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"I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech."
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Exlpore more Rhetoric quotes
"Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided."
"True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary and nothing but what is necessary."
"Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding."
"You aren't in the ivy halls of your miserable literature pursuit now. Without wasting more time, will thou cometh to the pointeth? Dost thou wanteth us to stayeth or leaveth?"
"It is absurd to hold that a man should be ashamed of an inability to defend himself with his limbs, but not ashamed of an inability to defend himself with speech and reason; for the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs."
"Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art."
"It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences-makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions."
Explore more quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
"He was very religious he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety."
"The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information."
"The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds."
"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written, I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."
"The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; "tout aboutit en un livre, everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different."
"We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon's image that fits man's imagination, and this accounts for the dragon's appearance in different places and periods."
"The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand."
"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries."
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