“There goes the parson, O illustrious spark!
And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk.”

A Smuggler's Song.
Puck of Pook's Hill 1906

Letter to parents (December 2013)

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

First Epistle to J. Lapraik, st. 13 (1786)

Letter to Lafayette (1 February 1830), published in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (1867), Vol. IV, p. 60 https://books.google.com/books?id=ugpFAQAAMAAJ&amp;pg=PA60#v=twopage&amp;q&amp;f=false&lt;!-- also quoted in The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (1989), by Drew R. McCoy, Cambridge University Press, p. 252 --&gt; <br class="br">1830s <br class="br">Context: Your anticipations with regard to the slavery among us were the natural offspring of your just principles and laudable sympathies; but I am sorry to say that the occasion which led to them proved to be little fitted for the slightest interposition on that subject. A sensibility, morbid in the highest degree, was never more awakened among those who have the largest stake in that species of interest, and the most violent against any governmental movement in relation to it. The excitability at the moment, happened, also, to be not a little augmented by party questions between the South and the North, and the efforts used to make the circumstance common to the former a sympathetic bond of co-operation. I scarcely express myself too strongly in saying, that any allusion in the Convention to the subject you have so much at heart would have been a spark to a mass of gunpowder. It is certain, nevertheless, that time, the “great Innovator,” is not idle in its salutary preparations. The Colonization Society are becoming more and more one of its agents. Outlets for the freed blacks are alone wanted for a rapid erasure of the blot from our Republican character.

Elric sighed and his quiet tones were tinged with hopelessness. “Without some confirmation of the order of things, my only comfort is to accept the anarchy. This way, I can revel in chaos and know, without fear, that we are doomed from the start—that our brief existence is both meaningless and damned. I can accept, then, that we are more than forsaken, because there was never anything there to forsake us. I have weighed the proof, Shaarilla, and must believe that anarchy prevails, in spite of all the laws which seemingly govern our actions, our sorcery, our logic. I see only chaos in the world. If the book we seek tells me otherwise, then I shall gladly believe it. Until then, I will put my trust only in my sword and myself.”
Source: The Elric Cycle, The Weird of the White Wolf (1977), Chapter 1, “A Woman Who Would Risk Grief to Her Soul” (p. 451)

General Prologue, l. 287
The Canterbury Tales

Part II, chapter 5.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)