PART VI Three years have now elapsed since I finished the treatise containing all these matters; and I was beginning to revise it, with the view to put it into the hands of a printer, when I learned that persons to whom I greatly defer, and whose authority over my actions is hardly less influential than is my own reason over my thoughts, had condemned a certain doctrine in physics, published a short time previously by another individual to which I will not say that I adhered, but only that, previously to their censure I had observed in it nothing which I could imagine to be prejudicial either to religion or to the state, and nothing therefore which would have prevented me from giving expression to it in writing, if reason had persuaded me of its truth; and this led me to fear lest among my own doctrines likewise some one might be found in which I had departed from the truth, notwithstanding the great care I have always taken not to accord belief to new opinions of which I had not the most certain demonstrations, and not to give expression to aught that might tend to the hurt of any one.
— from Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences by René Descartes

For let us consider on the one hand what divines have displayed with such eloquence concerning the importance of eternity; and at the same time reflect, that though in matters of rhetoric we ought to lay our account with some exaggeration, we must in this case allow, that the strongest figures are infinitely inferior to the subject: And after this let us view on the other hand, the prodigious security of men in this particular: I ask, if these people really believe what is inculcated on them, and what they pretend to affirm; and the answer is obviously in the negative.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

I have press'd through in my own right, I have sung the body and the soul, war and peace have I sung, and the songs of life and death, And the songs of birth, and shown that there are many births.
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Those who affirm that virtue is nothing but a conformity to reason; that there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things, which are the same to every rational being that considers them; that the immutable measures of right and wrong impose an obligation, not only on human creatures, but also on the Deity himself: All these systems concur in the opinion, that morality, like truth, is discerned merely by ideas, and by their juxta-position and comparison.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

There is more of riches, but less of force.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Divine Dancer Shiva is scripturally represented as having worked out the infinite modes of rhythm in His cosmic dance of universal creation, preservation, and dissolution, while Brahma accentuated the time-beat with the clanging cymbals, and Vishnu sounded the holy mridanga or drum.
— from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

Some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago, the ignorant men of Rome were wont to put Christians in the arena of the Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild beasts in upon them for a show.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

At a first glance, things appeared to be exceeding prosperous in this little tributary kingdom—whose lord was King Bagdemagus—as compared with the state of things in my own region.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

It will, from another point, leave dissatisfied those who decline the attempt to reduce this poetry to [Pg vii] some general but elastic laws, and who concentrate themselves on the immediate musical or rhetorical values (as they seem to them) of individual poems, or passages, or even (as is not uncommon) lines.
— from Historical Manual of English Prosody by George Saintsbury

Everywhere the Neolithic brachycephals seem to inhabit mountainous or rough country, perhaps because of preference, perhaps because as they gradually made their way they found these regions unoccupied.
— from The New Stone Age in Northern Europe by John M. (John Mason) Tyler

And in so far as the views here advanced differ from those commonly taught, the discrepancy is due to the writer's imperfect faith in the results of the inductive method of research, as commonly used by modern writers on Palæontology.
— from The Ornithosauria An elementary study of the bones of Pterodactyles made from fossil remains found in the Cambridge Upper Greensand, and arranged in the Woodwardian Museum of the University of Cambridge by H. G. (Harry Govier) Seeley

[19] Although the quantity of bog land in New England is less than in many other regions of equal area, yet there is a considerable extent of this formation in some of the Northeastern States.
— from Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action by George P. (George Perkins) Marsh

To find "toleration" in matters of religion, one must seek amongst the Deists, or amongst those who refuse to see in the Bible the revealed will of God to man.
— from Ancient Faiths And Modern A Dissertation upon Worships, Legends and Divinities in Central and Western Asia, Europe, and Elsewhere, Before the Christian Era. Showing Their Relations to Religious Customs as They Now Exist. by Thomas Inman

"The great King" was not deficient in that important mark of royalty-and which doubtless corroborated the opinion, then widely prevailing, that these Indians were of eastern origin—a goodly number of wives.
— from International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 by Various

39 For some time, in memory of Ruth, I struggled hard against a change of heart.
— from Patroon van Volkenberg A tale of old Manhattan in the year sixteen hundred & ninety-nine by Henry Thew Stephenson