Burnet calls Sir William Coventry the best speaker in the House of Commons, and “a man of the finest and best temper that belonged to the court,” and Pepys never omits an opportunity of paying a tribute to his public and private worth.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

I mentioned above that this cosmological argument contains a perfect nest of dialectical assumptions, which transcendental criticism does not find it difficult to expose and to dissipate.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

And if any offer of alliance or parley of individual elders comes from home, the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and permit no one to enter,—there is a battle, and they gain the victory; and straightway making alliance with the desires, they banish modesty, which they call folly, and send temperance over the border.
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

He stands second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist,—(for the articles of his compositions in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms on particular works)—I look in vain for any writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

But all conditions are precedent, not only in this extreme sense, but also to the existence of the plaintiff's cause of action.
— from The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes

There he saw dazzling camellias expanding themselves, with flowers which were giving forth their last colours and perfumes, not on bushes, but on trees, and within bamboo enclosures, cherry, plum, and apple trees, which the Japanese cultivate rather for their blossoms than their fruit, and which queerly-fashioned, grinning scarecrows protected from the sparrows, pigeons, ravens, and other voracious birds.
— from Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Nobody, I believe, immediately on hearing the sounds, virtue, liberty, or honor, conceives any precise notions of the particular modes of action and thinking, together with the mixed and simple ideas, and the several relations of them for which these Page 272 words are substituted; neither has he any general idea compounded of them; for if he had, then some of those particular ones, though indistinct perhaps, and confused, might come soon to be perceived.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) by Edmund Burke

In one matter the careless and prejudiced nature of accepted racial generalisations is particularly marked.
— from A Modern Utopia by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

In spite of the seeming obstacle imposed by this young girl, the intimacy between Cantor and Potter not only continued, but increased, but beyond a certain point it did not go—and that point was any disclosure of what Potter was doing or how he was doing it.
— from The Highflyers by Clarence Budington Kelland

He was reputed the most extensive planter in the United States; one of the wealthiest men in the whole southern country; and perhaps no other man in this country ever amassed so large a fortune by agriculture.
— from The Every Day Book of History and Chronology Embracing the Anniversaries of Memorable Persons and Events in Every Period and State of the World, from the Creation to the Present Time by Joel Munsell

Morphology and distribution might be studied almost as well, if animals and plants were a peculiar kind of crystals and possessed none of those functions which distinguish living beings so remarkably.
— from Man's Place in Nature, and Other Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley

Her religion had rested originally on two ideas, the might of the gods friendly to Rome, and the force of ceremonial over these gods; 8 and still when she accepted the gods of conquered nations for her own, it was to secure the possession of their might, and to have them for friends instead of foes; while her own worship was a matter of routine and habit jealously guarded by unchanging ceremonies, and prosecuted not out of affection, but for the material security of daily life, which, according to the deeply-rooted feeling of the people, could not go on without it.
— from The Formation of Christendom, Volume II by T. W. (Thomas William) Allies

Finally, in the very year His royal adversary lost his throne, and at the time of the opening of the first American Bahá’í Convention, convened in Chicago for the purpose of creating a permanent national organization for the construction of the Ma sh riqu’l-A dh kár, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá brought His undertaking to a successful conclusion, in spite of the incessant machinations of enemies both within and without.
— from God Passes By by Effendi Shoghi

CHAPTER II: FORM, COLOR AND PROPORTION Never overemphasize one of the dimensions of height, width and depth at the expense of one of the others.
— from How to Prepare and Serve a Meal; and Interior Decoration by Lillian B. Lansdown

So little progress has there been in Spain from the middle ages to to-day in true political science, that we see such butchers as Caballero and Valmaseda repeating to-day the crimes and follies of Cortes and Pamfilo Narvaez, of Pizarro and Almagro, and the revolt of the bloodthirsty volunteers of the Havana is only a question of time.
— from Castilian Days by John Hay