Her character, as abandoned to sorrow as to pleasure, was displayed to me during that long and weary night.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Belisarius himself had always understood, that riches, in a corrupt age, are the support and ornament of personal merit.
— 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

Not [Pg 142] by human dwellings—not in crowded cities alone, are the sights and sounds of life.
— from Twelve Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River in Louisiana by Solomon Northup

[ 215 ] The Jesuits had a guard of a Spanish captain and about thirty Spanish and Filipino soldiers, who, after some slaughter of the natives, compelled them to sue for peace.
— from A History of the Philippines by David P. Barrows

They only joined issue to dispute whether llamas p. 179 were carnivorous animals or not; in which dispute they were not quite on fair grounds, as Mrs Forrester (after they had grown warm and cool again) acknowledged that she always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologised for it very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt.
— from Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

" When they had spoken the girl upset the pan, and entered the opening in the wall, which at once closed, and appeared the same as before.
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang

It is she that calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by certain imaginary epicycles, but by natural and manifest reasons.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Who learns my lesson complete? Boss, journeyman, apprentice, churchman and atheist, The stupid and the wise thinker, parents and offspring, merchant, clerk, porter and customer, Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy—draw nigh and commence; It is no lesson—it lets down the bars to a good lesson, And that to another, and every one to another still.
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

What is called Magic is not a vain and chimerical act, as the Stoics and Epicureans pretend.
— from Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry by Albert Pike

I always thought they had the right to state their case, and ask that some action should be taken, letting the mayor or sheriff, as the case may be, make his own requisition.
— from Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots in July, 1877 Read in the Senate and House of Representatives May 23, 1878 by 1877 Pennsylvania. General Assembly. Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots in July

By naming streets: since men are so censorious, And apt to sow an author's wheat with tares, Reaping allusions private and inglorious, Where none were dreamt of, unto Love's affairs, Which were, or are, or are to be notorious, That therefore do I previously declare, Lord Henry's mansion was in Blank-Blank Square.
— from The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 6 by Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron

And then we re-embark on Lake Champlain, and all the summer afternoon sail down through phantom fleets, under the frowning ramparts of phantom forts, past grim rows of deathful-throated cannon, through serried hosts of warriors, with bright swords gleaming and strong arms lifted and stern lips parted; but from lips of man or throat of cannon comes no sound.
— from Gala-Days by Gail Hamilton

In some cases again, although the style and expressions used make it seem highly probable that he has derived his information from others— though, as it seems to me, these cases are not very numerous—we find, on the other hand, among these topographical notes a great number of observations, about which it is extremely difficult to form a decided opinion.
— from The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by da Vinci Leonardo

is,—but it is held by the great body of mankind who know or care anything about the subject, and it cannot be changed or substantially modified, because subsequent events have fixed its place and worth irrevocably.
— from Daniel Webster by Henry Cabot Lodge

And all these thoughts, vague, unformed, a dim and undefined sense of something, passed through Johan's brain as he sate cutting away at the stone, and trying to form the angel in his little garret, in the little town of ——, on the Rhine.
— from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol III, No 13, 1851 by Various

A moment after, the gable of the church appeared against the sky, and she recognised the poor, ridiculous creature in the tattered black bonnet, whose stiff, crooked appearance she had known since childhood.
— from Evelyn Innes by George Moore