rhetoric examples

"An envious heart makes a treacherous ear"

Isocolon

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"

anastrophe

"I go, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away"

anastrophe

"One ad does not a survey make"

anastrophe

"It is the best of times, yet the worst of times: we live in unparalleled prosperity, yet have starvation; modern science can perform miracles to save lives, yet we have war; we balance ourselves delicately on the mood, yet destroy the delicate balance on the earth. Young people search for meaning in life, yet are confused, demoralized, frustrated"

antithesis

"What if I am rich, and another is poor--strong, and he is weak--intelligent, and he is benighted--elevated, and he is depraved? Have we not one Father? Hath not one God created us?"

antithesis

"though studious, he was popular; though argumentative, he was modest; though inflexible, he was candid; and though metaphysical, he was orthodox"

antithesis

"your forefathers crossed the great water and land on this island. Their number were small. They found friends and not enemies. They told us they had Feld from their own country for fear of wicked men, and they had come here to enjoy their religion. They asked for a small seat. We took pity on them, granted their request; and they sat down amongst us. We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return"

antithesis

"Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better--splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper"

asyndeton

"I came, I saw, I conquered"

asyndeton

"And he to England shall along with you"

ellipsis

"So singularly clear was the water that when it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom seemed floating on the air! Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep. Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's breadth of sand"

ellipsis

"His purpose was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to confound the scrupulous"

isocolon

"...for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor"

parallelism

"It will be long before out larger life interprets itself in such imagination as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as Longfellow's, such prophesy as Whitler's, such grace as Holmes's, such humor and humanity as Lowell's"

parallelism

"So Janey waited a bloom time, and a green time, and an orange time"

parallelism

"We have seen the state of our Union in the endurance of rescuers, working past exhaustion. We've seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers-- in English, Hebrew, and Arabic"

parallelism

"And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider's thread is blotted with rain drops, and burdened, sags down. So she slept."

parenthesis

"He said he supervised ten editors--another euphemism-- in his department, which clears 90% of NBC's entertainment programming..."

parenthesis

"There is even, and it is the achievement of this book, a curious sense of happiness running through its paragraphs"

parenthesis

"Those two sports are among the darkest of our whole civilization-- pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard), which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves; not like an arrow, but a boomerang"

parenthesis