You should have let that charge alone, he is not the person with whom we have to deal, you are wasting your wrath to no purpose.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

But he has decided it was not propitious, something went wrong with the gods, I did not learn what it was; anyway, he is now tearing down one of the big buttresses on one side of it to see if fate will treat him more kindly then.
— from Letters from China and Japan by Harriet Alice Chipman Dewey

Observing this, and that the young gentleman was nearly of his own age and had in nothing the appearance of an habitual brawler, Nicholas, impelled by such feelings as will influence young men sometimes, felt a very strong disposition to side with the weaker party, and so thrust himself at once into the centre of the group, and in a more emphatic tone, perhaps, than circumstances might seem to warrant, demanded what all that noise was about.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

"I know all about it, mother," she replied; "I am nothing to my father, and he is nothing to me.
— from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself by Harriet A. (Harriet Ann) Jacobs

This public opinion, independent of the monarch's dictation, must be either with him or against him; if not the one, it will be the other.
— from Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill

But still this is a falsehood, for a hen is not the mother of an egg.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were married, by special license, in Southampton the day after their flight, and he is now the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius.
— from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Illustrated by Arthur Conan Doyle

“I keep my eye upon him,” I answered, “he is not thinking of us, and even if he should turn his head, the cloak shelters us from him.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

This we succeeded in doing, and he is now the postmaster at the Tuskegee Institute.
— from Up from Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington

Even those birds which do not build in close contiguity no sooner find that a hawk is near than they rise simultaneously and follow and annoy him: so much so that he will sometimes actually drop the prey he has captured.
— from Wild Life in a Southern County by Richard Jefferies

The summer of 1863, from peculiar circumstances, the dullness of freights elsewhere, and the depredations of the Alabama and other piratical cruisers, called to the China coast, and especially to Shanghai, as fine a fleet of clippers as was to be found in any port of the world; and on that bright mid-summer night we found them anchored in three parallel rows, crossing the channel of a river half a mile wide, and stretching for a mile and a half, if not two miles, up and down before Shanghai.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 Devoted To Literature And National Policy by Various

If he has, I ask him: Is not the way of the transgressor hard?
— from Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangelist by Dwight Lyman Moody

He is empowered to act only through the other officers of the Fleet as this Court may appoint; he is not to command directly.
— from The Highest Treason by Randall Garrett

The desire to eat cheese does not come upon a man suddenly, like the desire to take a drink, or stand off a creditor, and he is not taken possession of by the demon of appetite and pulled to the nearest saloon by a forty horse power devil, as is the man who has the jim jams.
— from Peck's Sunshine Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 by George W. (George Wilbur) Peck

Relinquishing every proof of the divinity of Christ derivable from the New Testament as less than useless, the grounds on which he calls for a belief in the incarnation of God in Christ (who, by the way, need not ever have existed as an historical character at all) are, that 'such a union of divinity and humanity is necessary to me, that my nature may find its complete religious satisfaction;' 'such a dogma alone supplies an adequate basis for morals, establishes the rights of man on a secure foundation, enables man to distinguish between authority and force, conciliates my double nature, rational and sentimental, and my double duties, egoistic and altruistic, and supplies an adequate incentive to progress.'
— from British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII January and April, 1871 by Various

They took off his pinafore and he is now teaching Latin outside Aldgate Station.
— from Aladdin of London; Or, Lodestar by Max Pemberton

One of them is a man who has borne a good character throughout his life, and has lost his work through no fault of his own; the works on which he was employed were closed, and he is now tramping in search of more work.
— from Church and Nation The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15 by William Temple

“I know Mr. Kingsbury,” said Lincoln, “and he is not the man to have cheated you out of a cent, and I can’t take the case, and advise you to drop the subject.”
— from Lincoln's Yarns and Stories A Complete Collection of the Funny and Witty Anecdotes That Made Lincoln Famous as America's Greatest Story Teller by Alexander K. (Alexander Kelly) McClure

In thunder tones is speaking here; The name--the age--it loudly tells, To eye and heart, if not the ear.
— from Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland by Abigail Stanley Hanna