I have been using up my eyesight on old characters lately; the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

I cannot conceive how such trivial qualities of the fancy, conducted by such false suppositions, can ever lead to any solid and rational system.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

When they had got on some way they came to four crossways, each leading to a different country.
— from Grimms' Fairy Tales by Wilhelm Grimm

Foot-sore enough and weary, I gained not then my journey's end, but came ere long to a craggy pass, dipping towards growing regions still beyond.
— from The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville

Deux temps simultanés: le temps taxé (par le fournisseur d'accès ou par les impératifs de productivité, égrené par l'antique chrono), et le temps aboli, qui fait passer d'un lien à l'autre, d'un lieu à l'autre à la vitesse de l'électron, dans l'illusion du déplacement instantané.
— from Entretiens / Interviews / Entrevistas by Marie Lebert

Climbing plants are monstrous and luxuriant, but others which have never been known to climb elsewhere learn the art as an escape from that somber shadow, so that the common nettle, the jasmine, and even the jacitara palm tree can be seen circling the stems of the cedars and striving to reach their crowns.
— from The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

[1261] Turpes amores conciliare , enforce love, tell any man where his friends are, about what employed, though in the most remote places; and if they will, [1262] bring their sweethearts to them by night, upon a goat's back flying in the air.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

You just had to pull your mouth down at the corners with your two fingers, like this and then look cross eyed, like this and then——” Uncle Arthur took out his note-book again and wrote down something in it, though no one saw him do it.
— from Sweet P's by Julie M. Lippmann

Once more, we may compare every life to "a tale that is told," because it has a moral.
— from The Crown of Thorns: A Token for the Sorrowing by E. H. (Edwin Hubbell) Chapin

She pointed to the closed entrance leading to an inner chamber.
— from My Lady Nobody: A Novel by Maarten Maartens

The hostel, which is designed to accommodate from 30 to 100 persons, is provided with its own kitchen, dining-room, and common-room, and to a certain extent life therein approximates to that of a large family.
— from The Woman's Part: A Record of Munitions Work by L. K. Yates

I kept her as full of water as possible for two or three days, marking with chalk every leak that appeared.
— from Boat Sailing in Fair Weather and Foul, 6th ed. by A. J. (Ahmed John) Kenealy

The only claim that I could ever lay to anything was that I was very much in want of it.”
— from Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood by George MacDonald

We can easily, like the ancients, suppose a Jupiter to be possessed of all those powers and perfections which the subordinate deities were endowed with separately.
— from Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses Edited, with an Introduction, by Helen Zimmern by Reynolds, Joshua, Sir

Togo is working with donors to write a PRGF that could eventually lead to a debt reduction plan.
— from The 2007 CIA World Factbook by United States. Central Intelligence Agency

The salaries available offer no attraction to enter the teaching profession in this island; and there is no compulsory education law to assist those who with lofty motives remain loyal to the profession when "better chances" come along.
— from A Labrador Doctor The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell by Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir