He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife.
— from Dubliners by James Joyce

BANYAN-DAY, a day on which no meat is served out for rations; probably derived from the BANIANS , a Hindoo caste, who abstain from animal food.—
— from A Dictionary of Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words Used at the Present Day in the Streets of London; the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the Houses of Parliament; the Dens of St. Giles; and the Palaces of St. James. by John Camden Hotten

One people is amenable to discipline from the beginning; another, not after ten centuries.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

They were all highly delighted with her grace, air, and beauty, and declared Don Fernando to be a man of very little taste when he rejected such charms.
— from The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Complete by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

A map is drawn for them by an Englishman named Jonathan Small.
— from The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

Of which kind of fighting the Turks still retain something in their practice of arms; and Socrates, in Plato, laughs at Laches, who had defined fortitude to be a standing firm in the ranks against the enemy.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

And doth not the gradual condensation of this Medium extend to some distance from the Bodies, and thereby cause the Inflexions of the Rays of Light, which pass by the edges of dense Bodies, at some distance from the Bodies?
— from Opticks Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light by Isaac Newton

‘The first twig, dear father, that brushes against your hat when you turn your face to come homewards,’ said she.
— from Grimms' Fairy Tales by Wilhelm Grimm

[53] or from pain, and that any impulses otherwise directed are derived from these by “association of ideas.”
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

For men being generally possessed before the time of our Saviour, by contagion of the Daemonology of the Greeks, of an opinion, that the Souls of men were substances distinct from their Bodies, and therefore that when the Body was dead, the Soule of every man, whether godly, or wicked, must subsist somewhere by vertue of its own nature, without acknowledging therein any supernaturall gift of Gods; the Doctors of the Church doubted a long time, what was the place, which they were to abide in, till they should be re-united to their Bodies in the Resurrection; supposing for a while, they lay under the Altars: but afterward the Church of Rome found it more profitable, to build for them this place of Purgatory; which by some other Churches in this later age, has been demolished.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

They had to carry pine boughs some distance for their beds, as they did wood and water.
— from Unexplored! by Allen Chaffee

With his hat still on his head, he had seated himself a short distance from the bed, and as he talked with the invalid he gnawed the jewelled handle of a small cane that he carried.
— from Avarice--Anger: Two of the Seven Cardinal Sins by Eugène Sue

They gripped each other fast, bloody sweat dripped from their brows, and their fiercely sparkling eyes declared that one of them must have no place on earth.
— from An Introduction to Mythology by Lewis Spence

That this feeling was wholly unconnected with any false views of their own position, or vain estimation of the claims derived from their birth and former condition, was evident from their readiness to receive into their friendly regards those in their present sphere in whose moral qualities they could confide, and who did not repel their courtesies by a rude and coarse manner.
— from Evenings at Donaldson Manor; Or, The Christmas Guest by Maria J. (Maria Jane) McIntosh

I took the dynamite from that bomb and put the dynamite in a piece of gas-pipe, about five inches long, with ends screwed on.
— from Anarchy and Anarchists A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in America and Europe; Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and in Deed; The Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators by Michael J. Schaack

Jan could have let himself down from the balcony and gotten into his own window in a jiffy.
— from The Phantom Treasure by Harriet Pyne Grove

But all at once the women declared their continued use to be unfashionable; and all use and demand for the beads at once ceasing, the merchants and others who had accumulated a large stock of them, in exchange for other commodities, at the same moment found that what they had regarded as money had no longer any purchasing power or value, and in consequence experienced great losses.
— from Robinson Crusoe's Money; or, The Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community by David Ames Wells

The master steered directly for the becalmed and motionless brigantine.
— from The Water-Witch; Or, the Skimmer of the Seas: A Tale by James Fenimore Cooper

Thus the ancients represented here below, in their initiations, what was, they said, to happen hereafter to the souls, when they would be disengaged from their bodies; and would be liberated from the obscure prison, wherein fate had chained [131] them by uniting them to terrestrial matter.
— from Pagan Origin of Partialist Doctrines by John Claudius Pitrat

Are you being strengthened day by day for the burdens and the annoyances and the sorrows of life by your coming here?
— from Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) by Alexander Maclaren