Yea, but you will infer, your mistress is complete, of a most absolute form in all men's opinions, no exceptions can be taken at her, nothing may be added to her person, nothing detracted, she is the mirror of women for her beauty, comeliness and pleasant grace, inimitable, merae deliciae, meri lepores , she is Myrothetium Veneris, Gratiarum pixis , a mere magazine of natural perfections, she hath all the Veneres and Graces,— mille faces et mille figuras , in each part absolute and complete, [5726] Laeta genas laeta os roseum, vaga lumina laeta : to be admired for her person, a most incomparable, unmatchable piece, aurea proles, ad simulachrum alicujus numinis composita, a Phoenix, vernantis aetatulae Venerilla , a nymph, a fairy,
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Very slight matters were enough to gall him in his sensitive mood, and the sight of Dorothea driving past him while he felt himself plodding along as a poor devil seeking a position in a world which in his present temper offered him little that he coveted, made his conduct seem a mere matter of necessity, and took away the sustainment of resolve.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Clergy have means and material: means, of number, organization, social weight; a material, at lowest, of public ignorance, known to be the mother of devotion.
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

It would be a kind of treason to proceed after this manner in our own domestic affairs, wherein a man must of necessity be of the one side or the other; though for a man who has no office or express command to call him out, to sit still I hold it more excusable (and yet I do not excuse myself upon these terms) than in foreign expeditions, to which, however, according to our laws, no man is pressed against his will.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

I will then say, that if a man must, of necessity, owe something, it ought to be by a more legitimate title than that whereof I am speaking, to which the necessity of this miserable war compels me; and not in so great a debt as that of my total preservation both of life and fortune: it overwhelms me.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

(The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.)
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Now this concept brings the Reason into a quite different order of things from that of a mere mechanism of nature, which is no longer satisfying here.
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant

For as one alternative we may explain all Teleology as a mere deception of the Judgement in its judging of the causal combination of things, and fly to the sole principle of a mere mechanism of nature, which merely seems to us, on account of the unity of the Substance of whose determinations nature is but the manifold, to contain a universal reference to purposes.
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant

First, dire Chimaera's conquest was enjoin'd; A mingled monster of no mortal kind!
— from The Iliad by Homer

And for that from this time forth whosoever relateth of the appointed matter must of necessity speak within these limits, [91] I shall think no shame to tell a story, which, albeit it compriseth in itself yet greater distresses hath not withal so splendid an issue.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

He unhobbled the beast, hung on by the mane, mounted, and set off bare-back for the road to Gambrevault. XXVIII Dawn climbing red over pinewoods piled on the hills; dawn optimistic yet ominous, harbinger of war and such perils as set the heart leaping and the blood afire; dawn that cried unto the world, "Better one burst of heroism and then the grave, than a miserable monotony of nothingness, a domestic surfeiting of the senses with a wife and a fat larder."
— from Love Among the Ruins by Warwick Deeping

No written laws can be so plain, so pure, But wit may gloss, and malice may obscure; Not those indited by his first command, A prophet graved the text, an angel held his hand.
— from The Works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 10 by John Dryden

It would be pedantic indeed to have devoted so many words to a mere matter of name.
— from The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

I think the prime minister for the time being ought largely to contribute to such a foundation; because his high station and merits must of necessity infect a great number with envy, hatred, lying, and such sort of distempers; and, of consequence, furnish the hospital annually with many incurables.
— from The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. - Volume 07 Historical and Political Tracts-Irish by Jonathan Swift

He made an attempt at a sketch of his views, but as he wrote to Fox in October 1856:— "I found it such unsatisfactory work that I have desisted, [Pg 182] and am now drawing up my work as perfect as my materials of nineteen years' collecting suffice, but do not intend to stop to perfect any line of investigation beyond current work."
— from Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters by Charles Darwin

Perhaps it was a mere matter of nerves, but it seemed to me that morning that it was the cliffs of the Valley.
— from Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories by Florence Finch Kelly

I was not over particular in my pick of friends, being lately landed, and but too glad to take up with the first varlets speaking my own sweet English; after many months of naught but jabbering Spanish sounding in my ears 'twas well and pleasing to hear once more the brave tongue in which my first aves were taught unto me."
— from The Fifth of November A Romance of the Stuarts by Charles S. Bentley

No written laws can be so plain, so pure, But wit may gloss, and malice may obscure; Not those indited by his first command, 320 A prophet graved the text, an angel held his hand.
— from The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Volume 1 With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes by John Dryden

But while all these determinations were being come to, I had had more than one interview with Rooke and Ormond (both of whom had entertained and made much of, nor ceased ever their commendations of, me), since it was very necessary that a decision should be come to as to what was to be my future course.
— from Across the Salt Seas: A Romance of the War of Succession by John Bloundelle-Burton

It was a speck at first; a metaphysical microscope of no conceivable power could have developed its exact shape and colour—a mere speck, floating, as it were, in a transparent kyst, in his soul—a mere germ—by-and-by to be an impish embryo, and ripe for action.
— from Wylder's Hand by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu