"Sophist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Thucydides was 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 ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... Zibeon, Jewish hypocrite and chief adjutant in the camp of Sheker (Falsehood). This Jewish Tartufe is very different in his complexity from the character created by Moliere. Zibeon is a wonderworking Rabbi, a subtle sophist, a crafty dialectician. The waves of the Talmud, the casuistry of more than a millennium of scholasticism, have left their traces in his mind and personality. In his hatred of the adversaries of the ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... 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
... 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 towards the worldly advantages of the marriage ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... 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 ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... When the sophist Sidonius, delivering a long panegyric on himself, said that he was acquainted with all the tenets of the philosophers: "If Aristotle calls me to the Lyceum, I obey; if Plato to the Academy, I come; Zeno to the Stoa, I take ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... according to 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
... indeed, in his rich endowment as poet and philosopher, and in his gentleness and sweetness of 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 depth ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the living. The poem foresees a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no effort at portraiture, and no suggestion of any repellent or pitiable traits.[35] We get not Byron's "self-torturing sophist", but a martyred sage who suffered and died at the hands of Christians,—'he who makes out of Christians human beings'. Toward the end he is apostrophized as the 'Great Endurer, and bidden to leap joyously into ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... "Catiline," he not only uses 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 Jonson commonly bettered his sources, and ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... very full 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
... 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
... point, he effectually canvassed the State. They are addressed to thinking men everywhere. Free from all trickery, strictly impartial, relying entirely upon the soundness of his premises for success,—for elegance of diction he had not, and he was too honest even to become a sophist,—these papers manifest at once the true patriot and the intelligent man. Thousands of adherents the Republican cause had in 1860, but not one more indefatigable or more heartily in earnest than Lyon. Outside the limits of party interests, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... time, and they will meet with their due punishment as soon as I have had my thunderbolt repaired. The two largest darts of it were broken and blunted the other day when I got in a rage and flung it at the sophist Anaxagoras, who was trying to make his disciples believe that we gods do not exist at all. However, I missed him, for Pericles held his hand over him, but the bolt struck the temple of the Dioscuri and set fire to it, and the bolt itself was nearly destroyed when it ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently 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 ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... is 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, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... 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
... Egypt, who took Helen from Paris and kept her till Menelaus arrived and 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 ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... 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
... about war in the abstract," cried the girl, "but I do know that this war is. I am not a sophist, and I can't put into words what is in my mind. I am only an ordinary girl; but, Bob"—she raised her voice as she spoke—"if you can stand by while your country is in danger, if you can turn a deaf ear to her call, if you refuse to help, and go on ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... 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 ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... lepers; for it would be tempting the devil to try and oust the cardinal, the more so as at that time it was not known who would be pope, three aspirants having resigned their hoods for the benefit of Christianity. The cardinal, who was a cunning Italian, long bearded, a great sophist, and the life and soul of the Council, guessed, by the feeblest exercise of the faculties of his understanding, the alpha and omega of the adventure. He only had to weigh in his mind one little thought before he knew how to proceed in order to be able to hypothecate ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... 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
... received with great 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 seemed to be on the way of fulfillment. But Plato acted injudiciously, and ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... is by process of reasoning. Thus in the Choephori: 'Some one resembling me has come: no one resembles me but Orestes: therefore Orestes has come.' Such too is the discovery made by Iphigenia in the play of Polyidus the Sophist. It was a natural reflection for Orestes to make, 'So I too must die at the altar like my sister.' So, again, in the Tydeus of Theodectes, the father says, 'I came to find my son, and I lose my own life.' So too in the Phineidae: the women, on seeing the place, inferred their fate:—'Here ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... course, characteristically a Greek limitation. "Man is the measure of all things," said the old Greek sophist, but modern science has taught us another lesson. Man may be in the foreground, but the drama of man's life is acted out for us against a tremendous background of natural happenings: a background that preceded man and will outlast him; and this background profoundly ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... 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 ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... 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 ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 same in the nations; it leads ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... "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. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... notes the discrepancies between the customs of different men, and notes also the discrepancies between the threatened results of the violation of traditional codes and the actual results. He may then come to the cynic's conclusion that morality is a myth and a delusion, and, in the words of the Sophist in Plato's Republic, "justice is merely the right of the stronger." Men in whom reflection or social sympathy extends not very far may, as they frequently do, stop at this point. These are the worldly ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... himself, "how should I go to tell her that she is not yet a Christian, and bid her swear by Jupiter, because that is her god, in order that she may escape imprisonment and death? Am I to do the part of a heathen priest or infidel sophist? O Caecilius, how am I forgetting your lessons! No; I will go on no such errand. Go, I will, if I may, Jucundus, but I will go on no conditions of yours. I go on no promise to try to get her out of prison anyhow, poor child. I will not go to ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... sad retreats That hold thee, smothered with excess of sweets, Shade of a shadow, spectre of a dream, Glance thy wan eye across the Stygian stream! The slipshod dreamer treads thy fragrant halls, The sophist's cobwebs hang thy roseate walls, And o'er the crotchets of thy jingling tunes The bard of mystery scrawls his crooked "runes." Yes, thou art gone, with all the tuneful hordes That candied thoughts ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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, expelled the church, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... 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 be difficult to exaggerate the importance ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... deserving of censure, he spared the vices of his own party and associates; and, like all satirists, for effect he often traduced character, as in the case of the virtuous Socrates. In an attack on the Sophists, in his play of the Clouds, he gives to Socrates the character of a vulgar Sophist, and holds him up to the derision of the Athenian people. But, as another has said, "Time has set all even; and 'poor Socrates,' as Aristophanes called him—as a far loftier ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... sad truth that bargains are met with more frequently in our youth than in our age. The sophist may argue that age begets philosophy, and that philosophy contemns all worldly things; yet certain it is that the book-hunter, one of the most philosophical of beings, remains on the look-out for bargains to the very end of his ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... 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
... desirous to see the original of this scenic picture, he rose up in the middle of the performance, stood all the rest of the time, and showed himself to the people; by which well-placed confidence in his own merit and innocence, reminding them of those virtues and wisdom so opposite to the sophist in the play, his pretended likeness, he detected the false circumstances, which were obtruded into his character, and obviated the malicious designs of the poet who, having brought his play a second time upon the stage, met with the contempt he justly merited for such ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... 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 on all human creatures as his brethren, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... wilt be a sophist before thy hundred years are ended," said her brother with a soft pinch of her ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... 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; 170 With reconciling words and courteous mien Turning into sweet milk the sophist's spleen. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... 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 will ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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.
... game. Very likely I should merely blow away half my head, and Destiny would give my good 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 ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... in words which no one could mistake. They have provided, not merely the Creed of Athanasius, but also the "Thirty-nine Articles"—which are thirty-nine separate and binding guarantees that one who holds orders in the Episcopal Church shall be either a man of inferior mentality, or else a sophist and hypocrite. How desperate some of them have become in the face of this cruel dilemma is illustrated by the tale which is told of Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford: that when he was required to recite the "Apostle's Creed" in public, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... society, that there should be some agreement, and that, for a time at least, certain opinions should prevail; and if philosophy had failed to secure this agreement, rhetoric, at least, was effectual; and, with the Sophist, rhetoric was "the art of making the worst appear the better reason." All wisdom was now confined to a species of "word jugglery," which in Athens was dignified as "the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... continued the Duchess, "the venerable goat attempted to subdue me by the force of argument; and, to do him justice, I must say that his philosophy, if not very rational, was at least very profound. He went over the entire field of moral subtleties, and proved himself an excellent sophist. He argued that as nature had given me passions, I was justified in gratifying them, despite the opinions of the world and the prohibitions of decent society. Much more he said that I have forgotten; but the drift of his remarks was, that as I had admitted him to be the most charming ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... story 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
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... no man of high character will profess them; and from, that moment until they are formally disestablished, they stand at the door of every profession and every public office to keep out every able man who is not a sophist or a liar. A nation which revises its parish councils once in three years, but will not revise its articles of religion once in three hundred, even when those articles avowedly began as a political compromise dictated by Mr Facing-Both-Ways, is a ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... earnest persons, I would only say, that a question of this kind is not to be shelved upon theoretical or speculative grounds. You may remember the story of the Sophist who demonstrated to Diogenes in the most complete and satisfactory manner that he could not walk; that, in fact, all motion was an impossibility; and that Diogenes refuted him by simply getting up and walking round his tub. So, in the same way, the man of science replies to objections ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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
... sophist cunning fraught, Essay'd that field which force had fail'd to gain, And proudly question'd, by success untaught, Britannia's lineal right—her ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... have suggested an idea to Bunyan in writing the second part of his Pilgrim. In the battle between Great Heart and Giant Maul the sophist, after an hour's hard fighting, "they sat down to rest them, but Mr. Great Heart betook him to prayer. When they had rested them, and taken breath, they both fell ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 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 allo phrontizon ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... comes 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 ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... while to be single-minded in your relation to me. From a personal point of view there is more that I might say, but perhaps that is damning enough, and I have no desire to be abusive. It is on my conscience to add, moreover, that I find you a sophist, and your sophistry a little vulgar. I find you compromising with your ambitions, which in themselves are not above reproach from any point of view. I find you adulterating what ought to be the pure ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Athens to teach in the university as self-appointed professor, or sophist, according to the fashion of that time, it was not to instruct Athenian youth in music or geometry or astronomy, but to teach them the art of being good citizens,—[Greek: Ten politiken technen, kai poiein andras agathous politas.] That ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... are never wanting in support of erroneous views; and more false conclusions are drawn from them than from the subtlest arguments of the sophist. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... 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 is little against the theory that most ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... 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 ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "thought is only the relation of the thinking subject to the object thought of, and that the thinking subject, the soul, is nothing more than the sum of the different moments of thinking." It is no wonder that that Sophist who was the author of such doctrines should be condemned to death to satisfy the clamours of a populace who had not advanced sufficiently into the depths of this secondary, this higher philosophy, and that it was ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... 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
... the astronomer Ptolemaeus, and Favorinus, the sophist, who await him here—to meet him at Pelusium. They will find some way of detaining ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 the character of ...
— Eryxias • An Imitator of Plato
... 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
... the 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, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... was such a thing—a French sophist I am afraid you mean. No, I am not a sophist, Evelyn; any thing else than that! I wish sometimes I did not see so clearly. I love, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... other. The god Terminus presided over her intellect. She knew her thoughts as we know each other's faces; and opinions, with most of us so vague, shadowy, and shifting, were in her mind substantial and distinct realities. Some persons see distinctions, others resemblances; but she saw both. No sophist could pass on her a counterfeit piece of intellectual money; but also she recognized the one pure metallic basis in coins of different epochs, and when mixed with a very ruinous alloy. This gave a comprehensive quality to her mind most imposing and convincing, as it enabled her to show the one ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... was, by my new friend the special pleader. He was also so kind as to put me at ease by the 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 pleader was not a mere man of forms ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... the nature of a substance. And it behooveth us from this belief To reason without having other views, And hence it has the nature of evidence." Then heard I: "If whatever is acquired Below as doctrine were thus understood, No sophist's subtlety would there find place." Thus was breathed forth from that enkindled love; Then added: "Thoroughly has been gone over Already of this coin the alloy and weight; But tell me if thou hast it in thy purse?" And I: "Yes, both so shining and so round, That in its stamp ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... an 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 halt ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... 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 ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... 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
... to make the faculties acute, but at the same time narrow. The study of jurisprudence may, no doubt, enlarge the intellect; but the habit of mind induced by an indiscriminate advocacy—which may be summoned to the defence of a Sidney to-day and of a spoon-thief to-morrow—is rather that of the sophist than of the philosophic reasoner. Not truth, but the questionable victory of the moment, becomes naturally and inevitably the aim and end of all the pleader's faculties. For him the question is not what principle, but what interest of John Doe, may be at stake. Such has been Mr. Choate's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the outbursts of the "realists" and the claptrap of the heroes of the passing hour? To answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who, when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: "But who then has found fault with him?" I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these scruples are still sounding ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... him were united a most logical head 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, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... by a powerful imagination and excellent reasoning faculties. For, swayed as these were by her sentiments and desires, they proved themselves most fertile in generating flattering illusions and artful sophisms. George Sand was indeed a great sophist. She had always in readiness an inexhaustible store of interpretations and subterfuges with which to palliate, excuse, or even metamorphose into their contraries the most odious of her words and actions. It is not likely that any one ever equalled, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... 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 ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... every stanza so penned 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... point of view. But the advantage would be hers also. Did he not desire her happiness? He tried to think so, but after all was ashamed to play the sophist with himself. The letter he carried in his pocket told the truth. He had but to think of her as married to Robert Narramore and the jealous fury of natural ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Whence all his spleen to GENIUS.—Ill to bear A Friend's renown, that to his own must reign, Compar'd, a Meteor's evanescent train, To Jupiter's fix'd orb, proves that each sneer, Subtle and fatal to poetic Sense, Did from insidious ENVY meanly flow, Illumed with dazzling hues of eloquence, And Sophist-Wit, that labor to o'er-throw Th' awards of AGES, and new laws dispense That lift the mean, and lay the ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... 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 bush with God ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... seriously disputed whether Scipio Africanus or Hannibal was the greater, Piccinino through the whole book must needs be called Scipio and Sforza Hannibal. But something positive had to be reported too respecting the Milanese army; the sophist presented himself to Sforza, was led along the ranks, praised highly all that he saw, and promised to hand it down to posterity. Apart from him the Italian literature of the day is rich in descriptions of wars and strategic devices, written for ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... of itinerant, mountebank, conjurer, cheat, sophist, and sorcerer, heaped upon the teachers of Christianity; sometimes to account for the report or apparent truth of their miracles, sometimes to explain their success. Our Lord was said to have learned ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... 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, grey flits ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Plato are here difficult to discover. In the Protagoras, however, he puts into the mouth of that famous sophist an exposition of the conventional ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... The real sting of the comedy from which we have quoted lies in the assumption, adopted throughout the play, that the atheist is also necessarily anti-social and immoral. The physicist, in the person of Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the one hand he is represented as teaching the theory of material causation, on the other the art of lying and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending the school is to learn how not to pay his debts; the achievement of his son is to learn how to dishonour his ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... side; Cebes and Simonides came from Thebes to hear him; Isocrates and Aristippus followed in his train; Euclid of Megara sought his society, at the risk of his life; the tyrant Critias, and even the Sophist Protagoras, acknowledged his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the Christian teachers had adopted the habits and manners of the philosophic school. They assumed the dress of the pompous sophist, and delivered the plain doctrines of the gospel ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... of Wellington has a genius for military affairs, so had Sir William Follett for advocacy—and genius of a very high order, as will be testified by all those before whom, or on whose behalf, he exhibited it—alike by clients or judges—as by opponents. If he were a very subtle sophist himself, he was himself one on whom no sophistry could impose. It fled before the penetrating glance of his aquiline eye. Faculties such as his must have secured him eminence in any pursuit or walk in life to which he might have devoted himself; particularly to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... fireside with this peasant without feeling either bored or tired; and he would wonder how it was that the village schoolmaster, and even the prior of the convent, in spite of their Greek and Latin, appeared to him, the one a bore, the other a sophist, in all their discussions. Knowing the perfect purity of the peasant's life, he attributed the ascendency of his mind to the power of virtue and the charm it spreads over all things. Then, each evening, he would humbly accuse himself before God of not having disputed with ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... to Athens. There we find Horace at about nineteen years of age, learning Greek, and attending the schools of the philosophers; those same Stoics and Epicureans whom a few years later the first great Christian Sophist was to harangue on Mars' Hill. These taught from their several points of view the basis of happiness and the aim of life. Each in turn impressed him: for a time he agreed with Stoic Zeno that active duty is the highest good; then lapsed into the easy doctrine of Epicurean Aristippus ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... 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 ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... could not be rejected. He was no coward or sophist to argue himself out of danger. He laid no flattering unction to his soul that he had done his best while another way remained untried. For this type of man may be half-hearted and a coward in little matters, but he never deceives himself. We have all our own virtues and their ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... imprecations Not men of brains, but the men of aptitudes Not the indignant and the frozen, but the genially indifferent One is a fish to her hook; another a moth to her light One night, and her character's gone Passion added to a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess Policy seems to petrify their minds Rage of a conceited schemer tricked Respect one another's affectations To time and a wife it is no disgrace for a man to bend Uncommon unprogressiveness When duelling ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... was passing through the market place I heard a sophist from Cilicia say that there is only one God. He said it ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... sophist of the island of Ceos, a disciple of Protagoras, as celebrated for his knowledge as for his eloquence. The Athenians condemned him to death as a corrupter of youth in ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... long that the great men will be not only those who have made no false step,[223] but even he who did make a mistake, Cato. For, as to myself, if your comrade Publius will let me, I think of playing the sophist: if he forces me, I shall at least defend myself, and, as is the trick of my trade, I publicly ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... 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 one bring different places together, as, for instance, enclose Megara and Corinth in a wall, ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... sophist cunning fraught, Essay'd that field which force had fail'd to gain, And proudly question'd, by success untaught, Britannia's ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... sublime Is built; and therefore substance it intends. And inasmuch as we must needs infer From such belief our reasoning, all respect To other view excluded, hence of proof Th' intention is deriv'd." Forthwith I heard: "If thus, whate'er by learning men attain, Were understood, the sophist would want room To exercise his wit." So breath'd the flame Of love: then added: "Current is the coin Thou utter'st, both in weight and in alloy. But tell me, if thou hast it in thy purse." "Even so glittering and so round," said I, "I not a whit misdoubt of its assay." Next issued from the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... also been considered, not as a real criticism, but as an exuberance of the metaphysical imagination which enabled Plato to go beyond himself. To the latter part of the dialogue we may certainly apply the words in which he himself describes the earlier philosophers in the Sophist: 'They went on their way rather regardless of whether we understood ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... 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 ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... receiving the presents which his friends and scholars often urged him to accept, he always returned them; to the great displeasure of his wife, who had no relish for carrying philosophy to such a height. In regard to food and clothes, so hardy was his manner of life that Antiphon, the Sophist, sometimes reproached him, by saying that he had not a slave so miserable as would be contented with it: "For," said he, "your food is disgustingly mean; besides, not only are you always very poorly dressed, but winter or summer you have the same robe; and never anything above it: ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... King Leonidas said, "Stranger, you speak of what is wanted when it is not wanted." Charilaus the cousin of Lykurgus, when asked why they had so few laws answered, that men of few words required few laws. And Archidamidas, when some blamed Hekataeus the Sophist for having said nothing during dinner, answered, "He who knows how to speak knows when to speak also." The following are some of those sarcastic sayings which I before said are not ungrateful. Demaratus, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... 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
... help 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 last injunction ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... 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, it is his happiness to ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Philosophers, who look at things first hand for 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
... fallacies from the same point of view as Aristotle. Their object is to discover the most fertile sources of error in solitary reasoning; his was to enumerate the various tricks of refutation which could be employed by a sophist in controversy. Aristotle's classification is an appendix ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... a fragment which breaks off in the middle of a sentence. It was designed to be the second part of a trilogy, which, like the other great Platonic trilogy of the Sophist, Statesman, Philosopher, was never completed. Timaeus had brought down the origin of the world to the creation of man, and the dawn of history was now to succeed the philosophy of nature. The Critias is also connected with the Republic. Plato, ...
— Critias • Plato
... the fall of a collar, or the curl 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 than Hume. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wine we owe the productions of Eschylus and Anacreon, whose muses were very chilly, till Bacchus warmed them. Aurelius, the sophist, composed his best declamations in his cups. Herodes, called Saginatus Orator, the fattened Orator, never talked better, than after drinking pretty plentifully. And according to Horace, this was the case ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... admit," answered Casanova promptly, "that even the Sophists were far from being such contemptible, foolish apprentices as your harsh criticism would imply. Let me give you a contemporary example. M. Voltaire's whole technique of thought and writing entitles us to describe him as an Arch-Sophist. Yet no one will refuse the due meed of honor to his extraordinary talent. I would not myself refuse it, though I am at this moment engaged in composing a polemic against him. Let me add that I am not allowing myself to be influenced in his favor by recollection ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... scornefull speache or flouting sport do flowe in ripe wittes and lauishe tongues of womankinde let them beware they do not deale with the learned sort, least Maister Alberto with phisicke drougues, or Philenio with Sophist art do staine their face, or otherwise offende them with the innocencie of their great Graundmother Eue when she was somoned from Paradise ioye. If the poore mayden of base birth be aduaunced (by fortune's grace) to highe estate: let her fixe in mynde the lady of Thurin. Finallye, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... Have not all nations suffered periods of corruption? This notion, that the whole people cannot err, opens the door for any license. It logically leads to that other idea, of the native majesty of man and the perfectibility of society, which this sophist boldly accepted. Rousseau thought that if society were released from all law and all restraint, the good impulses and good sense of the majority would produce a higher state of virtue and wisdom than what he saw around him, since majorities could do no wrong and the universal ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... [509] A celebrated sophist, born at Ceos, and a disciple of Protagoras. When sent on an embassy by his compatriots to Athens, he there publicly preached on eloquence, and had for his disciples Euripides, Isocrates and even Socrates. His "fifty drachmae lecture" has been much ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... penetrating, when he is a theologian; in other words, when he is announcing positive and everlasting dogmas, free from all quibble, and which are so clearly marked with the eastern cast, that not to perceive it one must never have had a glimpse of Asia.... There was in him a sophist and a theologian, or, if you choose, a Greek and a Chaldean.' The Athenians could never pardon one of their great leaders, all of whom fell victims in one shape or another to a temper frivolous as that of a child, ferocious as that of men,—'espece de moutons enrages, toujours ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... 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 justifies, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... derive this advantage, that your doings should die with you and no memory of them be transmitted to posterity. Now, gentlemen, if you want to laugh, listen to his clever device. He set himself the task of writing a history of the entire existence of the city (for he pretends to be a sophist and poet and philosopher and orator and historian), and he began not from the founding of it, like the rest are similarly busied, but from his own consulship, so that he might proceed backwards, making that the beginning of his account, and the ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... "The sophist of Abdera said that coitus is a slight fit of epilepsy, judging it to be an incurable disease." (Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, bk. ii, chapter x.) And Coelius Aurelianus, one of the chief physicians ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... giving to it those elements of darkness, disgrace, and treason which, unfortunately, are always to be found in the greatest struggles for freedom and right, and which, when history is written, give such grounds to the carper, the sophist, and skeptic to ridicule the noblest efforts of humanity. Such are the self-called Conservatives in this great battle—men hindering and impeding the great cause, eagerly grasping at every little premature advance—as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... 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, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... while 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
... there was nothing very extraordinary in that. But supposing there were an atheist who gave himself up for torture, vanity might be in his case a strong enough motive, as in that of the Gymnosophist, Calanus, and of the Sophist who, according to Lucian's account, was burnt to death of his own will. But the author thinks that that very vanity, that stubbornness, those other wild intentions of persons who otherwise seem to have quite good sense, cannot be explained by the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... and we find Smith also repeating Franck's vivid accounts of the weakness of Scripture when it is treated only as external history, or as words, texts, and phrases. "Scripture," he says, in the exact words and figures of the German Humanist, "is a Sealed Book which the greatest Sophist may be most acquainted with. It is like the Pillar of fire and cloud that parted between the Israelites and Egyptians, giving a clear and comfortable light to all those that are under the manuduction and guidance thereof [i.e. those who have the inner experience] but being full of darkness ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 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 of view ...
— The Republic • Plato
... contempt or for a local court to judge. "Do you see," said Aldington, "his mind runs in a channel of pure legalism, and then it escapes between freer shores." Aldington continued: "The trouble with Douglas is that he does not see that idealism is as real as realism. Douglas is something of a sophist. I do not mean to disparage his value to the country. But he is a genius in making the course of Jackson consistent. He has applied the same art to justify his own conduct. He will always prove an elusive debater; and you see, after all, this makes against ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... known men of extreme learning who yet are, some of them, uncouth in conduct, others violent and overbearing in converse, others unfair in controversy, others even unscrupulous in action—men of whom the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato's "Republic" may stand for the general type. Nay, some of us will subscribe with the old schoolmaster whom I will quote ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Phaedrus, the Republic, the Philebus, the Parmenides, and the Sophist, we may observe the tendency of Plato to combine two or more subjects or different aspects of the same subject in a single dialogue. In the Sophist and Statesman especially we note that the discussion is partly regarded as an illustration ...
— Statesman • Plato
... 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 views of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood |
