I went round by the garden, and laid wait for the messenger; who fought valorously to defend his trust, and we spilt the milk between us; but I succeeded in abstracting the epistle; and, threatening serious consequences if he did not look sharp home, I remained under the wall and perused Miss Cathy’s affectionate composition.
— from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

But if there had been then any Christian, that had had the Power of Teaching before; the Baptizing of him, that is the making of him a Christian, had given him no new Power, but had onely caused him to preach true Doctrine, that is, to use his Power aright; and therefore the Imposition of Hands had been unnecessary; Baptisme it selfe had been sufficient.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

If something is useful, it must be useful because it secures some end; the end must, if we have gone far enough, be valuable on its own account, and not merely because it is useful for some further end.
— from The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Thus in 1870 Bakunin explains that his secret society has been broken up because its secrets have been given away, 869 and that his colleague Netchaïeff has arrived at the conclusion that "in order to found a serious and indestructible society one must take for a basis the policy of Machiavelli."
— from Secret Societies And Subversive Movements by Nesta Helen Webster

And suppose the objector to refine still further, and to draw the nice distinction that not only parts of tops, but whole tops, when they spin round with their pegs fixed on the spot, are at rest and in motion at the same time (and he may say the same of anything which revolves in the same spot), his objection would not be admitted by us, because in such cases things are not at rest and in motion in the same parts of themselves; we should rather say that they have both an axis and a circumference, and that the axis stands still, for there is no deviation from the perpendicular; and that the circumference goes round.
— from The Republic by Plato

There passed no unkind words at all between us, but I seemed fair and went to drink with them.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

As far as I could ken thy chalky cliffs, When from thy shore the tempest beat us back, I stood upon the hatches in the storm; And when the dusky sky began to rob My earnest-gaping sight of thy land's view, I took a costly jewel from my neck- A heart it was, bound in with diamonds- And threw it towards thy land.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Now by a like respect for the good old maxim of “slow and sure,” and by dint of doing a little, or even a very little, every day, there is no lover of poetry and beauty who in the course of a few months might not be as deep as a bee in some of the sweetest flowers of other languages; and it is for readers of this sort that we have not only translated and commented on Greek and other passages in the book before us, but in some instances given intimations of the spirit in which we have studied them;—being anxious to allure to the study such as can find time for it, and to give some [Pg 9] little taste of their exquisiteness to those who cannot.
— from A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla by Leigh Hunt

You asked her if there was any promise of marriage between us before I sailed away on this last cruise.
— from Within the Capes by Howard Pyle

This proved so far satisfactory that Messrs. Gommee, Hills, Murray & Co. and Pavitt's Bank have considered themselves justified in undertaking to finance Barking Brothers until business in South Africa has resumed its ordinary course.
— from The Far Horizon by Lucas Malet

I was sure that if he thought it would profit him he would betray us; but I saw no way out of it now, and the fact that I had killed four Mahars instead of only the three I had expected to, made it possible to include the fellow in our scheme of escape.
— from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

But prithee don't be angry: 'twas agreed upon betwixt us, before I sent you, to make a fool of thee;—ha!
— from William Wycherley [Four Plays] by William Wycherley

Resemblance is to the Reason identity, which in the realm of reality is divided or broken up by immediate sensational impressions, in the sphere of religion by the illusions of the imagination; in short, that which is identical to the reason is made separate by the idea of individuality or personality.
— from The Essence of Christianity Translated from the second German edition by Ludwig Feuerbach

And then her face, chiselled as it were, with large eyes richly eyelashed, and an expression proud and sweet both; a mouth red as a strawberry, or rather the inside of a white fig, and her brow crowned with thick blue-black curly hair, which she bound up behind into such a heavy nest of ringlets that it needed as stately a throat as hers to bear their burden.
— from Barbarossa, and Other Tales by Paul Heyse

It claims to be unsectarian , because its schools take in pupils of all sects and religions.
— from Bahaism and Its Claims A Study of the Religion Promulgated by Baha Ullah and Abdul Baha by Samuel Graham Wilson

"We have a long vigil before us, Burroughs," I said.
— from The Master Detective: Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles by Percy James Brebner

They were not late to luncheon and Miss Campbell had not been uneasy, but it seemed strange to them to be sitting around a snowy damask-spread table in a beautiful big dining-room, with softly treading waiters at every hand to do their bidding and music floating to them from the piazza.
— from The Motor Maids by Palm and Pine by Katherine Stokes