Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of education—or any other undertaking—where conditions do not permit of foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey

I had carried her to a play, but she not being fit to go abroad, I to the office, where all the afternoon close examining the collection of my papers of the accounts of the Navy since this war to my great content, and so at night home to talk and sing with my-wife, and then to supper and so to bed with great pleasure.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

You have undulating wide expanses of sugar-cane—a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye; and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains, some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view.
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

A crowd of all the old and young hands on the place stood gathered around it, to bid farewell to their old associate.
— from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

To my great astonishment, it turned out, however, that the waistcoat was not an honour, but a bribe.
— from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

And I am so bold as to say, now I have so completely perfected the work I proposed to myself to do, that no other person, whether he were a Jew or foreigner, had he ever so great an inclination to it, could so accurately deliver these accounts to the Greeks as is done in these books.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

J. E. Smith, with two brigades, charged up the west side of the ridge to the support of Corse's command, over open ground and in the face of a heavy fire of both artillery and musketry, and reached the very parapet of the enemy.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

but the most valuable of all their roots is foreign to this neighbourhood I mean the Wappetoe, or the bulb of the Sagitifolia or common arrow head, which grows in great abundance in the marshey grounds of that beatifull and firtile valley on the Columbia commencing just above the entrance of Quicksand River, and extending downwards for about 70 Miles.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

I knew Sir Charles’s generosity, and I thought that if he heard the story from my own lips he would help me.”
— from The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

He promised a general amnesty if the place were surrendered, and arms laid down.
— from Freaks of Fanaticism, and Other Strange Events by S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

Groat, George G. An Introduction the Study of Organized Labor in America .
— from Problems in American Democracy by Thames Williamson

Reckon he wanted me to make a good appearance in the bosom of refined and cultured New England.”
— from Boys of Oakdale Academy by Morgan Scott

"Perhaps your boy," gazing anxiously in the man's face, "hasn't any mother to teach him."
— from Bertie's Home; or, the Way to be Happy by Madeline Leslie

Habitual dancing before a looking-glass, by begetting a kind of second nature, which will render the movements almost instinctive, will be of great assistance in this particular.
— from Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, August 7, 1841 by Various

All her absurd anxieties fell to the ground, and in their place arose the certainty that she had been rude to Mrs. Wilcox.
— from Howards End by E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster

They come, in dim procession led, The cold, the faithless, and the dead; As warm each hand, each brow as gay, As if they parted yesterday.
— from The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott

So saying, he made a gesture as if to imply that those years were effaced from the tablet of his memory.
— from What the Swallow Sang: A Novel by Friedrich Spielhagen

“I do not love the bloody game of war, and glad am I that we have got into a quiet corner here in Greenland, where there is small occasion for it.
— from The Norsemen in the West by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne