SISYPHUS was a great tyrant who, according to some accounts, barbarously murdered all travellers who came into his dominions, by hurling upon them enormous pieces of rock.
— from Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E. M. Berens

In a word, it was said, they neglected all the exterior parts of religion, and gave themselves up wholly to solitude and inward prayer.
— from Fox's Book of Martyrs Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs by John Foxe

not a little knowledge seems to be assumed, and this fact points to the existence of a popular play on the earlier part of Richard's reign.
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley

It will, I think, be well, in approaching this question, to consider the analogy presented by the early progress of railway enterprise.
— from Garden Cities of To-Morrow Being the Second Edition of "To-Morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform" by Howard, Ebenezer, Sir

These reasons, as well as the idea of an invasion of what we call our Literary Property, induced the London Booksellers to print an elegant and accurate edition of all the English Poets of reputation, from Chaucer to the present time.
— from Boswell's Life of Johnson Abridged and edited, with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood by James Boswell

So we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence as an organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be the exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey

One looked it well in the face, I seem to remember, this extravagance; and with the effect precisely of recognising the charm of the problem.
— from The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 1 by Henry James

Some may be more natural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better the essential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forward continually out of the past what can have a value for the present.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Regulation of thinking by its purpose Demand for the solution of a perplexity is the steadying and guiding factor in the entire process of reflection.
— from How We Think by John Dewey

The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine or supernatural powers, belongs essentially to that earlier period of religious history in which gods and men are still viewed as beings of much the same order, and before they are divided by the impassable gulf which, to later thought, opens out between them.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

That ecclesiastical primacy of Rome which burst with so much effect upon the second and third centuries flourished no longer when the Orient had an existence and a separate capital.
— from English Conferences of Ernest Renan: Rome and Christianity. Marcus Aurelius by Ernest Renan

"To teach a child the dogmas and spirit of a Sect, before he is taught the essential principles of Religion and Morality, is to invert the pyramid, to reverse the order of nature,—to feed with the bones of controversy instead of with the nourishing milk of Truth and Charity.... I can aver from personal experience and practice, as well as from a very extended enquiry on this subject, that a much more comprehensive course of Biblical and Religious instruction can be given than there is likely to be opportunity for doing so in Elementary Schools, without any restraint on the one side or any tincture of sectarianism on the other,—a course embracing the entire history of the Bible, its institutions, cardinal doctrines and morals, together with the evidences of its authenticity."
— from Egerton Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada by J. Harold (John Harold) Putman

Even in Athens the appearance of non-political pleadings among the forms of literature was a sign of debility; and it was doubly so in Rome, which did not, like Athens, by a sort of necessity produce this malformation from the exaggerated pursuit of rhetoric, but borrowed it from abroad arbitrarily and in antagonism to the better traditions of the nation.
— from The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) by Theodor Mommsen

His hair is combed and brushed down with something like youthful vanity, and he has a smooth, bright, rather handsome face, and without sunken cheeks, strikingly resembling in contour and the shape of the head some of the early portraits of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
— from McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 2, January, 1896 by Various

But if by terms of opprobrium, such as "sheeny" and "dago," we convince them that they are held in contempt, and if by oppression and fraud we render them suspicious of us, we can easily compact them into masses, hostile to us and dangerous to our institutions and organized for the express purpose of resisting all Americanizing influences.
— from Aliens or Americans? by Howard B. (Howard Benjamin) Grose

During the entire process of restoration, the body should be thoroughly rubbed upwards .
— from The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred and Fifty Thousand by Ray Vaughn Pierce

Each and all of these countries, with the exception perhaps of Russia, instead of advancing, will gradually recede in wealth and intelligence, not only from internal dissensions, but on account of the large portion of both, that will from time to time, as long as this state of things shall last, direct its course to the new world.
— from The American Quarterly Review, No. 18, June 1831 (Vol 9) by Various

It is a nice thing to hit the exact point of reserve and difficulty at which an interest of a certain sort is piqued, without danger of being extinguished.
— from The Tenants of Malory, Volume 1 by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Expose untamed and domesticated forms of life, together, to an entire set of physical conditions equally alien to the former habits of both, so that every power of resistance and accommodation shall be called into action, and the wild plant or animal will live, while the domesticated will perish.
— from The Earth as Modified by Human Action by George P. (George Perkins) Marsh