Moreover, it is a matter of great importance that no notice should be taken in his presence of the quaint sayings which result from the simplicity of the ideas in which he is brought up, nor should they be quoted in a way he can understand.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

rrible hanging are to me no more than an ogre in a child’s toy-book to a man once grown up.
— from The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

I speak not of many more: want of water, want of wood, shade, and shelter, want of fruitfulness, and mixture of grounds of several natures; want of prospect, want of level grounds, want of places at some near distance for sports of hunting, hawking, and races; too near the sea, too remote; having the commodity of navigable rivers, or the discommodity of their overflowing; too far off from great cities, which may hinder business; or too near them, which lurcheth 462 all provisions, and maketh every thing dear; where a man hath a great living laid together, and where he is scanted; all which, as it is impossible perhaps to find together, so it is good to know them, and think of them, that a man may take as many as he can; and if he have several dwellings, that he sort them so, that what he wanteth in the one he may find in the other.
— from Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients by Francis Bacon

For, pedant as he was, he made known to his countrymen the enemy of all the pedants, and turned a masterpiece of Greek into English as sound and scholarly as is found in any translator of his time.
— from Lucian's True History by of Samosata Lucian

[acquaintances] I do not know another better qualified for converse, whether in things of his own trade, or of other kinds, a man of great understanding and observation, and very agreeable in the manner of his discourse, and civil as far as is possible.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

He became afterwards a merchant of great note, and one of our provincial judges.
— from Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

With what face could any man or god say to another: Your duty is to do what you cannot know you ought to do; your function is to suffer what you cannot recognise to be worth suffering?
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Accordingly, their opinion of us is, indirectly, a matter of great importance; though I cannot see how it can have a direct or immediate value.
— from The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: the Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer

death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens

By the ceremony is signified to us, that by the power of the Holy Ghost, through the high-priesthood of our Lord, the whole universe and all that is in it has been consecrated and endowed by God with virtue, to become a means of grace and blessing to all believers, by His grace and might who works "in all things and through all things" to this end.
— from The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Leviticus by Samuel H. (Samuel Henry) Kellogg

There are moments of grief in which certain aspects of the subject of our [Pg 206] distress seems as irrelevant as matters entirely foreign to it.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 2, February, 1864 Devoted To Literature And National Policy by Various

After a minute of great patience, he turned his face back to the room again, and commenced tapping his foot on the carpet.
— from Rhoda Fleming — Complete by George Meredith

If any one stuck up a rod near the river, in two minutes it looked like a black fir pole with a bunch on the top; and John, who is a man of great entomological knowledge, spent some time in studying this phenomenon.
— from Three in Norway, by Two of Them by Walter J. Clutterbuck

Ullmann's mind seems at this stage to have been in the unreflective state, in which, perhaps, a majority of German theological students are at the outset; naturally so, too, for his vocation was rather the choice of his parents than his own.
— from British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV July and October, 1871 by Various

“But they was like all other prima donna’s jewels—for advertisin’ purposes only, an’ made o’ gum-arabic!”
— from The Pursuit of the House-Boat Being Some Further Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades, under the Leadership of Sherlock Holmes, Esq. by John Kendrick Bangs

The reason is, that the difference between our ages is that of a father and a son, and that, though now a man of great note and importance in every respect, he would be completely overcome with grief if I changed my bearing towards him.]
— from The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental Gastronomy by Brillat-Savarin