The healthy understanding is not the logical argumentative, but the intuitive; for the end of understanding is not to prove and find reasons, but to know and believe.
— 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.

But it will be well to consider that the human understanding is not to be blamed for its inability to know the substance of things, that is, to determine it by itself, but rather for requiring to cognise it which is a mere idea definitely as though it were a given object.
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant

I know for certain they awoke at dawn, And got their husbands up if not their boat sails.
— from Lysistrata by Aristophanes

Perhaps, too, he thought of me: perhaps he regretted the part he had had in preventing our union, by omitting to help us, if not by actually plotting against us.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

For as the function of the human understanding is no other than merely to appear to itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary sensations; and the sensations again all their reality from the impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

But, strange to tell, his utterance is no ordinary speech and flows in a melodious stream.
— from A History of Sanskrit Literature by Arthur Anthony Macdonell

Only my maid was up, and she had remained in her room at the top of the house until I needed her services.
— from The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple Court had known him more scantily than ever; and often when he had thrown himself upon it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again, and haunted that neighbourhood.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

the task he undertakes Is numb'ring sands and drinking oceans dry.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

As Protagoras declines to accommodate him, he rises to depart, but is detained by Callias, who thinks him unreasonable in not allowing Protagoras the liberty which he takes himself of speaking as he likes.
— from Protagoras by Plato

For the human understanding is no less exposed to the impressions of fancy, than to those of vulgar notions.
— from Novum Organum; Or, True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature by Francis Bacon

The hideous ulcer is no longer concealed.
— from The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, the Wickedest City in the World by Robert O. Harland

Richard had a guilty conscience; and yet the remark that was thus addressed to him, unconciliatory, if not directly hostile, as it was, rather reassured him than otherwise.
— from Bred in the Bone; Or, Like Father, Like Son: A Novel by James Payn

After having told Mathelet, your bât man, to get out and brush your full-dress uniform, as we are to go into action to-morrow, I crept quietly out of camp, armed only with my sabre, and crouched under the hedges until I neared the English camp.
— from Under Sentence of Death; Or, a Criminal's Last Hours by Victor Hugo

For small works or for regulators ( Art. 5 ) where the heading up is not constant, steeper gradients are permissible.
— from River and Canal Engineering, the characteristics of open flowing streams, and the principles and methods to be followed in dealing with them. by E. S. (Edward Skelton) Bellasis

"Harriet!" said I, "have you forgotten already William Temple's assurances that his uncle is not cross at all?"
— from Aunt Kitty's Tales by Maria J. (Maria Jane) McIntosh

"You are always talking, Esther," she said, with a provoking little smile; "but then," she added, quickly, as though she were afraid that I should think her unkind, "I never heard other girls talk so well.
— from Esther : a book for girls by Rosa Nouchette Carey

I am aware that the theory he upheld is now much contested, that there are those who, while they do not dispute the genuineness of the manifestations, would ascribe them to quite another cause, looking upon them as of purely objective nature, and entirely independent of the medium.
— from From Memory's Shrine: The Reminscences of Carmen Sylva by Carmen Sylva