"Demosthenes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the ease, the freshness, the intelligence, the universal beauty of Mrs. Woffington. Pomander sneered, to draw him out. Cibber smiled, with good-natured superiority. This nettled the young gentleman, he fired up, his handsome countenance glowed, he turned Demosthenes for her he loved. One advantage he had over both Cibber and Pomander, a fair stock of classical learning; on ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... offer he would long ere this have had permanent possession of the rank to which he too prematurely aspired. His refusal was followed by a retreat into the country, where, with the perseverance of Demosthenes, he laboured in fitting himself for a more successful effort; resolved to force his way if possible to the high ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... great writer:—"Whenever you have a mind to elevate your mind, to raise it to its highest pitch, and even to exceed yourself, upon any subject, think how Homer would have described it, how Plato would have imagined it, and how Demosthenes would have expressed it; and when you have so done, you will then, no doubt, have a standard which will raise you up to the dignity of anything that human genius can aspire to." Mr. Hastings was calling upon himself, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... When Demosthenes was practising oratory, he sought the sea-shore; but Fitzgerald repaired instead to a piece of woods about half a mile distant. It was rather an unfortunate selection, ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... on some occasions, a particular knack at making converts, being probably not unacquainted with that grand system of persuasion which is adopted by the greatest personages of the age, and fraught with maxims much more effectual than all the eloquence of Tully or Demosthenes, even when supported by the demonstrations of truth; besides, Mr. Hatchway's fidelity to his new ally was confirmed by his foreseeing, in his captain's marriage, an infinite fund of gratification for his own cynical disposition. Thus, therefore, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... plate, in the hope of something appearing upon it. And commas used for a similar purpose belong to the same family as notes at the foot of the page and parenthesis in the middle of the text; nay, all three differ only in degree. If Demosthenes and Cicero occasionally inserted words by ways of parenthesis, they would have done better ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... happen that Athens, after having recovered an equality with Sparta, should be forced to submit to the dominion of Macedon when she had two such great men as Phocion and Demosthenes at the head ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Fyfe surrounded by his satellite colonels and other aides, and muttered to his lieutenant, "If Old Brassbottom came down here to observe the exercise, then why the devil doesn't he go over to the hill and observe instead of hanging around here like a sword of Demosthenes?" ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... afterwards that it was you I was laughing at.' As that failed of specific effect, 'You really are a little ridiculous,' he said again, with the edge in his voice, 'hanging on the lips of that Backfisch as if she were Demosthenes.' ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... secret of so wide and so durable a popularity lay. They were compelled to own that the ignorant multitude had judged more correctly than the learned, and that the despised little book was really a masterpiece. Bunyan is indeed as decidedly the first of allegorists, as Demosthenes is the first of orators, or Shakspeare the first of dramatists. Other allegorists have shown equal ingenuity but no other allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make abstractions objects of terror, of pity, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... meetings with influential individuals in Germany. The Protestant princes, particularly the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Saxony, promised him assistance. He brought all his powers of eloquence and of diplomacy to make friends for the cause which he had now boldly espoused. The high-born Demosthenes electrified large assemblies by his indignant invectives against the Spanish Philip. He excelled even his royal antagonist in the industrious subtlety with which he began to form a thousand combinations. Swift, secret, incapable of fatigue, this powerful and patient intellect ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... development and refined requirements of the ear and larynx; partly on the strength, endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. In the ancient sense, a period is above all a physiological whole, inasmuch as it is comprised in one breath. Such periods as occur in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice, and all in one breath, were pleasures to the men of ANTIQUITY, who knew by their own schooling how to appreciate the virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the deliverance of such a period;—WE have really no right to the BIG ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... . An Athenian statesman of the 4th century B.C., who opposed Demosthenes in his efforts to resist Philip of Macedon. His reactionary policy was atoned for by ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... monopolizes the gem. This change is radical and astonishing, but discloses a change which has revolutionized the world. The old hero was conscienceless—a characteristic apparent in Greek civilization. What Greek patriot, whether Themistocles or Demosthenes, applied conscience to patriotism? They were as devoid of practical conscience as a Metope of the Parthenon was devoid of life. Patriotism was a transient sentiment. Demosthenes could become dumb in the presence of Philip's gold; and in a fit of pique over mistreatment ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... will be duped by them. Utterly disregarding the criticisms of the so-called masters of art, we of this century admire and wonder at the chefs- d'oeuvre of Greece and Rome. The mad cry of Aeschines docs not obscure the fame of Demosthenes; and in spite of Lucian, Caesar is, and will ever remain, the greatest man the world has ever produced. I guarantee that after your death you will be canonized, worshipped. I humbly entreat you not to hasten the time, but be content to have the apotheosis ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... was at this moment that President Boomer, who understood faculties as few men have done, quietly entered the room, laid his silk hat on a volume of Demosthenes, and proposed the vote of a degree of Doctor of Letters for Edward Tomlinson. He said that there was no need to remind the faculty of Tomlinson's services to the nation; they knew them. Of the members of ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... kill a man; and if a man commits suicide, bury the hand that struck the blow afar from its body." This is mentioned quite as an every-day matter, evidently without thinking it at all extraordinary, only to point an antithesis to the honors heaped upon Demosthenes. /3/ As late as the second century after Christ the traveller Pausanias observed with some surprise that they still sat in judgment on inanimate things in the Prytaneum. /4/ Plutarch attributes the institution to ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... as improbable, if not ridiculous, by the learned writer just quoted? If the early Fathers of the church timed their sermons by any instrument of the kind, we should expect their writings to contain internal evidence of the fact, just as frequent allusion is made by Demosthenes and other ancient orators to the klepshydra or water-clock, by which the time allotted to each speaker was measured. Besides, the close proximity of such an instrument would be a constant source of metaphorical allusion on the subject of time and eternity. Perhaps ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... increased, and the parties in the case might have hired advocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortions of fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the Private Orations of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that the witnesses should burst into passionate weeping than that they should tell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by a show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... lessened when they became an artifice of politics. Themistocles, with a design of engaging the Athenians to quit Athens, in order to be in a better condition to resist Xerxes, made the Pythoness deliver an oracle, commanding them to take refuge in wooden walls. Demosthenes said, that the Pythoness philippised, to signify that she was gained over ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the side of his masters" and grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes," he still contrasts childhood as a time when one "wants to know nearly everything" with "the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know about something I did ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... him to the Sistine Chapel. He has no feeling for art, and, being very true and earnest, could only do his best to try to admire Michael Angelo; but here and there, where he understood, the pleasure was expressed with a blunt characteristic simplicity. Standing before the statue of Demosthenes, he said: 'That man is persuaded himself of what he speaks, and will therefore persuade others.' She liked him exceedingly. For my part, I should join in more admiration if it were not for his having accepted money, but paid patriots ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... without failing in rational conduct, govern themselves by different principles, and tend towards a different result. It is as reasonable for a woman to concern herself respecting her personal attractions as it was for Demosthenes to cultivate ...
— The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women • Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
... but his advice is completely ignored. New laws are made for every change in the weather, for every little daily incident in politics. We are getting used to this hand-to-mouth legislation. Like the barbarian warrior, of whom Demosthenes tells us, who always protected that portion of his person which had just received a blow, holding his shield up to his shoulder, when his shoulder had been struck, down again to his thigh when the blow fell there, the dominant ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... by coarseness of language." By language he meant not only words and phrases, but coarseness of voice. There can be nothing more characteristic of good breeding than a soft, well modulated, pleasing voice. This quotation from Demosthenes is only another way of saying it: "As a vessel is known by the sound whether it is cracked or not, so men are proved by their speeches whether they ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... and her colossal statue. On the plain below were the temples of Theseus and Jupiter Olympus, and innumerable others. He stood where Socrates had stood four hundred years before, defending himself against the charge of atheism; where Demosthenes had pleaded in immortal strains of eloquence in behalf of Hellenic freedom; where the most solemn and venerable court of justice known among men was wont to assemble. There he made the memorable ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Landor that kind of archaeological accuracy which is sought by some composers of historical romances. Were it not that critics have asserted the opposite, it would be hardly worth while to say that Landor's style seldom condescends to adapt itself to the mouth of the speaker, and that from Demosthenes to Porson every interlocutor has palpably the true Landorian trick of speech. Here and there, it is true, the effect is rather unpleasant. Pericles and Aspasia are apt to indulge in criticism of English customs, and no weak regard for time and place ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... to suggest to me a seat in the House of Commons. A member of Parliament might rise to anything, and Lord Rainsforth had sufficient influence to effect my return. Dazzling prospect this to a young scholar fresh from Thucydides, and with Demosthenes fresh at his tongue's end! My dear boy, I was not then, you see, quite what I am now: in a word, I loved Ellinor Compton, and therefore I was ambitious. You know how ambitious she is still. But I could not mould my ambition to hers. I could not contemplate entering the senate of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... difficulty which has hitherto been found in inducing strangers to withdraw during a division of the House. This responsible office could not have been conferred upon any one so capable of discharging its onerous duties as the Colonel. We will stake our hump, that half-a-dozen words of the gallant Demosthenes would, at any time have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... his dexterity in presenting his case. James Mill used to point out to his son among other skilful arts of Demosthenes, these two: first, that he said everything important to his purpose at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his hearers into the state most fitted to receive it; second, that he insinuated gradually and indirectly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to this belief. It came very slowly as did also the opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social standing whatever among the people whose alms support the institutions, religious and philanthropic, of which these men are the executive heads. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... shore and kiss your landladies." Though this oration was pronounced with as much self-applause as Cicero felt when, by the force of his eloquence, he made Caesar the master of the world to tremble; or as the vehement Demosthenes, when used to thunder against king Philip; yet we are not quite certain whether it was the power of eloquence alone persuaded the men to enter voluntarily, or whether being seated between the two rocks ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... purification which one does not know whether to describe as ablutions or anointings. Thus Demosthenes in his speech "On the crown', accused Aeschines of having "purified the initiated and wiped them clean with (not from) mud and pitch.'' Smearing with gypsum (titanos. titanos) had a similar purifying effect, and it has been suggested i that the Titans were no more than old-world ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... subject, now provoked considerable merriment by his ungraceful and involuntary gestures, clutching desperately at a chair, then taking a fresh hold of the table to steady himself. It well illustrated Demosthenes' famous rule for oratory, "Action! action! action!" But a more serious impression quickly prevailed among the audience, that it was high time to retire, and, like Longfellow's Arabs, they began to "silently steal away." The chairman of the meeting, Mayor Wood, ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... it hinted, though I have forgotten where, that Jefferson, and not Logan, was the author of this speech; but the extravagant manner in which Jefferson himself praises it, seems to exclude the suspicion. "I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero," he says, "and of any other more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan!" Praise certainly quite high enough, for a mixture of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... explanations in Mingault's notes. In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through; one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little; all Thucydides; the Hellenics of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the Anthology; a little of Dionysius; several books of Polybius; and lastly Aristotle's Rhetoric, which, as the first expressly scientific treatise ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... to the world we know, I should regret a good many things; first, I suppose, that I did not realize sooner that we must be going back, instead of letting myself be utterly overwhelmed. Then I think I should be sorry that I didn't practise, a la Demosthenes, when I had a whole coast to myself, and most of all I should regret that we have not kept a record of our lives from day to day. There is other writing I should want to do,—but there is no paper, and I don't know how ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... gleamed venom as he instructed business men, bankers, smart young officers, lorgnetted dowagers and sweet-faced girls, in the duty of hating with the whole heart and the whole mind. I soon felt that if Lissauer is the Horace of Hate, Sombart is its Demosthenes. ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... mysterious passage under the desks of some unknown object which apparently was making the circuit of the school. With the annoyed consciousness that he was perhaps unwittingly participating in some game, he finally "nailed it" in the possession of Demosthenes Walker, aged six, to the spontaneous outcry of "Cotched!" from the whole school. When produced from Master Walker's desk in company with a horned toad and a piece of gingerbread, it was found to be Concha's white ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... those two short years of college life, he read: Cudworth's "Intellectual System," Hobbes's "Dialogues," Bacon's "Essays," Plutarch's "Morals," Cicero's "De Officiis," Montaigne's "Essays," Rousseau's "Emile," Demosthenes's "Orations," Aristotle's "Politics," Ralt's "Dictionary of Trade," and ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... almost mythical, a benighted Popish savage, of whom there was very little to know, and that little hardly worth knowing. Our feeling towards Gray in this matter is much the same as our feeling towards Mitford in the matter of Greek history. We are angry with Mitford for misrepresenting Demosthenes and a crowd of other Athenian worthies, but we do not forget that he was the first to deal with Demosthenes and his fellows, neither as mere names nor as demi-gods, but as real living men like ourselves. It was a pity to misrepresent ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... B. (pompously.) When Demosthenes was asked what were the three principal attributes of eloquence, he answered, that the first was action; on being asked which was the second, he replied, action; and the third, action; and such is the idea of the Irish mimbers in the House of Commons. Now ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... believe it, sir. Burke has great knowledge, great fluency of words, and great promptness of ideas, so that he can speak with great illustration on any subject that comes before him. He is neither like Cicero, nor like Demosthenes, nor like any one else, but speaks as well as ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... read Locke, Say's Political Economy, Smith's Wealth of Nations, Plutarch, Josephus, Herodotus, Lingard, Hume and Smollett, Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Pope, Byron, Shakespeare, Boswell's Johnson, Junius, The Tattler, The Rambler, the English Reviews, French from text-books without a teacher and Rhetoric (Blair's full edition). Much of Blair's Rhetoric I studied carefully and with great benefit. Some of my papers of those days were written ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... Sophists were the chief masters. Moreover, as Rhetoric was especially political in its nature, it presupposed or introduced the cultivation of History; and thus the pages of Thucydides became one of the special studies by which Demosthenes rose to be the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... eloquence which had appeared since Burke. And yet if we compare it with Burke, or with the great Greek exemplar of all those who would give speech the cogency of act,—we see at once the causes of its practical failure. In Demosthenes the thoughts and principles are often as lofty as any patriot can express; but their loftiness, in his speech, as in the very truth of things, seemed but to add to their immediate reality. They were beaten and inwoven into the facts of the hour; ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... have done worse, who got his living by it? If the acts of Xenophon and Caesar had not far transcended their eloquence, I don't believe they would ever have taken the pains to write them. They made it their business to recommend not their saying, but their doing. The companions of Demosthenes in the embassy to Philip, extolling that prince as handsome, eloquent, and a stout drinker, Demosthenes said that those were commendations more proper for a woman, an advocate, or a sponge. 'Tis not his profession to know either how to hunt, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the Miscellanies, besides a lengthy Preface, includes the author's poems, essays On Conversation, On the Knowledge of the Characters of Men, On Nothing, a squib upon the transactions of the Royal Society, a translation from Demosthenes, and one or two minor pieces. Much of the biographical material contained in the Preface has already been made use of, as well as those verses which can be definitely dated, or which relate to the author's love-affairs. The hitherto unnoticed portions of the volume consist chiefly ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... deportment and urbane manners in our great shops and stores been more clamant; never has the standard been higher. Our ex-officials may have to stoop, but it will be to conquer. We can confidently look forward to the day when no shop will be without its DEMOSTHENES, ALCIBIADES or its CICERO. Opportunities for employment on the stage are likely to be multiplied by the alleged intention of several actor-managers to enter Parliament, while others, nobly anxious to satisfy the claims of youth, have expressed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... Lincolnshire, was at Camb., and held various high positions under Queen Elizabeth. He was the author of The Rule of Reason containing the Arte of Logique (1551), and The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), and made translations from Demosthenes. He endeavoured to maintain the purity of the language against ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... orators have been diligent students of words. Demosthenes and Cicero were indefatigable in their study of language. Shakespeare, "infinite in faculty," took infinite pains to embody his thought in words of crystal clearness. Coleridge once said of him that one might as well try to dislodge a brick from a building ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... has survived and increased in its influence among men. The glory of Athens and Sparta, the grandeur of the Imperial City, are a long-lost memory, but the poetry of Homer and Virgil, the oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, abide with us forevermore. Whatever America holds that may be of value to posterity will not ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... between the Ancients and Moderns is reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day? If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in modern times; if ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... St. Philip, on the west side of Lower Regent Street, is a quaint building with Doric portico and curious little cupola, the latter a copy of the Lanthorn of Demosthenes at Athens. It was built in 1820 by Repton, from designs by Sir W. Chambers, and has the merit of being almost continually ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... people. In Greece, the Cynic and Epicurean schools were only different phases of the same degeneration. "Thirst, for money, and nothing else, will be the ruin of Sparta!" (Cicero, De Offic, II, 22, 77.) See the magnificent description by Demosthenes, in which he shows the over-estimation of material things to be the principal cause of the decline of Athens, and in which he lays great stress on the fact, that Athens, on its decay, had a larger ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... given us a very exciting volume, glowing with revolutionary fervor, and eloquent of revolutionary heroes. The great difficulty is that each of his orators is described in terms which a cool person might hesitate in applying to Demosthenes and Cicero. Mr. Magoon writes too much on the high-pressure principle. As we move down the Mississippi stream of his rhetoric, we are pleased with the rapidity of the motion, and the chivalrous feeling of the captain of the boat, but we look occasionally at the boiler and the engine with some ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... Mr. Foote. An important debate towards the end of Sir Robert Walpole's administration being mentioned, Dr. Francis observed, "that Mr. Pitt's speech on that occasion was the best he had ever read." He added, "that he had employed eight years of his life in the study of Demosthenes, and finished a translation of that celebrated orator, with all the decorations of style and language within the reach of his capacity; but he had met with nothing equal to the speech above mentioned." Many of the company remembered the debate; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... any measure that comes from the Right Honorable Gentleman tends to the public good, my bark is ready." Of a different kind is that grand passage,—"America, they tell me, has resisted—I rejoice to hear it,"—which Mr. Grattan used to pronounce finer than anything in Demosthenes.] while another Englishman, Lord Bacon, by making Fancy the hand-maid of Philosophy, had long since set an example of that union of the imaginative and the solid, which, both in writing and in speaking, forms the characteristic distinction of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... "Historical Sketches of the Statesmen who flourished in the Time of George the Third;" in 1845-6, "Lives of Men of Letters and Science who flourished in the Time of George the Third;" and he has since given to the world works on "The French Revolution," on "Instinct," "Demosthenes' Oration on the Crown," &c., &c. Collections of his Speeches and Forensic Arguments, and of his Critical Essays, as well as the other works above referred to, have been republished in ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... city of the Greek emperors is still standing, and there letters shine with a last lustre. While the foe is at its gates, it rectifies its grammars, goes back to origins, rejects new words, and revives the ancient language of Demosthenes. Never had the town of Constantine been more Greek than on the eve of its destruction.[877] The fame of its rhetoricians is spread abroad; men come from Italy to hear John Argyropoulos, the Chrysoloras, the famous Chrysococces, deacon of St. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... feeling, and her only statesman, Pitt, remained in studied seclusion, the First Consul might well feel assured of the impotence of the Island Power, and view the bickering of her politicians with the same quiet contempt that Philip felt for the Athens of Demosthenes. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... of speech;[018] they had their convivial meetings, their amours, their hours of relaxation, pleasantry, and mirth; they were treated, in short, with so much humanity in general, as to occasion that observation of Demosthenes, in his second Philippick, "that the condition of a slave, at Athens, was preferable to that of a free citizen, in many other countries." But if any exception happened (which was sometimes the case) from the general treatment described; if persecution took the place of lenity, and made the ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... progress, to help maintain your rights, to throw the weight of our influence for fair treatment, for the side of law and order and justice. The Republican party must not forget for a moment the truth of the argument that Demosthenes once made against Philip with such striking force,—"All power is unstable that is founded on injustice." This party cannot afford to be less than just. The Negro should not ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... Luxembourg. These gardens form the midday and afternoon promenade of that part of the city. In one wing of the Palace is the Chamber of Peers, elegantly fitted up and in some respect resembling a Greek theatre. The busts of Cicero, Brutus, Demosthenes, Phocion and other great men of antiquity adorn the niches of this chamber and on the grand escalier are the statues in natural size of Kleber, Dessaix, Caffarelli and other French generals. Report says that these ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... September, 1776, all the troops in Charleston were ordered to rendezvous without the gates of the city, to hear, as we were told, "Some great news." Soon as we were paraded, governor Rutledge ascended a stage, and in the forcible manner of a Demosthenes, informed, that Congress had dissolved all relation with England, by an open Declaration ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... we find, And in her agricultural school We learn to farm by modern rule; Professor Walter fills the chair, But teaches in the open air. And by his side we tend the stock, Or swing the scythe, or bind the shock. Nor miss we academic lore, We walk where Plato walked before, And eloquent Demosthenes, Who taught their youth beneath the trees; Here with sharp eyes we love to scan The rules that point Dame Nature's plan, We mark the track of bear and deer, And long to see them reft of fear.— Though well they shun our changeful moods, Taught by our rifle in the ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... black and white put, Not minding the if's, the be's, and the but, 30 Then read it all over, see how it will run, How answers the wit, the retort, and the pun, Your writings may then with old Socrates vie, May on the same shelf with Demosthenes lie, May as Junius be sharp, or as Plato be sage. 35 The pattern or satire to all of the age; But stop—a mad author I mean not to turn, Nor with thirst of applause does my heated brain burn, Sufficient that sense, wit, and grammar combined, My letters may make ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... agencies through which good and evil are effected. Natural laws are only the rules by which the great Father Spirit acts. Laws are rules by which agents act, and they always imply agents. Men of olden times are often spoken of as great metaphysicians. Who has not heard of Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato and many others. But those ancient men, here as in physics, dealt so much in fancy that they were not disposed to enter into the simple examination of their own minds or spirits. Entangled in the doctrines of chance, fate and destiny they robbed the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... Dardanelles Darwin David II. Deism, Democracy, De Morgan Demosthenes De Quincey Derby, Countess of Desmoulins Dial, The, Diamond Necklace, Dickens Diderot Diogenes Disraeli. See Beaconsfield Dobell Don Quixote, Doering, Herr Dresden Drogheda Drumclog Dryden Duffy, Sir C. Gavan Dumfries Dunbar ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... himself! I met him at the theatre whilst our Thais was acting. He was furiously excited, and spoke with violence, as I can testify. He is an honest man, but he will abuse us all; his eloquence is terrible. If Marcus is the Plato of the Christians, Paphnutius is the Demosthenes. Epicurus, in his little garden, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... speak on National Service and the duty of every man in connection with the war will never forget his earnestness and fervor. His voice will come ringing down the ages calling men of British birth to their duty like the voice of Demosthenes, the Greek patriot, whose constant cry was, "Yet O Athenians, yet there is time. And there is one manner in which you can recover your greatness, or dying fall worthy of your Marathon and Salamis. Yet O Athenians you have it in your power, ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... commanding genius. They are great legislators, or great warriors, or great poets, or orators of the most vehement and impassioned spirit. Such were Moses, Joshua, the heroic youth of Hebron, and his magnificent son; such, too, was Isaiah, a man, humanly speaking, not inferior to Demosthenes, and struggling for a similar and as beautiful a cause, the independence of a small state, eminent for its intellectual power, against the barbarian grandeur of a military empire. All the great things have been done by the little nations. ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... into school books, and declaimed by many an aspiring young Cicero. Most of them are, doubtless, as fictitious as Logan's celebrated speech, which was exalted by the great Jefferson almost to a level with the outbursts of Demosthenes, to be reduced again to very small proportions by the ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... Faery Queen, The Stones of Venice, Natural History (White's), And then Pendennis, The Arabian Nights, Cicero's Orations, Plain Tales from the Hills, The Wealth of Nations, And Byles on Bills, As in a Glass Darkly, Demosthenes' Crown, The Treatise of Berkeley, Tom Hughes's Tom Brown, The Mahabharata, The Humour of Hook, The Kreutzer Sonata, And Lalla Rookh, Great Battles by Creasy, And Hudibras, And Midshipman Easy, And Rasselas, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... stature of my body is small, myself not so well spoken, my voice low, my carriage lawyer-like, and of the common fashion, my nature soft and bashful, my purse thin, light, and never yet plentiful. If Demosthenes, being so learned and eloquent as he was, one whom none surpassed, trembled to speak before Phocion at Athens, how much more shall I, being unlearned and unskilful to supply the place of dignity, charge, and trouble, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... life is the ideal of every Greek and he is a model as head of the family, in his moderate means trying to raise children to his generation and give them the best he can afford. Hopeful, that some Socrates or Demosthenes might develop out of his offspring. The Greek has never been identified with any unlawful or criminal movement of the so-called Anarchistic or Socialistic. The Greek at all times and under all circumstances is an example ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... would excuse the sudden wheel, Upon his courser might the blame bestow: But, after, he so ill his strokes did deal, Demosthenes his cause might well forego. With paper armed he seems, and not with steel, So shrinks he at the wind of every blow: At length he breaks the ordered champions through, Amid loud laughter from the ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... not present the faintest idea. It has been my fortune to hear some of the ablest speeches of the greatest living orators on both sides of the water, but I must confess I never heard anything which so completely realized my conception of what Demosthenes was when he delivered the oration for ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... glory of Great Britain rests, in no small degree, on the refined taste and classical education of her politicians; and the portion of her oratory acknowledged to be the most energetic, bears the greatest resemblance to the spirit of Demosthenes.—North American Review. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... that his blindness, far from injuring, abetted his genius. Tyrtus, being physically unable to fight, became the poet of fighting, and achieved more with his words than did most men with their weapons. Demosthenes, again, was an orator frustrated by many defects. Everyone knows the story of his wretched articulation and how he shut himself up and practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth in order to overcome it. Few of the great orators, indeed, seem to ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... ancients, whom they named. They inquired whether they should see them, and were answered in the affirmative, and were told, that if they were desirous, they might pay their respects to them, as they were courteous and affable. The novitiates then inquired after Demosthenes, Diogenes, and Epicurus; and were answered, "Demosthenes is not here, but with Plato; Diogenes, with his scholars, resides under Helicon, because of his little attention to worldly things, and his being engaged in heavenly contemplations; Epicurus dwells in a border ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Tazewell well knew its scope, could not be performed by him in that retirement to enjoy which he had relinquished wealth and fame. There is another view of a more personal kind. Whether history is of higher dignity than speech, whether a Thucydides or a Demosthenes be the greater intellect, the critics may decide; but one thing is certain, that the faculties and accomplishments required for writing history and for oral disputations are not only not the same, but have rarely been united in a supreme ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... not altogether correct, but in the main confirmed by many great orators who confess to laborious preparation for their speech-making, and by the fact that many of our famous after-dinner speakers have been known to send their speeches to the Press before they were delivered. The case of Demosthenes would seem to indicate the necessity of the most careful study and preparation in order to make a truly great speech, however gifted an orator may be; and those who, like the late Henry Ward Beecher, have astonished their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... typical man of that generation, both the victim and the hero of his time—a man who is almost a Titan in word and a pigmy in deed. He is eloquent as a young Demosthenes. An irresistible debater, he carries everything before him the moment he appears. But he fails ignominiously when put to the hard test of action. Yet he is not an impostor. His enthusiasm is contagious because it is sincere, and his eloquence is convincing because devotion to his ideals ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... the power of depravity in enervating and enslaving the human mind; he therefore encouraged profusion, dissipation, and gambling, as being sure of meeting with little opposition from those who possessed such characters, in his projects of ambition—as Demosthenes declared in one of his orations.(21) Indeed, gambling had arrived at such a height in Greece, that Aristotle scruples not to rank gamblers 'with thieves and plunderers, who for the sake of gain do not scruple to ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... rational calculation, as the cause of events. But where he is obliged to reckon with an element independent of human efforts, he calls it Tyche and not "the immortal gods." A somewhat similar view we find in another great political author of the stage of transition to our period, namely, Demosthenes. Demosthenes of course employs the official apparatus of gods: he invokes them on solemn occasions; he quotes their authority in support of his assertions (once he even reported a revelation which he ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... become settled in their ways and who had begun to pass their days in a sort of sleepy submission to the idea of the gradual passing away of their lives, awoke and went into Main Street in the evening to argue with skeptical farmers. Beside Ed Hall, who had become a Demosthenes on the subject of progress and the duty of the town to awake and stick to Steve Hunter and the machine, a dozen other men held forth on the street corners. Oratorical ability awoke in the most unexpected places. Rumors flew from lip to lip. It was said that within a year Bidwell was to have ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... all else. Her heart cried, up on the World's four corners of the Way, and to it came the Vision Splendid. She gossiped with old Herodotus across the earth to the black and blameless Ethiopians; she saw the sculptured glories of Phidias marbled amid the splendor of the swamp; she listened to Demosthenes and walked the Appian Way with Cornelia—while all New ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob. Thenceforth Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf of the slave. His eloquence was impassioned and direct, and his English singularly pure, simple, and nervous. He is perhaps nearer to Demosthenes than any other American orator. He was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes outside of politics, and his lecture on the Lost Arts was a favorite with ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... defender of anything but virtue and justice, his genius, elevated by this sublime sentiment, would be equal to that of the greatest orators. He followed my advice, and now feels the good effects of it. His defence of M. de Portes is worthy of Demosthenes. He came every year within a quarter of a league of the Hermitage to pass the vacation at St. Brice, in the fife of Mauleon, belonging to his mother, and where the great Bossuet had formerly lodged. This is a fief, of which a like succession of proprietors would render ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... affections, particularly in narration; to which it may be replied that where the trope is far- fetched and hard, it is fit for nothing but to puzzle the understanding, and may be reckoned amongst those things of Demosthenes which AEschines called [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] not [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]—that is, prodigies, not words. It must be granted to Casaubon that the knowledge of many things is lost in our modern ages which were of familiar notice to the ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... I rode home, "his Lordship will be surprised and gratified, I dare say, to find himself a perfect Demosthenes in the newspaper reports of to-morrow morning. Hems, coughs, stammerings, blowing of the nose, and ten-minute lapses of memory, all vanish in passing through the sieves and bolters of a report. What magicians the reporters are! What talents, what ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... invulnerable mortals are never oppressed with mauvaise honte, that malady which keeps the faculties of the soul under imaginary imprisonment. A well-dipped Irishman, on the contrary, can move, speak, think, like Demosthenes, with as much ease, when the eyes of numbers are upon him, as if the spectators were so many cabbage-stalks. This virtue of civil courage is of inestimable value in the opinion of the best judges. The great Lord Verulam—no one, by-the-by, could be a better ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... been, Laurie studied to some purpose that year, for he graduated with honor, and gave the Latin oration with the grace of a Phillips and the eloquence of a Demosthenes, so his friends said. They were all there, his grandfather—oh, so proud—Mr. and Mrs. March, John and Meg, Jo and Beth, and all exulted over him with the sincere admiration which boys make light of at the time, but fail to win from ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... are accustomed to designate as a fool; but to connect the two as cause and effect is like saying that a man was a great athlete because he was lame, or that Lord Byron had a beautiful face because he had a club-foot, or that Demosthenes was a great orator because he stammered. Men have been made by their foibles, but in those cases weakness in some directions has been more than compensated for by strength in others. Boswell lacked some of the great literary powers, but he possessed others, and those that he did ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Englishmen among the honoured score were Marlborough and Dampier.* (* Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat 1 267.) It is curious to find the adventurous ex-buccaneer in such noble company as that of Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, and George Washington, but the fact that he was among the selected heroes may be taken as another evidence of Bonaparte's interest in the men who helped to find out what the world was like. Perhaps if ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... this whole matter was a mixture of cowardice and meanness. Recollecting his poetical temperament, and the well-known stories of Demosthenes at Cheronea, and Horace at Philippi, we are not disposed to be harsh on his cowardice, but we have no excuse for his meanness. It discovers a want of heart, and an infinite littleness of soul. We can ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... the learned examine and make tryall thereof, through all the parts of Rethoricke, in fitte phrases, in pithy sentences, in galant tropes, in flowing speeche, in plaine sense, and surely in my judgment, I think he wyll yeelde him that verdict which Quintillian giveth of both the best orators Demosthenes and Tully, that from the one, nothing may be taken away, to the other nothing may be added[13]." After such eulogy, the description of Lyly by another writer as "alter Tullius anglorum" will not seem strange. These praises were not the extravagances ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Balfour is very anxious that Mr. William O'Brien should wear prison clothes, sleep on a plank bed, and be subjected to other indignities, but Mr. Mahaffy goes far beyond such mild measures as these, and begins his history by frankly expressing his regret that Demosthenes was not summarily put to death for his attempt to keep the spirit of patriotism alive among the citizens of Athens! Indeed, he has no patience with what he calls 'the foolish and senseless opposition to Macedonia'; regards the revolt of the Spartans against 'Alexander's ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... in a loud voice, but in flowing and elegantly-accented Greek. He was a native of Arelas—[Arles]—in Gaul, but no Hellene of them all could pour forth a purer flow of the language of Demosthenes than he. The self-reliant, keen, and vivacious natives of the African metropolis were far more to his taste than the Athenians; these dwelt only in, and for, the past; the Alexandrians rejoiced in the present. Here an independent spirit still survived, while on the shores ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of praise was served out in slices to favored individuals; dry toasts were drunk by drier dignitaries; the Governor was compared to Solon; the Chief Justice to Brutus; the Orator of the Day to Demosthenes; the Colonel of the Boston Regiment to Julius Caesar; and everybody went home happy from a feast where the historic parallels were sure to hold out to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... congenial to those hermaphrodite spirits who thirst to win the title of champion of one sex and victor over the other. What is the love and submission of one manly heart to the woman whose ambition it is to sway the minds of multitudes as did a Demosthenes or a Cicero? What are the tender affections and childish prattle of the family circle, to women whose ears itch for the loud laugh and boisterous cheer ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... international doctrine of the independence of this continent; of John Quincy Adams, the pioneer of abolitionism in his radical condemnation of slavery; of Clay, the warm defender of the South American colonies in their struggle for emancipation; of Webster, the Demosthenes of the Union and of American liberty; of Seward, the rival for election of Lincoln, but who, being defeated by the latter, was invited by him to form part of his Cabinet; of Forsyth, Calhoun, Everett, Marcy, Evarts, Blaine, Bayard, and Hay. It is a path of stars, at the termination of which the ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... knowen apte to his purpose whan they are set in theyr order so to speke them that it may be pleasaunt and delectable to the audience / so that it may be sayd of hym that hystories make mencion that an olde woman sayd ones [A.iiii.v] by Demosthenes / & syns hath ben a como[n] prouerbe amonge the Grekes [Greek: outos esti] which is as moche to say as (This is he) And this last p[ro]perty is called among ler- ned men ( Eloquence. Of these foure the moost difficile ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... Commons; he had delivered his maiden speech with some effect; and had been heard favorably on various subsequent occasions; on one of which it was that, to the extreme surprise of the house, he terminated his speech with a passage from Demosthenes—not presented in English, but in sounding Attic Greek. Latin is a privileged dialect in parliament. But Greek! It would not have been at all more startling to the usages of the house, had his lordship quoted Persic or Telinga. Still, though felt as something ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Daniel Webster who caused the Friday Afternoon to become an institution in the schools of America. His early struggles were dwelt upon and rehearsed by parents and pedagogues until every boy was looked upon as a possible Demosthenes holding senates in thrall. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... I think I'll drive across and look at the legless Demosthenes," said her companion. "I was going to do a little shopping, anyway. So I'll report later, if he's ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the newspaper article, is superior to Plato: at any rate it is couched in language which is very rarely obscure. On the other hand, the greatest writers of Greece, Thucydides, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, are generally those which are found to be most difficult and to diverge most widely from the English idiom. The translator will often have to convert the more abstract Greek into the more concrete English, or vice versa, and he ought not to force upon one language the character of another. ...
— Charmides • Plato
... that AEschines spoke of Demosthenes' delivery of his "Oration on the Crown" as having the ferocity of a wild beast. I do not see how that can be, however, because Demosthenes selected Isaeus as his teacher for the reason that Isaeus was ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... how I would live most gladly, do well perceive there is no such quietness in England, nor pleasure in strange countries, as even in St. John's college, to keep company with the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Tully. Which my choice of quietness is not purposed to lie in idleness, nor constrained by a wilful nature, because I will not or can not serve elsewhere, when I trust I could apply myself to mo kinds of life than I hope any need shall ever drive me to seek, but only ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... in very small quantities. We find that the greatest part of that intellectual labor which has most extended the domain of thought and human knowledge has been performed by men of sobriety, many of them having been drinkers of water only. Under this last category may be ranked Demosthenes, Johnson, Haller, Bacon, Milton, Dante, etc. Johnson, it is true, was a great tea drinker. Voltaire drank coffee at times to excess, and occasionally a small quantity of light wine. So, also, did Fontenelle. Newton solaced himself ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... the Lamp.—Can you or one of your learned correspondents, tell me the origin or first user of the literary "smelling of the lamp?" I know that it is commonly attributed to Demosthenes? but if it is his, I want ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... says Easy Aaron to me, for he's that happy an' enthoosiastic he's got to open up on some gent; "these cases is bound to fix my fame as the modern Demosthenes. You knows how eloquent I am about Shoestring? That won't be a marker to the oration I'll frame up for these miscreants in the calaboose. For why? Shoestring's time I ain't organised; also, I'm more or less shook by the late bullets buzzin' ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... but twenty-seven years of age when he began his official career, but he seemed one who had leaped into life full-armed. He absorbed knowledge on every hand. Demosthenes was his idol, and he, too, declaimed by the seashore with his mouth full of pebbles. His splendid command of language was acquired by the practise of translation and retranslation. Whether Greek or ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... billie; True Campbells, Frederick an' Hay; An' Livingstone, the bauld Sir Willie: An' monie ithers, Whom auld Demosthenes or ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... looking at an alleged fact on all sides, and turning it over and over in his mind; we know that he must have meditated long on ideas, opinions, and events; and the result is a brief, pithy narrative. Tradition hath it that Demosthenes copied out this history eight times, or even learned it by heart. Chatham, urging the removal of the forces from Boston, had reason to refer to the history of Greece, and, that he might impress it upon the lords that he knew whereof he spoke, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Demosthenes," as Lord Byron called him, was defending an army commissary, who, during the distress of the American army in 1781, had seized some bullocks belonging to John Hook, a wealthy Scottish settler. The seizure was not quite legal, but Henry, defending, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... his Discours sur l'Eglogue and a Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, widened the field of debate. Were trees in ancient days taller than those in our own fields? If not, why may not modern men equal Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes? "Nothing checks the progress of things, nothing confines the intelligence so much as admiration of the ancients." Genius is bestowed by Nature on every age, but knowledge grows from generation to generation. In his dialogues entitled the Parallele des ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... such instructions, the Thessalian Cineas, the confidential minister of Pyrrhus, went to Rome. That dexterous negotiator, whom his contemporaries compared to Demosthenes so far as a rhetorician might be compared to a statesman and the minister of a sovereign to a popular leader, had orders to display by every means the respect which the victor of Heraclea really felt for his vanquished opponents, to make known the wish of the king to come to Rome in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... on their feet. He knew that from the beginning of oratory the orator's spontaneity was for the silence and solitude of the closet where he mused his words to an imagined audience; that this was the use of orators from Demosthenes and Cicero up and down. He studied every word and syllable, and memorized them by a system of mnemonics peculiar to himself, consisting of an arbitrary arrangement of things on a table—knives, forks, salt-cellars; inkstands, pens, boxes, or whatever was at hand—which stood for points and clauses ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his favourite musings on the worthlessness of all orators, from Demosthenes and Cicero to Burke and Fox, from Burke and Fox to Gladstone and Bright. The world was conveniently divided into talking men and acting men. Gladstone had never done anything. He had ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... known as the works of his earlier years. He commenced the year with an inquiry, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, which he intended as a preface to the translations which he made of the great speeches of AEschines and Demosthenes, De Corona. These translations are lost, though the preface remains. He then translated, or rather paraphrased the Timaeus of Plato, of which a large proportion has come down to us, and the Protagoras, of which we have lost all but a sentence or two. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... fellows. Adler's theory of "psychic compensation" is based on the observation that handicapped individuals frequently excel in the very fields in which they are apparently least qualified to compete. Demosthenes, for example, became a great orator in spite of the fact that he stuttered. Ordahl presents the only comprehensive survey of the literature in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Discovery of America, Speech of Romulus after founding Rome, Speech of Quinctius Capitolinus, Caius Marius to the Romans, Demosthenes to the Athenians, The perfect Speaker, On the Duties of School-Boys, from the pious and judicious Rollin, Columbia.—A Poem, The Choice of a Rural Life.—A Poem, Hymns and Prayers, Character of Man, Winter, Douglas's Account ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... with your toe?) And the receipts which thence might flow, We could divide between us; Still more attractions to combine, Beside these services of mine, I will throw in a very fine (It would do nicely for a sign) 600 Original Titian's Venus.' Another offered handsome fees If Knott would get Demosthenes (Nay, his mere knuckles, for more ease) To rap a few short sentences; Or if, for want of proper keys, His Greek might make confusion, Then just to get a rap from Burke, To recommend a little work On Public Elocution. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... snow-storm happened, which compelled the besiegers to retreat. The patriots characterized this storm as Providential. Had the weather remained fair, the patriots would have been beaten, the democracy would not have been restored, and we should never have had the orations of Demosthenes; and perhaps even Plato might not have written and thought for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... distinguished members of the Lower House, the box in which the managers stood contained an array of speakers such as perhaps had not appeared together since the great age of Athenian eloquence. There were Fox and Sheridan, the English Demosthenes and the English Hyperides. There was Burke—ignorant indeed, or negligent, of the art of adapting his reasonings and his style to the capacity and taste of his hearers, but in amplitude of comprehension and richness of imagination superior to every orator, ancient or modern. There, with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the essential agony of a soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the Athens[5] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion. In the writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the Crown, in the measured cadences of the Panegyric, the effort to lead Athens towards ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... This was an island between Crete and the Peloponnesus, in the Saronic gulf, which was sacred to Apollo. Latona resided there, having given Delos to Neptune in exchange for it. Demosthenes ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the three great ages and the three great nations: from the Greeks, from the Romans, from France and her rivals. From the Greeks he chose Alexander and Demosthenes; the genius of conquest and the genius of eloquence. From the Romans he chose Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Brutus and Caesar, placing the great victim side by side with the murderer, as great almost as himself. From the modern world he chose Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, the great Conde, Duguay-Trouin, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... men in the earlier history of the old city. He made a sacred enclosure of the Acropolis and placed there the masterpieces of Greece and other countries. The city is said to have had a population of three hundred thousand in his day, two-thirds of them being slaves. The names of Socrates, Demosthenes, and Lycurgus also belong to the list of great Athenians. In 1040 the Normans captured Piraeus, the seaport of Athens, and in 1455 the Turks, commanded by Omar, captured the city. The Acropolis was ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... western visitors a notion of the contents of Thucydides, and he came to us for sympathy and money to help him shake off the barbarians and their yoke, and save the wreck of the ancient temples. The appeal was shrewdly planned. England reads Thucydides, and skims Demosthenes, though Greece, it is presumed, does not. The impressions of our boyhood fasten upon our hearts, and our mature reason judges them like a father, not like a judge. To sweep the Tartar out of the Peloponnese, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Oratore, Brutus sive de claris Oratoribus, Orator sive de optimo genere Dicendi, De partitione Oratoria, Topica, and de optimo genere Oratorum. The last-mentioned, which is a fragment, is understood to have been the proem to his translation (now lost) of the speeches of Demosthenes and AEschines, De Corona. These he translated with the view of defending, by the example of the Greek orators, his own style of eloquence, which, as we shall afterwards find, the critics of the day censured as too Asiatic in its character; and hence the proem, which still survives, is ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Philosophy of the Human Mind." The work of the third or final year was in Physics, Astronomy, and Ethics, principally "Butler's Analogy." In the Classics course selections from Homer, Virgil, Euripides and Horace were read in the first year; selections from Cicero, Horace, Demosthenes and Sophocles in the second year; and selections from Herodotus, AEschylus, Thucydides, and Tacitus in the third year. In the first and second years the students were "exercised in Greek and Latin ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... ever made in my life, and all that I can say is, that it was wonderfully successful. Demosthenes, and Cicero, and the Earl of Chatham, and Burke, and Mirabeau, all rolled into one, couldn't have been more successful. The mob rolled back. They looked ashamed. It was a word of sense spoken in a forcible manner. And that I take it is the essence ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... these admirable monuments were intended to represent. But it is not in the city of Constantine, nor in the declining period of an empire, when the human mind was depressed by civil and religious slavery, that we should seek for the souls of Homer and of Demosthenes. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... to transgress the salt at the table—that is, to break the laws of hospitality, and to injure one by whom any person had been entertained—was accounted one of the blackest crimes: hence that exaggerating interrogation of Demosthenes, "Where is the salt? where the hospital tables?" for in despite of these, he had been the author of these troubles. And the crime of Paris in stealing Helena is aggravated by Cassandra, upon this consideration, that he had contemned ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... We next visited what is called Demosthenes's Lantern, situated close to a ruined house, formerly the Franciscan convent. Mr. Finlay and some others have cleared away the rubbish and masses of fallen masonry from about the Lantern: they have also dug a ditch around it, to prevent the devastation committed by visitors ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... authentic history. Such is the inherent dignity of human nature, that there belong to it sublimities of virtues which all men may attain, and which no man can transcend: and though this be not true in an equal degree of intellectual power, yet in the persons of Plato, Demosthenes, and Homer, and in those of Shakespeare, Milton, and Lord Bacon, were enshrined as much of the divinity of intellect as the inhabitants of this planet can hope will ever take up its abode among them. But the question is not of the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... any invective of Cato's so fine as your encomtum. O if my Lord(2) could be sufficiently praised, sufficiently praised he would have been undoubtedly by you! This kind of thing is not done nowadays.(3) It were easier to match Pheidias, easier to match Apelles, easier in a word to match Demosthenes himself, or Cato himself; than to match this finisht and perfect work. Never have I read anything more refined, anything more after the ancient type, anything more delicious, anything more Latin. O happy you, to be endowed with eloquence so great! O happy I, to be tinder the charge of such a master! ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... his life away in kindly deeds, men found that the light divine had been transferred to the painter's canvas. Eloquence also loves sincere lips. The history of oratory includes few great scenes—Demosthenes' plea for Athenian liberty that resulted in his death, Luther's single challenge to the hosts of Pope and Emperor, Wendell Phillips' at Faneuil Hall, Lincoln's at Gettysburg. All these risked life for a cause, and were baptized with eloquence, their ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to be he meaning of {en megaro} an expression similar to that of Demosthenes in a parallel ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... all, the classics were all that I had and so I valued them. I have seen thus a deceived dog value a pup with a broken leg, and a pauper child nurse a dead doll with the sawdust out of it. So I nursed my dead Homer and my broken Demosthenes though I knew in my heart that there was more sawdust in the stomach of one modern author than in the whole lot of them. Observe, I am not saying which it is that has ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock |
