To be brief, I found, by my Friend's Account of him, that he had got a great Stock of Health, but nothing else; and that if it were a Man's Business only to live, there would not be a more accomplished young Fellow in the whole Country.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

People who commit these falsehoods may be people of talent, and, as Goethe says of himself, may have “desire to fabulate.”
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross

The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland?
— from Intentions by Oscar Wilde

A good slave obeys his master.
— from Latin for Beginners by Benjamin L. (Benjamin Leonard) D'Ooge

Sometimes when he was down at his great house in Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was still there.
— from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Try your Gall system on him, and let me know what you think.
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Though by no means severe in its operation, not amounting to three-quarters per cent on annual income, [35] —from which the lame, the blind, and very poor were exempt,—it nevertheless raised a general spirit of hostility, particularly from its retaining the insulting distinction of a ‘tax on infidels.’
— from Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, v. 1 of 3 or the Central and Western Rajput States of India by James Tod

In another, he used to have good store of hooks and buckles, wherewith he would couple men and women together that sat in company close to one another, but especially those that wore gowns of crimson taffeties, that, when they were about to go away, they might rend all their gowns.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

EMILIA I will be hang'd, if some eternal villain, Some busy and insinuating rogue, Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office, Have not devis'd this slander; I'll be hang'd else.
— from Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare

The next year, 1785, when he was thirty-five years old, the great sorrow of his life came upon him.
— from Famous Givers and Their Gifts by Sarah Knowles Bolton

He permitted this greatest statesman of his time, and one of the greatest perhaps of all time, to have a free hand in managing his kingdom.
— from A Short History of France by Mary Platt Parmele

It might be that the great strength of his prime was gone, but his health seemed unimpaired, 92 and I believe he still felt master of his fate as he went quietly about his daily work.
— from Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer: A Record of the Last Years of Frederick Bettesworth by George Sturt

Then Gudrun held out her hand and a golden gleam shone on her finger, at the sight whereof Brynhild waxed wan as a dead woman. "
— from The Story of Sigurd the Volsung by William Morris

The teacher should, however, know which type he is employing at any given stage of his instruction, and why he is using this type in preference to another type of teaching.
— from How to Teach Religion Principles and Methods by George Herbert Betts

It is naturally difficult to decide in a passage like this, the difference existing between a man's /utukku/ and his /edimmu/, but the probability is, that the former means his spiritual essence, whilst the latter stands for the ghostly shadow of his body, resembling in meaning the /ka/ of the Egyptians.
— from The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria by Theophilus G. (Theophilus Goldridge) Pinches

Brick, a grim smile on his pugnacious face, was secretly sizing up the lad whom he had driven by taunting words to defend himself with his fists.
— from Camp Lenape on the Long Trail by Carl Saxon

A glaze swam over her eyes; they were open, but as the eyes of the dead.
— from Lore of Proserpine by Maurice Hewlett

All at once, through the open window, she heard Stella, her mother, laughing; the carelessly gay sound overwhelmed her with an instinctive unreasoning dread.
— from Linda Condon by Joseph Hergesheimer