But they are not so, for they are incapable of reason or intellect; the only being which can properly have mind is the invisible soul, whereas fire and water, and earth and air, are all of them visible bodies.
— from Timaeus by Plato

“That’s what I envy you, that you are able to mix in these interesting scientific circles,” he said.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

Accordingly, [Pg 452] so far as present comfort goes, the first man in Paradise was more blessed than any just man in this insecure state; but as regards the hope of future good, every man who not merely supposes, but certainly knows that he shall eternally enjoy the most high God in the company of angels, and beyond the reach of ill,—this man, no matter what bodily torments afflict him, is more blessed than was he who, even in that great felicity of Paradise, was uncertain of his fate.
— from The City of God, Volume I by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

I thought, such was the effect of my imagination, that I saw this whole tribe of antediluvian creatures.
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

These burning fits but meteors bee, Whose matter in thee is soone spent.
— from The Poems of John Donne, Volume 1 (of 2) Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts by John Donne

But there was something so repellent to me in the idea—something so meanly like the common herd of spies and informers in the mere act of adopting a disguise—that I dismissed the question from consideration almost as soon as it had risen in my mind.
— from The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

English Edition Mainly I think I should base the request to weigh the following pages on the assumption that they present, however indirectly, some views of the West and Modern, or of a distinctly western and modern (American) tendency, about certain matters.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Therefore directly the character of this affair suggested itself to me, I thought it should be dealt with with special secrecy, and ventured to come over here.”
— from The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad

"At six o'clock this morning I thought I should never use my legs again."
— from The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope

"Tell me if this is still a safeguard," she said, baring her beautiful white arm, and showing a large round scar.
— from Daisy Thornton by Mary Jane Holmes

When I saw once more the towers of Mantes I thought I should go mad, and I believe I was not far from it.
— from Bouvard and Pécuchet: A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life, part 2 by Gustave Flaubert

And if you say, “Read my books, & be content—you have me in them,” I say, it is because I read them so that I am not content.
— from The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman

“Well, now, there’s Mammy,” said Marie, “I think it’s selfish of her to sleep so sound nights; she knows I need little attentions almost every hour, when my worst turns are on, and yet she’s so hard to wake.
— from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

It is well for them if they are delicate folk, whose misery is quickly ended; it is the strong who suffer most in the instinctive struggle for life.
— from The Red Symbol by John Ironside

The smallness of this country makes it all the more important that it should be occupied and developed by a selected population, while its attractiveness as a field of settlement and the limited amount of land available place it in a position of independence in which it is able to insist on the maintenance of a high standard of fitness on the part of those desiring to share in its advantages.
— from Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders Report of the Committee of Inquiry Appointed by the Hon. Sir Maui Pomare, K.B.E., C.M.G., Minister of Health by New Zealand. Committee of Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders

Next morning Capitola came down into the breakfast-room with one idea prominent in her hard little head, to which she mentally gave expression: "Well as I like that old man, he must not permit himself to talk to me in that indecent strain, and so he must be made to know."
— from Hidden Hand by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

“And this mare is twenty if she is a day, mates!”
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky