Our political system and methods, however, demanded a separate Secretary of War, and in October President Grant asked me to scan the list of the volunteer generals of good record who had served in the civil war, preferably from the "West."
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

return Footnote 5: Bully Dawson, a swaggering sharper of Whitefriars, is said to have been sketched by Shadwell in the Captain Hackum of his comedy called The Squire of Alsatia.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

The child forced into premature concern with economic remote results may develop a surprising sharpening of wits in a particular direction, but this precocious specialization is always paid for by later apathy and dullness.
— from How We Think by John Dewey

It contains the most careful provision for the education and starting in life of a family of three daughters and seven sons, of whom the youngest seems to have been still an infant.
— from Le Morte d'Arthur: Volume 1 by Malory, Thomas, Sir

The earth-end would be attached to the telephone receivers and to the apparatus, consisting of a spark-gap wheel and other instruments designed to send into space the electrical impulses that could be broken up into dots, dashes and spaces, spelling out words according to the Morse or Continental code—whichever was used.
— from Dick Hamilton's Airship; Or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds by Howard Roger Garis

I could not endure to rob him of the labour of a life, and walk at large oppressed by the consciousness of impotence: of a depressed and sunken spirit; of which groveling meanness would be the chief feature.
— from The Adventures of Hugh Trevor by Thomas Holcroft

you, by holding your lock privately in your right hand, with your fore-finger may flip it over his cheek, and lock it by pressing your fore-finger a little down, after some store of words, and the lock, having hung on a while, seem to pull the key out of his nose.
— from Hocus Pocus; or The Whole Art of Legerdemain, in Perfection. By which the meanest capacity may perform the whole without the help of a teacher. Together with the Use of all the Instruments belonging thereto. by Henry Dean

The prehistoric caves of Spain or the cliff dwellings of the Colorado could not be more interesting than a compilation of these records, including the drawings and sketches, some of which are real works of art.
— from The Emma Gees by Herbert W. McBride

Those crumbling stones, that time-worn archway, those shattered windows, that rusty portcullis, all surely, though imperceptibly, corroding under the ceaseless waste of “calm decay,” and sadly suggestive of wealth, and power, and beauty all buried in the dust of bygone days; and, on the other hand, the lusty present, full of vigour, energy, and bustling life, to be seen in the gaily-decked visitors swarming amidst the ruins in every direction, and to be heard in the loud shouts and ringing laughter of children, and of men and women too, who had sprung back into their childhood’s reckless buoyancy for a brief hour or two.
— from True to his Colours The Life that Wears Best by Theodore P. Wilson

Two Days afterwards Setoc set out with his two Slaves and his Camels, for Arabia Deserta .
— from Zadig; Or, The Book of Fate by Voltaire

n he saw Pony frown he would let his tail drop and stay still, or walk off to the woodshed and keep looking around at Pony to see if he were in earnest.
— from The Flight of Pony Baker A Boy's Town Story by William Dean Howells

The home par excellence of the dreaded 'gator was this dark and sombre sheet of water, for to it almost nightly came the tapirs to quench their thirst and to bathe.
— from In Far Bolivia: A Story of a Strange Wild Land by Gordon Stables

Lower down are schistose sandstones of which the Esquimaux make the heads of their arrows.
— from The Unexploited West A Compilation of all of the authentic information available at the present time as to the Natural Resources of the Unexploited Regions of Northern Canada by Ernest J. Chambers