The seemingly superfluous number of footmen at Golden Hall and Great Estates are, aside from standing on parade at formal parties, needed actually to do the immense amount of work that houses of such size entail; whereas a small apartment can be fairly well looked after by one alone.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post

" Telemachus answered boldly, for Minerva had given him courage to ask about his father and get himself a good name.
— from The Odyssey Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original by Homer

Father, I am glad you are come; give me your present to one Master Bassanio, who indeed gives rare new liveries; if I serve not him, I will run as far as God has any ground.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

No one takes his own individual colt and drags him away from his fellows against his will, raging and foaming, and gives him a groom to attend to him alone, and trains and rubs him down privately, and gives him the qualities in education which will make him not only a good soldier, but also a governor of a state and of cities.
— from Laws by Plato

If I serve not him, I will run as far as God has any ground.
— from The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

“My mother, whom I scarcely knew, was very good, but rather simple; so much so that they say that when the fishes in our pool did not bite, she called in a professional fisherman and gave him a good day’s wages to teach them to do so.
— from The city of the discreet by Pío Baroja

He had to drop down from a great height, and get rid in all haste of his celestial pinions, when he heard his aunt Dora calling him; and his self-command was not sufficient to conceal, as he obeyed that summons, a certain annoyed expression in his face.
— from The Perpetual Curate by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

A good father, a good husband, a good friend, he was sincerely attached to the Protestant religion of the English church, “not from indifference,” as he said himself of the nation at large, “but from zeal; not because he thought there was less religion in it, but because he knew there was more.”
— from The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 3 (of 7) by Arthur Thomas Malkin

The surrender of the London house and of some of the chief expenses were made conditions of such favours, and Griffith had assented gratefully when alone with his father; but after an interview with his wife, demonstrations were made that it was highly economical to have a house in town, and horses, carriages, and servants and that any change would be highly derogatory to the heir of Earlscombe and the sacred wishes of the late Sir Henry Peacock.
— from Chantry House by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

He shoots one through each of seven cowdung cakes, the bride after each shot washing his forehead and giving him a green twig for a tooth-brush and some sweets.
— from The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 3 by R. V. (Robert Vane) Russell

What is really this man who is now a gamin and now an angel, whose face seems almost simultaneously to wear the sardonic grin of a Mephistopheles and the wistful smile of a Christ, this flaunting Bohemian who has written some of the tenderest love songs in literature, this cosmopolitan who cherished the deepest feelings for his fatherland, this incarnate paradox who almost at one and the same moment is swashbuckler and martyr, French and German, Hebrew and Greek, revolutionary and aristocrat, optimist and pessimist, idealist and mocker, believer and infidel?
— from Modernities by Horace Barnett Samuel