He said to some one, who was expressing indignation at being overlooked when the thirty had seized on the supreme power, “Do you, then, repent of not being a tyrant too?”
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

Still, I had all the night, and being out was the great thing.
— from Howards End by E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster

When we arrived, Colonel C——'s family were at breakfast, of which they made us partake; and after vainly endeavouring to dissuade us from what appeared to them our Quixotic expedition, Mrs. C—— added a dozen fine white fish to the contents of the sack, and sent her youngest son to help Mr. T—— along with his burthen, and to bear us company on our desolate road.
— from Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie

It has been thought that to shoot at a block of wood thinking it to be a man is not an attempt to murder, /1/ and that to put a hand into an empty pocket, intending to pick it, is not an attempt to commit larceny, although on the latter question there is a difference of opinion. /2/
— from The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes

In the first place, it was necessary there should be only one person in the shop, and that person’s physiognomy must be so encouraging as to give me confidence to pass the threshold; but when once the dear little cake was procured, and I shut up in my chamber with that and a bottle of wine, taken cautiously from the bottom of a cupboard, how much did I enjoy drinking my wine, and reading a few pages of a novel; for when I have no company I always wish to read while eating; it seems a substitute for society, and I dispatch alternately a page and a morsel; ‘tis indeed, as if my book dined with me.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

l’Impertinent.]—coming by I called him in and so we sat drinking a bottle of wine till night.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

Was not a bowl of wine the cause of the demise of Alexander the Great, or, at least, does not Dr. Lempriere say so?—so did this bowl of rack punch influence the fates of all the principal characters in this "Novel without a Hero," which we are now relating.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

‘A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad,’ I continued, ‘if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.
— from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

It was covered with wonderful creatures: one bear was fastened by his long tail to the pole; another bigger one was trotting round; a snake was coiling about anywhere; a lady stood disconsolate against a rock; another sat in a chair; a giant sprawled with a club in one hand and a lion's skin in the other; a big dog and a little dog stood on their hind legs; a lion seemed just about to spring on a young maiden's head; and all were thickly spotted over, just as if they had Lucy's rash, with stars big and little: and still more strange, her brothers declared these were the stars in the sky, and this was the way people found their road at sea; but if Lucy asked how, they always said she was not big enough to [13] understand, and it had not occurred to Lucy to ask whether the truth was not that they were not big enough to explain.
— from Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

The Malays, the Vikings of the East Indies, found in bhang a drug the most exciting and maddening in its effects of any known to civilized or uncivilized man; a substitute for opium or haschisch bearing much the same relation to those sedatives as brandy or whiskey to the light wines of Southern Europe.
— from Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885 by Various

My being goes out into these other lives and becomes one with them.
— from The Gate of Appreciation: Studies in the Relation of Art to Life by Carleton Eldredge Noyes

Flowers in umbel like clusters, or somewhat corymbose, appearing before or with the leaves on branchlets of the preceding year.
— from Trees of Indiana First Revised Edition (Publication No. 13, Department of Conservation, State of Indiana) by Charles Clemon Deam

So, from the experiences of shrewd managers, we have dug out the gist of their ideas and put it in the form of a chart that gives a basis on which to work.
— from The Knack of Managing by Lewis K. Urquhart

After all these years of gravity and restraint and endurance, this momentary outbreak of the old Adam in our hero is like a breath of wind through an open window.
— from Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery — Volume 5 by Filson Young

When the lords were coming into the circuit, as they passed the jail, the trumpeters gave a blast, on which the jack-daw gave a flutter against the iron bars of the window, and dropped down dead.
— from A History of the Gipsies: with Specimens of the Gipsy Language by Walter Simson

They called for the restoration of the States-General, not daring to admit that they wished to secure the legislative and political power for themselves; and thus they hastened on the resurrection of a body of which they had gathered the inheritance, a body which, on returning to life, would at once reduce them to their own department.
— from The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England, Volume 1 (of 6) Mémoires d'outre-tombe, volume 1 by Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de

They each had, in the lower hall, a bicycle on which they rode to and from school and to play.
— from Cytherea by Joseph Hergesheimer

They had not learnt to say of a book of which they disapproved, that it was weak or dull: in pronouncing it to be vicious, they helped to promote its sale; and the most decried has been the most widely read of the author's works.
— from Byron by John Nichol

It is like the addition of a barrel of water to a pond; theoretically the surface level is raised, but not to any appreciable extent.
— from Readings in Money and Banking Selected and Adapted by Chester Arthur Phillips