The thing never got a chance to die, for every day, at one place or another, possible purchasers looked us over, and, as often as any other way, their comment on the king was something like this: “Here’s a two-dollar-and-a-half chump with a thirty-dollar style.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Adj. poetic, poetical; lyric, lyrical, tuneful, epic, dithyrambic &c. n.; metrical; a catalectin[obs3]; elegiac, iambic, trochaic, anapestic[obs3]; amoebaeic, Melibean, skaldic[obs3]; Ionic, Sapphic, Alcaic[obs3], Pindaric.
— from Roget's Thesaurus by Peter Mark Roget

A mere bookish learning is a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it, according to the opinion of Plato, who says, that constancy, faith, and sincerity, are the true philosophy, and the other sciences, that are directed to other ends; mere adulterate paint.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy man’s great indignation), I was transferred to the care, first of a blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic lest I should expose his ignorance; and finally to that of a respectable scholar at the head of a great school on an ancient foundation.
— from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

In sudden low spirits, Twemlow replies, 'I don't think he would.' 'My political opinions,' says Veneering, not previously aware of having any, 'are identical with those of Lord Snigsworth, and perhaps as a matter of public feeling and public principle, Lord Snigsworth would give me his name.'
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

When I subsume under a pure practical law an action possible to me in the world of sense, I am not concerned with the possibility of the action as an event in the world of sense.
— from The Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant

One afternoon he went out with Arthur to the University of California, and, with bated breath and a feeling of religious awe, went through the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics professor lecturing to his classes.
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

che 'nnanzi a li altri piu` presso li stanno; Democrito, che 'l mondo a caso pone, Diogenes, Anassagora e Tale, Empedocles, Eraclito e Zenone; e vidi il buono accoglitor del quale, Diascoride dico; e vidi Orfeo, Tulio e Lino e Seneca morale; Euclide geometra e Tolomeo, Ipocrate, Avicenna e Galieno, Averois, che 'l gran comento feo.
— from Divina Commedia di Dante: Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Never had Edward seen such a perfectly proportioned little figure, nor such a graceful carriage.
— from The Princess Galva: A Romance by David Whitelaw

a fellow without a penny——" Pauline laid her soft, jewelled hand on his arm: "My dear friend, he thinks of it if you do not, and I am much mistaken if dear Nina is not already dazzled by his brilliant qualities.
— from Beatrice Boville and Other Stories by Ouida

A child-poet wandering in fay-haunted Arden, or listening to the harper that frequented the fireside of Polesworth Hall where the boy was a petted page, later the honoured almoner of the bounty of many patrons, one who "not unworthily," as Tofte said, "beareth the name of the chiefest archangel, singing after this soule-ravishing manner," yet leaving but "five pounds lying by him at his death, which was satis viatici ad cœlum "—is not this the panorama of a poetic career?
— from Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: Idea, Fidesa and Chloris by Smith, William, active 1596

Constantine Blair began to look out for a candidate for Henstead and to wonder whether Sir Winterton would again expose himself to the unpleasantness of a contested election; Lady Castlefort must find another Prime Minister, the fighting men another champion, even the Alethea Printing Press Limited a new chairman.
— from Quisanté by Anthony Hope

At last a sudden turn revealed a wide opening; but our joy was of short duration; nothing but a perpendicular precipice lay in front of us.
— from Adventures of a Young Naturalist by Lucien Biart

He went on quietly earning a living as a maker of lenses; he refused a professorship, preferring, like Maimonides before him, to rely on other than literary pursuits as a means of livelihood.
— from Chapters on Jewish Literature by Israel Abrahams

But, no; the brutes stand there looking at nothing much until Jack Shiels stares a minute at this horse Beryl Mae is on and pipes up: 'Why, say, I thought Pierce let that little bay runt go to the guy that was in here after polo ponies last Thursday.
— from Somewhere in Red Gap by Harry Leon Wilson

Now, as experience alone can decide what conforms to the feeling of pleasure, and by hypothesis the practical law is to be based on this as a condition, it follows that the possibility of a priori practical laws would be at once excluded, because it was imagined to be necessary first of all to find an object the concept of which, as a good, should constitute the universal though empirical principle of determination of the will.
— from The Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant