For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.
— from Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences by René Descartes

They say that they can’t make it now even there.
— from Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

The wife's worst remorse when she stands without the threshold of the home she may never enter more is not equal to the agony of the husband who closes the portal on that familiar and entreating face.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

It was not that I was afraid you would betray me (I never even thought of that), but I thought, ‘How can I look him in the face if I don't confess?’
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Madam is not English, then?” said I, respectfully.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

The real, vigorous man is not easily turned thereto.
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross

[349] Among definite changes in the current morality of the Græco-Roman civilised world, which are to be attributed mainly if not entirely to the extension and intensification of sympathy due to Christianity, the following may be especially noted: (1) the severe condemnation and final suppression of the practice of exposing infants; (2) effective abhorrence of the barbarism of gladiatorial combats; (3) immediate moral mitigation of slavery, and a strong encouragement of emancipation; (4) great extension of the eleemosynary provision made for the sick and poor.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

When you tell me that motion is not essential to matter but necessary to it, you try to cheat me with words which would be easier to refute if there was a little more sense in them.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

But if, when it has forsaken it, the man is not even then in death, but after death, who shall say when he is in death?
— from The City of God, Volume I by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

Even the widowed mother is no exception to this rule.
— from Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 5 of 7 by Edgar Thurston

It refers mainly, if not exclusively, to those who accept Christ under the influence of Christian teaching at heathen festivals and who may live far away from Christian communities.
— from India's Problem, Krishna or Christ by John P. (John Peter) Jones

Fortunately the Museum is not empty to-day.’
— from The Uncommercial Traveller by Charles Dickens

They are, briefly, that a plurality of worlds would be irrational, since no reason could be given for one number rather than another, that it is more in accordance with the perfection of the monad, that all reality should be massed together in one world, that the economy of nature does not admit of the multiplication of goods, that the passive capacity ( matter ) is not equal to the active power (the form ), that the perfect is by its very nature unique.
— from Giordano Bruno by J. Lewis (James Lewis) McIntyre

But when madness has to be encountered as if it were sense, it makes it no easier to know that it is madness.”
— from Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood by George MacDonald

The human mother is no exception to this rule.
— from Psychology: A Study Of Mental Life by Robert Sessions Woodworth

But there is a presumption, I think, that, in the absence of a State Bank, they must be made, mainly if not entirely, through the Presidency Banks.
— from Indian Currency and Finance by John Maynard Keynes

Suppose he had a majority of votes at the late election, may it not hereafter appear that the election was carried by corruption or fraud, and that the member is not entitled to his seat?
— from Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 2 (of 16) by United States. Congress