If my object in these pages were to present a complete scheme of counsels and maxims for the guidance of life, I should have to repeat the numerous rules—some of them excellent—which have been drawn up by thinkers of all ages, from Theognis and Solomon[1] down to La Rochefoucauld; and, in so doing, I should inevitably entail upon the reader a vast amount of well-worn commonplace.
— from The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer

I remember my father telling us one day, with a laugh, that several persons had asked him whether Miss —, a grand old lady in Shropshire, had called on him, so that at last he enquired why they asked him; and he was told that Miss —, whom my father had somehow mortally offended, was telling everybody that she would call and tell 'that fat old doctor very plainly what she thought of him.'
— from Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1 by Charles Darwin

Then a glance of loving inquiry searched his inmost soul.
— from On the Cross: A Romance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau by Wilhelmine von Hillern

I was like to a man who travels in the dead of night over rough ways, and now and again slumbers uneasily with troubled dreams, and now looks out upon a glimmer of light in some house or village, and now on nothing but the pitchy darkness; and yet he is always travelling on and on till he is weary with madness of fatigue.
— from The Pride of Jennico: Being a Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico by Egerton Castle

But it is well known here that a space of rest greater or less in spontaneous herbage, will restore the exhaustion of a single crop.
— from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 4 (of 9) Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private by Thomas Jefferson