329 —When Tigranes, 330 the Armenian, being encamped 184 upon a hill with four hundred thousand men, discovered the army of the Romans, being not above fourteen thousand, marching towards him, he made himself merry with it, and said, “Yonder men are too many for an ambassage, and too few for a fight;” but before the sun set, he found them enow to give him the chase with infinite slaughter.
— from Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients by Francis Bacon

I do not foresee when I shall have ideas; they come when they please, and not when I call for them; either they avoid me altogether, or rushing in crowds, overwhelm me with their force and number.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

They continued to travel over a rough and unfrequented road, seeing now and then at a distance the solitary shepherd, with his dog, stalking along the valley, and hearing only the dashing of torrents, which the woods concealed from the eye, the long sullen murmur of the breeze, as it swept over the pines, or the notes of the eagle and the vulture, which were seen towering round the beetling cliff.
— from The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe

His blood was as thoroughly up as Adam's now, and the two men, forgetting the emotions that had gone before, fought with the instinctive fierceness of panthers in the deepening twilight darkened by the trees.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

V. The ample jurisdiction required by the farmers of the revenue to accomplish their engagements might be placed in an odious light, as if they had purchased from the emperor the lives and fortunes of their fellow-citizens.
— 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

A strange story was brought to us from the East, to which little credit would have been given, had not the fact been attested by a multitude of witnesses, in various parts of the world.
— from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

When we have been prowling at midnight through the gloomy crevices they call streets, where no footfalls but ours were echoing, where only ourselves were abroad, and lights appeared only at long intervals and at a distance, and mysteriously disappeared again, and the houses at our elbows seemed to stretch upward farther than ever toward the heavens, the memory of a cave I used to know at home was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its flitting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations of branching crevices and corridors
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

This animal cult expresses itself primarily in the attitude towards the totem animal, quite aside from special ceremonies and ceremonial festivities: not only each individual animal but every representative of the same species was to a certain degree a sanctified animal; the member of the totem was forbidden to eat the flesh of the totem animal or he was allowed to eat it only under special circumstances.
— from Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics by Sigmund Freud

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands.
— from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

A reaction from the excitement that had sustained me during my labours had set in, and I am persuaded that had any further exertion been necessary for the preservation of my life I should not have undertaken it.
— from A Pirate of the Caribbees by Harry Collingwood

Darwin himself, as we have seen, intentionally left unexplained certain primary features of life and therefore cannot be blamed for having failed to explain them, though even then his theory remains wrong.
— from The Science and Philosophy of the Organism by Hans Driesch

Six days before, the governor had suddenly reversed his policy of noninterference in port affairs and authorized a license for the English to sell their cargo in Surat and buy Indian goods, something the Shahbandar had found one excuse after another to delay.
— from The Moghul by Thomas Hoover

But as Balloquet seemed to possess some private information concerning that modest personage, I determined to question him on the subject; for I was anxious to know whether I was mistaken in my conjectures, and whether I owed Monsieur Faisandé an apology for the evil thoughts of him that had come to my mind.
— from Frédérique, vol. 1 by Paul de Kock

“By all the torturing fates that ever turned awry love’s currents!” exclaimed Buondlemonte, as he reached the street, “but my destined spouse seems to be formed more in the mould of the tigress than the dove.
— from Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, March 1850 by Various

These, and other obstacles, little fitted to encourage travellers, still exist.
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

Be it remembered that from the earliest to the latest days, the priests were the scribes and that in their capacity as writers of the texts, they would be enjoying the advantages of an intellectual impulse.
— from The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria by Morris Jastrow

Who does not know the sort of sensation which falls upon a man when he feels that even the elements have turned against him,—how he buttons up his coat and bids the clouds open themselves upon his devoted bosom? "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!
— from Mr. Scarborough's Family by Anthony Trollope

As we have already remarked, plan from the earliest times must often have held in his hands the stones which served him as weapons or as tools.
— from Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples by Nadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de