Their temporal power insensibly arose from the calamities of the times: and the Roman bishops, who have deluged Europe and Asia with blood, were compelled to reign as the ministers of charity and peace.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

This twofold manner of cogitating a power residing in a sensuous object does not run counter to any of the conceptions which we ought to form of the world of phenomena or of a possible experience.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

" After Grant's defeat at the first battle of Shiloh, nearly every newspaper of both parties in the North, almost every member of Congress, and public sentiment everywhere demanded his removal.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

I shall not, continued he, at this time remind Sir Roger of the great and noble Monuments of Charity and Publick Spirit, which have been erected by Merchants since the Reformation, but at present content my self with what he allows us, Parsimony and Frugality.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

The health I have is full and free, without other rule or discipline than my own custom and pleasure.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Men of convictions are prisoners.
— from The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Maid Goes With Her A young girl who goes to a ball without a chaperon (meaning of course a private ball), takes a maid with her who sits in the dressing-room the entire evening.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post

Modern Research Modern means of communication and photography have enabled scientists in widely different parts to study our book from all angles, to scrutinize the earliest records, the Vatican and the New York manuscripts and the codex Salmasianus in Paris.
— from Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome by Apicius

Then again, the pictures of a condition of affairs, in which it might be useful and necessary to have in hand means of compulsion, are partly based on the false conception of a contract between rulers and ruled, and partly presuppose the [pg 146] possibility of such a divergence in spirit between these two parties as would make constitution and government quite out of the question.
— from Hegel's Philosophy of Mind by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Inheriting from their ancestors a peaceful, timid, passionless, incurious disposition, they fall an easy prey to all who choose to molest them; they bow their necks to the yoke of slavery without a murmur, and think it a matter of course; and perhaps no people in the world are to be found who are less susceptible of intense feeling, and the finer emotions of the human mind, on being stolen away from their favourite amusements and pursuits, and from the bosom of their wives and families, than these Cumbrie people, who are held in general disesteem.
— from Travels of Richard and John Lander into the interior of Africa, for the discovery of the course and termination of the Niger From unpublished documents in the possession of the late Capt. John William Barber Fullerton ... with a prefatory analysis of the previous travels of Park, Denham, Clapperton, Adams, Lyon, Ritchie, &c. into the hitherto unexplored countries of Africa by Robert Huish

That day I dined with a member of Congress, a peripatetic lecturer, and the principal citizens of the township, and took the return cars at night amid the glare of a torch-light procession.
— from Acadia or, A Month with the Blue Noses by Frederic S. (Frederic Swartwout) Cozzens

Hence the most enlightened minds are apt to yield to credulity in this sphere, much to the annoyance of the ‘regular faculty,’ who complain with reason that quackery, whether in the form of popular specifics or the person of a charlatan, derives its main support from men of civic and professional reputation.
— from The Collector Essays on Books, Newspapers, Pictures, Inns, Authors, Doctors, Holidays, Actors, Preachers by Henry T. (Henry Theodore) Tuckerman

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of an universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God.—The Word of God exists in something else.
— from The Writings of Thomas Paine — Volume 4 (1794-1796): The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine

I faltered with a mixture of confusion and pain.
— from Neighbours on the Green by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

Most of the trees in the jungle do not attain a very great girth, but they grow up very rapidly to reach the light and in their upper branches there is soon accumulated a dense mass of climbers and parasitic plants, which in the course of time become too heavy for the tree and cause it to collapse.
— from Pygmies & Papuans: The Stone Age To-day in Dutch New Guinea by A. F. R. (Alexander Frederick Richmond) Wollaston

They think they have done wonders if they have only faithfully copied the dictionaries of the personages they bring upon the stage, forgetting that the great art is to chuse the moments of character and passion in those who are to speak, since it is those moments alone that render them interesting.
— from The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 01 (of 12) by William Hazlitt

Apply some gum to the edge of the disc which has been folded back, and fix it securely on the top of the mass of cyanide and paper at the bottom of the jar, by pressing the gummed edge against the sides of the bottle.
— from Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting A Complete Handbook for the Amateur Taxidermist, Collector, Osteologist, Museum-Builder, Sportsman, and Traveller by W. J. (William Jacob) Holland