I own that she very nearly conquered me once; for she asked me what I should think if she were to tell me that my God, whose nature and attributes I had been explaining to her, was but the expression for man’s highest conception of goodness, wisdom, and power; that in order to generate a more vivid conception of so great and glorious a thought, man had personified it and called it by a name; that it was an unworthy conception of the Deity to hold Him personal, inasmuch as escape from human contingencies became thus impossible; that the real thing men should worship was the Divine, whereinsoever they could find it; that “God” was but man’s way of expressing his sense of the Divine; that as justice, hope, wisdom, &c., were all parts of goodness, so God was the expression which embraced all goodness and all good power; that people would no more cease to love God on ceasing to believe in His objective personality, than they had ceased to love justice on discovering that she was not really personal; nay, that they would never truly love Him till they saw Him thus.
— from Erewhon; Or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler

We are assured, that, by his salutary rigor, crimes and factions, mischievous arts and pernicious connivance, the luxurious growth of a feeble and oppressive government, were eradicated throughout the Roman world.
— 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

“Come, come,” cried D’Artagnan, “we must finish with this,” and in his turn he pressed Mordaunt hard, who continued to lose ground, but evidently on purpose and without letting his sword leave the line for a moment.
— from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas

I am, therefore, induced to address you in this form the inquiry whether, to stop the further effusion of blood and devastation of property, you are willing to make a temporary suspension of active operations, and to communicate to Lieutenant-General Grant, commanding the armies of the United States, the request that he will take like action in regard to other armies, the object being to permit the civil authorities to enter into the needful arrangements to terminate the existing war.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

“What a lovely bit of glass,” cried the little girl; and she ran home, laughing.
— from The Happy Prince, and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde

However, they frustrate their own gains, for other people make fun of them and call them la grande nation .
— from The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: the Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer

First comes the love god, leading by the hand Alcestis, model of all wifely virtues, whose emblem is the daisy; and behind them follow a troup of glorious women, all of whom have been faithful in love.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

The soft tranquillity of the scene below, where the evening breeze scarcely curled the water, or swelled the passing sail, that caught the last gleam of the sun, and where, now and then, a dipping oar was all that disturbed the trembling radiance, conspired with the tender melody of her lute to lull her mind into a state of gentle sadness, and she sung the mournful songs of past times, till the remembrances they awakened were too powerful for her heart, her tears fell upon the lute, over which she drooped, and her voice trembled, and was unable to proceed.
— from The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe

In 1810, a schooner called the Lady Gore or the Bella Gore , commanded by Captain Sa
— from Toronto of Old Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario by Henry Scadding

“Have they caught the little girl and the boy?
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She bathed; she did her hair; she dressed; she put on that dainty camisole with its pale blue ribbon twined through intricate meshes and concealed those little garments which proved her to be a true woman--concealed them with the camisole and the mystery of her sex.
— from The City of Beautiful Nonsense by E. Temple (Ernest Temple) Thurston

After a careful search along the opposite side of the chamber, they located gangway No. 1, in which the water was still within two inches of the roof.
— from Derrick Sterling: A Story of the Mines by Kirk Munroe

During summer, and as long before and after as the temperature permitted, the hut was the place he preferred when his necessity was upon him; and it was Kirsty's especial delight to sit in it on a warm day, the door open and her brother asleep on her feet, reading and reading while the sun went down the sky, to fill the hut as he set with a glory of promise; after which came the long gloamin, like a life out of which the light but not the love has vanished, in which she neither worked nor read, but brooded over many things.
— from Heather and Snow by George MacDonald

As the mother was dead and no relatives came to claim the little girl, he decided to take care of her himself, and soon found himself loving her with a deep, fatherly tenderness.
— from Third Reader: The Alexandra Readers by W. A. (William Albert) McIntyre

Miss Layton sat at her desk, reading, until the other scholars had all gone, and she was left alone with Ella; then, closing her book, she called the little girl to her.
— from Ella Clinton; or, By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them by Martha Finley

"When they were all gone, then came into my remembrance the worthy forewarning and godly declaration of that most constant martyr of God, Master John Clark, who, well nigh two years before that, when I did earnestly desire him to grant me to be his scholar, said unto me after this sort: 'Dalaber, you desire you wot not what, and that which you are, I fear, unable to take upon you; for though now my preaching be sweet and pleasant to you, because there is no persecution laid on you for it, yet the time will come, and that, peradventure, shortly, if ye continue to live godly therein, that God will lay on you the cross of persecution, to try you whether you can as pure gold abide the fire.
— from The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) by James Anthony Froude

But whatever might be the cause, the little gentleman had to defer taking his degree for some months at least.
— from The Further Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Under-Graduate Being a Continuation of "The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman" by Cuthbert Bede

That even for the production of luxuries, the monopolizing demand of the rich was not required—that the appliances of real civilization, the landscapes, gardens, stately rooms, baths, books, pictures, works of art, collections of curiosities, which now went to pamper me alone—me, one single human soul—might be helping, in an associate society, to civilize a hundred families, now debarred from them by isolated poverty, without robbing me of an atom of the real enjoyment or benefit of them.
— from Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography by Charles Kingsley