The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the wo rds, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real.

Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation.

They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms." Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things.

As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey, This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.

there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.

On the contrary, you will find the greater number of men both ready in conceiving and quick in learning, since such quickness is natural to man. As birds are born to fly, horses to run, and wild beasts to show fierceness, so to us peculiarly belong activity and sagacity of understanding; hence the origin of the mind is thought to be from heaven.

if the arts were taught with greater conciseness they would certainly be more easily understood, and once the true method for their use was revealed, they would be more easy to practice.

We shall distinguish the art of rhetoric from the other arts, and make it a single one of the liberal arts, not a confused mixture of all arts; we shall sep-arate its true properties, remove weak and useless subtleties, and point out the things that are miss-ing.

he was completely silent about method; in a loud sophistic debate over quite useless rules he handed down to us nothing about the use of the art as a universal, but only as a particular.

that the arts of dialectic and rhetoric have been confused by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.

the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?

but he who could speak would be chosen if he wished; and in a contest with a man of any other profession the rhetorician more than any one would have the power of getting himself chosen, for he can speak more persuasively to the multitude than any of them, and on any subject. Such is the nature and power of the art of rhetoric!

that rhetoric is the artificer of persuasion, having this and no other business, and that this is her crown and end.

the knowledge of the other arts has only to do with some sort of external action, as of the hand; but there is no such action of the hand in rhetoric which works and takes effect only through the medium of discourse.

that any one in my house might put any question to him, and that he would answer.

How then is it necessary to regard as just the blame of Helen, who either passionately in love or persuaded by discourse or abducted by force or constrained by divine constraints did the things she did, escaping responsibility every way?

Accordingly, if one must attribute responsibility to Fortune and the god, one must acquit Helen of infamy.

I myself wish to absolve this ill-reputed woman from responsibility, and to show that those who blame her are lying--and, having shown the truth, to put an end to ignorance.

for it is equal error and ignorance to blame the praiseworthy and to praise the blameworthy.

nothing is always seemly or always disgraceful, but the right occasion takes the same things and makes them disgraceful and then alters them and makes them seemly.

a thing might be good for some persons but bad for others, or at one time good and at another time bad for the same person.