Sophists

but if you do not meet with a teacher—Zeus, or some other such—who quickly and clearly tells you what you must do, you are no better off, not even if you wear away your whole life sleepless and fasting among the ill-starred sophists.

And he understood too that Alexander despised the manner in which he conversed with him, since he had never heard a man skilled in speaking, but admired the discourses of the sophists as lofty and magnificent.

and of these, the voiceless and silent ones are deceived themselves alone, but the most headlong and witless, imitating the first, make an uproar and are eager to deceive others—you would find it the same with the so-called sophists:

for the Lord alone knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are vain" — the Scripture calling "wise," of course, the sophists who are over-curious about phrases and arts.

with a crown of delight she will shield you" — since you too, fortifying her with the parapet of philosophy and of right magnificence, will keep her unassailable by the sophists.

while certain others, exalting themselves, force themselves to find slanders against the words, devising contentious inquiries — hunters of little phrases, zealots of paltry arts, "wranglers and twisters of thongs," as that man of Abdera says:

no, if you will only hear me with good will, I am very confident that those who have been misled as to my pursuits and have been won over by my would-be slanderers will promptly change their views, while those who think of me as I really am will be still more confirmed in their opinion.

Let me ask you, however, not to pay any attention to what you have heard about me in the past from my would-be slanderers and calumniators, not to credit charges which have been made without proof or trial, and not to be influenced by the suspicions which have been maliciously implanted in you by my enemies, but to judge me to be the kind of man which the accusation and the defense in this trial will show me to be;

The fact is that, although I have known that some of the sophists traduce my occupation, saying that it has to do with writing speeches for the courts, very much as one might have the effrontery to call Pheidias, who wrought our statue of Athena, a doll-maker, or say that Zeuxis and Parrhasius practiced the same art as the sign-painters, nevertheless I have never deigned to defend myself against t …

Perhaps however the sophists are bound to demand their fees in advance, since nobody would pay money for the knowledge which they possess.

but in politics the sophists, who profess to teach the science, never practice it.

On the other hand those sophists who profess to teach politics are found to be very far from doing so successfully.

we, who are thus stripped bare of our stakes by the power of a single letter, or the tribe of sophists, whose art it is to levy tolls upon their words.

But we, my admirable friend, keep company with Moses and Elijah and men so blessed as these, who tell us their own affairs in the barbarian tongue;

Not that in disavowing these subjects of instruction I am impugning the reputation of those who have chosen the profession of sophist, but my reason is that the truth of the matter happens to be as follows:

that such speeches are quite as ineffectual as the legal codes and constitutions drawn up by the sophists;

But you will be in the best position to discover with accuracy whether there is any truth in what I say if you put aside the prejudices which are held against the sophists and against speeches which are composed to be read, and take them up one by one in your thought and scrutinize them, not making it a casual task, nor one to be attacked in a spirit of indifference, but with the close reasoning a …

And everyone who is capable of equivocation and glossing-over, whether in himself, by making it be fancied that he is a sage when he is no sage, is a sophist.

Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call sophists and regard as their rivals, inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Or are you too one of the multitude who believe that there are young men who are corrupted by the sophists, and that there are sophists in private life who corrupt to any extent worth mentioning, and that it is not rather the very men who talk in this strain who are the chief sophists and educate most effectively and mould to their own heart’s desire young and old, men and women?

This was the mode employed by Socrates in opposition to that used by the Sophists.

Those who offer it to all comers for money are known as sophists, prostitutors of wisdom, but we think that he who makes a friend of one whom he knows to be gifted by nature, and teaches him all the good he can, fulfils the duty of a citizen and a gentleman.