Rhetorical Terms Examples

Front 1

Give us this day our daily bread.

Back 1

Synecdoche

Front 2

Brazil won the soccer match.

Back 2

Synecdoche

Front 3

"When I give, I give myself."
(Walt Whitman)

Back 3

Anadiplosis

Front 4

"At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb . . ."
(Elizabeth Bishop, "A Miracle for Breakfast")

Back 4

Anadiplosis

Front 5

"Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task."
(Henry James)

Back 5

Anadiplosis

Front 6

"The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair."
(Howard Griffin, Black Like Me)

Back 6

Anadiplosis

Front 7

"The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it."
(Dylan Thomas on Wales)

Back 7

Anadiplosis

Front 8

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you."

Back 8

Anadiplosis

Front 9

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."
(Rick Blaine in Casablanca)

Back 9

Anaphora

Front 10

"I'm not afraid to die. . . . I'm not afraid to live. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm just afraid I might have to stop talking about myself for five minutes."
(Kinky Friedman, When the Cat's Away)

Back 10

Anaphora

Front 11

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
(Jack London)

Back 11

Antithesis

Front 12

"Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
(advertising slogan)

Back 12

Antithesis

Front 13

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
(Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at St. Louis, 1964)

Back 13

Antithesis

Front 14

"You're easy on the eyes
Hard on the heart."
(Terri Clark)

Back 14

Antithesis

Front 15

"All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself."
(Shantideva)

Back 15

Antithesis

Front 16

"The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression."
(Harold Pinter)

Back 16

Antithesis

Front 17

"I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me."
(Ovid)

Back 17

Chiasmus

Front 18

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair."
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth I.i)

Back 18

Chiasmus

Front 19

"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
(Samuel Johnson)

Back 19

Chiasmus

Front 20

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
(Alfred North Whitehead)

Back 20

Chiasmus

Front 21

"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."
(Winston Churchill)

Back 21

Chiasmus

Front 22

"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults."
(Peter De Vries)

Back 22

Chiasmus

Front 23

"Don't sweat the petty things--and don't pet the sweaty things."
(anonymous)

Back 23

Chiasmus

Front 24

"Never let a fool kiss you--or a kiss fool you."
(anonymous)

Back 24

Chiasmus

Front 25

• "My job is not to represent Washington to you, but to represent you to Washington."
(Barack Obama)

Back 25

Chiasmus

Front 26

"A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir to a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deni'st the least syllable of thy addition."
(William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, II.2)

Back 26

Invective

Front 27

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. . . . God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wishwash. Extermine them, slime."
(D.H. Lawrence, letter to editor Edward Garnett)

Back 27

Invective

Front 28

"Well, of course, this is just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement, you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn't become a Freemason now if you went down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me."
(John Cleese in Monty Python's "The Architect Sketch")

Back 28

Invective

Front 29

"We are not amused."
(Attributed to Queen Victoria)

Back 29

Litotes

Front 30

"for life's not a paragraph
And death I think is no parenthesis"
(e.e. cummings, "since

Back 30

Litotes

Front 31

"O brawling love! O loving hate! . . .
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this."
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)

Back 31

Oxymoron

Front 32

"That building is a little bit big and pretty ugly."
(James Thurber)

Back 32

Oxymoron

Front 33

• the expressions "act naturally," "original copy," "found missing," "alone together," "peace force," "definite possibility," "terribly pleased," "real phony," "ill health," "turn up missing," "jumbo shrimp," "alone together," "loose tights," "small crowd," and "clearly misunderstood"

Back 33

Oxymoron

Front 34

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater."
(William Hazlitt)

Back 34

Ellipses

Front 35

"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them."
(Virginia Woolf)

Back 35

Ellipses