No, no, says I, there is reason in all things: though I might have fallen down in a fit that was no rule for them, being, because it is no business of mine to look gruff, and fight battles.'
— from The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe

The old lady started with the presupposition that the rump and the head of the two horses belonged to one, and could make no use of the obvious solution of the problem of the inconceivably long horse by breaking it in two.
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross

" "Truly, I did think so myself," quoth Little John, "therefore, no doubt, thou dost think it was wise of me to abide all night at the Blue Boar Inn, instead of venturing forth in such stormy weather; dost thou not?" "A plague of thee and thy doings!" cried Robin Hood.
— from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

I know that the law of duelling is a prejudice which may be called, and perhaps rightly, barbarous, but it is a prejudice which no man of honour can contend against, and I believed Schmit to be a thorough gentleman.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Without those two learned Frenchmen I should be blind indeed in the Eastern world.
— 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

This is not because one derives delight from any man's distress, but because it is pleasurable to perceive from what troubles one is oneself free.)]
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

To barge blindly into it for want of a little common sense and patience isn't my notion of management.
— from The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain.
— from What's Wrong with the World by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

‘Tis nevertheless to be believed, if it be a transmigration from one place to another, that it is a bettering of one’s condition to go and live with so many great persons deceased, and to be exempt from having any more to do with unjust and corrupt judges; if it be an annihilation of our being, ‘tis yet a bettering of one’s condition to enter into a long and peaceable night; we find nothing more sweet in life than quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

I was heartily scared; but thought nothing of what was really the cause, only thinking that the top of my cave was fallen in, as some of it had done before: and for fear I should be buried in it I ran forward to my ladder, and not thinking myself safe there neither, I got over my wall for fear of the pieces of the hill, which I expected might roll down upon me.
— from The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Part of one side having been broken into, it seemed as if the whole had been raised upon rough stone-work, the materials for which must have been brought from a considerable distance.
— from The Scientific Tourist through Ireland in which the traveller is directed to the principal objects of antiquity, art, science & the picturesque by Thomas Walford

All the rest, in a high sense, is but bullion, is it not?—and the criticism emphatically applies to heterogeneous assemblages of obsolete currencies, formed without taste, and held without fruit.
— from The Confessions of a Collector by William Carew Hazlitt

Remember that these men are only doing their duty, and that whoever is to be blamed, it is not they—no, but the wicked men and cruel laws that set them upon us.
— from Willy Reilly The Works of William Carleton, Volume One by William Carleton

Lise then broke out into a roar, but Buteau immediately interposed, and thrust her violently aside.
— from The Soil (La terre): A Realistic Novel by Émile Zola

But to accomplish this, the child must constantly be brought into immediate contact with the physical world about him and taught to observe.
— from The Mind and Its Education by George Herbert Betts

you would answer, I suppose, being a little boy, “Because it is hot;” which is all you know about it.
— from Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children by Charles Kingsley

You can always find a match of seven thousand francs a year for the dear boy, but it is not often that you could come across the savings of forty years and landed property as well managed, built up, and kept in repair as that of Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.
— from Beatrix by Honoré de Balzac

I'll be blasted if I'll suffer for your mistakes!"
— from Stand by for Mars! by Carey Rockwell

No, it is the neat thing to say you were reluctant, and then append the profound thoughts that "struggled for utterance," in your brain; but it is the true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found it impossible to think at all—though in good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and not poetical, either.
— from The Innocents Abroad — Volume 06 by Mark Twain

[49] The kind of man who might actually let my brother bring Indians into our home.
— from Shaman by Robert Shea