"Dialectic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there must be examinations and lectures, and discipline and hard reading, nothing of all this matters a jot in comparison with the association of youth with youth and the communion of quick and eager spirits. I have lived my life with clever people, men and women who thought themselves masters of dialectic, but I can say truthfully that I have never heard such good talk as in my own rooms and in the rooms of my contemporaries at Oxford. There, and there only, have I seen practised what Dr. Johnson believed to be an essential to good talk, the ability to stretch one's legs and have one's ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... he considered himself in some degree as having a mission to express that diplomatic contempt for the Senate which his colleagues, if they felt it, were obliged to conceal. He performed his duties with conscientious precision. He never missed an opportunity to thrust the sharp point of his dialectic rapier through the joints of the clumsy and hide-bound senatorial self-esteem. He delighted in skilfully exposing to Madeleine's eyes some new side of Ratcliffe's ignorance. His conversation at such times sparkled with historical allusions, quotations in half a dozen different ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... town—from the shirt-sleeved nabob of the county office to the droll wag of the favorite loafing-place—the rules and by-laws of which resort, by the way, being rudely charcoaled on the wall above the cutter's bench, and somewhat artistically culminating in an original dialectic legend which ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... by loose reasoners and pretentious talkers, and even by quiet easy-going friends, who unexpectedly found themselves led on blindfold, with the utmost gravity, into traps and absurdities by the wiles of his mischievous dialectic. This was the outside look of his relentless earnestness. People who did not like him, or his views, and who, perhaps, had winced under his irony, naturally put down his strong language, which on occasion could certainly ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... statement or right inference. He often, indeed, in these matters carried ignorance of what he was talking about, and confidence in his own knowledge of it to the extremest verge of the possible. He sometimes mistook dialectic or antiquated English for classical, and laboriously corrected the latter by putting the former in parentheses by its side. In orthography and pronunciation he had never got beyond that puerile conception which fancies it a most creditable feature in a word ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... true Greek unless he had grappled with this Play of the Negative, which had some marvelous fascination for the Greek mind. It is the leaven working in the Sophists with their subtle rhetoric, in Socrates with his negating elenchus, in Plato with his confounding dialectic. Homer, as the prophet of his people, foreshadowing all forms of Greek spirit and of Greek literature, bring to light repeatedly this ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... not proceed farther into the subject than a preliminary examination of executive authority, in which he laid down principles of strict construction of the Constitution which have never been adopted in practice and which are now interesting only as specimens of dialectic subtlety. ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... by certain idealists who build republics in the air and try to obtain political perfection, presupposing the perfection of the human race, in such a way that we have philosophers as leaders, philanthropy instead of law, dialectic instead of tactics, and sophists instead of soldiers. With this subversion of things, social order was shaken up, and from its very beginning advanced with rapid strides towards universal dissolution, which ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... constitutional construction which were requisite to convert the Union into a league of States and had laid his work at the feet of Calhoun. Taylor was a candid man and frankly owned the historical difficulties in the way of carrying out his purpose; but Calhoun's less scrupulous dialectic swept aside every obstacle that stood in the way of attributing to the States ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... Jerome [*Comment. in Ep. ad Ephes. iv, 17] says: "Is it not evident that a man who day and night wrestles with the dialectic art, the student of natural science whose gaze pierces the heavens, walks in vanity of understanding and darkness of mind?" Now vanity of understanding and darkness of mind are sinful. Therefore curiosity about intellective ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... There are dialectic varieties in the Mythology of the Esquimaux as of the Greeks and Hindus, and, with a change of gender between Sun and Moon, the same story occurs among other tribes in the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... theory, until in its efforts to escape from his assaults it so changed its character as to become a thing totally different from the theory proposed by Volta. The more persistently it was defended, however, the more clearly did it show itself to be a congeries of devices, bearing the stamp of dialectic skill rather than ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... Lockhart, Provost of the Collegiate Church of Crichton, in Mid-Lothian, was Rector of the University of St. Andrews, from 1521 to 1525. He was the author of more than one work, printed at Paris, on Dialectic Philosophy. He afterwards was Dean of Glasgow, where he died on the 22d of June 1547.—(Obituary in the Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... not come to hear Fra Giuseppe. All his impassioned spirituality was wasted on an audience of Christians and oft-converted converts. Baffled, he fell back on scholastic argumentation, but in vain did he turn the weapons of Talmudic dialectic against the Talmudists themselves. Not even his discovery by cabbalistic calculations that the Pope's name and office were predicted in the Old Testament availed to draw the Jews, and it was only in the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... appearance in Antioch Paul seems to have occupied a very influential position among his brethren. In that refined and opulent city his learning, his dialectic skill, his prudence, and his pious ardour were all calculated to make his ministry most effective. About a year after his arrival there, he was deputed, in company with a friend, to visit Palestine on an errand of love. "In those days ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the lower order of the people, for those born to toil in manual labor, hardened by the struggle for existence, the announcement of the connection of misery with all forms of existence was not made, nor was the dialectic of the law of the painful concatenation of causes and effects calculated to satisfy 'the poor in spirit.' 'To the wise belongeth this law,' it is said, 'not to the foolish.' Very unlike the work of that ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... wonted dialectic skill Douglas sought to establish his case. The existing laws made no provision for collecting the revenue on shipboard. It was admitted on all sides that collection at the port of entry in South ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... rapid transformation. It is true, the economic, material, scientific, and moral changes in the Athens of the fifth century came about quickly and drastically, and the reconstitution of intellectual and moral ideas mooted by the Sophists found a profound expression in the dialectic of the drama. How far the Elizabethans were influenced by the revival of learning and science, the discovery of the new world and the expansion of commerce, is a question I need not embark upon. But it will not be disputed that the face of the world has never in any known period of history been ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... core of a subject, and broods patiently over its living elements and relations, before it assumes to take them as materials for argumentation. This broad grasp of premises, which implies a penetrating and interpretative as well as dialectic mind, is the distinguishing difference between a great reasoner and an able logician. In regard to the form of the work, we can see no reason why its essays should be thrown into the shape of letters. The epistolary spirit vanishes almost as soon as "Dear Sir" and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... philosophy a fictitious liveliness, wherewith to insinuate it into the good graces of the student. I hope rather to be true to the meaning of philosophy. For there is that in its stand-point and its problem which makes it universally significant entirely apart from dialectic and erudition. These are derived interests, indispensable to the scholar, but quite separable from that modicum of philosophy which helps to make the man. The present book is written for the sake of elucidating the inevitable philosophy. It ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... better day which he saw and declared. His eloquence was not merely that of clear and luminous statement, felicitous illustration, or excited yet restrained feeling; it was the eloquence also of thought. With something of the imaginative, he united rare dialectic power. He felt the truth before he expounded it; but when once it was felt by him, then his logical power came into remarkably effective play. Step by step he led his hearers onward, till at last he placed them on the summit whence they could see all the landscape ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... there's enough for one bout, and too much for some. No good ever came of argument and dialectic, for these breed only angry gestures and gusty disputes (de gustibus non disputandum) and the ruin of friendships and the very fruitful pullulation of Dictionaries, textbooks and wicked men, not to speak of Intellectuals, Newspapers, Libraries, Debating-clubs, bankruptcies, madness, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... commenced a new village. Repeated at intervals of time, several such villages would appear, each independent of the other and a self-governing body, but united in a league or confederacy for mutual protection. Dialectic variation would finally spring up, and thus ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... not, on the whole, successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to the poet who has written, upon one hand, Guinevere and the Passing of Arthur, and upon the other the homely, dialectic monologue ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... basis. The late Professor D. G. Ritchie very brilliantly examined the theory of natural rights, and by means of much subtle dissection and argument found that there were no natural rights; law was the only basis of privilege. It is quite easy to be convinced by the author's delightful dialectic, but the conviction is apt to vanish suddenly in the presence of a ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... of language. Individual and dialectic variations. Time variation or "drift." How dialects arise. Linguistic stocks. Direction or "slope" of linguistic drift. Tendencies illustrated in an English sentence. Hesitations of usage as symptomatic of the direction of drift. Leveling tendencies in English. Weakening of ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... of questions concerning the grounds of morality, and statements concerning the nature of science; of inquiries concerning "real being," and speculations on the ordering of a model Republic, in the same discourse. Ethics, politics, ontology, and theology, are all comprised in his Dialectic, which is, in fact, the one grand "science of the idea of the good." Now to the mind of Aristotle it seemed better, and much more systematic, that these questions should be separated, and referred to particular heads; and, above all, that they should ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... private school of his own, outside the walls. "I attached myself to the Palatine Peripatician who then presided on the hill of Sainte-Genevieve, the doctor illustrious, admired by all. There, at his feet, I received the first elements of the dialectic art, and according to the measure of my poor understanding I received with all the avidity of my soul everything that ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the heading "De animi qualitatibus," says: "There was something portentous about this boy. He had learnt, as I heard, seven languages, and certainly he knew thoroughly his own, French, and Latin. He was skilled in Dialectic, and eager to be instructed in all subjects. When I met him, he was in his fifteenth year, and he asked me (speaking Latin no less perfectly and fluently than myself), 'What is contained in those rare books of yours, De rerum ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... subdivided the three divisions and made six,—Dialectic and Rhetoric, comprised in Logic; Ethic and Politic; Physic and Theology. This division was merely for practical use, for all Philosophy is one. Even among the earliest Stoics Logic, or Dialectic, does not ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... extremely agreeable. It suggested to Frederick the sound of colliding billiard balls. His enunciation was perfect, absolutely free of a dialectic tinge. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... another, is not to make the lower of the stages symbolic of the higher. Indeed to introduce the concept of symbolism at all into such a context is to court inextricable confusion. Let symbolism be one thing, and let organic (or dialectic) connection be another—then we know where we are when we claim for natural objects that they have a being and a meaning in their own right, and that they are akin to the soul of man. Emerson had a firm grasp of the nature-mystic's ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... is that Mr. Asquith possesses all the appearance of greatness but few of its elements. He has dignity of presence, an almost unrivalled mastery of language, a trenchant dialectic, a just and honourable mind; but he is entirely without creative power and has outgrown that energy of moral earnestness which characterized the early ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... Grammar that is the moon's daughter, I have shut their ears to the imaginary harpings and speech of the angels; and I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the light star and out of the amorous star, you have been my spear-man and my catapult! Oh! my swift horsemen! Oh! my keen darting arguments, it is because of you that I have overthrown the hosts of ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... in prose as the hymn-writers (who were very commonly themselves Scholastics) produced in verse. With the exception of Abelard, whose interest is rather biographical than strictly literary, and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of mediaeval dialectic, the Doctors Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and Angelic, have left nothing which even on the widest interpretation of pure literature can be included within it, or even any names that figure in any but the least select of literary histories. Yet they cannot but receive some ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "wedding festivities are out of place." The word (zijeh) here used is a dialectic (Syrian) variant of zewaj, marriage. Burton, "we ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... was bound to admit that all Irishmen outside Ulster are blackguards, and that the atmosphere of Dublin is poisonous. Clithering, on the other hand, was officially committed to an unqualified admiration for everything south of the Boyne. I do not think that Malcolmson appreciated his dialectic advantage. His mind was running on big guns ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... I touch another characteristic—his feeling for logic, for dialectic, which made him one of the severest reasoners that it would be possible to meet in argument. He used, in his admirably assumed air of brag, an attitude which he could take with perfect humour and perfect dignity—to protest that he was one of two or three Englishmen who had ever mastered the philosophical ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... disposed to protect or to cultivate those sciences which give to man a power over nature: thus it was that mathematics were most shamefully neglected; in physics the absurd doctrines of the Peripatetics predominated; and the name of philosophy was given to a puerile and complicated dialectic which had neither the merit of ingenious classification, nor that subtlety of argument which distinguished the school ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... differentiation would be largely at work. Without frequent intercourse, frequent interchange of women as the great factor in that intercourse, the tribes and bands of mankind would still go on separating, would develop dialectic and customary, if not physical and moral differences. It was no longer a case of pools perhaps, but they were still in lakes. There were as yet no open seas of mankind. With advancing civilization, with iron weapons and war discipline, with ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... divergencies of types of doctrine in the New Testament. There are such types, within certain limits. Nobody would mistake a word of John's calm, mystical, contemplative spirit for a word of Paul's fiery, dialectic spirit. And nobody would mistake either the one or the other for Peter's impulsive, warm-hearted exhortations. But whilst there are diversities in the way of apprehending, there are no diversities in the declaration of what is the central truth to be apprehended. These varyings ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Khalak, lying in its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima Thule. It was all right—what he had just been hearing was a part of this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet he was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic, perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might have been his of ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... dream. If afterwards the work be analysed, the pains with which it was built up can be traced; the powerful effect which it produced will be found due, not alone to the creative power, the imagination of the author, but also to his dialectic skill and to his critical faculty. It is all very well to talk of great works as the fruits of hot inspiration and not cold intellect. A masterpiece is the outcome of both; the one provides the material, the other shapes it. Schubert was an inspired ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... there was rising that vast and subtle passion for dialectic combat, which was of his very fibre. He had almost lost the feeling that this was his own future being discussed. He saw before him in this sanguine man, whose voice and eyes had such a white-hot sound and look, the incarnation of all that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... unbelief were merely the outcome of the speculations of subtler minds, which it was necessary to stop at the fountain-head. The arch-heretic of the time was Peter Abailard, who routed in succession two great teachers—William of Champeaux in dialectic in the great cathedral school of Paris, and Anselm of Laon, a pupil of Anselm of Canterbury, in theology. He gathered round him on the Mount of Ste. Genevieve, just outside Paris, a large band of students, in whom ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... is the fact that Vergil first prepared himself for public life,[6] and progressed so far as to accept one case in court. In order to enter public life in those days it was customary to train one's self as widely as possible in literature, history, rhetoric, dialectic, and court procedure, and to attract public notice for election purposes by taking a few cases. It was not every citizen who dared enter such a career. This was the one occupation that the nobility guarded most jealously. While ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... arises whenever an author would disguise his solicitude for his work, by appearing negligent, and even undesirous of its success. A writer will rarely conclude such a preface without betraying himself. I think that even Dr. Johnson forgot his sound dialectic in the admirable Preface to his Dictionary. In one part he says, "having laboured this work with so much application, I cannot but have some degree of parental fondness." But in his conclusion he tells ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli |
