Again, if Nature, creatress of all things, Were wont to force all things to be resolved Unto least parts, then would she not avail To reproduce from out them anything; Because whate'er is not endowed with parts Cannot possess those properties required Of generative stuff—divers connections, Weights, blows, encounters, motions, whereby things Forevermore have being and go on. H2 anchor CONFUTATION OF OTHER PHILOSOPHERS
— from On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus

From Rome, which to most men of an imaginative temperament such as his would have yielded so many pleasurable sensations, with all the curiosities of the Renaissance still fresh there, his thoughts went back painfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with its wide expanses of waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and its far-off scent of the sea.
— from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

It is an unmitigated evil, utterly indefensible in the light of philosophy; religion or good sense.
— from The Art of Money Getting; Or, Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum

Practice rows of good straight stitching.
— from Clothing and Health: An Elementary Textbook of Home Making by Anna M. (Anna Maria) Cooley

They give to the whole book something of the grotesque character of those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite start up in the midst of a soft green plain.
— from Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2 by Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron

And this for some moments will quiver right over the hive, with prodigious rustle of gossamer silks that countless electrified hands might be ceaselessly rending and stitching; it floats undulating, it trembles and flutters like a veil of gladness invisible fingers support in the sky, and wave to and fro, from the flowers to the blue, expecting sublime advent or departure.
— from The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck

The following pages are therefore adapted from what might be styled the personal record of Gene Stratton-Porter.
— from At the Foot of the Rainbow by Gene Stratton-Porter