Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:18

Excerpt #1, from The Republic of Plato, by Plato

…with strict orders to prevent any embryo which may come into being from seeing the light; and if any force a way to the birth, the parents must understand that the offspring of such an union cannot be maintained, and arrange accordingly. That also, he said, is a reasonable proposition. But how 461D will they know who are fathers and daughters, and so on? They will never know. The way will be this:–dating from the day of the hymeneal, the bridegroom who was then married will call all the male children who are born in the seventh and tenth month afterwards his sons, and the female children his daughters, and they will call him father, and he will call their children his grandchildren, and they {156} will call the elder generation grandfathers and grandmothers. All who were begotten at the time when their fathers and mothers came together will be called their brothers and 461E sisters, and these, as I was saying, will be forbidden to inter-marry. This, however, is not to be understood as an absolute prohibition of the marriage of brothers and sisters; if the lot favours them, and they receive the sanction of the Pythian oracle, the law will allow them. Quite right, he replied. Such is the scheme, Glaucon, according to which the guardians of our State are to have their wives and families in common. And now you would have the…

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Excerpt #2, from The philosophy of biology, by James Johnstone

…means of which the potential energy of stored chemical compounds passes into the kinetic energy of bodily movements; and the existence (so far as we can say that it exists in organisms other than ourselves) of some degree of consciousness. Neither do those morphological schemata which we construct as diagnostic of phyla, or classes, or orders, etc., separate these groups from each other so clearly and unequivocally as our classifications suggest. It might seem for instance that the presence or absence of a notochord would sharply distinguish between the vertebrate and invertebrate, but structures which suggest in their development the true notochordal skeleton of the typical vertebrate animal are to be traced in animals which exhibit few or none of the characters which we regard as diagnostic of the Vertebrate. Typical Arthropods and typical Vertebrates seem to be distinct from each other, but the extinct Ostracoderms of Silurian times may have been animals which possessed an internal axial skeleton, and which were also armed by a heavy dermal exo-skeleton. It is a hypothesis of considerable plausibility that they really were Arthropods, on the other hand they are usually regarded as Vertebrates. So also with most other phyla: the morphological characters which absolutely distinguish between one group and others are very few indeed, and the small appended groups that lie…

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Excerpt #3, from The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie

…M. le curé to bring some holy water. Never will I sleep another night under that roof. It might be my turn, who knows?” She crossed herself. “Yes,” I cried, “but who has been killed?” “Do I know—me? A man—a stranger. They found him up there—in the shed—not a hundred yards from where they found poor Monsieur. And that is not all. He is stabbed—stabbed to the heart with the same dagger!__” 14 The Second Body Waiting for no more, I turned and ran up the path to the shed. The two men on guard there stood aside to let me pass and, filled with excitement, I entered. The light was dim, the place was a mere rough wooden erection to keep old pots and tools in. I had entered impetuously, but on the threshold I checked myself, fascinated by the spectacle before me. Giraud was on his hands and knees, a pocket torch in his hand with which he was examining every inch of the ground. He looked up with a frown at my entrance, then his face relaxed a little in a sort of good-humoured contempt. “Ah, c’est l’Anglais!__ Enter then. Let us see what you can make of this affair.”…

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Excerpt #4, from Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685

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Excerpt #5, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume

…still supposed imperfect, without the assistance of experience, which is alone able to give stability and certainty to the maxims, derived from study and reflection. But notwithstanding that this distinction be thus universally received, both in the active speculative scenes of life, I shall not scruple to pronounce, that it is, at bottom, erroneous, at least, superficial. If we examine those arguments, which, in any of the sciences above mentioned, are supposed to be the mere effects of reasoning and reflection, they will be found to terminate, at last, in some general principle or conclusion, for which we can assign no reason but observation and experience. The only difference between them and those maxims, which are vulgarly esteemed the result of pure experience, is, that the former cannot be established without some process of thought, and some reflection on what we have observed, in order to distinguish its circumstances, and trace its consequences: Whereas in the latter, the experienced event is exactly and fully familiar to that which we infer as the result of any particular situation. The history of a TIBERIUS or a NERO makes us dread a like tyranny, were our monarchs freed from the restraints of laws…

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Excerpt #6, from The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

…suffered more than any of them, am walking on foot to the house of a woman of rather questionable reputation! A man, look you, who has thirteen bullets on his breast!… You don’t believe it? Well, I can assure you it was entirely on my account that Pirogoff telegraphed to Paris, and left Sebastopol at the greatest risk during the siege. Nelaton, the Tuileries surgeon, demanded a safe conduct, in the name of science, into the besieged city in order to attend my wounds. The government knows all about it. ‘That’s the Ivolgin with thirteen bullets in him!’ That’s how they speak of me…. Do you see that house, prince? One of my old friends lives on the first floor, with his large family. In this and five other houses, three overlooking Nevsky, two in the Morskaya, are all that remain of my personal friends. Nina Alexandrovna gave them up long ago, but I keep in touch with them still… I may say I find refreshment in this little coterie, in thus meeting my old acquaintances and subordinates, who worship me still, in spite of all. General Sokolovitch (by the way, I have not called on him lately, or seen Anna Fedorovna)… You know, my dear prince, when a person does not receive company himself, he gives up going to other people’s houses involuntarily. And yet… well… you look as if you didn’t believe me…. Well now, why should I not present the son of my old friend and companion to this delightful family—General Ivolgin and…

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Excerpt #7, from Curiosities of Human Nature, by Samuel G. Goodrich

…to find out this and that, mentioning the different parts contained in that theorem. His father then asked how he came to inquire about that. He replied, that he had found out such a thing, naming some of the more simple problems; and thus, in reply to different questions, he showed that he had gone on his own investigations, totally unassisted, from the most simple definition in geometry, to Euclid’s thirty-second proposition. This, it must be remembered, was when Pascal was but twelve years of age. His subsequent progress perfectly accorded with this extraordinary display of talent. His father now gave him Euclid’s Elements to peruse at his hours of recreation. He read them, and understood them, without any assistance. His progress was so rapid that he was soon admitted to the meetings of a society of which his father, Roberval, and some other celebrated mathematicians were members, and from which afterwards originated the Royal Academy of Sciences, at Paris. During Pascal’s residence with his father at Rouen, and while he was only in his nineteenth year, he invented his famous arithmetical machine, by which all numerical calculations, however complex, can be made by the mechanical operation of its different parts, without any arithmetical skill in the person who uses it. He had a patent for this invention in 1649. His studies, however, began to be interrupted when he…

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Excerpt #8, from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau

…according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us. Sounds But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before…

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Excerpt #9, from The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare

…So be gone; you are sped._ Still more fool I shall appear By the time I linger here. With one fool’s head I came to woo, But I go away with two. Sweet, adieu! I’ll keep my oath, Patiently to bear my wroth. [Exit Aragon with his train.] PORTIA…. Thus hath the candle sing’d the moth. O, these deliberate fools! When they do choose, They have the wisdom by their wit to lose. NERISSA. The ancient saying is no heresy: Hanging and wiving goes by destiny. PORTIA…. Come, draw the curtain, Nerissa. Enter a Messenger. MESSENGER. Where is my lady? PORTIA….

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Excerpt #10, from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare

…GUILDENSTERN. Prison, my lord? HAMLET. Denmark’s a prison. ROSENCRANTZ. Then is the world one. HAMLET. A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst. ROSENCRANTZ. We think not so, my lord. HAMLET. Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. ROSENCRANTZ. Why, then your ambition makes it one; ’tis too narrow for your mind. HAMLET. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. GUILDENSTERN. Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. HAMLET. A dream itself is but a shadow. ROSENCRANTZ. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow. HAMLET. Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch’d heroes the beggars’ shadows. Shall we to th’ court? For, by my fay, I cannot reason. ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN. We’ll wait upon you….

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Excerpt #11, from Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

…resumed its original mocking expression. He went on drinking tea. “There have been a great many of these crimes lately,” said Zametov. “Only the other day I read in the Moscow News that a whole gang of false coiners had been caught in Moscow. It was a regular society. They used to forge tickets!” “Oh, but it was a long time ago! I read about it a month ago,” Raskolnikov answered calmly. “So you consider them criminals?” he added, smiling. “Of course they are criminals.” “They? They are children, simpletons, not criminals! Why, half a hundred people meeting for such an object–what an idea! Three would be too many, and then they want to have more faith in one another than in themselves! One has only to blab in his cups and it all collapses. Simpletons! They engaged untrustworthy people to change the notes–what a thing to trust to a casual stranger! Well, let us suppose that these simpletons succeed and each makes a million, and what follows for the rest of their lives? Each is dependent on the others for the rest of his life! Better hang oneself at once! And they did not know how to change the notes either; the man who changed the notes took five thousand roubles, and his hands trembled. He counted the first four thousand, but did not count the fifth thousand–he was in such a hurry to get the…

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Excerpt #12, from A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

…remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory members of the profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief. The remodelled procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the hearse–advised by the regular driver, who was perched beside him, under close inspection, for the purpose–and with a pieman, also attended by his cabinet minister, driving the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a popular street character of the time, was impressed as an additional ornament, before the cavalcade had gone far down the Strand; and his bear, who was black and very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to that part of the procession in which he walked. Thus, with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruiting at every step, and all the shops shutting up before it. Its destination was the old church of Saint Pancras, far off in the fields. It got there in course of time; insisted on pouring into the burial-ground; finally, accomplished the interment of the deceased Roger Cly in its own way, and highly to its own satisfaction. The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the necessity of providing some other entertainment for itself, another brighter genius (or perhaps the same) conceived the humour of impeaching casual passers-by, as Old Bailey spies, and wreaking vengeance on them. Chase…

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