding, or who does not feel and know much more than he can give a reason for. Hence the distinction between eloquence and wisdom, between ingenuity and common sense. A man may be dexterous and able in explaining the grounds of his opinions, and yet may be a mere sophist, because he only sees one-half of a subject. Another may feel the whole weight of a question, nothing relating to it may be lost upon him, and yet he may be able to give no account of the manner in which it affects him, or to drag his reasons ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the more delicate flowers of genius of the first period. The Worship of Venus might be more appropriately named Games of the Loves in Honour of Venus. The subject is taken from the Imagines[36] of Philostratus, a renowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the Roman Empire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of the Hellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series of paintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips

... Some moon-struck sophist stood Watching the shade from his own soul upthrown 3245 Fill Heaven and darken Earth, and in such mood The Form he saw and worshipped was his own, His likeness in the world's vast mirror shown; And 'twere ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... we pass from the style to an examination of the subject, we trace a connection with the later rather than with the earlier dialogues. In the first place there is the connexion, indicated by Plato himself at the end of the dialogue, with the Sophist, to which in many respects the Theaetetus is so little akin. (1) The same persons reappear, including the younger Socrates, whose name is just mentioned in the Theaetetus; (2) the theory of rest, which Socrates has declined to consider, is resumed by the ...
— Theaetetus • Plato

... fatten the region-kites. Speak not to me, sir, but begone! Am I, your kinsman and benefactor, a fit person to be juggled out of my commendation and eulogy, and brought to bedaub such a whitened sepulchre as the sophist Milton?" ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... 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. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... epitaph on Eratosthenes, who died B.C. 196. Eight other epigrams in the Palatine Anthology, and four more in Planudes, are attributed to a Dionysius. One is headed "Dionysius of Andros," one "Dionysius of Rhodes" (it is an epitaph on a Rhodian), one "Dionysius the Sophist," the others "Dionysius" simply. There were certainly several authors of the name, which was one of the commonest in Greece; but no distinction in style can be traced among these epigrams, and there ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... my taste." And that was the true attitude of his mind; but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and wrangle over by the hour. It was no wonder if he loved the Greeks; he was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been a sophist and met Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and done battle with him staunchly and manfully owned his defeat; and the dialogue, arranged by Plato, would have shone even in Plato's gallery. He seemed in talk aggressive, petulant, full ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the oldest State universities there were eight professors out of more than one hundred who were unbelievers or skeptics, and in one of the youngest there were but three known skeptics among more than eighty professors. Even this small number should not be possible, because one "anti-Christian sophist or a velvet-footed infidel" may work moral and religious disaster to the young in any college. "A college," remarks President Gates, "must be either avowedly and openly Christian, or by the very absence of avowed Christian influence it will ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker

... perspicuity and force, in rich and choice expression. He united a most logical 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; he was too conscientious to make errour permanent and pernicious, by deliberately writing it. He was conscious of his superiority. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... friends, but no friend.[1173] Garrick was so diffused, he had no man to whom he wished to unbosom himself. He found people always ready to applaud him, and that always for the same thing: so he saw life with great uniformity.' I took upon me, for once, to fight with Goliath's weapons, and play the sophist.—'Garrick did not need a friend, as he got from every body all he wanted. What is a friend? One who supports you and comforts you, while others do not. Friendship, you know, Sir, is the cordial drop, "to make ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... theology," Dean Stanley wrote, "is essentially logical in form and based on law. The Eastern theology is rhetorical in form and based on philosophy. The Latin divine succeeded to the Roman advocate. The Oriental divine succeeded to the Grecian sophist."[28] ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... balances virtue and vice as it were on the point of a finger, and argues prettily on the way the two can be easily merged into each other, almost without perception. "If without perception, then without sin," says the sophist; "it is merely a question of balance." Certainly if generosity drifts into extravagance you have a virtue turned into a vice;—but there is one thing these spurious debaters cannot do, and that is to turn a vice into a virtue. That ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... Pompeius, he shed tears; the device was a lion holding a sword. He put to death Achillas and Potheinus, and the king himself being defeated in battle was lost somewhere near the river. Theodotus the sophist escaped the vengeance of Caesar, for he fled from Egypt and wandered about in a miserable state, the object of detestation; but Brutus Marcus, after he had killed Caesar and got the power in his hands, finding ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... selfish point of view. But the advantage would be hers also. Did he not desire her happiness? He tried to think so, but after all was ashamed to play the sophist with himself. The letter he carried in his pocket told the truth. He had but to think of her as married to Robert Narramore and the jealous fury of natural man drove ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... A man 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 reject ...
— 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.

... tempting the devil to try and oust the cardinal, the more so as at that time it was not known who would be pope, three aspirants having resigned their hoods for the benefit of Christianity. The cardinal, who was a cunning Italian, long bearded, a great sophist, and the life and soul of the Council, guessed, by the feeblest exercise of the faculties of his understanding, the alpha and omega of the adventure. He only had to weigh in his mind one little thought before he knew how ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... 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

... no conception of. They know no other influence than corruption and reckon all their probabilities from precedent. A new case is to them a new world, and while they are seeking for a parallel they get lost. The talents of Lord Mansfield can be estimated at best no higher than those of a sophist. He understands the subtleties but not the elegance of nature; and by continually viewing mankind through the cold medium of the law, never thinks of penetrating into the warmer region of the mind. As for Lord North, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... its present form from the lifetime or shortly after the death of Hadrian, but seems to be based in part on an earlier version by the sophist Alcidamas (c. 400 B.C.). Plutarch ("Conviv. Sept. Sap.", 40) uses an earlier (or at least a shorter) version than that which we possess [1118]. The extant "Contest", however, has clearly combined with the original document much other ill-digested matter on the life and descent of Homer, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... a 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 ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes

... city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous; for otherwise it is merely an alliance for self-defence; differing from those of the same cast which are made between different people only in place: for law is an agreement and a pledge, as the sophist Lycophron says, between the citizens of their intending to do justice to each other, though not sufficient to make all the citizens just and good: and that this is fiact is evident, for could any ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle

... wine we owe the productions of Eschylus and Anacreon, whose muses were very chilly, till Bacchus warmed them. Aurelius, the sophist, composed his best declamations in his cups. Herodes, called Saginatus Orator, the fattened Orator, never talked better, than after drinking pretty plentifully. And according to Horace, this ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus

... utterance[1297]. In him were united a most logical 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. 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen—it can almost certainly be prophesied—that ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,—'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into Charon's boat and go tell the spirits about this ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... century, 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... men everywhere. Free from all trickery, strictly impartial, relying entirely upon the soundness of his premises for success,—for elegance of diction he had not, and he was too honest even to become a sophist,—these papers manifest at once the true patriot and the intelligent man. Thousands of adherents the Republican cause had in 1860, but not one more indefatigable or more heartily in earnest than Lyon. Outside the limits of party interests, and uninfluenced personally by the predominance ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Euripides, in 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 ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang

... his shaggy-born crest upbristle for anger and woe, Horribly frowning and growling, his fury will launch at the foe Huge-clamped masses of words, with exertion Titanic up—tearing Great ship-timber planks for the fray. But here will the tongue be at work, uncoiling, word-testing refining, Sophist-creator of phrases, dissecting, detracting, maligning, Shaking the envious bits, and with subtle analysis paring The lung's ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes

... so had Sir William Follett for advocacy—and genius of a very high order, as will be testified by all those before whom, or on whose behalf, he exhibited it—alike by clients or judges—as by opponents. If he were a very subtle sophist himself, he was himself one on whom no sophistry could impose. It fled before the penetrating glance of his aquiline eye. Faculties such as his must have secured him eminence in any pursuit or walk in life to which he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... their familiarity; and that no other weapons could have been used to pierce the superstitious prejudice with which the works of certain painters are shielded from the attacks of reason. My answer is that given long ago to a similar complaint, uttered under the same circumstances by the foiled sophist:—"[Greek: (Hos d'estin ho anthropos; hos apaideutos tis, os ouio phaula onomata onomazein tolma en semno pragmati.) Toioutos tis, o Hippia, ouden ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... Varangian guard. He had been all day playing the part of the ambitious politician, the selfish time-server, the dark and subtle conspirator; and now it seemed, as if to exhaust the catalogue of his various parts in the human drama, he chose to exhibit himself in the character of the wily sophist, and justify, or seem to justify, the arts by which he had risen to wealth and eminence, and hoped even now to arise ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... hope is founded, and therefore it takes the designation of substance; and from this belief we needs must syllogize, without having other sight, wherefore it receives the designation of evidence."[3] Then I heard, "If whatever is acquired below for doctrine, were so understood, the wit of sophist would have no place there." Thus was breathed forth from that enkindled love; then it added, "Very well have the alloy and the weight of this coin been now run through, but tell me if thou hast it in thy purse?" And I, "Yes, I have it so shining and so round that in its stamp ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri

... of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness ...
— The Republic • Plato

... 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

... are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone—glimmering through the dreams of things that were: First in the race that led to glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away:—is this the whole? A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour! The warrior's weapon, and the sophist's stole Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower, Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... the free-thinking Sophist, "The times are refined In sense to a wondrous degree; Your old-fashion'd faith does but fetter the mind, And it 's wrong not to seek to be free." Says the sage Politician, "Your natural share Of talents would raise you much higher, Than thus ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... "In my heart, dear 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 ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... of 1862 there took place the elections for Representatives to the Thirty-eighth Congress. The most ingenious sophist could hardly maintain that strenuous anti-slavery voters, who had been angry with the government for backwardness in the emancipation policy, ought now to manifest their discontent by voting the Democratic ticket. If there should be a Democratic reaction at the polls it could not possibly ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... 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 seemed to be on the way of fulfillment. But Plato acted injudiciously, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... Athenian literature and art: of the Parthenon and Phidias; of AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to popular ideas, the typical Sophist, but in fact differing from the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... of Forms of Prayer proved against John Bunyan and the Dissenters. 1700. This is a very rare and curious volume. The author, as usual in such controversies, deals wholesale in invective, and displays all the ability of a sophist. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... 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 dictated by Mr Facing-Both-Ways, is a nation ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... "You 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

... now moody and with knit brows, and now streaming with tears and with arms outstretched to Heaven. Hyperbole, prosopopaeia, and other literary machinery are too often and too deliberately used by him. We are tempted to regard him now as a sophist making the best use of his arts, now as a rhetorician cudgeling his brains for a purpose, now as a preacher becoming excited, that is to say, an actor ever maintaining a thesis, striking an attitude and aiming at effects. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... stage: he is with difficulty convinced that Socrates is in earnest; for if these things are true, then, as he says with real emotion, the foundations of society are upside down. In him another type of character is represented; he is neither sophist nor philosopher, but man of the world, and an accomplished Athenian gentleman. He might be described in modern language as a cynic or materialist, a lover of power and also of pleasure, and unscrupulous in his means of ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... utterly inapplicable to human affairs. The theorist railed at the folly of the world, instead of confessing his own; and the men of practice unjustly blamed philosophy, instead of condemning the sophist. The causes which the politician has to consider are, above all others, multiplied, mutable, minute, subtile, and, if I may so speak, evanescent; perpetually changing their form, and varying their combinations; losing their nature, while they keep their ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh

... his flowery prose into verse, might have found a precedent and model for their task in Ben Jonson, whose popular song, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," is, as Mr. Cumberland first remarked, but a piece of fanciful mosaic, collected out of the love-letters of the sophist Philostratus. But many of the narrations in Aristaenetus are incapable of being elevated into poetry; and, unluckily, these familiar parts seem chiefly to have fallen to the department of Halhed, who was far less gifted than his coadjutor with that artist-like touch, which polishes away the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... 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; what he ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... of a lock, than the shallow think for. Should we be so apt as we are now to compassionate the misfortunes, and to forgive the insincerity of Charles I., if his pictures had pourtrayed him in a bob wig and a pigtail? Vandyke was a greater sophist ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... any sophist cavils that righteousness is in the will, and therefore it cannot be ascribed to faith, which is in the intellect, the reply is easy, because in the schools even such persons acknowledge that the will commands the intellect to assent to the Word of God. We say also quite clearly: ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon

... account of the Kalends celebrations is given in two discourses of Libanius, the famous Greek sophist ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... 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, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... 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, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... of the heroes of the passing hour? To answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who, when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: "But who then has found fault with him?" I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these scruples are still sounding in the ears ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche

... 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 speak, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... eager 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 ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... domineering woman. They were born into the misty morning twilight of the medieval renaissance, of an age when intellectual curiosity was awakening, when philosophy, the sciences and Latin literature were studied with a lively but uncritical enthusiasm, when the rhetorician and the sophist were the uncrowned kings of intelligent society. The philosophy was little more than school-logic, derived at second or third hand from Aristotle, the science a grotesque amalgam of empiricism and tradition. The Latin classics, apart from ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... Marcellus, had seen this confession, they would have cleared him of the imputation of Sabellianism, and expounded favorably certain ambiguous expressions which occurred in his book against the Arises, which is now lost, and was compiled against a work of Asterius the Sophist, surnamed the advocate ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... sophist of Abdera said that coitus is a slight fit of epilepsy, judging it to be an incurable disease." (Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, bk. ii, chapter x.) And Coelius Aurelianus, one of the chief physicians ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... described this atmosphere first because it is the only atmosphere in which such a thing as the Eugenist legislation could be proposed among men. All other ages would have called it to some kind of logical account, however academic or narrow. The lowest sophist in the Greek schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the Eugenist to tell him (at least) whether Midias was segregated because he was curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomist of the mediaeval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot discuss ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... such simples a balm for wounded pride, I did not really deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher. And all the while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until my sexton's mood, confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almost entirely to the company of mental bats ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... mountebank, conjurer, cheat, sophist, and sorcerer, heaped upon the teachers of Christianity; sometimes to account for the report or apparent truth of their miracles, sometimes to explain their success. Our Lord was said to have learned his miraculous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... 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, in such sayings ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... diverse out of our human sight Pass, followed one with love and each with wonder: The stormy sophist with his mouth of thunder, Clothed with loud words and mantled in the might Of darkness and magnificence of night; And one whose eye could smite the night in sunder, Searching if light or no light were thereunder, And found in love ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... of the comedy from which we have quoted lies in the assumption, adopted throughout the play, that the atheist is also necessarily anti-social and immoral. The physicist, in the person of Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the one hand he is represented as teaching the theory of material causation, on the other the art of lying and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending the school is to learn how not to pay his debts; ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... have displayed; a demand for crude theory and unsound philosophy, rather than none at all. It is a sort of repetition of the "Quid novi?" of the Areopagus, and it must have an answer. Men must be found who can treat, where it is necessary, like the Athenian sophist, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... Jonson here translates a prose love-letter of Philostratus, the Greek sophist, may detract from the originality but not the beauty of ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... the propositions, or with an artificially constructed illusion, in imitation of the natural error. There is, therefore, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason—not that in which the bungler, from want of the requisite knowledge, involves himself, nor that which the sophist devises for the purpose of misleading, but that which is an inseparable adjunct of human reason, and which, even after its illusions have been exposed, does not cease to deceive, and continually to lead reason into momentary errors, which ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... Dame Joan Danvers, etc.—consigned to the shades of academic oblivion. During the period when the funds were employed in conformity with the testator's design, the authorities, in their wisdom, ignored limitations of age, birth, and neighbourhood, and thus any member of the University, sophist or questionist, bachelor or master, was entitled to a share of the benefit. This wide charity cannot have met with unanimous approval. Large as the fund was, it would hardly have sufficed for the needs of every ill-clothed and ill-fed scholar; and, in the distribution of the ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... had either taste or fragrance, owing its reputation entirely to the peculiar vessels and water used by the Chinese, so that it was folly to partake of it, unless tea-drinkers could supply themselves with pure water from the Vassie and the fragrant tea-pots of Gnihing. This sagacious sophist and dogmatizer also discovered that, among other evils, tea-drinking deprived its devotees of the power of expectoration, and entailed sterility; wherefore he hoped Europeans would thereafter keep to their natural beverages— wine and ale—and reject ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray

... of Genius shall decay, And Reason's brightest lustre fade away; The Sophist's art, the Poet's boldest flight, Shall sink in darkness, and conclude in night; But Faith triumphant over Time shall stand, Shall grasp the Sacred Volume in her hand; Back to its source the heavenly gift convey, Then in the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... The self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction—he, who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence. 1538 BYRON: Ch. Harold, Canto iii., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... 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 was of the vaguest, and yet more than ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... one would use in court. Though Jefferson had great influence with the President, he was generally outvoted. Knox, of course, was against him. Randolph, the Attorney-General, upon whose support he had a right to depend, was an ingenious, but unsteady, sophist. He had so just an understanding, that his appreciation of his opponent's argument was usually stronger than his confidence in his own. He commonly agreed with Jefferson, and voted with Hamilton. The Secretary of State was not allowed to control his own department. Hamilton continually interfered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... its cupola the form of a lily, and I covered it with chiselled gold, so that it shone like the day," London inscription, translated by M. Fr. LENORMANT, in his Histoire ancienne, vol. ii. pp. 228-229. See also a text of Philostratus in his life of Apollonius of Tyana, (i. 25). The sophist who seems to have founded his description of Babylon on good information, speaks of a "great brick edifice plated with bronze, which had a dome representing the firmament and ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... guest To force himself upon you, 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

... the quibble of the sophist, who singles out instances of law violated in civilized communities, and holds them up as the criterion by which to judge civilization, and triumphantly exclaims, Lo! the fruits of civilization—of that civilization which arrogates ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit

... which was rooted far less in specific reasoning than in a general anti-sacerdotal instinct that lies deep in the hearts of Englishmen. John Sterling called the famous article the assault of an equipped and practised sophist against a crude young platonist, who happens by accident to have been taught the hard and broken dialect of Aristotle rather than the deep, continuous, and musical flow of his true and ultimate master. Author and critic exchanged magnanimous letters worthy of two great and honourable men.[106] Not ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... good and pure Latinity has its peculiar taste, its manners, and, to express myself thus, its Atticisms; if in this sense a letter shall be found not sufficiently Attic, so much the better; for what was Herod the sophist censured? but that having been born an Athenian, he affected too much to appear one in his language. Should a letter seem too Attical; still better, since it was by discovering Theophrastus, who was no Athenian, that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... Evangelicals, especially of Melanchthon and Brueck, had made it impossible to rouse the Emperor to such a degree as the exigency of the case demanded. (Plitt, 63.) Luther wrote: "For that shameless gab and bloodthirsty sophist, Doctor Eck, one of their chief advisers, publicly declared in the presence of our people that if the Emperor had followed the resolution made at Bononia, and, immediately on entering Germany, had courageously attacked the Lutherans with the sword, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... sophist, I fear," I said, smiling. "See, here is Miss Martina B. Cadwallader advancing upon us. Stern virtue is on every ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn

... illustrious philosophers. Anaxagoras said, that snow was black: would you endure me if I were to say the same? You would not bear even for me to express a doubt on the subject. But who is this man? is he a Sophist? for by that name were those men called, who used to philosophize for the sake of display or of profit. The glory of the gravity and genius of that man was great. Why should I speak of Democritus? Who is there whom we can compare with him for the greatness, not merely of his genius, but ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... lore of Greece—the book still bright With Plato's precious thought— The Theban's harp—the judging-right Stagyra's sophist taught— Bard, Critic, Moralist to-day Can but their spirit speak, The self-same thoughts transfused. Away, We are not Gael but Greek. Then drink, and dream the red grape weeps Those dead but deathless lords, Whose influence in our bosom sleeps, Like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... do not think any philosophy can work such a miracle. I know that you, dear sophist, will soon console yourself with other girls. Don't think me jealous; I should abhor myself if I thought I was capable of so vile a passion, but I should despise myself if I was capable of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... mere spite. But the portrait gradually becomes more definite in details limned from life. 'The Jesuits have so many loopholes for escape, pretexts, colors of insinuation, that they are more changeful than the Sophist of Plato; and when one thinks to have caught them between thumb and finger, they wriggle out and vanish' (ib. vol. i. p. 230). 'The Jesuit fathers have methods of acquiring in this world, and making ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... confession, hear this: 'But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died. Let not, then, your good be evil spoken of.' Isn't that precisely what you were doing of the good in those church-members, Eurie? Now a sophist would possibly say that the argument of Paul had reference to food offered to idols, and not to dancing; but I think here is a chance for us to exercise that judgment and common sense which we are so fond ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden

... Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong. The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng. Be neither saint nor sophist-led, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... threatened with loss of Irish Vote. You will be in a dilemma, as you cannot then side with him against me, the real friend of Ireland; whilst I shall be confirmed in my position as the only possible Leader of the Party. If, on the contrary, this unrivalled sophist is drawn into anything like a declaration that will satisfy you in the face of the Irish People, he will be hopelessly embarrassed with his English friends; I shall have paid off an old score, and can afford to retire from the Leadership, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various

... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... at the moment of his death. This was the lotos, of a peculiar red colour, which the people of Lower Egypt used to wear in wreaths upon his festival. It received the name Antinoeian; and the Alexandrian sophist, Pancrates, seeking to pay a double compliment to Hadrian and his favourite, wrote a poem in which he pretended that this lily was stained with the blood of a Libyan lion slain by the Emperor. As Arrian compared his master to Achilles, so Pancrates ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... followed it in his History of the Romans, [Footnote: Vol. iii. pp. 441-452.] and you will own as much. But there is no need to look abroad. Words of our own out of number, such as 'barbarous,' 'benefice,' 'clerk,' 'common-sense,' 'romance,' 'sacrament,' 'sophist,' [Footnote: For a history of 'sophist' see Sir Alexander Grant's Ethics of Aristotle, 2nd ed. vol. i. p. 106, sqq.] would prove the truth of the assertion. Let us take 'sacrament'; its history, while it carries us far, will yet carry ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench



Words linked to "Sophist" :   reasoner, philosopher, sophistic



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