The most immediate effects of pleasure and pain are the propense and averse motions of the mind; which are diversified into volition, into desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear, according as the pleasure or pain changes its situation, and becomes probable or improbable, certain or uncertain, or is considered as out of our power for the present moment.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

This day, the 18th of March, there remained only provisions for two days, although they limited their consumption to the bare necessaries of life.
— from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

Briefly, the action of mind upon matter xxxvi (to use the ordinary phraseology for the sake of clearness) is—we may assume for our present purpose—an established fact.
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant

Just as then in reality, all about them was the noise and uproar of an immense crowd of people, flooding the whole of Fontanka Embankment between the two bridges, as well as all the surrounding streets and alleys; just as then, Semyon Ivanovitch, in company with the drunken cadger, was carried along behind a fence, where they were squeezed as though in pincers in a huge timber-yard full of spectators who had gathered from the street, from Tolkutchy Market and from all the surrounding houses, taverns, and restaurants.
— from White Nights and Other Stories The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Volume X by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In North Carolina prospectors obtained permission from the owners of the land to wash or dig on shares, varying from one-fourth to one-half, and the proprietor was accustomed to put his slaves to work in the same way along the creek bottoms after the crops had been safely gathered.
— from Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by James Mooney

I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James

But he who, with true piety towards God, whom he loves, believes, and hopes in, fixes his attention more on those things in which he displeases himself, than on those things, if there are any such, which please himself, or rather, not himself, but the truth, does not attribute that by which he can now please the truth to anything but to the mercy of Him whom he has feared to displease, giving thanks for what in him is healed, and pouring out prayers for the healing of that which is yet unhealed.
— from The City of God, Volume I by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

You have enumerated with so ready a memory, and so copiously, the opinions of philosophers, from Thales the Milesian, concerning the nature of the Gods, that I am surprised to see so much learning in a Roman.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth by Marcus Tullius Cicero

Whether this imperfection of structure arises from an enlargement of the plan; or from the imperfect reconcilement in the writer's own mind of the struggling elements of thought which are now first brought together by him; or, perhaps, from the composition of the work at different times—are questions, like the similar question about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are worth asking, but which cannot have a distinct answer.
— from The Republic by Plato

The older men thought that they would either subdue the places against which they were to sail, or at all events, with so large a force, meet with no disaster; those in the prime of life felt a longing for foreign sights and spectacles, and had no doubt that they should come safe home again; while the idea of the common people and the soldiery was to earn wages at the moment, and make conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the future.
— from The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

That his bones became the object of assiduous cult, in spite of repeated prohibitions, that innumerable miracles were worked at his tomb, that crowds of pilgrims flocked to it, that his feast-day became one of the great solemnities of the year, and that he was regarded as one of the most efficient saints in the calendar, only shows the popular estimate of his virtues and the zeal of those who regarded {46} themselves as his disciples.
— from A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III by Henry Charles Lea

They marched through the streets singing the “Veni creator spiritus,” and crying out: “Pray, for the times are at hand.”
— from The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche by Anatole France

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— from State of the Union Addresses by Jimmy Carter

The rich cannot fairly be said to get more good from the State than the poor; they probably get less, because they are better capable of providing for their own defence; but the rich are able to do more good to the State than the poor, and because they are able, they are bound.
— from Contemporary Socialism by John Rae

ON THE BRINK Miss Bencomb was leaving the hotel for the railway, which was quite near at hand, and had only recently been opened, as if on purpose for this event.
— from The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament by Thomas Hardy

The sun was shining, and a breath of perfume from the roses in a woman's gown assailed him, as she passed by on the threshold to enter the restaurant.
— from The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton by E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim

When the stroke of poverty felled them to the earth, these exultations were quenched in grief.
— from Victoria C. Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch by Theodore Tilton

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— from The Hungry Heart: A Novel by David Graham Phillips