Everyone is busied and labours to serve him, and indeed, to make amends for this, he does this good to mankind, as to invent for them all arts, machines, trades, engines, and crafts; he even instructs brutes in arts which are against their nature, making poets of ravens, jackdaws, chattering jays, parrots, and starlings, and poetesses of magpies, teaching them to utter human language, speak, and sing; and all for the gut.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

"Life in and with Nature and with the fair silent things of Nature, should be fostered by parents and others," Froebel tells us, "as a chief fulcrum of child-life, and this is accomplished chiefly in play, which is at first simply natural life." Let us surmount the ruts of our teaching experience and climb high enough to look back upon our own childhood, to see where beauty called to us, where we attained to beauty.
— from The Child under Eight by E. R. (Elsie Riach) Murray

That the Sun weighs not much more than 280 an equal bulk of water, is taken as evidence that the matter he consists of is but little heavier than water; although, considering his enormous gravitative force, which at his surface is twenty-eight times the gravitative force at the surface of the Earth, and considering his enormous mass, which is 390,000 times that of the Earth, the matter he is made of can, in such case, have no analogy to the liquids or solids we know.
— from Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions by Herbert Spencer

For a long time the emperor at Constantinople had exercised the right of confirming the election of the bishop of Rome.
— from A Source Book for Mediæval History Selected Documents illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Age by Oliver J. (Oliver Joseph) Thatcher

For a moment she yielded to that embrace and closed her eyes, and then she gently drew away from him.
— from The Making of Bobby Burnit Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man by George Randolph Chester

Happily the Emperor, again casting his eyes on the map which lay unrolled before him, gave him time to recover himself; and he replied, "Sire, the golden clouds which ornament this ceiling" (for all this took place in the council-chamber), "and which surround the guardian star of your Majesty, cost twenty thousand francs in truth; but if I had consulted the hearts of your subjects, the imperial eagle which is again about to strike with a thunderbolt the enemies of France and of your throne, would have spread its wings amid the rarest diamonds.
— from Recollections of the Private Life of Napoleon — Complete by Louis Constant Wairy

He was no common man; the expectations and conjectures he excited were of no ordinary sort; and I felt that an army might be destroyed, and a spacious plain covered with the wounded and the dying, without producing greater commotion in my soul.
— from St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century by William Godwin

They sit th' allotted hours, then eager run, 90 Rushing to pleasure when the duty's done; His hour of leisure is of different kind, Then cares domestic rush upon his mind; And half the ease and comfort he enjoys, Is when surrounded by slates, books, and boys.
— from George Crabbe: Poems, Volume 1 (of 3) by George Crabbe

Northwest Smith moved his shoulders against the earth and closed his eyes, breathing so deeply that the gun holstered upon his chest drew tight against its strap as he drank the fragrance of Earth and clover warm in the sun.
— from Song in a Minor Key by C. L. (Catherine Lucile) Moore

And if the eyes of the man are dreamy and abstracted, it is because there lies over the vision of this vanished farm an infinite regret, greater in its compass than all the shares the Erie Auriferous Consolidated has ever thrown upon the market.
— from Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock