Although you call out, and confound the sea and sky, you still address a deaf man.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

When chosen a priest of the college of Augurs, whom the Romans appoint to watch and register the omens derived from the flight of birds, or the signs of the heavens, he so carefully applied himself to learning the ancient customs and religion of his ancestors, that the priesthood, hitherto merely considered as an empty title of honour and sought after for that reason only, became regarded as the sublimest craft of all, confirming the saying of the philosophers, that holiness consists in a knowledge of how to serve the gods.
— from Plutarch's Lives, Volume 1 (of 4) by Plutarch

And, contrariwise (III. xiii.), it endeavours to exclude the existence of such things as affect us painfully; therefore, we endeavour to affirm concerning ourselves, and concerning the loved object, whatever we conceive to affect ourselves, or the love object pleasurably.
— from Ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza

But now his commanders and soldiers met in several companies, and consulted openly about changing the public affairs; and, out of their indignation, cried out, how "at Rome there are soldiers that live delicately, and when they have not ventured so much as to hear the fame of war, they ordain whom they please for our governors, and in hopes of gain make them emperors; while you, who have gone through so many labors, and are grown into years under your helmets, give leave to others to use such a power, when yet you have among yourselves one more worthy to rule than any whom they have set up.
— from The Wars of the Jews; Or, The History of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Flavius Josephus

He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all C things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

For, the will being the power of directing our operative faculties to some action, for some end, cannot at any time be moved towards what is judged at that time unattainable: that would be to suppose an intelligent being designedly to act for an end, only to lose its labour; for so it is to act for what is judged not attainable; and therefore very great uneasinesses move not the will, when they are judged not capable of a cure: they in that case put us not upon endeavours.
— from An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books 1 and 2 by John Locke

We have the clearest evidence that this process is developing in connection with these special instincts that make for war; for we men and women in these later times are repelled by the results of the functioning of these fighting instincts, and we have created the ideal of peace, the conception of a condition that is not now realized in nature, but which we think of as possible of realization.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

You are now of an age to choose your line of life or at least make choice of a calling that will bring you honour and profit when you are older; and what I have resolved to do is to divide my property into four parts; three I will give to you, to each his portion without making any difference, and the other I will retain to live upon and support myself for whatever remainder of life Heaven may be pleased to grant me.
— from The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Besides the chance of a check to emigration generally, the influx of strangers is often extremely capricious in the direction it takes, flowing one year into one particular locality, and afterwards into another.
— from Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie

Deep layer of giant pyramidal cells of the posterior central or ascending parietal convolution of a child thirty days old 119 14.
— from Psychotherapy Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease by James J. (James Joseph) Walsh

On one hand that more important division of the earth, extending from the Western coast of Africa to the Eastern coast of Asia, comprises the three ancient continents, which, from the upper to the middle part, occupy almost the whole space of this half of the globe.
— from The Philosophy of History, Vol. 1 of 2 by Friedrich von Schlegel

Nevertheless, thanks to the influence of this bourgeois spirit upon the intellects that in American towns must live with, if not share it; thanks, also, to the magazines through which our finer minds must appeal to the public rather than to a circle or a clique, the nerves of transfer between the community at large and the intellectuals are active, the tendons that unite them strong.
— from Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series] by Henry Seidel Canby

28 Improvement societies, properly organized for the purpose of improving and ornamenting the streets and public squares of any city or town by planting and cultivating ornamental trees therein, may be authorized by any town to use, take care of, and control the public grounds or open spaces in any of its public ways, not needed for public travel.
— from The Road and the Roadside by Burton Willis Potter

Is it as conquerors of a city to be added to France?
— from Lord Palmerston by Anthony Trollope

I noticed one evening that a respectable, quiet-looking young couple, with an old lady in widow's weeds, whom I immediately decided was the widowed mother of either husband or wife (for of course they were husband and wife) went to look at the empty house, attended by the little old man; and from the fact, that after looking at the premises for a longer time than visitors usually did, the party came out, and, contrary to custom, all four walked away together, I was led to suppose that I might have opposite neighbors.
— from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. VII, December 1850, Vol. II by Various

When Mr. Rennie, the engineer, was engaged in surveying the Weald with a view to the cutting of a canal through it in 1802, he found the country almost destitute of practicable roads, though so near to the metropolis on the one hand and to the sea-coast on the other.
— from The Life of Thomas Telford, Civil Engineer With an Introductory History of Roads and Travelling in Great Britain by Samuel Smiles

I mean the theory that “pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are the correlatives of acts conducive to its welfare.”
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

But, the character of a criminal, though it may be urged by himself as a proof of his innocence, is never to be mentioned by his prosecutor as an aggravation or proof of his guilt.
— from The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Volume 10 Parlimentary Debates I by Samuel Johnson