I could never point out any thing at the Great House, no matter how beautiful or powerful, but that he had seen something at Baltimore far exceeding, both in beauty and strength, the object which I pointed out to him.
— from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

The agnostics do not deny the existence of a Divine Being, but merely maintain that we have no scientific ground for either belief or denial.— Bibliography : Sir Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic's Apology ; R. Flint, Agnosticism ; J. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism .
— from The New Gresham Encyclopedia. A to Amide Vol. 1 Part 1 by Various

It would have been bad enough to go to her seat, and see the pitying faces of her friends, or the satisfied ones of her few enemies; but to face the whole school, with that shame fresh upon her, seemed impossible, and for a second she felt as if she could only drop down where she stood, and break her heart with crying.
— from Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy by Louisa May Alcott

It was given out that Roches, with his interpreter Shiwoda, would leave that evening for Europe, Baron Brin, the secretary, remaining in charge.
— from A Diplomat in Japan The inner history of the critical years in the evolution of Japan when the ports were opened and the monarchy restored, recorded by a diplomatist who took an active part in the events of the time, with an account of his personal experiences during that period by Ernest Mason Satow

The judgment she made of my first Essays, being a woman, so young, and in this age, and alone in her own country; and the famous vehemence wherewith she loved me, and desired my acquaintance solely from the esteem she had thence of me, before she ever saw my face, is an incident very worthy of consideration.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

As soon as Marius triumphed, and returned from exile, besides the butcheries everywhere perpetrated, the head of the consul Octavius was exposed on the rostrum; Cæsar and Fimbria were assassinated in their own houses; the two Crassi, father and son, were murdered in one another's sight; Bebius and Numitorius were disembowelled by being dragged with hooks; Catulus escaped the hands of his enemies by drinking poison; Merula, the flamen of Jupiter, cut his veins and made a libation of his own blood to his god.
— from The City of God, Volume I by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

Determine to form exact business habits.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

Mothers in eager abandonment, and the unarmed crowd and feeble elders beset towers and house-roofs, or stand at the lofty gates.
— from The Aeneid of Virgil by Virgil

The heterogeneous Rays are in some measure separated from one another by the Refraction of the Prism in the third Experiment, and in the fifth Experiment, by taking away the Penumbra from the rectilinear sides of the coloured Image, that Separation in those very rectilinear sides or straight edges of the Image becomes perfect.
— from Opticks Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light by Isaac Newton

Resolved , That a committee of conference and correspondence be appointed, who shall have in charge to communicate the preceding resolutions to the Legislatures of the several States; to assure them that this commonwealth continues in the same esteem of their friendship and union which it has manifested from that moment at which a common danger first suggested a common union: that it considers union, for specified national purposes, and particularly to those specified in their late federal compact, to be friendly to the peace, happiness and prosperity of all the States: that faithful to that compact, according to the plain intent and meaning in which it was understood and acceded to by the several parties, it is sincerely anxious for its preservation: that it does also believe, that to take from the States 469 all the powers of self-government and transfer them to a general and consolidated government, without regard to the special delegations and reservations solemnly agreed to in that compact, is not for the peace, happiness or prosperity of these States; and that therefore this commonwealth is determined, as it doubts not its co-States are, to submit to undelegated, and consequently unlimited powers in no man, or body of men on earth: that in cases of an abuse of the delegated powers, the members of the general government, being chosen by the people, a change by the people would be the constitutional remedy; but, where powers are assumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy: that every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact, ( casus non fœderis, ) to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits: that without this right, they would be under the dominion, absolute and unlimited, of whosoever might exercise this right of judgment for them: that nevertheless, this commonwealth, from motives of regard and respect for its co-States, has wished to communicate with them on the subject: that with them alone it is proper to communicate, they alone being parties to the compact, and solely authorized to judge in the last resort of the powers exercised under it, Congress being not a party, but merely the creature of the compact, and subject as to its assumptions of power to the final judgment of those by whom, and for whose use itself and its powers were all created and modified: that if the acts before specified should stand, these conclusions would flow from them; that the general government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes, and punish it themselves whether enumerated or not enumerated by the constitution as cognizable by them: that they may transfer its cognizance to the President, or any other person, who may himself be the accuser, counsel, judge and jury, whose suspicions may be the evidence, his order the sentence, his officer the executioner, and his breast the sole record of the transaction: that a very numerous and valuable description of the inhabitants of these States being, by this precedent, reduced, as outlaws, to the absolute dominion of one man, and the barrier of the Constitution 470 thus swept away from us all, no rampart now remains against the passions and the powers of a majority in Congress to protect from a like exportation, or other more grievous punishment, the minority of the same body, the legislatures, judges, governors and counsellors of the States, nor their other peaceable inhabitants, who may venture to reclaim the constitutional rights and liberties of the States and people, or who for other causes, good or bad, may be obnoxious to the views, or marked by the suspicions of the President, or be thought dangerous to his or their election, or other interests, public or personal: that the friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment; but the citizen will soon follow, or rather, has already followed, for already has a sedition act marked him as its prey: that these and successive acts of the same character, unless arrested at the threshold, necessarily drive these States into revolution and blood, and will furnish new calumnies against republican government, and new pretexts for those who wish it to be believed that man cannot be governed but by a rod of iron: that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism—free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power: that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go; and let the honest advocate of confidence read the Alien and Sedition acts, and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the government it created, and whether we should be wise in destroying those limits.
— from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 9 (of 9) Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private by Thomas Jefferson

And the rarer ones--the grey shrike, that buzzard of the cliff (the most perilous scramble of all my life), the crested titmouse, the serin finch on the apple tree, that first icterine warbler whose five eggs, blotched with purple and quite unfamiliar at the time, gave me such a thrill of joy that I nearly lost my foothold on the swerving alder branch---- At this point, my meditations were suddenly interrupted by a vigorous grunt or snort; a snort that would have done credit to an enraged tapir.
— from Alone by Norman Douglas

And this morning renewed in his heart the painful likeness of four things,–life, a day, a year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.– Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the brooks.
— from Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I. by Jean Paul

As he wrote in after years: "I had acquired from early boyhood the idea that it was expected of me to become a pianist, and every moment spent in 'scribbling' seemed to be stolen from the more legitimate work of piano practice."
— from Edward MacDowell: A Study by Lawrence Gilman

"Two of 'em gone this time, Fred, and I guess I'm the unluckiest feller ever, because they disappeared yesterday afternoon; and mom sent me over with a message to Aunt Alicia about four o'clock.
— from Fred Fenton on the Crew; Or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School by Allen Chapman

Translations will be made into several languages, the French edition being now in preparation by two gentlemen belonging to the Foreign Office of the Sublime Porte, who have obtained a privilege of ten years for its sale.
— from The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 by Various

September 28.—As we proceeded down the river, the vale still continued to open on either hand, the hills receding from each bank of the stream from two to three miles.
— from Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales by John Oxley

Frederick, emboldened by the document he had in his pocket, was very frank.
— from History of Frederick the Second, Called Frederick the Great. by John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

"All your friends," he said, "are men who have often had their fingers burned in that fire, even before it was done at your hearth.
— from Notre Coeur; or, A Woman's Pastime: A Novel by Guy de Maupassant