"I think you could, dear; and I think you ought.
— from Little Women; Or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy by Louisa May Alcott

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the bourgeois.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

[1444] Polydore Virgil, as all northern countries do; and it would be very offensive to us to live after their diet, or they to live after ours.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Note 20 ( return ) [ See Constantine de Administrando Imperio, c. 3, 4, 13, 38-42, Katona has nicely fixed the composition of this work to the years 949, 950, 951, (p. 4-7.)
— 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

These solitaries and deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their claim to intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic spirits, who constitute the glory of our time; all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, "ephectics," and "hectics" of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the latter, both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists of knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience dwells and is alive—in point of fact they believe themselves as far away as possible from the ascetic [Pg 195] ideal, do these "free, very free spirits": and yet, if I may reveal what they themselves cannot see—for they stand too near themselves: this ideal is simply their ideal, they represent it nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves are its most spiritualised product, its most advanced picket of skirmishers and scouts, its most insidious delicate and elusive form of seduction.—If I am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will be one with this sentence: for some time past there have been no free spirits; for they still believe in truth .
— from The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

A moment later a hand came down, and immediately on that another leg.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

Jamque vale Soli cum diceret Ambrociotes, In Stygios fertur desiluisse lacus, Morte nihil dignum passus: sed forte Platonis Divini eximum de nece legit opus.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

He listened to her attentively, took the mass of documents which she had brought with her—Benjamin F. Butler's minority report, Francis Minor's resolutions, Judge Riddle's speech made in Washington in a similar case the year previous, various Supreme Court decisions, an incontrovertible array of argument—and told her he would give her an answer on Monday.
— from The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years by Ida Husted Harper

I can do as I did in Crofield.
— from Crowded Out o' Crofield; or, The Boy who made his Way by William O. Stoddard

A man can do anything if he only thinks he can and tries hard.
— from A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West by Hamlin Garland

How to define a name, may not only be an inquiry of considerable difficulty and intricacy, but may involve considerations going deep into the nature of the things which are denoted by the name.
— from A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive by John Stuart Mill

The cover design and illustrations are in keeping with the story itself.—
— from Scotch Wit and Humor by W. H. (Walter Henry) Howe

"I certainly do appreciate it, and I thank you very much.
— from In and Out by Edgar Franklin

He is the only one that ever made me wish I were a true woman, instead of a vain flirt; and the best thing my wisdom could devise, after I found out his beneficent power, was to give him a slap in the face, and shut myself up with a stupid novel.
— from From Jest to Earnest by Edward Payson Roe

The centrosome divides as in ordinary cell division (Fig. 35), and after rotating on its axis it approaches the surface of the egg (Figs. 36 and 37).
— from The Story of the Living Machine A Review of the Conclusions of Modern Biology in Regard to the Mechanism Which Controls the Phenomena of Living Activity by H. W. (Herbert William) Conn

[xiv] I shall draw a picture of two dress-suit cases of money being slipped across the table at the foot of a judge's bench in the court-room, from its custodian to its new owners, upon the rendering of a court decision; and I shall show how the new owners frustrated a plot having for its object their waylaying and the recovery of the bags of money.
— from Frenzied Finance, Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated by Thomas William Lawson