Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Eloquence")

March 10—16, 2024 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: "Eloquence”

Opening Line of the Week

Westlake was a master of the opening line—and this is one of his best. The words come from Chester “Chet” Conway, a larger-than-life New York City cab driver with a weakness for playing the ponies and, as this first sentence suggests, a massive capacity for self-delusion. In the tale, he continued:

“That’s always been my problem, eloquence, though some might claim my problem was something else again.”

For nearly 2,000 other memorable opening lines from world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

On March 17, 1680, this man died at age 67 in Paris. Born in 1613 into one of France’s most noble families, he was the oldest of fourteen children. Growing up, he received the education one would expect of a young gentleman-in-training.  In addition to private tutoring in Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, and philosophy, he learned how to fence, hunt, dance, and behave with proper etiquette. 

Well before he exited his teenage years, he was a decorated veteran of French military battles in Italy and other European countries. By all accounts, he was also a dashing and debonair courtier with a propensity for romantic and political intrigue. He ultimately allied himself with The Fronde, a civil insurrection on the part of French nobility against the French monarchy. When the rebellion was crushed, he was stripped of his title as a duc (the French version of a duke), driven from his family's estate, and banished from Paris. 

At age forty, he was broke, badly wounded, and without much hope. During his recovery, he began re-reading the Greek and Roman classics he studied as a child, recording his own thoughts and reflections as he did. In 1665, he published Maximes (in English “maxims”), a volume of approximately 500 observations stimulated by his reading of ancient authors. Formally, a maxim is a pithy quotation that attempts to express truth or wisdom in a succinct way. A close synonym is aphorism.

As the years passed, he continued to unveil more of his maxims in subsequent editions. Ultimately, Maximes became one of history’s great literary treasures, and it has remained in continuous print for more than 350 years. This week’s Mystery Man is often hailed as “history’s greatest aphorist,” and he is clearly deserving of the tribute. Many of his saying are eloquently phrased, and it seems fitting that two of his most famous maxims were on the subject of eloquence: 

Who is this person? (Answer below)

Have You Ever Been Stirred by Eloquence?

The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) defines eloquence as “Persuasive, powerful discourse; the skill or power of using such discourse.” The word derives from the Latin loqui, to speak, which is also the root of such English words as circumlocution, grandiloquent, and loquacious.

I don’t typically quibble with AHD definitions, but this one is inadequate in two important ways: (1) it fails to capture the elevated nature of eloquence and (2) it completely ignores the elevating impact eloquence has on people.

Since ancient times, great thinkers and writers have acknowledged the critical importance of eloquence in human affairs, and many of the things they’ve said have a distinctly modern feel. In his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (3rd c. A.D.) Diogenes Laërtius quoted the 4th-century B. C. philosopher Demetrius as saying:

“Everything that steel achieves in war can be won in politics by eloquence.”

In 102 A.D., the Roman historian known to modern readers as Tacitus wrote in A Dialogue Concerning Oratory:

“Great eloquence, like fire, grows with its material; it becomes fiercer with movement, and brighter as it burns.”

In his Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal wrote:

“Eloquence is a painting of thought.”

And in an 1825 lecture, William Cullen Bryant offered what I regard as the single best thing ever said on the subject:

“Eloquence is the poetry of prose.”

While eloquence is indisputably beautiful, it can also be enormously inspirational. And when the words of another person propel us into action, it has an enlivening or rejuvenating quality. It is appropriate that the Latin root spir (the root of such words as inspiration, respiration, and spiritual) literally means “to breathe into” or “to breathe life into.” 

Eloquence is always welcome, but history has shown that it becomes indispensable during the most dangerous of times. We saw this happen in a dramatic way during the American War of Independence. On Dec. 19, 1776, the Pennsylvania Journal published “The Crisis,” the first of thirteen pamphlets written by Thomas Paine. The words of that document were so stirring that four days later—and three days before the historic Battle of Trenton—George Washington read the entire pamphlet to his battle-weary and half-frozen troops. Today, we still recall Paine’s eloquent opening words:

“These are the times that try men’s souls." 

Indispensable rhetoric also showed up during the darkest days of World War II, when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill kept hope alive among British citizens with his Parliament speeches and radio broadcasts. Churchill’s words were so critical to the survival of England that Edward R. Murrow famously said of him:

“He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen and hearten those Europeans upon whom the long dark night of tyranny had descended.”

Earlier, I described eloquence as elevated speech, and I did so because it rises so far above regular speech that it is often referred to as soaring. In large part, eloquence achieves great heights through the use of figures of speech. In a June 4, 1940 address in Parliament, for example, Churchill used the rhetorical device known as anaphora in these famous words:

“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”

Note here that Churchill repeats the phrase we shall or we shall not a total of eleven times. Martin Luther King, Jr. did something similar in his 1963 March on Washington speech, repeating the phrase “I have a dream” nine separate times in the most memorable portion of the address.

Perhaps the most famous example of a eloquently-phrased figure of speech occurred on January 20, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy employed the literary device known as chiasmus in his inaugural address:

“And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Let me bring my remarks to a close by posing one simple question: Why do people respond with such existential enthusiasm to displays of eloquence? I’ve pondered this question for many years, but have never formulated a completely satisfying answer—until this past week. And I have David Crystal—the celebrated English linguist and one of my favorite nonfiction authors—to thank for it.

While doing the research for this week’s newsletter, I happened upon Crystal’s 2016 book The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works (2016). In the first chapter, he answered the question about as well as it is possible to be answered. For eloquence to occur, he suggested, it must appeal to our reason, our emotions. and our aesthetic sensibility. That is, it must simultaneously persuade us, move us, and delight us. Well done, professor Crystal.

This week, take a few moments to think about how your life has been affected by eloquent words. Before doing anything, though, take a few moments to peruse this week’s selection of quotations on the subject: 

• Eloquence is the art of translating thought into language of the heart. — Sarah Knowles Bolton

• Eloquence is the verbal equivalent of a black dress and pearls. — Carl Bowers

• Eloquent speech is not from lip to ear, but rather from heart to heart. — William Jennings Bryan

• The truest eloquence is that which holds us too mute for applause. — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

• In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Eloquence may set fire to reason. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

• Eloquence is the art of clothing thoughts in such a garb of language that the words excite emotions which the thoughts themselves might fail to awaken. — Maria Mitchell

• Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information. — Mark Twain

• But to a higher mark than song can reach,/Rose this pure eloquence. — William Wordsworth 

• Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction. — William Zinsser

QUOTE NOTE: Zinsser preceded the observation by contrasting eloquence with plain speech, writing: “Ultimately eloquence runs on a deeper current. It moves us with what it leaves unsaid, touching off echoes in what we already know from our reading, our religion and our heritage.”

For source information on these quotations, and many others on the topic of ELOQUENCE, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Narcissism”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note