Our knowledge, when named modestly, is only the innermost conviction that some matter is so and so according to human capacity, and “such and such a condition of things.”
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross

2. Voluptuousness: unto all hair-shirted despisers of the body, a sting and stake; and, cursed as “the world,” by all backworldsmen: for it mocketh and befooleth all erring, misinferring teachers.
— from Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

If the demand for labour and the price of provisions remained the same, it would still be necessary that the labourer should, in that place, earn such a subsistence as could be bought only for ten shillings a-week; so that, after paying the tax, he should have ten shillings a-week free wages.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Why do we image to ourselves such things as never had any existence, and which never can have, such as Scyllas and Chimæras?
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth by Marcus Tullius Cicero

Insidiously, and by remote ways, as well as by the power of stick and stone and clout of hand, were the shackles of White Fang’s bondage being riveted upon him.
— from White Fang by Jack London

To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.
— from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

This much, Jerry, with his head becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood there before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Entering this run, the visitors beheld a number of dogs of all sorts and sizes and colours.
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

We think your stories all splendid, and could not do without you.
— from Harper's Young People, September 13, 1881 An Illustrated Weekly by Various

Now if my object were money, as some seemed to think, I had then a fair opportunity to tell him a falsehood, and say, "I indeed received from the English that sum, but I have expended so and so, and cannot leave them unless I restore the whole."
— from Fox's Book of Martyrs Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs by John Foxe

“I 'd have sworn you felt as I did about this old fop; and we must be arrant snobs, Nelly, or else his coming down amongst us here would not have broken us all up, setting us exchanging sneers and scoffs, and criticising each other's knowledge of life.
— from The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly by Charles James Lever

When interested his mind seems always so actively centred upon the matter under investigation that to speak is an effort.
— from In White Raiment by William Le Queux

that, [67] when he was buried in 1323, within these very walls, St Stephen and St Augustine came down from heaven, and laid his body in the tomb with their own holy hands—an incident which forms the subject of the picture.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849 by Various

They were such a secret as could not be hid.
— from Ombra by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

It may seem extraordinary that Jane Austen should have written so little during the years that elapsed between leaving Steventon and settling at Chawton; especially when this cessation from work is contrasted with her literary activity both before and after that period.
— from Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh

At first Johnny, oppressed with his dignity as Aunt Annie's "beau," stalked soberly at her side, and Susie also claimed Gregory according to agreement, and insisted on keeping hold of his hand.
— from Opening a Chestnut Burr by Edward Payson Roe