and I understood you to say, ‘Oh, nothing, except that he is the quickest judge of——’ Then we were gone, and I didn’t get the rest.
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

We may readily understand that there is in the state of nature nothing, which by universal consent is pronounced good or bad; for in the state of nature everyone thinks solely of his own advantage, and according to his disposition, with reference only to his individual advantage, decides what is good or bad, being bound by no law to anyone besides himself.
— from Ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza

I know some have quarrelled since that at the experiment, and said that there died the more people because of those fires; but I am persuaded those that say so offer no evidence to prove it, neither can I believe it on any account whatever.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London by Daniel Defoe

It was not long, until a new flock of monks came along on their pilgrimage, and another one, and the monks as well as most of the other travellers and people walking through the land spoke of nothing else than of Gotama and his impending death.
— from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Rachel urged me to seek repose at once, to recruit my strength for to-morrow’s journey, as we must be gone before the dawn; but in my present state of nervous excitement that was entirely out of the question.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Yet if any one contends that it is said of nothing else than circumcision, that in it the infant has broken the covenant of God because he is not circumcised, he must seek some method of explanation by which it may be understood without absurdity (such as this) that he has broken the covenant, because it has been broken in him although not by him.
— from The City of God, Volume II by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor babe.
— from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

And if that is to be called apathy, where the mind is the subject of no emotion, then who would not consider this insensibility to be worse than all vices?
— from The City of God, Volume II by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom: Let me be cruel, not unnatural.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

The tyro of the dripping-pan will be no more entitled to screen himself behind his imperfect science or neglected education, than the unlettered criminal to plead his ignorance of the alphabet as a justification of his ignorance of the statute law, [Pg 242] whose enactments send him to Botany Bay.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 370, August 1846 by Various

Custom, however, being the growth of time, tends to a tyrannous and bewildering complexity: forms, originally natural, then symbolical, end in being arbitrary; suggestive of nothing, except to the initiated; yet, if connected with religion, so sanctified by the association, that it appears sacrilege to desist from their employment; and when their meaning is lost, they assume their place, not among empty gesticulations, [Pg 37] but among the mystical signs by which earth communes with heaven.
— from Studies of Christianity; Or, Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers by James Martineau

The silence of night enabled the young surgeons to hear vaguely the noise their horses made in eating their provender, and the murmur of the waters of the Rhine, together with those indefinable sounds which always enliven an inn when filled with persons preparing to go to bed.
— from The Red Inn by Honoré de Balzac

Such an author as Scribe is a national museum of invention—a never-failing source of new enjoyment to his lively countrymen, and he has probably tasted the pleasures of a bright and lasting reputation as fully as any author living.
— from Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (Vol. 1) by Frances Milton Trollope

When considering the literature of place, one must not overlook the fair land of Provence or the "Midi of France"—that little-known land lying immediately to the westward of Marseilles, which is seldom or never even tasted by the hungry tourist.
— from The Cathedrals of Southern France by M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

Soon after, the Empress seemingly acquiesced in the plan of reform, and announced that she too was interested in progress; but, whether sincere or not, erelong the tables were turned; six of the Emperor's advisers were beheaded, 298 and the seventh, an intimate friend of the Emperor, advised in time, left the country.
— from Travels in the Far East by Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

On the night before last the British line fell back from near La Chèche and swung around in a loop south of Neuve Eglise toward Ravelsberg Farm.
— from Current History: A Monthly Magazine of the New York Times, May 1918 Vol. VIII, Part I, No. 2 by Various