They should be regarded in many cases as merely the first strong and suggestive sketches of an artist, intended to be embodied at some time in the finished picture.
— from Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete by Emily Dickinson

Now in the place where the journey is least and shortest from the Northern to the Southern Sea (which is also called Erythraian), that is from Mount Casion, which is the boundary between Egypt and Syria, the distance is exactly 137 a thousand furlongs to the Arabian gulf; but the channel is much longer, since it is more winding; and in the reign of Necos there perished while digging it twelve myriads 13701 of the Egyptians.
— from The History of Herodotus — Volume 1 by Herodotus

He turned fiercely upon me, and tried to look me down, and face me out of my statement; but finding that that wouldn't do, and that I was entering upon my defence in such a way as would show to the other two that he was in the wrong,—he changed his ground, and pointed to the shipping papers of the Pilgrim, from which my name had never been erased, and said that there was my name,—that I belonged to her,—that he had an absolute discretionary power,—and, in short, that I must be on board the Pilgrim by the next morning with my chest and hammock, or have some one ready to go in my place, and that he would not hear another word from me.
— from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana

The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned.
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

“Ah, senora,” said Dona Clara, “what end can be hoped for when his father is of such lofty position, and so wealthy, that he would think I was not fit to be even a servant to his son, much less wife?
— from The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

One still sees the ancient forest, with its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the place where seven roads meet—u a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le pais; we hear the light-hearted country people calling each other by their rustic names, and putting forward, as their spokesman, one among them who is more eloquent and ready than the rest—li un qui plus fu enparles des autres; for the little book has its burlesque element also, so that one hears the faint, far-off laughter still.
— from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

If the next day we open a volume of Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannot but enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and that another man's imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him a distress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, we shall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and a profounder truth than the other.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

That compact between France and Spain, to which the Two Sicilies acceded later, bore within it, in the then strained relations between England and Spain, the germ of the great wars between England and the House of Bourbon which issued in the creation of the British Empire and the independence of the United States.
— from The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 by A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

The Spartans had never abandoned their right to the province of Messenia, which had been wrested from them by Epaminondas; and since Thebes was no longer to be feared, they seem to have conceived hopes of regaining their lost power.
— from The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes Literally translated with notes by Demosthenes

As for the second voyage, it seemeth sufficient that he hath better explored and searched the commodities of those people and Countreys, which in his first voyage the yeere before he had found out.
— from The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation — Volume 12 America, Part I by Richard Hakluyt

Then, seeing that his first attempt had not been exactly a success, the boatswain proceeded upon his usual lines.
— from Turned Adrift by Harry Collingwood

Worlds, indeed, are to be exchanged, and so they must have been if Adam had never been driven from paradise.
— from The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences by Edward Hitchcock

Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three years before Evelina appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and husbands, when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.
— from Jane Austen and Her Times by G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton

This porch also contained seats, and was considered very elegant; but every one knew that the head "faller" was engaged to be married to a girl "back East," and said that was the reason he had built so fine a house.
— from Rick Dale, A Story of the Northwest Coast by Kirk Munroe

A larger proportion of the female population of New England has been employed at some time in manufacturing establishments, and they are not on this account less good wives, mothers, or educators of families."
— from North America — Volume 1 by Anthony Trollope

In our age such an interruption of communication would throw the whole island into confusion: but there was then so little trade and correspondence between England and Scotland that the inconvenience was probably much smaller than has been often occasioned in our own time by a short delay in the arrival of the Indian mail.
— from The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 2 by Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron

Then his form came back to her mind, as he had looked when they stood face to face at the parting of the ways, when the sun had glinted down upon them through the trees, and he had looked her straight in the face with his clear blue eyes, and said: "Thou knowest that I love thee.
— from Children of the Dawn : Old Tales of Greece by E. F. (Elsie Finnimore) Buckley

I therefore caused a tent to be pitched at a distance from both establishments and solicited the gentlemen of both Companies to meet Mr. Back and myself there for the purpose of affording us their combined assistance.
— from The Journey to the Polar Sea by John Franklin