Can the candle help it?” “No,” I returned; “but cannot the Estella help it?”
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Such a principle must be quite advantageous to reason and can hurt it nowhere in its application to nature.
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant

As Cicero has it, nature is “non artificiosa solum, sed plane artifex.”
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant

These, it is true, played the fool, like my friend Garrick, in jest only; but several eminent characters have, in numberless instances of their lives, played the fool egregiously in earnest; so far as to render it a matter of some doubt whether their wisdom or folly was predominant; or whether they were better intitled to the applause or censure, the admiration or contempt, the love or hatred, of mankind.
— from History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

This latter condition, however, is not indispensable, since the saying or expression has a comic virtue of its own.
— from Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson

A real cold hen is nervous is nervous with a towel with a spool with real beads.
— from Tender Buttons Objects—Food—Rooms by Gertrude Stein

I cannot help it now, I must laugh!
— from Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, No. 5, May 1849 by Various

Equally strange is the omen with which the ancient baronet's family of Clifton, of Clifton Hall, in Nottinghamshire, is forewarned when death is about to visit one of its members.
— from Strange Pages from Family Papers by T. F. (Thomas Firminger) Thiselton-Dyer

In conversation, he is neither impatient, restless, nor hurried, and though he is careful in selecting his words, he attaches more importance to the matter of his discourse than to the manner.
— from The Mentor A little book for the guidance of such men and boys as would appear to advantage in the society of persons of the better sort by Alfred Ayres