Literary notes about touchstone (AI summary)
The term "touchstone" in literature often serves both as a metaphorical benchmark for authenticity and as a literal tool for testing purity. For instance, Louisa May Alcott employs the term to symbolize the measure of a person's genuine nature, suggesting that a sound and sweet character serves as a touchstone for others’ authenticity [1]. Similarly, in Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates refers to maintaining his fundamental standard of truth when he laments possibly losing his touchstone [2, 3]. Oscar Wilde and Santayana also use the idea to invoke the notion of an unwavering criterion against which ideas or characters are measured [4, 5]. Meanwhile, in works like Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, the term is used more literally—to test gold, thereby drawing a parallel between an established standard of quality and the evaluation of human character or argumentation [6, 7].
- Christie was one of these; and in proportion as her own nature was sound and sweet so was its power as a touchstone for the genuineness of others.
— from Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott - The answer does not satisfy Socrates, who fears that he is losing his touchstone.
— from Gorgias by Plato - What is your meaning, Socrates? SOCRATES: I will tell you; I think that I have found in you the desired touchstone.
— from Gorgias by Plato - There is much virtue in that If, as Touchstone would say.
— from Intentions by Oscar Wilde - It may indeed be said that no man of any depth of soul has made his prolonged existence the touchstone of his enthusiasms.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - Gold can be only known by the application of the touchstone.
— from Ivanhoe: A Romance by Walter Scott - I trust, however, that the facts of this author will be as far from bearing the touchstone, as his arguments.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) by Edmund Burke
