quotations about arguments & arguing
We may convince others by our arguments; but we can only persuade them by their own.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
MILAN KUNDERA
Encounter
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.
OSCAR WILDE
The Critic as Artist
The quiet shaft of ridicule oftimes does more than argument.
WILLIAM SCARBOROUGH
attributed, And I Quote
And but one word with one of us? Couple it with something; make it a word and a blow.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
If he take you in hand, sir, with an argument,
He'll bray you in a mortar.
BEN JONSON
The Alchemist
And friendly free discussion, calling forth
From the fair jewel, Truth, its latent ray.
JAMES THOMSON
Liberty
Never maintain an argument with heat and clamour, though you think or know yourself to be in the right.
LORD CHESTERFIELD
letter, October 16, 1747
Whenever you argue with another wiser than yourself, in order that others may admire your wisdom, they will discover your ignorance.
SADI
Gulistan
And sheath'd their swords for lack of argument.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry V
In arguing, answer your opponent's earnest with jest and his jest with earnest.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Argument is a gift of Nature.
CHARLES DICKENS
Barnaby Rudge
One single positive weighs more,
You know, than negatives a score.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Epistle to Fleetwood Shepherd
Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be
Others will go on speaking and you will not be able to argue back
RAM MOHAN ROY
attributed, Africa Quarterly, 2006
Brief and bitter the debate.
ROBERT BROWNING
Hervé Riel
You are fond of argument, and now you fancy that I am a bag full of arguments.
SOCRATES
Theaetetus
The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge -- much older than the desire for truth -- to command attention.
BARRY UNSWORTH
Sacred Hunger
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
BEN GOLDACRE
Bad Science
If ifs and ands were pots and pans
There'd be no work for the tinkers.
ROBERT BLACKHOUSE PEACOCK
A glossary of the dialect of the hundred of Lonsdale
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
JOHN MORLEY
On Compromise