Whatever is distinct, is distinguishable; and whatever is distinguishable, is separable by the thought or imagination.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Many a better man than you has lived and died in debt; and they can’t put you in prison, you know, because you’re a peer.”
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

After many protestings by degrees I did arrive at what I would All divided that were bred so long at school together All ended in love
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

“I see that she is happy,” he repeated, and the doubt whether she were happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna’s mind.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

Their wives never came to the island until late in May or early in June, for they did not care to be torn to pieces; and the young two-, three-, and four-year-old seals who had not begun housekeeping went inland about half a mile through the ranks of the fighters and played about on the sand dunes in droves and legions, and rubbed off every single green thing that grew.
— from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

After the receipt of his letter, which was long delayed, I determined at length to write to him no more.
— from Philosophical Works, v. 1 (of 4) Including All the Essays, and Exhibiting the More Important Alterations and Corrections in the Successive Editions Published by the Author by David Hume

The permanence of caste has not been touched; and society has kept its divisions into distinct and almost changeless classes.
— from A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 2 by François Guizot

That he, our hope, might have retir'd his power And driven into despair an enemy's hope Who strongly hath set footing in this land.
— from King Richard the Second by William Shakespeare

“You are not, perhaps, aware, ma’am, that my dog is devotedly attached to your niece.
— from My Lady's Money by Wilkie Collins

In Dieppe, the undoubted centre of the first seismic disturbances, in Dieppe and the outlying districts hell was let loose.
— from The Tremendous Event by Maurice Leblanc

The bitterest portion of the satire with which Miranda invigorates, not the comic spirit, but the morality of his dramas, is directed against the Italian and particularly the Romish priesthood, to whose scandalous mode of life, the basest characters are made, as the most proper 84 witnesses in such a case, to bear ample testimony.
— from History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature (Vol 2 of 2) by Friedrich Bouterwek

The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very little moved by abstract principles of humanity and justice, until those principles are interpreted for them by the stinging commentary of some infringement upon their own rights, and then their instincts and passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable reinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas, those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force till they are allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong or imminent peril.
— from The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V Political Essays by James Russell Lowell

[11] I am greatly disgusted with the cookery-books, especially the pretentious volume of Francatelli’s, on being unable to find any recipe for this delicious Italian dish, and a similar absence of a dozen or two of equally common and excellent preparations familiar to all who have dined at the Lepre (Rome), or other good Italian restaurants.
— from The Chemistry of Cookery by W. Mattieu (William Mattieu) Williams