It would destroy every comfort of my life to know that you were married to Lady Susan Vernon; it would be the death of that honest pride with which I have hitherto considered my son; I should blush to see him, to hear of him, to think of him.
— from Lady Susan by Jane Austen

It takes away by the roots daily evils coming of melancholy, falling-sickness, vertigo, convulsions, megrim, leprosies, and many other infirmities; for my part I should be loth to take it inwardly unless upon desperate occasions, or in clysters.
— from The Complete Herbal To which is now added, upwards of one hundred additional herbs, with a display of their medicinal and occult qualities physically applied to the cure of all disorders incident to mankind: to which are now first annexed, the English physician enlarged, and key to Physic. by Nicholas Culpeper

In particular, it has pleased them to suppose, that the zeal of the Roman magistrates, disdaining every consideration of moral virtue or public decency, endeavored to seduce those whom they were unable to vanquish, and that by their orders the most brutal violence was offered to those whom they found it impossible to seduce.
— 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

We thank God for the portion of His Spirit with which He dowers every child of man, just as we thank Him for pouring it all upon the Infant in the Manger.
— from A Little Book for Christmas by Cyrus Townsend Brady

—While the Pythagoreans had made matter, in so far as it is quantity and the manifold, the basis of their philosophizing, and while in this they only abstracted from the determined elemental condition of matter, the Eleatics carry the process to its ultimate limit, and make, as the principle of their philosophy, a total abstraction from every finite determinateness, from every change and vicissitude which belongs to concrete being.
— from A History of Philosophy in Epitome by Albert Schwegler

"I've been watchin' him close for weeks, seein' him drink every cent of my dad's money, seein' him get to be less 'n less of a man.
— from Bruce of the Circle A by Harold Titus

When people in books begin to talk like human beings the reader thinks the dialogue either commonplace or mildly realistic, and votes it a bore."
— from The Spinners' Book of Fiction by Spinners' Club

The clubs of London afford, as I have reason to know, ample material for the most abundant fun; but they who expect to find it at Crockford's, the Athenæum, and other maisons de jeu , where yawning dandies, expert chevaliers , old men of the town, roués of all sorts, Mingle, mingle, mingle, As they mingle may, will be wofully disappointed.
— from Bentley's Miscellany, Volume I by Various

How soothingly do these emotions descend upon the soul, like the sweet breath of spring, to disperse every cloud of melancholy, of vexing care, of passion.
— from Isabella Orsini: A Historical Novel of the Fifteenth Century by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi

In my own land, the land of my birth, the cradle of my race, I am called Don Bernardino Yglesias Palealogue y Santordo y Castelnuova de Escoban, Count of Minurca and Marquis of Salvaterra!”
— from The Mystery of the Sea by Bram Stoker