But the truth is the soul is an exile and wanderer, being driven about by the divine decrees and laws, and then, as in some sea-girt island, gets joined to the body like an oyster to its shell, as Plato says, because it cannot call to mind or remember from what honour and greatness of happiness it migrated, not from Sardis to Athens, nor from Corinth to Lemnos or Scyros, but exchanging heaven and the moon for earth and life upon earth, if it shifts from place to place for ever so short a time it is put out and feels strange, and fades away like a dying plant.
— from Plutarch's Morals by Plutarch

But philosophers, observing that, almost in every part of nature, there is contained a vast variety of springs and principles, which are hid, by reason of their minuteness or remoteness, find, that it is at least possible the contrariety of events may not proceed from any contingency in the cause, but from the secret operation of contrary causes.
— from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

In the course of the sermon, (there was no sign of any MS., or reading from notes,) some of the parts would be in the highest degree majestic and picturesque.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Now we stood in a position in which I could not possibly resort to the same means of reconciliation, for it would have meant my being inconsistent in all my views and actions.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

The Sovereign was not a whit more gracious to me on returning from the Continent than he had been before my departure; and I had it from one of the aides-de-camp of the Royal Dukes his brothers, that my conduct and amusements at Paris had been odiously misrepresented by some spies there, and had formed the subject of Royal comment; and that the King had, influenced by these calumnies, actually said I was the most disreputable man in the three kingdoms.
— from Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray

Good-bye;—I must run away, for they would send here for me, or, rather, farewell till I see you again.
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

Not before I was alone in my own room for the night and had again been dejected and unhappy there did I begin to know how wrong and thankless this state was.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

"It is made of rotten fibres," the Shopkeeper cries.
— from Indo-China and Its Primitive People by Henry Baudesson

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

We cannot be kept silent!'" Charles Dumas, a French Socialist, on his return to France from Russia, wrote a book in which he warns his fellow-comrades on the dangers of Bolshevism, and among other things he says: "Upon my arrival in Petrograd I wanted, first of all, to meet three of my old Russian friends, but soon learned that my searches were in vain.
— from The Red Conspiracy by Joseph J. Mereto

Captain Twining is a man of really fine intellect combined with a remarkable capacity for getting things done; without his constant presence at my elbow, my work would have been much heavier and much less successful than it was.
— from The Victory At Sea by Burton Jesse Hendrick

I knew therefore that they had been disturbed, and most probably by my gun; but not before they had made a hearty meal of roasted fresh-water mussels (unios) and nuts of a kind which grew on a large shady tree in pods, like a tamarind pod, the kernel being contained in a shell, of which each pod held several, and the fruit tasting exactly like filberts.
— from Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, Volume 1 by Grey, George, Sir

With this appropriation he was expected to care for a mileage four times greater than that of the west side and was thus responsible for not only eastern approaches but maintenance of 150 miles of road from Darwin, all roads in the valley and those which furnished the north and south approaches.
— from Loafing Along Death Valley Trails: A Personal Narrative of People and Places by William Caruthers

The air was calm and clear and full of bright sunlight, and I watched them from the stupendous mass of rock forming the headland on which stands the famous Logan Rock.
— from The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated by W. H. (William Henry) Hudson

I have offered this suggestion for what it may be worth as a practical proposal; it seems certainly deserving of discussion, and I could not refrain from putting it forward as a possible means of relief from an intolerable situation.
— from What Prohibition Has Done to America by Fabian Franklin

Others, more obstinate, remain faithful to their own habits, and continue to follow the stated changes to which they had been accustomed.
— from The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 10, No. 266, July 28, 1827 by Various

This busy man of the world, with no education save that which he was able to get in the "odds and ends" of time, told [Pg 297] the story of his own life in a way that has commanded the interest and admiration of multitudes of readers for over a hundred years.
— from The Story of American History for Elementary Schools by Albert F. (Albert Franklin) Blaisdell