how some poor women did cry; and in my life I never did see such natural expression of passion as I did here in some women’s bewailing themselves, and running to every parcel of men that were brought, one after another, to look for their husbands, and wept over every vessel that went off, thinking they might be there, and looking after the ship as far as ever they could by moone-light, that it grieved me to the heart to hear them.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

‘Yes; and another thing is, that I’ve humbled Mr. Hatfield so charmingly; and another—why, you must allow me some share of female vanity: I don’t pretend to be without that most essential attribute of our sex—and if you had seen poor Hatfield’s intense eagerness in making his ardent declaration and his flattering proposal, and his agony of mind, that no effort of pride could conceal, on being refused, you would have allowed I had some cause to be gratified.’
— from Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Reason, with its practical law, determines the will immediately, not by means of an intervening feeling of pleasure or pain, not even of pleasure in the law itself, and it is only because it can, as pure reason, be practical, that it is possible for it to be legislative.
— from The Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant

Gladstone says there is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body, or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

Then there was Norman; he might have turned round and said at his age he could not be troubled with a raw boy from the plow-tail, but he was like a father to me, and took no end of pains with me.
— from Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

But yet who bade that Manichaeus write on these things also, skill in which was no element of piety?
— from The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

the corolla consists of six long oval, obtusly pointed skye blue or water coloured petals, each about 1 inch in length; the corolla is regular as to the form and size of the petals but irregular as to their position, five of them are placed near ech other pointing upward while one stands horizantally or pointing downwards, they are inserted with a short claw on the extremity of the footstalk at the base of the germ; the corolla is of course inferior; it is also shriveling, and continues untill the seeds are perfect.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

In his eight years of office he had solved nearly every old problem of American statesmanship, and had left little or nothing to annoy his successor.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

The necessary expense of preparing a work of such magnitude for the press, must have been a considerable deduction from the price stipulated to be paid for the copy-right.
— from Boswell's Life of Johnson Abridged and edited, with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood by James Boswell

An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidently leave each creature the very same that it was before; for after a nominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no trace of a change would be perceptible.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

But, when she vanished, he threw himself down on the flowery mead, he called her name to the breezes, he embraced the tall lilies, he kissed the roses on their glowing lips; and all the flowers understood his rapture, and the morning wind, the brooks, and the bushes talked with him of the nameless ecstasy of pure affection.
— from The Serapion Brethren, Vol. I. by E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus) Hoffmann

This question discomfited us; for, as a matter of fact, there had been no element of philosophy in our education up to that time.
— from On the Future of our Educational Institutions by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

For while in nearly every other part of the world the population of to-day is more or less completely descended from the prehistoric population of the same region, and has developed its social order in a slow growth extending over many centuries, the American population is essentially a transplanted population, a still fluid and imperfect fusion of great fragments torn at this point or that from the gradually evolved societies of Europe.
— from An Englishman Looks at the World Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

So the wretched life, once beautiful and loveful, was now ended, or perhaps born in some new sphere to begin again its struggle after the highest beauty, the only perfect love.
— from John Halifax, Gentleman by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

There seems to be no doubt that certain organic compounds which are injurious to plant life are often present in the soil, either as the normal excretions of plant roots or as products of the decomposition of preceding plant growths.
— from The Chemistry of Plant Life by Roscoe Wilfred Thatcher

Judge Bond called for me there in his carriage, and took me (as invited by the President) to a great assemblage of Baltimore magnates (inaugurating the John Hopkins University), where I had casually quite an ovation, meeting literally hundreds of friends: I cannot pretend to remember many names, but these will remind me of others: General McClellan, General Ellicott (cousin to our Bishop), Carroll, the State Governor, no end of professors, among them Sylvester, who knew my brother Arthur at the Athenæum, plenty of judges, presidents of institutions, doctors, journalists, lawyers, and many fine figure-heads of elderly magnates; each and all knew me as an early book friend, and I had quite to hold a court for two hours, receiving each as [Pg 275] introduced, and having to say something pretty to him.
— from My Life as an Author by Martin Farquhar Tupper

I am not enthusiastic or passionate by nature; my judgment is more powerful than my instinct, my curiosity than my appetite, my fancy than my perseverance.
— from Notre Coeur; or, A Woman's Pastime: A Novel by Guy de Maupassant

Every one must have seen farms otherwise equal, the one producing the double of the other by the superior culture and management of its possessor; and every one must have under his eye numerous examples of persons setting out in life with no other possession than skill in agriculture, and speedily, by its sole exercise, acquire wealth and 482 independence.
— from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 9 (of 9) Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private by Thomas Jefferson

The specious and artful character of Avienus was admirably qualified to conduct a negotiation either of public or private interest: his colleague Trigetius had exercised the Prætorian præfecture of Italy; and Leo, bishop of Rome, consented to expose his life for the safety of his flock.
— from History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 3 by Edward Gibbon

It can't think, as we do, and there is no ego or personality," Scott said smugly.
— from Terminal Compromise by Winn Schwartau