And when he takes the cup all the Barons and the rest of the company drop on their knees and make the deepest obeisance before him, and then the Emperor doth drink.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

Moreover, I provided most thoroughly for a study of universal history, and to this end did not fail to equip myself with the most voluminous works.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

What I hold and believe to-day I hold and believe with my whole belief; all my instruments and engines seize and take hold of this opinion, and become responsible to me for it, at least as much as in them lies; I could not embrace nor conserve any truth with greater confidence and assurance than I do this; I am wholly and entirely possessed with it; but has it not befallen me, not only once, but a hundred, a thousand times, every day, to have embraced some other thing with all the same instruments, and in the same condition, which I have since judged to be false?
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

I was still busy in pushing forward the repairs to the railroad bridge at Bear Creek, and in patching up the many breaks between it and Tuscumbia, when on the 27th of October, as I sat on the porch of a house, I was approached by a dirty, black-haired individual with mixed dress and strange demeanor, who inquired for me, and, on being assured that I was in fact the man, he handed me a letter from General Blair at Tuscumbia, and another short one, which was a telegraph-message from General Grant at Chattanooga, addressed to me through General George Crook, commanding at Huntsville, Alabama, to this effect: Drop all work on Memphis & Charleston Railroad, cross the Tennessee and hurry eastward with all possible dispatch toward Bridgeport, till you meet further orders from me.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

She, who had hated accounts and arithmetic, now devoted her attention to them every day, sometimes more than once a day; she, who loathed poverty, encountered the most sordid privations with a smile; she, who once throve upon debts and promises to pay, now exclaimed: “I would do anything rather than fall into debt.
— from Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo Edited with a Biography of Juliette Drouet by Louis Guimbaud

Who was this man? an examination had been made; witnesses had been heard, and they were unanimous; light had abounded throughout the entire debate; the accusation said: “We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealer of fruit; we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender who has broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerous description, a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom justice has long been in search of, and who, eight years ago, on emerging from the galleys at Toulon, committed a highway robbery, accompanied by violence, on the person of a child, a Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime provided for by article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try him for which we reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have been judicially established.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

I shall not, of course enter upon any speculations or add any hypothetical assumptions to the empirical data contained in the foregoing chapters.
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea by Bronislaw Malinowski

The principles established in a former paper(1) teach us that the States will retain all pre-existing authorities which may not be exclusively delegated to the federal head; and that this exclusive delegation can only exist in one of three cases: where an exclusive authority is, in express terms, granted to the Union; or where a particular authority is granted to the Union, and the exercise of a like authority is prohibited to the States; or where an authority is granted to the Union, with which a similar authority in the States would be utterly incompatible.
— from The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton

Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons which, as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed that the events depended on those commands.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

On the walls here and there the eternal device, so sublime in conception, so sordid in execution, recalled the aims of the so-called club: "Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité, sinon la Mort."
— from I Will Repay by Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness

He only said—to the guards: “Take her”; and to the executioner, “Do your duty.”
— from Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — Volume 2 by Mark Twain

All sorts of howling arose to their ears; Duke and the dogs were barking furiously.
— from The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras by Jules Verne

The Novi Krai of Harbin admitted that these extraterritorial demonstrations in Far Western China aimed not so much at aggression in Turkestan as cajoling further privileges in Manchuria, such as navigation on the Sungari, Russian settlements, mining and railway rights, etc.
— from China Revolutionized by John Stuart Thomson

It appears to the writer that such evidence is equally unsatisfactory, inasmuch as the works in question were produced some century and a half anterior to the earliest dated piece of Diruta ware.
— from Maiolica by C. Drury E. (Charles Drury Edward) Fortnum

He was the innocent cause of the original difficulty with the sensitive Henry, he all the time earnestly desirous of doing him honor."
— from Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals In Two Volumes, Volume II by Samuel Finley Breese Morse

If you don't take your knapsack and be off, none of the Saints can help you!" Then begging his father's blessing, Cienzo mounted his horse, and tucking the enchanted dog under his arm, he went his way out of the city.
— from Stories from the Pentamerone by Giambattista Basile

Having informed him from whom it came, and that there was a French translation annexed, he opened it and proceeded to read the letter in my presence, which, when he had finished, he desired me to return to General Pinckney as his answer: That the Executive Directory knew of no Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America, since the presentation of Mr. Monroe's letters of recall, and that the Executive Directory had charged him to notify to Mr. Monroe (here he read the quotation contained in the letter) qu'il ne reconnoitra et ne recevra plus de Ministre Plenipotentiaire des Etats Unis, jusqu'après le redressement des griefs demandé au Gouvernement Americain, et que la République Françoise est en droit d'en attendre.
— from Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 2 (of 16) by United States. Congress

Then followed some details of their arrival at the World's Fair and an amusing account of the good lady's first impressions, which were so large and so astounding that she was obliged to '"remain at home and take the entire day to think things over in."
— from Against Odds: A Detective Story by Lawrence L. Lynch