In other words, we should succeed in making it probable that the totemic system resulted from the conditions underlying the Oedipus complex, just as the animal phobia of ‘little John’ and the poultry perversion of ‘little Arpád’ resulted from it.
— from Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics by Sigmund Freud

In the account thus far we have the following items of ancient mythology:—1, the Cat; 2, the Dog; 3, the Pride of Life (Asmodeus), represented in the fine dress and manners of the fiend; 4, the Prince of this World, offering its throne; 5, the Egyptian belief in potency of the Name; 6, the Hunger-Demon, who dares not be felt, because his back is hollow, and, though himself a shadow, casts none; 7, the disembodied devil of the rabbins, who seeks to enter a human form, in order to enjoy the higher powers of which man is capable; 8, the fiend of fire.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway

Or pen portraits of living American reformers.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

Again, common sense is quite prepared to recognise that there are persons of peculiar temperament to whom the ordinary pleasures of life are really quite trifling in comparison with more refined enjoyments: and also that men generally are liable to fall, for certain periods, under the sway of absorbing impulses, which take them out of the range within which the judgments of common sense are even broadly and generally valid.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

And this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On the other hand, a poetic vehicle in which there is much ornamental play of language and rhythm may clothe a dry ideal skeleton.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

[The Duke of York’s letter appointing Thomas Wilson Surveyor of the Victualling of His Majesty’s Navy in the Port of London, and referring to Pepys as Surveyor-General of the Victualling Affairs, is printed in “Memoirs of the English Affairs, chiefly Naval, 1660- 73,” by James, Duke of York, 1729, p. 131.]
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

“Nothing,” says he, “that is destitute itself of life and reason can generate a being possessed of life and reason; but the world does generate beings possessed of life and reason; the world, therefore, is not itself destitute of life and reason.”
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth by Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Dramatic authorship," he says, "is to the profession of literature as reversing is to waltzing—an agony within a misery.
— from Ellen Terry and Her Sisters by T. Edgar (Thomas Edgar) Pemberton

Well he might be, for it appeared that the stranger was no less a personage than Peter Rythovius, a doctor of divinity, a distinguished pedant of Louvain, a relation of a bishop and himself a Church dignitary.
— from PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete by John Lothrop Motley

I shall expect to see your Picture plumped out like a ripe Peach—you would not be very willing to give me a slice of it.
— from Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends by John Keats

The wonders they had seen: that house of mystery lying like a palace of the story-books far down below the rolling Pacific; the surprise of it all; the picture of lights and rooms and of a woman's face; and now this plateau of rock with breakers at their feet and the island mists for their horizon; and, in the far distance, away upon the sword-fish reef, sights and sounds which quickened every pulse—who shall blame them if they could answer me never a word?
— from The House Under the Sea: A Romance by Max Pemberton

Syphax and Massinissa, princes of Libya, are rivals for the hand of Sophonisba, daughter of Asdrubal, a powerful Carthaginian nobleman.
— from The Works of John Marston. Volume 2 by John Marston

The same awful, and in some sense mysterious, power of limiting and restraining the influx of His love belongs to unbelief still, whether it take the shape of active rejection, or only of careless, passive non-reception.
— from Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Mark by Alexander Maclaren

When that Wind from Heaven stirred them, the dead white bones put on Life and rose up.
— from That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day by Richard Dehan

If [59] these blackheads keep coming and if you go on squeezing them, if you insist upon covering the pimples with powder or lotion, a real skin disease will be the result.
— from Confidential Chats with Girls by William Lee Howard

On general principles of law and reason, the oaths which foreigners take, on coming here, and being "naturalized" (as it is called), are of no validity.
— from No Treason, Vol. VI.: The Constitution of No Authority by Lysander Spooner