To live a life that shall be entirely prudent and discreet, and to draw from experience all the instruction it contains, it is requisite to be constantly thinking back,—to make a kind of recapitulation of what we have done, of our impressions and sensations, to compare our former with our present judgments—what we set before us and struggle to achieve, with the actual result and satisfaction we have obtained.
— from The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer

Yet prize as unduly as ye will that body's excellences; so long as ye know that this that ye admire, whatever its worth, can be dissolved away by the feeble flame of a three days' fever.
— from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

The dominions from which she draws her resources, lying at an immense distance from the capital and from one another, make it more necessary for her than for any other State to temporize, until she can inspire with activity all parts of her enormous but disjointed empire."
— from The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 by A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

Love is a superstition that doth fear the idol which itself hath made.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

I don't know what's to become of the dinner, for it's ready, and there's no one to eat it.
— from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

They purposed remaining in London only three days, prior to departing for some weeks to a distant part of the coast.
— from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Up betimes, at it again with great content, and so to the Office, where all the morning, and did fall out with W. Pen about his slight performance of his office, and so home to dinner, fully satisfied that this Office must sink or the whole Service be undone.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

I fear that, even sitting by that desolate hearth, and beneath the roof whose noble was an exile from his own house, Robert Audley was weak enough to think of these things—weak enough to let his fancy wander away to the dismal fir-trees under the cold March sky, and the dark-brown eyes that were so like the eyes of his lost friend.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

Ere the full tale be finished and the darkness find him without pain.
— from Oedipus King of Thebes Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes by Sophocles

These two porches, the arch by which we have entered, and the wild vaulting that rises to an apex over our heads amid a profusion of glistening stalactites, are the dominant features of this piece of fairy architecture.
— from The Netherworld of Mendip Explorations in the great caverns of Somerset, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and elsewhere by Ernest A. (Ernest Albert) Baker

“This discourteous fellow Angelo formeth the greatest contrast to Leonardo da Vinci, now the leading artist of Florence, in whom the word gentleman hath as full a [341] showing as in any noble living.
— from Witch Winnie's Mystery, or The Old Oak Cabinet The Story of a King's Daughter by Elizabeth W. (Elizabeth Williams) Champney

When virtuous love is sought Thy power is naught, Though dating from the Flood, Blue blood!
— from The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan by Arthur Sullivan

Considering the proportions by decades, [68] we find that of the total of 213,282 Russian immigrants entering in the decade from 1881 to 1890, the Jewish immigrants contributed 135,003, or 63.3 per cent.
— from Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. LIX, No. 4, 1914 by Samuel Joseph

While the high aristocrats looked down as a rule on Cicero the novus homo, and for some years positively hated him[151], Caesar, though differing from him toto coelo in politics, was always on pleasant terms of personal intercourse with him; he had a charm of manner, a literary taste, and a genuine admiration for genius, which was invariably irresistible to the sensitive "novus homo."
— from Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero by W. Warde (William Warde) Fowler

The queer burnt spots, called the “Devil's footsteps,” had never attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a “Goody,” so called, or sweeper, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know something.—I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers, and a most ghostly garret,—with the “Devil's footsteps” in the fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity.
— from The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes: An Index of the Project Gutenberg Editions by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Dr. McCosh on the delegated forces of God, 317 –318.
— from The Source and Mode of Solar Energy Throughout the Universe by Isaac W. (Isaac Winter) Heysinger

By an exaggeration of the same process we at once get an approximation to the form of one of the sharp-snouted, {753} or longirostrine, crocodiles, such as the genus Tomistoma ; and, in the species figured, the oblique position of the orbits, the arched contour of the occipital border, and certain other characters suggest a certain amount of curvature, such as I have represented in the diagram (Fig.
— from On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Great scholars and thinkers of old, such as Horace, Homer, Pindar, Tasso, and all the glorious line, dreamt of flight, but it has been left for the present century to see those dreams fulfilled.
— from The Mastery of the Air by William J. Claxton