As Pope’s genius ripened, the best part of the world in which he worked was pressing forward, as a mariner who will no longer hug the coast but crowds all sail to cross the storms of a wide unknown sea.
— from An Essay on Man; Moral Essays and Satires by Alexander Pope

She would steal to their attics, open their drawers and boxes, wantonly tear their best caps and soil their best shawls; she would watch her opportunity to get at the buffet of the salle-à-manger, where she would smash articles of porcelain or glass—or to the cupboard of the storeroom, where she would plunder the preserves, drink the sweet wine, break jars and bottles, and so contrive as to throw the onus of suspicion on the cook and the kitchen-maid.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

in tones suppressed With thee I conversed when I bore Comfort and succour to the poor,
— from Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] A Romance of Russian Life in Verse by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

And how it got the upper hand of your precedent Order so well constituted before, if we may believe those men whose profession gives them cause to inquire most, it may be doubted there was in it the fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of bookselling; who under pretence of the poor in their Company not to be defrauded, and the just retaining of each man his several copy, which God forbid should be gainsaid, brought divers glossing colours to the House, which were indeed but colours, and serving to no end except it be to exercise a superiority over their neighbours; men who do not therefore labour in an honest profession to which learning is indebted, that they should be made other men's vassals.
— from Areopagitica A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England by John Milton

A true English heart breathes, calm and strong, through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better for that.
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle

If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land, in both college and secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assures us "it must be increased to five times its present average" to equal the average of the land.
— from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

The boy cried a second time, "What do you want here?—-speak if thou art an honest fellow, or I will throw thee down the steps!"
— from Household Tales by Brothers Grimm by Wilhelm Grimm

Music, also, the architect ought to understand so that he may have knowledge of the canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune ballistae, catapultae, and scorpiones to the proper key.
— from The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius Pollio

If we had been cordial and sweet to her, she never would have said that about Mary Stewart or the food at Queen’s, either.”
— from Molly Brown's Freshman Days by Nell Speed

He made himself a formal promise, by everything he reverenced, never to be caught a second time attempting an ascent; he asserted that mountains are far more interesting when seen from below, and that a man must be a maniac to expose himself to the chance of breaking every bone in his body a hundred thousand times, and having his nose frozen off in the middle of the month of August, in Andalusia, and in sight of Africa.
— from Wanderings in Spain by Théophile Gautier

For those who delight in literary filiations and genealogies, the kind of story in which Nodier excelled (and in which, though some of his own were written after 1830, he may truly be considered as "schoolmaster" to Mérimée and Gautier and Gérard de Nerval and all their fellows), may be, without violence or exaggeration, said to be a new form of the French fairy-tale, divested of common form, and readjusted with the help of the German Märchen and fantasy-pieces.
— from A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century by George Saintsbury

By the time Captain Gildrock's boat came along side, the two prisoners were at liberty.
— from All Adrift; Or, The Goldwing Club by Oliver Optic

Here, as there, the stranger is impressed with those outward symbols of nineteenth-century life, the agencies of steam, gas, and electricity that appear in many busy centres in whimsical incongruity to their Oriental setting; but these are the adjuncts rather than the essentials of that Western civilization which both countries are striving to imitate.
— from Siam : The Land of the White Elephant as It Was and Is by George B. (George Blagden) Bacon

Then he got the ivory chessmen out of the [80] Buhl cabinet, and set them out on that delightful chess-table whose chequers are of mother-of-pearl and ivory, and tried to play a game, right hand against left.
— from The Magic City by E. (Edith) Nesbit

We must not forget that the cruel prejudice, under which colored people labor, makes it extremely difficult for them to gain admission to the best colleges and schools; they are obliged to contend with obstacles, which white men never encounter.
— from An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans by Lydia Maria Child

Any neutral vessel approaching said ports, or attempting to leave the same, without notice or knowledge of the establishment of such blockade, will be duly warned by the commander of the blockading forces, who will indorse on her register the fact and the date of such warning, where such indorsement was made; and if the same vessel shall again attempt to enter any blockaded port she will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient port for such proceedings against her and her cargo as prize as may be deemed advisable.
— from Our War with Spain for Cuba's Freedom by Trumbull White