The scarce-suppressed impetus of a most irritable nature glowed in his cheek, fed with sharp shafts his glances, a nature—the injudicious, the mawkish, the hesitating, the sullen, the affected, above all, the unyielding, might quickly render violent and implacable.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

The revelation of God to any man is not God coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to the man's soul.
— from The Pursuit of God by A. W. (Aiden Wilson) Tozer

You love Charan so that it will be very hard for you to part, and yet to have a dancing-girl before [ 16 ] you are married is not good form, and will interfere with your marriage prospects and promotion.
— from Korean Folk Tales: Imps, Ghosts and Faries by Yuk Yi

And Mitka is not guilty and had no share in it.”
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

‘And aunt Maxwell is never going to leave off hers,’ persisted the naughty boy; but when he saw that his pertness was seriously displeasing and painful to his aunt, he went and silently put his arm round her neck, kissed her cheek, and withdrew to the recess of one of the great bay-windows, where he quietly amused himself with his dog, while Mrs. Maxwell gravely discussed with me the interesting topics of the weather, the season, and the roads.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

“Up to this point,” said Faria, interrupting the thread of his narrative, “this seems to you very meaningless, no doubt, eh?” “Oh, my friend,” cried Dantès, “on the contrary, it seems as if I were reading a most interesting narrative; go on, I beg of you.”
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

A man is not guilty if he loves his neighbour’s wife, provided he keeps this unhappy passion under the control of the law of duty; he is guilty if he loves his own wife so greatly as to sacrifice everything to that love.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In a melancholy mood she therefore communed within herself, "As far as my infant name goes, there is, in this establishment, no one who has any idea what it is, and how is it that he has come to know it, and that he utters it in his dream?"
— from Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book I by Xueqin Cao

Now the Exaggerator is thought to have a tendency to lay claim to things reflecting credit on him, both when they do not belong to him at all and also in greater degree than that in which they really do: whereas the Reserved man, on the contrary, denies those which really belong to him or else depreciates them, while the mean character being a Plain-matter-of-fact person is Truthful in life and word, admitting the existence of what does really belong to him and making it neither greater nor less than the truth.
— from The Ethics of Aristotle by Aristotle

So at Mowat in New Guinea men have no relation with women when the turtles are coupling, though there is considerable laxity of morals at other times.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

Pee-wee shouted, “A message is no good at all—even the most important message in the world is no good to the fellow that makes it——” Brent said, “Then he’s just wasting his time making it.
— from Roy Blakeley's Motor Caravan by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

"How fareth the little man's mother?" said he, "and may I not go in to see her immediately?"
— from Arius the Libyan: A Romance of the Primitive Church by Nathan C. (Nathan Chapman) Kouns

And may I not go to him again, and say, 'This is your name'?—for the name, like the picture, is an imitation.
— from Cratylus by Plato

You are making a mistake in not going to Trecastagne.
— from Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions by Henry Festing Jones

The distance between him and me is not great enough to have produced that sort of worship.
— from The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope

The amount of testimony necessary to prove a miracle is no greater than that which is requisite to prove the occurrence of any other unusual but confessedly possible event.
— from Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3) by Augustus Hopkins Strong

I should dig the wet soil from the spot of which you speak, for all muck is not good for this Iris, and after mixing it with some good loam and well-rotted cow manure replace it and plant the clumps of Iris two feet apart, for they will spread wonderfully.
— from The Garden, You, and I by Mabel Osgood Wright

A man is not greatest as victor in war, nor inventor or explorer, nor even in science, or in his intellectual or artistic capacity, or exemplar in some vast benevolence.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Such a man is not going to make himself tiresome by importunity.
— from The Upton Letters by Arthur Christopher Benson