"Demosthenes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his own works that he was a young student at Delphi, in the thirteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Nero, A.D. 66. He visited both Italy and Rome, and probably resided at Rome for some time. He wrote his Life of Demosthenes, at least after his return to Chaeroneia: he says (Life of Demosthenes, c. 2), that he had not time to exercise himself in the Latin Language during his residence at Rome, being much occupied with public ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... the ancient philosophers and orators omitted in the sphere of his studies. The works of Plato, the orations of Demosthenes, Isocrates, AEschines, and Cicero, were not only read, but made the subject of critical ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... chose, impervious to human sight. The doom of tyrannies was thenceforth sealed. Satire and invective became potent as armies. The unseen hands of the Juniuses could launch the thunderbolts, and make the ministers tremble. One whisper from this giant fills the earth as easily as Demosthenes filled the Agora. It will soon be heard at the antipodes as easily as in the next street. It travels with the lightning under the oceans. It makes the mass one man, speaks to it in the same common language, and elicits a sure and single response. Speech passes into thought, and thence promptly ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... not. You see, we of to-day are rather ahead of Demosthenes and Cicero, and those old fellows. I suppose Rome ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... appeared to have been more powerful in this respect than that of all the ancient systems of philosophy; though even in these, in point of theory, we might trace great liberality and consideration for human rights. Where could be found finer sentiments of liberty than in Demosthenes and Cicero? Where bolder assertions of the rights of mankind, than in Tacitus and Thucydides? But, alas! these were the holders of slaves! It was not so with those who had been converted to Christianity. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... Livy. 2 Vols. Cicero's Orations. Cicero's Offices, Laelius, Cato Major, Paradoxes, Scipio's Dream, Letter to Quintus. Cicero On Oratory and Orators. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and The Commonwealth. Juvenal. Xenophon. Homer's Iliad. Homer's Odyssey. Herodotus. Demosthenes. 2 Vols. Thucydides. AEschylus. Sophocles. Euripides. 2 Vols. Plato ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... 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 absolutely no foundation ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... had been killed at Alton, Ill., 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
... enthusiasm, it does not appear to me the best way of stimulating the study of any writer." Still, Mr. Mahaffy can occasionally defend a Greek author against the strictures of other critics. Thus he cannot agree with Mr. Simcox in giving "some credence to the attacks on Demosthenes charging him with unchastity. These," he observes, "the whole man's life and his portrait-statue forbid us to believe." We do not quite understand how the fact that Demosthenes was a "whole man" tends to rebut the charge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... sentences as these: "Think of the many elements of thought a boy comes in contact with when he reads Caesar and Tacitus in succession, Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle". "See what is implied in having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides or Demosthenes; what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human existence, on political society, on the relations of man to man, on human nature itself." There are various conceivable ways of counter-arguing these assertions, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... 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 ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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 it ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... 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 ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... back 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 to ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... 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 ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pilgrimage was to classic Greece, the land of Solon and Lycurgus, Pericles and Pisistratus, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Demosthenes—the land of Byron and Shelley—the land of poetry and patriotism, of the myths of gods and the histories of heroes—the land which Art and Nature have fondly combined to enrich with their choicest treasures. ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... 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 chapter and ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... the loss of civil rights, either total or partial. See C. R. Kennedy, "Select Speeches of Demosthenes," Note 13, Disenfranchisement. ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... to be he meaning of {en megaro} an expression similar to that of Demosthenes in a parallel case—{eti ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... whose religion forbids the admission of science and the arts among them. We should wish success to the object of the two empires, if they meant to leave the country in possession of the Greek inhabitants. We might then expect, once more, to see the language of Homer and Demosthenes a living language. For I am persuaded the modern Greek would easily get back to its classical models. But this is not intended. They only propose to put the Greeks under other masters; to substitute one set ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 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
... TO THE PEACE OF NICIAS (421 B.C.).—Soon after the affair at Mytilene and the destruction of Plataea, an enterprising general of the Athenians, named Demosthenes, seized and fortified a point of land (Pylos) on the coast of Messenia. The Spartans made every effort to dislodge the enemy. In the course of the siege, four hundred Spartans under Brasidas, having landed upon a little island (Sphacteria), were so unfortunate ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... 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 ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... entirely metrical, since this would be poetry (Orator, 220). Greek writers relied for metrical effect in prose on those feet which were not much used in poetry. Aristotle recommended the paean [uuu-]. Cicero preferred the cretic [-u-] which he says is the metrical equivalent of the paean. Demosthenes was especially fond of the cretic. Rhythm pervades the whole sentence but is most important at the end or clausula, where the swell of the period sinks to rest. The ears of the Romans were incredibly sensitive ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... 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 satin slipper, the young girl herself, meanwhile, bending demurely ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... phonograph not only in establishing at first hand the facts of history, but in preserving the human voice. What would we not give to listen to the very accents and tones of the Sermon on the Mount, the orations of Demosthenes, the first Pitt's appeal for American liberty, the Farewell of Washington, or the Address at Gettysburg? Until Edison made his wonderful invention in 1877, the human race was entirely without means for preserving ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... foolish as to let your own difficulties or your own abilities stand in the way. It is said that people would go to hear Cicero and would come away and say, "Did you ever hear anything like it? wasn't it sublime? wasn't it grand?" But they would go and hear Demosthenes, and he would fire them so with the subject that they would want to go and fight at once. They forgot all about Demosthenes, but were stirred by his message; that was the ...
— Men of the Bible • Dwight Moody
... Mackenzie addressed the House with more than his wonted ability. He exposed the flimsiness of the charges against him, and the gross partiality of the proceedings. But the House was in search, not of justice, but of a victim, and neither the eloquence of a Demosthenes nor the reasoning powers of a Pascal would have availed aught with that hostile majority. Attorney-General Boulton, in the course of the discussion, delivered himself of a tempest of characteristic abuse against the accused, to whom he referred as a reptile. Solicitor-General Hagerman could ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the Greeks and Persians held intimate relations with each other as early as the fourth century B.C., and from the speech of Demosthenes against a proposed war with Persia, delivered in 354 B.C, we may well believe that they had already had a long and intimate connection with each ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... 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 ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... is, the great orator. "Many a fiery Alp;" that is, high volcanic mountain. "Such is the following application of famous names; a Solomon for a wise man, a Croesus for a rich man, a Judas for a traitor, a Demosthenes for an orator, and a Homer for ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... course, is saying a great deal. There are speakers there, lots of them that can talk two or three hours at a stretch, but the old war horse could beat them all. They say that when John Henry Bagshaw got well started, say after a couple of hours of talk, he could speak as Pericles or Demosthenes or Cicero never ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... two books of the original, comprising the apophthegms of Socrates, Aristippus, Diogenes, Philippus, Alexander, Antigonus, Augustus Caesar, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Phocion, Cicero, and Demosthenes. ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various
... 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 ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... which other speakers confide, or are believed to confide, when they are 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of his life Richard did not cast behind him classical reading. He spoke copiously and powerfully about Cicero. He had read, and he had understood, the four orations of Demosthenes, read and taught in our public schools. He was at home in Virgil and in Horace. I cannot speak positively about Homer,—but I am very sure that he read the Iliad now and then; not as a professed scholar ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... Mr Donnithorne, as he carefully filled his pipe with precious weed, "your oratorical powers are uncommon! Surely thy talents had been better bestowed in the Church or at the Bar than in the sickroom or the hospital. Demosthenes himself would have paled before thee, lad—though, if truth must be told, there is a dash more sound than sense in ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... marvelled, among many scholars, and, which is to be pitied, among some preachers. Truly, I could wish (if at least I might be so bold to wish, in a thing beyond the reach of my capacity) the diligent imitators of Tully and Demosthenes, most worthy to be imitated, did not so much keep Nizolian paper-books {92} of their figures and phrases, as by attentive translation, as it were, devour them whole, and make them wholly theirs. For now they cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served at the table: like ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... belonging to the same high class. He was wont to pour forth the copious stream of plain, intelligible observations, and indulge in the varied appeals to feeling, memory, and interest, which Lord Brougham sets down as characteristic of ancient oratory. It has been said that while Demosthenes was a sculptor, Burke was a painter. Mr. Webster was distinctly more of the former than the latter. He rarely amplified or developed an image or a description, and in this he followed the Greek rather than the Englishman. Dr. Francis ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... remember that Greece, in spite of her AEschylus, Sophocles, Xenophon, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato, and Aristotle, perished because her independent states would not combine against ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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 ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... separate art, which was called Rhetoric, and of which the 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
... Wordsworth's pamphlet was the finest piece of political 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
... there was Bouffon Le Grand—another extraordinary personage in his way. He grew deranged through love, and fancied himself possessed of two heads. One of these he maintained to be the head of Cicero; the other he imagined a composite one, being Demosthenes' from the top of the forehead to the mouth, and Lord Brougham's from the mouth to the chin. It is not impossible that he was wrong; but he would have convinced you of his being in the right; for he was a man of great eloquence. He had an absolute ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... trap. The saddest case I can remember is that of poor Charles Vanderpoop. He was a bright young lad, and showed some promise of rising to heights as a slacker. He fell in this fashion. One Easter term his form had half-finished a speech of Demosthenes, and the form-master gave them to understand that they would absorb the rest during the forthcoming term. Charles, being naturally anxious to do as little work as possible during the summer months, ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... flow of words, command of words, command of language; copia verborum[Lat]; power of speech, gift of the gab; usus loquendi[Lat]. speaker &c. v.; spokesman; prolocutor, interlocutor; mouthpiece, Hermes; orator, oratrix[obs3], oratress[obs3]; Demosthenes, Cicero; rhetorician; stump orator, platform orator; speechmaker, patterer[obs3], improvisatore[obs3]. V. speak of; say, utter, pronounce, deliver, give utterance to; utter forth, pour forth; breathe, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments—from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to Mr. Brougham. Our course is rather that of a good-humoured expose, the worst effect of which will be to raise a laugh at the expense of poor humanity, or a merited smile at our own dulness and mistaken sense of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... sir, that Burke has read Cicero much?' JOHNSON. 'I don't 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 ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... drawing in the entire collection is No. 89. Never did Keene show greater mastery over his material. In this drawing every line of the black-lead pencil is more eloquent than Demosthenes' most eloquent period. The roll and the lurch of the vessel, the tumult of waves and wind, the mental and physical condition of the passengers, all are given as nothing in this world could give them except that magic pencil. The figure, the man that the wind blows out of the picture, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... 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
... and his admirable faculty of making the commonplace seem fresh and picturesque, his positiveness wearied me at times, and his frequent sacrifices of truth to effect kept me in a questioning attitude very unlike the attitude of reverence in which I had listened to the Demosthenes ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... 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
... candidates. One Isaac Cook—Headmaster of Ripon—explained as shewing the high value of his Classical attainments that when he was elected to Ripon he was examined "with another candidate in Terence, Cicero, Tacitus, the Greek Testament and Demosthenes, and ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... 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 ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... of the three Men and their Bag of Money (Vol. ii., p. 132.).—In Tales, and quicke Answers, very mery, and pleasant to rede, is the following, with the title "Howe Demosthenes defended a Mayde:"— ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... incomparable in their kind. The merit of the latter is, perhaps, rather oratorical than poetical; nor can I recollect anything in the great Athenian speeches which equals it in force of invective and bitterness of sarcasm. I have heard the most eloquent statesman of the age remark that, next to Demosthenes, Dante is the writer who ought to be most attentively studied by every man who ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Latin in his writings, but his allusions to Greek literature are such as leave no doubt that he had a liberal education. In his earliest works he refers to Plato; in later years he quotes Homer, and models his notes on Aristotle, his Apology to Constantius on Demosthenes. To Egyptian idolatry he seldom alludes. Scripture, however, is his chosen and familiar study, and few commentators have ever shown a firmer grasp of certain of its leading thoughts. He at least ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... light 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 ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the local history, and thus touched the patriotism of his audience in the parish bounds, and the past glories of America were revived in terms of a new and strange flattery. We were like the Athenians after hearing the Philippics of Demosthenes,—all ready to march against the Austrian. Before he left New York I had volunteered to fight or conspire, or take any part in the struggle which might fall to me. I kept my counsel from my family, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... advantage in our progress through human life. Cicero deserves to be studied still more for his talents than for the improvement in language to be derived from reading him. He was unquestionably, with the single exception of Demosthenes, the greatest orator among the ancients. He was too a profound Philosopher. His 'de ofiiciis' is among the most valuable treatises I have ever seen in ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... me and I believed there must be something wrong with a fellow who could conceive such a stupendous undertaking. Surely no one would think for a moment of putting it into execution! I also read with stolid indifference of the Herculean feats of labor performed by men known to history. For example, Demosthenes copied in his own handwriting Thucydides' History eight times, merely to make himself familiar with the style of that great man. An incident that appealed to me in a more ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... 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
... system. He says, "And a better and nearer example herein may be our most noble Queen Elizabeth, who never took yet Greek nor Latin grammar in her hand after the first declining of a noun and a verb; but only by this double translating of Demosthenes and Isocrates daily, without missing, every forenoon, and likewise some part of Tully every afternoon, for the space of a year or two, hath attained to such a perfect understanding in both tongues, and to such a ready utterance of the Latin, and that with such a judgment as there be few now ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... and Demosthenes, called by Cicero the prince of orators, has, according to Hermippus, more of art than of nature. To Demades, his orations appear too much laboured; others have thought him too dry; and, if we may trust AEschines, his language ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of passion upon the Ossa of elocutionary correctness, still without surmounting the zone of plant life; which in the Arts, sir, must extend higher than geographers concede. And yet I evoked laughter; from which I may conclude that my efforts amused. The great Demosthenes, sir, practised declamation with his mouth full of pebbles—for retaliatory purposes, I ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... competition with his 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... vain to attempt to give any one 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 ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... compare the events of ancient times with the modern, and discover the causes which produced revolutions, and show that, generally, in the world, virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Later, he can learn a short course of logic, free from all pedantry; then study the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes, and read the tragedies of Racine. When older, he should have some knowledge of the opinions of philosophers, and the different religious sects, without inspiring him with dislike for any one sect. Make it clear to him that we all worship God—only in different ways. It ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... many busts of great men to adorn the Galerie des Consuls, the only 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 ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... of 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
... eschewing license, Fare to what chequered fate the will of Heaven Reserves for them, than shackled by the chains The wisest tyrant, gilding servitude With seeming gains, imposes. We are free In speech, in council, in debate, in act, As when our great Demosthenes hurled back Defiance to the tyrant. Nay, my lord, Forgive my open speech. I have not forgot That we are one in heart and mind and soul, Knit in sweet bonds for ever. Put from thee This jaundiced humour. If State-craft please not, by the headlong chase Which once I know thou lovedst. Do not grudge ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... clear insight discerned what is now universally recognized, that he was "encumbered by a burning imagination." She told him that he was apt to light up any object he looked upon, "just as we, when we carried torches into the Vatican, were not clear as to how much we brought to that wonderful Demosthenes, folding the marble round him in its thousand folds," and questioned as to where was the dividing line between the sculptor and the torch-bearer. This fairly clairvoyant insight of Mrs. Browning into character, the ability to discern defects as well as virtues where she loved, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... the lecture, but most of the quotations I recited from memory. Not having had any lessons in elocution, I trusted to my natural voice, and felt that in this new role the less gesticulation I used the better. Whether the advice of Demosthenes is rightly translated or not—first requisite, action; second, action; third, action—I am sure that English word does not express the requisite for women. I should rather call it earnestness—a conviction that what you ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... 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 of Scylla and Charybdis, it ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... draw a bit. Her mother's fine contempt for ladylike accomplishments had even intervened in the high-school days to prevent her taking a free-hand course required in the curriculum, during which you spent weeks making a charcoal study of a bust of Demosthenes. But this lack never even occurred to Rose as a handicap. She hadn't the faintest impulse to make a beginning by putting a picture down on paper and making a dress of it afterward. She went straight at her materials, or the equivalent of her materials, as a sculptor goes at his clay. She ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... wasn't the first orathor livin', barrin' Cicero or Demosthenes himself, I couldn't schrew a penny out o' you! Now, Pether, there's a specimen of logic for you; an' if it wasn't good, depind upon it the money would be in your pocket still. I've never known you to give a penny for any charitable purpose, since ever I ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... in peaceful times, of which we now speak, will not produce orators like Patrick Henry and James Otis at the opening of our Revolutionary struggle, like Mirabeau in France, or Cicero in Rome, pleading for a dying republic, or Demosthenes in Athens contending hopelessly against the domination of one ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... he who 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
... conceal the meanness of their body by the glory of their virtue? You see; the wisest man of his day actually went so far as to use the mirror as an instrument of moral discipline. Again, who is ignorant of the fact that Demosthenes, the greatest master of the art of speaking, always practised pleading before a mirror as though before a professor of rhetoric? When that supreme orator had drained deep draughts of eloquence in the study ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... and finding their fates among the stars. But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hired him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no more just then than such ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... own days. According to this prejudice, oratory depends more upon its subject than history, and poetry yet more than oratory. Our times, therefore, show more regard to Herodotus and Suetonius, than to Demosthenes and Cicero, and more to all these than to Homer or Virgil. Of this prejudice, there are regular gradations; and to come back to the point which we have left, we show, for the same imperceptible reason, less regard to tragick poets ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 1840 he published his "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
... as he was in the senate, and supreme at the tribunal, nor prevent his recording him as a furious and pernicious man; the whole city of Athens must not stop his relation of the Sicilian slaughter, the seizure of Demosthenes, {53b} the death of Nicias, their violent thirst, the water which they drank, and the death of so many of them whilst they were drinking it. He will imagine (which will certainly be the case) that no man in his ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... Lord Cromer always openly and frankly prepared his speeches, and I have seen him entranced in the process. As he always had a classical reference for everything he did, he was in the habit of mentioning that Demosthenes also was unwilling to "put his faculty at the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 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 on any moral or psychological subject ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... me, I am for the present a sort of lion. My speech has set me in the front rank, if I can keep there; and it has not been my luck hitherto to lose ground when I have once got it. Sheil and I are on very civil terms. He talks largely concerning Demosthenes and Burke. He made, I must say, an excellent speech; too florid ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... many men, wealthier than you and me, have accepted the offers of those who came forward to indemnify the persecuted for the demolition of their property. Ask yourself if Demosthenes or Milton, the two most illustrious defenders of liberty, by speech and pen, would have thrust aside the tribute which is due to such men alone. Would you dash out the signature of one who declares ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... exemplary a life, was so busy in virtue, so unblemished of fault, that he could not be overlooked by the managers of the quadrennial national performance, searching with Demosthenes' lantern for a man against whom nothing could be said. They called Eric from private life to be headliner in ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... multiloquence^; burst of eloquence; facundity^; flow of words, command of words, command of language; copia verborum [Lat.]; power of speech, gift of the gab; usus loquendi [Lat.]. speaker &c v.; spokesman; prolocutor, interlocutor; mouthpiece, Hermes; orator, oratrix^, oratress^; Demosthenes, Cicero; rhetorician; stump orator, platform orator; speechmaker, patterer^, improvisatore^. V. speak of; say, utter, pronounce, deliver, give utterance to; utter forth, pour forth; breathe, let fall, come out with; rap out, blurt out have on one's lips; have at the end of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Then did I know what spells of infinite choice, To rouse or lull, hath the sweet human voice; Then did I seem to seize the sudden clue To that grand troublous Life Antique—to view, Under the rockstand of Demosthenes, Mutable Athens heave ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Demosthenes and Cicero Are doubtless stately names to hear, But that of good Amphitryon Sounds far more pleasant ...
— 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.
... compelled my grandfather, as Paul was driven, in his epistle to the Corinthians, and as Demosthenes was forced in his oration for the crown, to enter somewhat upon his own past record. Though a very modest and unpretentious man, yet it is said that the author of the Log-Book, on this memorable occasion straightened himself up, and boldly referred his hearers to the glorious days of the war ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... news-papers.' Sir Adam mentioned the orators, poets, and artists of Greece. JOHNSON. 'Sir, I am talking of the mass of the people. We see even what the boasted Athenians were. The little effect which Demosthenes's orations had upon them, shews ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... their wisedome and eloquence, to a better state, and also to be exquisite in thother, is a thing of all most [Sidenote: Demosthe- nes. Tisias. Gorgias. Eschines[.] Tullie. Cato.] noble and excellent. The eloquence of Demosthenes, Isocra- tes, Tisias, Gorgias, Eschines, were a great bulwarke and staie to Athens and all Grece, Rome also by the like vertue of Eloquence, in famous and wise orators vpholded: the wise and eloquente Oracions of Tullie againste Catiline. The graue and sentencious ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... of Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator, was cast in evil times. The glorious days of his country's brilliant political pre-eminence among Grecian States, and of her still more brilliant pre-eminence as a leader and torch-bearer to the world ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... I, Studies in Eloquence: Introductory; History of Eloquence; Life and Character of Demosthenes; Oration on the Crown; Inferences; Inferences (continued); Inferences (continued); Inferences (concluded).—Part II, Studies in Logic: Introductory; Argumentation; Classification; Practical ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it is to be confessed, is no slight recommendation; but he is to be highly commended for not losing that advantage, and adding to a propriety of speech which might pass the criticism of Longinus, an action which would have been approved by Demosthenes. He has a peculiar force in his way, and has many of his audience who could not be intelligent hearers of his discourse were there not explanation as well as grace in his action. This art of his is used with the most ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the performance we were invited by Mr. Harris to a supper of some thirty persons, where we were the special guests. The manager toasted me, and I said something,—I trust appropriate; but just what I said is as irrecoverable as the orations of Demosthenes on the seashore, or the sermons of St. Francis to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... than the ordinary run of Mishmees, but they are just as dirty. Khosha is a little man, with a mahogany-coloured wrinkled face. Great attention was paid by their attendants to all they said, and Khosha himself is evidently the Demosthenes of the Mishmees. When interrupted, he commanded silence in an authoritative way. Krisong was not present. Khosha declares that Rooling, the Mezhoo chief, is nobody, and that Wilcox gave him his present unknown to them. The acquisitions in Botany consisted of some fine Cyrtandraceae, a ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... venerable institution of learning, on coming to Memorial Hall, will find at the theater end, on the outside and just above the cornice, seven niches containing gigantic busts of these seven orators: Demosthenes, the Greek; Cicero, the Roman; Chrysostom, the Asiatic Greek; Bossuet, the Frenchman; Chatham, the Englishman; Burke, the Irishman; and Webster, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... down, the old button-maker sleeps with his father (to pluralize his ancestors would be a grave historical error), and Joseph II. reigns in his stead, exercising, I doubt not, over his factory-people the same ingenuity of torture which in old times nearly drove the fags to rebellion. He is a Demosthenes, they say, at vestries, and a Draco at the Board of Guardians; but in the centre of his broad face, marring the platitude of its smooth-shaven respectability, still burns angrily a dark red scar—Guy's sign-manual—which he will carry to ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... port of Lisbon.' He finishes with these noble and avenging threats:—'But let them not be deceived; wherever they put them, such captives have, on their side, the two most powerful advocates in the whole world—their innocence and their misfortune. No Cicero, no Demosthenes can so charm the ear, or so powerfully rouse the mind, as these two defenders; because, among other privileges, God has given them that of being always present, to cry out for justice, to serve both as witnesses and advocates, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... he so far relaxed the severity of his principles as to learn the Greek language and study the great writers. Nor could he help feeling attracted to minds like those of Thucydides and Demosthenes, in sagacity and earnestness so congenial to his own. Nevertheless, his originality is in nothing more conspicuously shown than in his method of treating history. He struck a line of inquiry in which he found no successor. The Origines, if it had remained, would undoubtedly ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... have, in this way, been obnoxious to criticism. Aristotle himself has been accused of ignorance; Aristophanes of impiety and buffoonery; Virgil of plagiarism, and a want of invention; Horace of obscurity; Cicero has been, said to want vigor and connexion, and Demosthenes to be deficient in nature, and in purity of language. Yet these have all survived the censures of the critic, and flourished on to a glorious immortality. Every now and then the world is startled by some new doctrines in matters of taste, some ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... facetious must know the difference between a vice and a commendable study or recreation; for instance, between the love of money or contention and of music or hunting; for men are grieved if twitted with the former, but take it very well if they are laughed at for the latter. Thus Demosthenes the Mitylenean was pleasant enough when, knocking at a man's door that was much given to singing and playing on the harp, and being bid come in, he said, I will, if you will tie up your harp. But the flatterer of Lysimachus was offensive; ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the Fullers may have taken their motto from the words employed by Juvenal in describing the father of Demosthenes, who was a ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... classical knowledge; and, though he had far too much sense to despise the help of 'cribs,' he soon found himself able to get on pretty well without them. He mentions a number of authors, Homer, for example, and Aeschylus, who supplied a motto for 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity '; he reads Demosthenes, partly with a view to Greek law; dips into Plato and Aristotle, and is intensely interested by Cicero's 'De Natura Deorum.' He declares, as I have said, that he cared little for literature in itself; and it is no doubt ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen |
