Of the conduct of the worldly minded Pumblechook while this was doing, I desire to say no more than it was all addressed to me; and that even when those noble passages were read which remind humanity how it brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out, and how it fleeth like a shadow and never continueth long in one stay, I heard him cough a reservation of the case of a young gentleman who came unexpectedly into large property.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

I could lament in one sentence and laugh in the next, but as to opinion or counsel I am sure that none will be extracted worth having from this letter.
— from The Letters of Jane Austen Selected from the compilation of her great nephew, Edward, Lord Bradbourne by Jane Austen

When a regiment is deployed as skirmishers, and crosses an open field or woods, under heavy fire, if each man runs forward from tree to tree, or stump to stump, and yet preserves a good general alignment, it gives great confidence to the men themselves, for they always keep their eyes well to the right and left, and watch their comrades; but when some few hold back, stick too close or too long to a comfortable log, it often stops the line and defeats the whole object.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

However, as long as my Charlotte lived, I only slept at his house, for from nine in the morning till after midnight I was with my dear.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

When smoking is a habit a man must have no common constitution who can leave it off suddenly without some temporary damage to his nervous system.
— from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

"Lying so nicely on the bank of the Danube, which here makes such beautiful curves, and marked on the map with capital letters, it ought (such was my notion) to be a place having at least one well-built and well-stocked bazar, a handsome seraglio, and some good-looking mosques.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 by Various

Gunpowder was invented by no one; it is a direct product of Greek fire, composed, like it, of sulphur and saltpetre; only since that epoch these mixtures; which were only dissolving, have been transformed into detonating mixtures.
— from The Moon-Voyage by Jules Verne

Ad hoc tam dirum et exsecrabile perfugium qui descenderunt, ii certe licet in ore suorum asseclarum volitent, sacerdotia nundinentur declamitent in concione, ferrum in catholicos, equuleum crucemque consciscant; tamen victi, abiecti, squalidi, prostrati sunt: quandoquidem arrepta virgula censoria, veluti arbitri sedentes honorarii, divinas ipsas tabulas, si quae ad stomachum non fecissent, obliterant.
— from Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious Members of Our Universities by Campion, Edmund, Saint

From Dunkirk to Ostend, by the coast line, is only some twenty-five miles, yet although they started at a little after eleven o'clock it was three in the afternoon before they finally landed at the Belgian seaport.
— from Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross by L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum

The idea of the superior and p. 237 desirable young woman, whom she remembered as the mother of those two sweet children, living in open sin, obsessed her.
— from The Black Diamond by Francis Brett Young

“We could scarcely have believed that after all our Christian labours in our so truly—I say it with pride—Christian city, in which everything is done to destroy the poison of toleration and of mad confidence in our own judgment, men could be found amongst us, who would dare, unrestrained by all authority, to go their own way in search of truth;—these free-thinkers and heathens spring up only because the constituted authorities (even our otherwise so active Censorship at their head) are far too indulgent towards the greatest of all crimes, unbelief.
— from Tour in England, Ireland, and France, in the years 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829. with remarks on the manners and customs of the inhabitants, and anecdotes of distiguished public characters. In a series of letters by a German Prince. by Pückler-Muskau, Hermann, Fürst von

In a flash he saw that his only chance lay in one shot so well aimed as to kill or maim the brute; if he missed, nothing could save him; yet the slightest click or rustle would not escape its sensitive ears.
— from Kobo: A Story of the Russo-Japanese War by Herbert Strang

"Health and happiness" are terms that are so often closely linked in our speech and in our literature.
— from The Girl Wanted: A Book of Friendly Thoughts by Nixon Waterman

Of the rest of these definitions, the reader will determine whether they be not every one of them pitiful; and if it was possible for the Doctor, or any other man, to convey less information, on so plain a subject.
— from Deformities of Samuel Johnson, Selected from His Works by James Thomson Callender

But for his blindness, we may here say, the chances are that he would long ere now have been a known Parliamentary man, and that, after having been a Cromwellian leader in Oliver's second Parliament, he might have been now in Thurloe's exact place in Richard's present Parliament, or beside Thurloe as a strangely different chief.
— from The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time by David Masson