There were particular ways of doing everything in that family: particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams, and keeping the bottled gooseberries; so that no daughter of that house could be indifferent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson, rather than a Gibson or a Watson.
— from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Yea, do good or do evil, if you can.
— from Pascal's Pensées by Blaise Pascal

There are, first, those which the service claimed would directly promote or avert: secondly, there is the pain and secondary harm of disappointed expectation, if the service be not rendered: thirdly, we have to reckon the various pleasures connected with the exercise of natural benevolent affections, especially when reciprocated, including the indirect effects on the agent’s character of maintaining such affections.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

The huge volcano which was the first stage of our daring experiment is above five thousand feet high.
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Do come back again, and we won’t talk about cats or dogs either, if you don’t like them!’
— from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

and in how many ways it conduces to our desired end, if pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, and not of a shopkeeper!
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

One day early in April, I was up at General Grant's headquarters, and we talked over all these things with absolute freedom.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

Proof.—Let it be granted that the mind is simultaneously affected by two emotions, of which one neither increases nor diminishes its power of activity, and the other does either increase or diminish the said power (III.
— from Ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza

So that not all the stars in space are suns—at least, not in the sense given to the word by our domestic experience in the solar system.
— from Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885 by Various

He denounced Adams as a man of disgusting egotism, intense jealousy, and ungovernable temper, and reviewed in a scathing manner his entire public career, and especially the recent dismissal of the secretaries who were friendly to Hamilton.
— from Alexander Hamilton by Charles A. (Charles Arthur) Conant

What to say or do, either, I couldn't think; since the more he cut me out, and the less friendly I felt to him, the less could I risk the chance of showing us both up for what we were ,—which, of course, would bring him in for the worst of it; as if I , by Jove, were, going to serve him some low trick for the sake of shoving him out with the young lady.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 410, December 1849 by Various

We may place in the time of Elizabeth the beginning of that rise of the importance of the urban as compared with the rural population, which has been going on ever since, till, in our own day, England is entirely dominated by her towns.
— from A History of England Eleventh Edition by Charles Oman

We can not avoid all sources of disease even if we would.
— from Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, September 1899 Vol. LV, May to October, 1899 by Various

It is generally supposed to mean, that the stag implores the young man; but as the youth is mad, the absurdity, of the passage is heightened if we suppose that he implores the stag, and, in the moment of its own danger, entreats it to come to his own assistance; as certainly the Latin will admit of that interpretation.—Ovid has a somewhat similar passage in the Pontic Epistles, B. ii.
— from The Comedies of Terence Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes by Terence

Then he remembered other damning episodes in his black record—the time he had gone into a mathematics exam and read the formulas from Buster Bean's collar; the night he had helped Sport McGinnis smuggle a bottle of beer in for a welsh rabbit and swallowed a full third of the rank stuff.
— from Skippy Bedelle His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete Man of the World by Owen Johnson

Emissions not necessary to health — Eminent testimony — Diurnal emissions — Cause of diurnal emissions — Internal emissions — An important caution — Impotence — General effects — General debility — Consumption — Dyspepsia — Heart-disease — Throat affections — Nervous diseases — Epilepsy — Failure of special senses — Spinal irritation — Insanity — A victim's mental condition pictured — Effects in females — Local effects — Leucorrhoea — Uterine disease — Cancer of the womb — Sterility — Atrophy of mammæ — Pruritis — General effects — A common cause of hysteria — Effects upon offspring — Treatment of self-abuse and its effects — Prevention of secret vice — Cultivate chastity — Timely warning — Curative treatment of the effects of self-abuse — Cure of the habit — How may a person help himself? —
— from Plain Facts for Old and Young by John Harvey Kellogg

We must be composed of the spiritual elements of beauty, thought, sensation, and seizure of all intellectual things, growing by the daily absorption of divine essences into spiritual bodies, incorporate of love, of light, of lofty aspirations and tenderest desires; of thoughts that comprehend the world, and hearts that embrace it with a divine capacity of affection.
— from Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2) by William Howitt

And this, diversity is so important, this contribution of diverse elements is so necessary to the complex strength and prosperity of the whole, that one must view with alarm all federal interference and tendency to greater centralization.
— from Certain Diversities of American Life by Charles Dudley Warner