If ever you prove false one to another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be call’d to the world’s end after my name—call them all Pandars; let all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokers between Pandars.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

What will it be, then, when I put a duke's robe on my back, or dress myself in gold and pearls like a count?
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

But Mr. Wace has, for a young scientific investigator, a particularly lucid and consecutive habit of mind.
— from The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

This waiter, who was middle-aged and spare, looked for help to a waiter of more authority—a stout, potential old man, with a double chin, in black breeches and stockings, who came out of a place like a churchwarden’s pew, at the end of the coffee-room, where he kept company with a cash-box, a Directory, a Law-list, and other books and papers.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

When La Beale Isoud understood that he was wedded she sent to him by her maiden Bragwaine as piteous letters as could be thought and made, and her conclusion was that, an it pleased Sir Tristram, that he would come to her court, and bring with him Isoud la Blanche Mains, and they should be kept as well as she herself.
— from Le Morte d'Arthur: Volume 1 by Malory, Thomas, Sir

Near them he sets a cocoanut, which has been blackened with charcoal, on some rice spread on a plantain leaf, a cocoanut reddened with turmeric and chunam on raw rice, and another on a leaf, containing fried paddy.
— from Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 7 of 7 by Edgar Thurston

] he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness; he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice: “Humani a se nihil alienum putet.”
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

The native country of Homer, and the theatre of the Trojan war, still retained the last sparks of his mythology: by the care of the same bishop, seventy thousand Pagans were detected and converted in Asia, Phrygia, Lydia, and Caria; ninety-six churches were built for the new proselytes; and linen vestments, Bibles, and liturgies, and vases of gold and silver, were supplied by the pious munificence of Justinian.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Social problems may be conveniently classified with reference to these three aspects of group life, that is to say, problems of ( a ) organization and administration, ( b ) policy and polity (legislation), and ( c ) human nature (culture).
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

It was really very kind of him, and the more so, as being altogether unexpected: he got great praise for this, did Mr. Jennings; specially, too, because he had gained nothing whatever from his aunt's death, though her heir and probable legatee, and clearly was a disappointed man.
— from The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper by Martin Farquhar Tupper

After the tug and pilot left, a course was shaped towards the hidden mysteries that lay across the sea.
— from The Shellback's Progress In the Nineteenth Century by Runciman, Walter Runciman, Baron

I’m only a poor little artless child; I care only for Calyste.
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

The steep descents form cycloid curves, that flatten at their bases, and over which the ferruginous stratum of mould atop projects like a cornice.
— from The Cruise of the Betsey or, A Summer Ramble Among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland by Hugh Miller

"You might be almost as great a fool as poor Lucilla, and clear the air before you with this!"
— from Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins

She wore her fair hair rolled in front on each side into a puff like a capital O. Dotty looked at her in surprise.
— from Dotty Dimple Out West by Sophie May

They had evidently in her got hold of something far more dangerous than a Pankhurst or a Pethick Lawrence, a Constance Lytton or an Emily Davison.
— from Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement by Harry Johnston

Mr. Rindge, born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1857, but at present residing in California, has given his native city a public library, a city hall, a manual training-school, and a valuable site for a high school.
— from Famous Givers and Their Gifts by Sarah Knowles Bolton