460 Hymeneal festivals will be celebrated at times fixed with an eye to population, and the brides and bridegrooms will lxxiii meet at them; and by an ingenious system of lots the rulers will contrive that the brave and the fair come together, and that those of inferior breed are paired with inferiors—the latter will ascribe to chance what is really the invention of the rulers.
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

It seemed only likely that she would be there." "Yes," Mr. Carmichael said, "it seems more than probable.
— from A Little Princess Being the whole story of Sara Crewe now told for the first time by Frances Hodgson Burnett

45 Pleasures are like poppies spread, / You seize the flower, its bloom is shed; / Or, like the snowflake in the river, / A moment white, then melts for ever.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

Therefore, Phaedrus, I say of Love that he is the fairest and best in himself, and the cause of what is fairest and best in all other things.
— from Symposium by Plato

That is something one learns to value, when one has been on the brink of starvation, as we have.
— from An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

But, as it were, in sort or limitation, To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, And talk to you sometimes?
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Irupi, Shadowy One, Let the Queen come to me.
— from Malay Magic Being an introduction to the folklore and popular religion of the Malay Peninsula by Walter William Skeat

I believe that these sources of evidence, impartially consulted, will declare that desiring a thing and finding it pleasant, aversion to it and thinking of it as painful, are phenomena entirely inseparable, or rather two parts of the same phenomenon; in strictness of language, two different modes of naming the same psychological fact: that to think of an object as desirable (unless for the sake of its consequences), and to think of it as pleasant, are one and the same thing; and that to desire anything, except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
— from Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill

The intellectual tendencies of our race have always been somewhat conservative, and its standards of literary taste or belief, once set up, are not varied without a struggle.
— from Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Then there is some one left to—My darling sis!”
— from The Haute Noblesse: A Novel by George Manville Fenn

They protect the paved streets and the buildings largely from the direct rays of the sun; they cool the lower stratum of air by evaporation from their immense surfaces of leaves; they absorb at once the malarious emanations and gases of decomposition, and abstract their poisonous properties for their own consumption; they withdraw from the air the carbonic acid thrown off from the animal system as a poison, and decomposing it, appropriate the element dangerous to man, and give back to the atmosphere the element essential to his health and even life.
— from Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1899 Volume LIV, No. 4, February 1899 by Various

There must be a spring somewhere, and if she was as patient as she declared herself to be, she would surely find it sooner or later; that is, if she could carry out her search without exciting suspicion.
— from One of the 28th: A Tale of Waterloo by G. A. (George Alfred) Henty

Selfishness, fear and worry contract and congeal the blood vessels, the nerve fibers, and the other channels through which the life forces are conveyed from the innermost source of life to different parts and organs of the physical body.
— from Nature Cure: Philosophy & Practice Based on the Unity of Disease & Cure by Henry Lindlahr

"'Nothin',' replies the shorthorn, imbibin' of his forty drops, "only it sort o' looks to my onaccustomed eye like this deadfall is open rather late.
— from Wolfville Days by Alfred Henry Lewis

The basis is deeply cup-formed or cylindrical, and in section oval like the shell; it penetrates the coral to a very remarkable depth,—in one instance to three inches.
— from A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 2 of 2) The Balanidæ, (or Sessile Cirripedes); the Verrucidæ, etc., etc. by Charles Darwin