Perhaps it would have been better, on the whole, if no allusion to it had escaped me.’
— from Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Thence walked to Redriffe, and so to the Trinity House, and a great dinner, as is usual, and so to my office, where busy all the afternoon till late, and then home to bed, being much troubled in mind for several things, first, for the condition of the fleete for lacke of provisions, the blame this office lies under and the shame that they deserve to have brought upon them for the ships not being gone out of the River, and then for my business of Tangier which is not settled, and lastly for fear that I am not observed to have attended the office business of late as much as I ought to do, though there has been nothing but my attendance on Tangier that has occasioned my absence, and that of late not much.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

Several pages of new matter have thus been introduced: for which—I am glad to say—I have made room by shortening what seemed prolix, omitting what seemed superfluous, and relegating digressions to notes, in other parts of the work: so that the bulk of the whole is not increased.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

The Commons, indeed, look dangerous; but on the whole is not revolt, unknown now for five generations, an impossibility?
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

Samoylenko got up, put his arm round Laevsky’s waist, and both of them went into Nikodim Alexandritch’s study.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

For even, according to them, the body of the world is not a god, but the soul of the world and its parts.
— from The City of God, Volume I by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

Grant all its ugliness and sin—the petty, horrible snarl of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than I—notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be denied.
— from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child.
— from Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville

For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach?
— from Pascal's Pensées by Blaise Pascal

The shouts and noises of the natives in their assemblies, and the blowing and beating of their war instruments, need cause no alarm to us, nor should the natives be despised.
— from The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, 1595 to 1606. Volume 1 by Pedro Fernandes de Queirós

You need not eat dessert till the ladies are gone, but offer them whatever is nearest to you.
— from Martine's Hand-book of Etiquette, and Guide to True Politeness by Arthur Martine

The parts may be old, the whole is not; and Goethe falls into a modest fallacy, when, in acknowledging his obligation to others, he disclaims originality for himself.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

The wood-woman sometimes comes with a broken wheel-barrow, and begs to have the wheel repaired, and she pays by the chips which turn into gold, or she gives to knitters a ball of thread which is never ended.
— from The Fairy Mythology Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries by Thomas Keightley

For the profligate companions of these revels, he invented the appellation of his roués , the literal meaning of which is men broken on the wheel; intended, no doubt, to express their broken-down characters and dislocated fortunes; although a contemporary asserts that it designated the punishment that most of them merited.
— from The Crayon Papers by Washington Irving

One sees generally neither the rich yellow of the West Indian mulatto, nor the deep oily black of the West Indian negro.
— from North America — Volume 2 by Anthony Trollope

"When we have escaped," she went on, "if ever we do escape, then this will still be our troth, will it not, John Cowles?" "Yes, and our marriage, when you have signed, now or any other time."
— from The Way of a Man by Emerson Hough

If George III. had been a bloodthirsty despot, like Philip II. of Spain; if General Gage had been another Duke of Alva; if American citizens by the hundred had been burned alive or broken on the wheel in New York and Boston; if whole towns had been given up to the cruelty and lust of a beastly soldiery, then no one—not even Dr. Johnson—would have found it hard to understand why the Americans should have exhibited a rebellious temper.
— from The American Revolution by John Fiske