Rhetoric is the creature of art. [ H. Holley ]
Spare your rhetoric and speak logic. [ Proverb ]
Rhetoric is the quackery of eloquence. [ Colton ]
Insinuations are the devil's rhetoric. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Sweet, silent rhetoric of persuading eyes. [ Sir W. Davenant ]
The full heart knows no rhetoric of words. [ Bovee ]
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. [ Plato ]
The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason. [ Colton ]
Rhetoric is nothing but reason well dressed and argument put in order. [ Jeremy Collier ]
Rhetoric is very good, or stark naught; there is no medium in rhetoric. [ Selden ]
Rhetoric adorns and enlarges a thing with words, but is of no value without logic. [ Luther ]
There is a truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones. [ W. Penn ]
The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity. [ Whately ]
The two best rules for a system of rhetoric are: first, have something to say; and next, say it. [ George Emmons ]
Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances. [ Bovee ]
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. [ Bacon ]
Rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in; it is the quackery of eloquence, and deals in nostrums, not in cures. [ Colton ]
A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric. [ Bovee ]
Grammar speaks; dialectics teaches us truth; rhetoric gives colouring to our speech; music sings; arithmetic reckons; geometry measures; astronomy teaches us the stars.
By reasoning we satisfy ourselves: by rhetoric we satisfy others. Most modern orators and rhetoricians content themselves with fulfilling the first part of this proposition. [ P. B. Randolph ]
Exaggeration, as to rhetoric, is using a vast force to lift a feather;
as to morals and character, it is using falsehood to lift one's self out of the confidence of his fellow-men. [ Hugo Amot ]
Flowers of rhetoric, in sermons or serious discourses, are like the red and blue flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap the profit. [ Swift ]
In my opinion, the unjust man whose tongue is full of glozing rhetoric, merits the heaviest punishment; vaunting that he can with his tongue gloze over injustice, he dares to act wickedly, yet he is not over-wise. [ Euripides ]
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. [ Lord Bacon ]
Without attempting a formal definition of the word, I am inclined to consider rhetoric, when reduced to a system in books, as a body of rules derived from experience and observation, extending to all communications by language, and designed to make it efficient. [ W. E. Channing ]
Rhetoric is appealing to the passions instead of the reason of your auditors, and claiming that value for the workmanship which ought to be measured by the ore alone. An orator is one who can stamp such a value upon counterfeit coin as shall make it pass for genuine. [ Chatfield ]
Oratory is the huffing and blustering spoiled child of a semi-barbarous age. The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason; and the art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and readers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]
None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances. [ Bovee ]
If thou desire the love of God and man, be humble. The proud heart, as it loves none but itself, is beloved of none. By itself, the voice of humility is God's music, and the silence of humility is God's rhetoric. Humility enforces where neither virtue nor strength can prevail, nor reason. [ Enchiridion ]
Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; the passions are powerful pleaders, and their very silence, like that of Garrick, goes directly to the soul, but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in; it is the quackery of eloquence, and deals in nostrums, not in cures. [ Colton ]
The language of the heart - the language which comes from the heart
and goes to the heart
- is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language - difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied. [ Bovee ]