I could show that among these four kinds of inequality, personal qualities being the origin of all the others, wealth is the one to which they are all reduced in the end; for, as riches tend most immediately to the prosperity of individuals, and are easiest to communicate, they are used to purchase every other distinction.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Clerk also points out that a necessary corollary of the lee-gage, assumed for tactical reasons, is to aim at the assailant's spars, his motive power, so that his attack cannot be pushed farther than the defendant chooses, and at Stromboli the crippled condition of the French is evident; for after Ruyter had fallen to leeward, and could no longer help his separated rear, it was practically unmolested by the French, although none of these had been sunk.
— from The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 by A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

But if you take the cover off, the expanding forces are released into the open air, and the water settles down again to its proper level.
— from The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius Pollio

Having acquired the whole of the system, and equipped himself with a large library of Buddhist doctrinal works and still more with every sort of ecclesiastical furniture and religious goods, he returned to Japan.
— from The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji by William Elliot Griffis

Similarly the object of beating the human scapegoat on the genital organs with squills and so on, must have been to release his reproductive energies from any restraint or spell under which they might be laid by demoniacal or other malignant agency; and as the Thargelia at which he was annually sacrificed was an early harvest festival celebrated in May, we must recognise in him a representative of the creative and fertilising god of vegetation.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

To detect every fallacy, and rectify every mistake, would be endless.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) by Edmund Burke

It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Life itself—Life s eternal fruitfulness and recurrence caused anguish, destruction, and the will to annihilation.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

EURIPUS, flux and reflux.
— from Epicoene; Or, The Silent Woman by Ben Jonson

To sink to the next vein below, and to tunnel to another, are trifles in comparison with the first, yet each furnishes a return equally large.
— from The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished by Henry Charles Carey

Unlike so many people, who, either from lack of energy or else from a resigned sense of the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur to remain moored like houseboats to a certain point on the bank of the stream of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered to them above and below that point, that degree in life in which they will remain fixed until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre distractions, that just not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there with them; Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the women with whom he must pass time, but to pass his time among women whom he had already found to be beautiful and charming.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

It is not always easy for a Robin to give up and let one with dull breast feathers know that he thinks himself wrong.
— from Among the Meadow People by Clara Dillingham Pierson

His speech was earnest, florid, and rather argumentative in tone.
— from Our Churches and Chapels: Their Parsons, Priests, & Congregations Being a Critical and Historical Account of Every Place of Worship in Preston by Atticus

1,186.—Diagram of connections of a battery equipment for a residential lighting plant.
— from Hawkins Electrical Guide v. 04 (of 10) Questions, Answers, & Illustrations, A progressive course of study for engineers, electricians, students and those desiring to acquire a working knowledge of electricity and its applications by N. (Nehemiah) Hawkins

Of course, none of the respectable members of these castes would join them, and only those who were excommunicated found a ready home among these [ 192 ] Donga Dāsaris.
— from Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 2 of 7 by Edgar Thurston

The most developed Monads—the Lunar Gods or “Spirits,” called, in India, the Pitris—whose function it is to pass in the First Round through the whole triple cycle of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, in their most ethereal, filmy, and rudimentary forms, in order to clothe themselves in, and assimilate, the nature of the newly formed Chain.
— from The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4 by H. P. (Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky

Once or twice using L , he was I till No. 405, which he signed O , and by this letter he held, except for a return to C (with a single use of O ), from 433 to 477.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

I had forgotten to say, also, that the year before, when I went the first time to kiss the Pope's feet, I took the road by Perugia in order to set in place three large altar-pieces executed for a refectory of the Black Friars of S. Piero in that city.
— from Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 10 (of 10) Bronzino to Vasari, & General Index. by Giorgio Vasari

The pressure was accordingly applied in a mild degree, but the enemy were too strongly posted, and it was too late in the evening for a regular attack."
— from The Boys of '61 or, Four Years of Fighting, Personal Observations with the Army and Navy by Charles Carleton Coffin