In vain I placed myself in the antechamber of Madam de Breil, I could not obtain one mark of attention from her daughter; she went in and out without looking at me, nor had I the confidence to raise my eyes to her; I was even so foolishly stupid, that one day, on dropping her glove as she passed, instead of seizing and covering it with kisses, as I would gladly have done, I did not dare to quit my place, but suffered it to be taken up by a great booby of a footman, whom I could willingly have knocked down for his officiousness.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

As my brother’s party went on towards the crossroads to the south of Barnet they saw a woman approaching the road across some fields on their left, carrying a child and with two other children; and then passed a man in dirty black, with a thick stick in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other.
— from The War of the Worlds by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

And is not injustice equally fatal when existing in a single person; in the first place rendering him incapable of action because he is not at unity with himself, and in the second place making him an enemy to himself and the just?
— from The Republic of Plato by Plato

For example, when an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the needle pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body; but if he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet, uttering certain magic words as he does so.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

His medal and bugle are still preserved in the regiment.
— from The Waterloo Roll Call With Biographical Notes and Anecdotes by Charles Dalton

Ad haec perpetranda furore rapti ducuntur, cruciatus quosvis tolerant, et mortem, et furore exacerbato audent et ad supplicia plus irritantur, mirum est quantam habeant in tormentis patientiam.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

286 Cherokee correspondence, 1823 and 1824, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, II , pp.
— from Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by James Mooney

Green altars, rais’d of turf, with gifts she crown’d, And sacred priests in order stand around, And thrice the name of hapless Hector sound.
— from The Aeneid by Virgil

Mathematics has come to seem the type of good logic because it is an illustration of logic in a sphere so highly abstract in idea and so pervasive in sense as to be at once manageable and useful.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Another and similar phenomenon is the “double beat of the hammer.”
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross

The Tartars won, the opposing Jesuits were recalled, and Schall passed into the confidence of the new emperor.
— from A Candid History of the Jesuits by Joseph McCabe

‘However meek we are,’ Miss Fanny struck in before she could answer, ‘we don’t go creeping into people’s rooms on the tops of cold mountains, and sitting perishing in the frost with people, unless we know something about them beforehand.
— from Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

In instituting a comparison between the Senate of the United States and similar political institutions, of other countries, of France and England, for example, he was sure the comparison might be made without disadvantage to the American Senate.
— from Thirty Years' View (Vol. 2 of 2) or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 by Thomas Hart Benton

[473] He told another that in a previous existence he had killed an anchorite, and for this he had already suffered punishment in hell for several thousand years; he would also lose his head in this life, and would suffer the same misfortune for four hundred successive existences.
— from The History of Antiquity, Vol. 4 (of 6) by Max Duncker

I would rather stand a score pikes in an onset with my single hand, where the business is with flesh and blood, than buffet with a single imp of the Wizard.
— from Rob of the Bowl: A Legend of St. Inigoe's. Vol. 1 (of 2) by John Pendleton Kennedy

It was not much—a lock of hair in a sealed packet in his pocket-book.
— from The Moon Rock by Arthur J. (Arthur John) Rees

Mons Seleuci was a small place in the Cottian Alps, a few miles distant from Vapincum, or Gap, an episcopal city of Dauphine.
— from History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 2 by Edward Gibbon

The Earl of Winchilsea, a peer of no personal importance, but a stalwart upholder of Church and State, published in the Standard newspaper of March 16, 1829, a virulent letter, describing the whole transaction "as a blind to the protestant and high church party," and accusing the prime minister of insidious designs for the introduction of popery in every department of the state.
— from The Political History of England - Vol XI From Addington's Administration to the close of William IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) by John Knight Fotheringham