When we trace up the human understanding to its first principles, we find it to lead us into such sentiments, as seem to turn into ridicule all our past pains and industry, and to discourage us from future enquiries.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Feague is used, figuratively, for encouraging or spiriting one up.
— from 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose

God knows with how great difficulty most of these things are to be understood: for (for example) how shall the physician find out the true sign of the disease, every disease being capable of an infinite number of indications?
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

We fairly seemed to pick up our wheels and fly—and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything and held in solution!
— from Roughing It by Mark Twain

Death himself slew those poor children By means of their unselfish fear for each other!
— from The Satyricon — Complete by Petronius Arbiter

Warburton has a secret wish to anticipate the design; but he must have understood, from former examples, that the execution of such a work would have demanded many years.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Behold, Thou hast given unto us for food every herb bearing seed which is upon all the earth; and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed.
— from The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

With the appearance of the middleman, wholly irresponsible, and ut terly reckless and unrestrained, began the era of tenement building which turned out such blocks as Gotham Court, where, in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the tenants died at the rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand of population; which forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 in 41.83 in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom from epidemic disease, and which wrung from the early organizers of the Health Department this wail: “There are numerous examples of tenement-houses in which are lodged several hundred people that have a pro rata allotment of ground area scarcely equal to two square yards upon the city lot, court-yards and all included.”
— from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis

If it means, however, that the best conducted government is also the best kind of government,—that is, the best form of political constitution,—then it is utterly false: for examples of wise administration are no proof of the kind of government.
— from Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay by Immanuel Kant

Yet we too triumph in the day That bare, to entrance our eyes and ears, To lighten daylight, and to play Such notes as darkness knows and fears, The child whose face illumes our way, Whose voice lifts up the heart that hears, Whose hand is as the hand of May To bring us flowers from eight full years.
— from Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc. From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. by Algernon Charles Swinburne

[Pg 159] ter, the recruits would have received the advantage of a few months training before they were brought into actual service, and the General, that of a certain uninterrupted force for each campaign.
— from The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 Commander in Chief of the American Forces During the War which Established the Independence of his Country and First President of the United States by John Marshall

He had an unbounded capacity for swallowing gin-and-soda; he had a good eye and a steady hand as a pigeon-shot; and he possessed an unrivalled faculty for exploiting “mugs.”
— from Bohemian Days in Fleet Street by William Mackay

It is true there has been no income used for family expenses, and the legacies can be paid.
— from Floyd Grandon's Honor by Amanda M. Douglas

You understand how horrible it is to think that some ragamuffin may kill me, a man who has thoughts and feelings, and that it would make no difference if alongside of me some Antónof were killed,—a being not different from an animal—and that it might easily happen that I and not this Antónof were killed, which is always une fatalité for every lofty and good man.
— from The Invaders, and Other Stories by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

The committee to which it was sent received it with great regret, and a unanimous feeling found expression that, at anyrate, he should retain the office of Principal.
— from Principal Cairns by John Cairns

"[86] These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate.
— from Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold by Matthew Arnold

Aware of the utter uselessness, from former experience, of endeavouring to incline them to continue the search, I went silently back.
— from The Diary of a Hunter from the Punjab to the Karakorum Mountains by Augustus Henry Irby

He had in view a British commercial advantage during the war, since if the United States respected the second and third articles of the Declaration of Paris, and "if Confederate privateers should roam the ocean and seize the ships and goods of citizens of the North, all the better for other commercial nations; for it would soon cause the commerce of the United States to be carried on under foreign flags, especially the British and French
— from Great Britain and the American Civil War by Ephraim Douglass Adams

I have noticed that subjects discussed at the C. L. S. C. meetings often come up for further examination in shops, stores, on the street, and in the family, and these discussions I judge go far to fix in the mind the subjects discussed.
— from The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, April 1884, No. 7 by Chautauqua Institution