The mood of levity, of 'I don't care,' is for this world's ills a sovereign and practical anaesthetic.
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

Here are the educated classes occupying themselves with exquisite emotions, with speculations upon the Infinite, with addresses to flowers, with the worship of waterfalls and flying clouds, and with the incessant portraiture of a thousand moods and variations of love, while their neighbours lie grovelling in the mire, and never know anything more of life or its duties than is afforded them by a police report in a bit of newspaper picked out of the kennel.
— from Mark Rutherford's Deliverance by William Hale White

If the rounded end of the rod be slightly dipped into the melted fat, and then brought to the surface of the mercury, a small hemispherical particle will attach itself there and speedily congeal, becoming more or less opaque in doing so.
— from Cooley's Cyclopædia of Practical Receipts and Collateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures, Professions, and Trades..., Sixth Edition, Volume I by Richard Vine Tuson

Whether a learner shall acquire more or less of it, depends upon his own individual aptitude 272 Analogy of learning vernacular Greek.
— from Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 2 by George Grote

Whether a learner shall acquire more or less of it, depends upon his own individual aptitude.
— from Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 2 by George Grote

Yet he would hardly distinguish accurately the Church from the different heresies which everywhere sprang up around it, holding more or less of its doctrines and mixing them up with corruptions
— from The Formation of Christendom, Volume II by T. W. (Thomas William) Allies

“I do understand the meaning of life, only it doesn’t mean love to me.
— from Grace Harlowe's Problem by Josephine Chase