that entertainment—and rare entertainment—is not seldom found in causing others, at least in thought, some pain, and in raking them with the small shot of wickedness?
— from Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

If you go near the suitors you will be undone to a certainty, for their pride and insolence reach the very heavens.
— from The Odyssey Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original by Homer

An ideal, ideally conceived and known to be an ideal, a spirit worshipped in spirit and in truth, will take the place of the pleasing phenomenon; and in regard to every actual being, however noble, discipleship will yield to emulation, and worship to an admiration more or less selective and critical.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

We at once gave him what he required, and he set about translating it bit by bit, and when he had done he said: “All that is here in Spanish is what the Moorish paper contains, and you must bear in mind that when it says ‘Lela Marien’ it means ‘Our Lady the Virgin Mary.’” We read the paper and it ran thus: “When I was a child my father had a slave who taught me to pray the Christian prayer in my own language, and told me many things about Lela Marien.
— from The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

In Auburn $200 additional compensation was voted to the male teachers and $25 to the women, 264 who thereupon held a meeting and passed an ironical resolution thanking the board for their liberal allowance.
— from The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years by Ida Husted Harper

In the east, in those days, the smallest moneyed denomination was a penny and it represented the smallest purchasable quantity of any commodity.
— from Roughing It by Mark Twain

If we take these facts together, we may form a pretty accurate idea respecting the period at which he lived.
— from Notes and Queries, Vol. IV, Number 97, September 6, 1851 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. by Various

Moreover in politics, as well as in philosophy and in religion, the intellect of democratic nations is peculiarly open to simple and general notions.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville

Dim as the forming of Dew in the warming of Moonlight, they light on the petals; All is revealed to them; All—from the sunniest Tips to the honiest [Pg 16] Heart, whence they yield to them Spice through the darkness that settles.
— from One Day & Another: A Lyrical Eclogue by Madison Julius Cawein

Extreme variableness of the first, invariableness of the second.—Consequences of this principle as it regards the phenomena.—There can only be diseases where there are vital properties.—Why.—The progress of the physiological and physical sciences wholly different in this respect.—Differences between animate and inanimate solids and fluids.—The vital properties become exhausted, the physical do not.—Consequences.—The latter are inherent in matter, the others are not.—General remarks upon the enumeration of the differences of animate and inanimate bodies.—Particular remark relative to sympathies.—Their general phenomena.
— from General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 1 (of 3) by Xavier Bichat

What we need to avoid, as the Lambeth Conference has reminded us, is a purely insular and provincial attitude in relation to doctrines which have not been formally set forth by Anglican authority.
— from Our Lady Saint Mary by J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd) Barry

The speeches about the panic, and in reference to the proposed laws to alleviate it, were remarkable for their inflation, even in that age of windy oratory.
— from Thomas Hart Benton by Theodore Roosevelt

And then the moment passes and I remember that this dry-as-dust world is shrieking always for proofs—this extraordinary conglomeration of human animals in weird attire, with monstrous tastes and extraordinary habits, who make up what they call the civilized world.
— from The Black Box by E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim

There thus appeared at Verona a man strangely clad and using strange gestures, who, when brought before the mayor, recited with great energy passages of Latin verse and prose, taken from the works of Panormita, answered in reply to the questions put to him that he was himself Panormita, and was able to give so many small and commonly unknown details about the life of this scholar, that his statement obtained general credit.
— from The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt

I can put my finger upon two or three magazine articles written at this period, and paid for with a few wretched shillings, which papers as I read them awaken in me the keenest pangs of bitter remembrance.
— from The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray

But there is a wide gap between theory and practice, and it required the voyages of Columbus and his successors to bridge that gap.
— from A History of Science — Volume 2 by Edward Huntington Williams

She is still a serf-nation, but she is struggling wisely and patiently, and is ready to struggle, with all the energy her advisers think politic, for liberty.
— from Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry by Thomas Osborne Davis