A young man in our college yonder asked me to formulate for him what I thought was the happiest hour in a man's history, and I studied it long and came back convinced that the happiest hour that any man ever sees in any earthly matter is when a young man takes his bride over the threshold of the door, for the first time, of the house he himself has earned and built, when he turns to his bride and with an eloquence greater than any language of mine, he sayeth to his wife, "My loved one, I earned this home myself; I earned it all.
— from The Art of Public Speaking by J. Berg (Joseph Berg) Esenwein

She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain; and the longing betrayed itself in her reply.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

With love’s bright arrows from her eyes, And balm on her permissive lips, She pass’d, and night was a surprise, As when the sun at Quito dips.
— from The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore

This famous courtezan, whose beauty was justly celebrated, feeling herself eaten away by an internal disease, promised to give a hundred louis to a doctor named Lucchesi, who by dint of mercury undertook to cure her, but Ancilla specified on the agreement that she was not to pay the aforesaid sum till Lucchesi had offered with her an amorous sacrifice.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

As Drummle and Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

For the law, too, and all who were connected with it, he exhibited a bitter contempt which delighted some and alarmed others of his fellow boarders.
— from The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle

The hero reascends: the prince o'erawed Scarce lifts his eyes, and bows as to a god, Then with surprise (surprise chastised by fears): "How art thou changed!
— from The Odyssey by Homer

This very incongruity of sensuous and abstract knowledge, on account of which the latter always merely approximates to the former, as mosaic approximates to painting, is the cause of a very remarkable phenomenon which, like reason itself, is peculiar to human nature, and of which the explanations that have ever anew been attempted, are insufficient: I mean laughter .
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

The mother had devoured the whole of the plentiful helpings I had sent in to her, and she had emptied a bottle of Burgundy, which she carried very well.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

cried Trim, advancing three steps as he spoke, does a man think of his christian-name when he goes upon the attack?—Or when he stands in the trench, Trim? cried my uncle Toby, looking firm.—Or when he enters a breach?
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

He works, will go for his expedition and break his neck there, not for the sake of love for his neighbour, but for the sake of such abstractions as humanity, future generations, an ideal race of men.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

For here, another author transacts, via his editor, another business transaction that is different from the initial business transaction transacted by the initial author, and consequently does not intrude upon the initial author's initial business transaction with the public; he represents not that author, as speaking through him, but another.
— from Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books From: Essays and Treaties on Moral, Political and various Philosophical Subjects by Immanuel Kant

The queen-mother, as she sat there in that brown room, was closely observing the king, who, during supper, had exhibited a boisterous good-humor which she felt to be assumed in order to mask some intention against her.
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

He stopped there, wandering about the fields, watching peasants at work, imprinting their images firmly upon his eye and brain, and then going home again to put the figures he had thus observed upon his vivid canvas.
— from Biographies of Working Men by Grant Allen

He appears to be editor of The Outlook, and notwithstanding that, I have every admiration, because when everything is said concerning The Outlook, after all one must admit that it is frank in its delinquencies, that it is outspoken in its departures from fact, that it is vigorous in its mistaken criticisms of men like me.
— from Mark Twain's Speeches by Mark Twain

The sight of soldiers always set her blood to leaping, and lit the fires in her eyes and brought the warm rich color to her cheeks; it was then that you saw that she was too beautiful to be of the earth, or at any rate that there was a subtle something somewhere about her beauty that differed it from the human types of your experience and exalted it above them.
— from Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — Volume 1 by Mark Twain

Whereas had but any other person entered with us into a vow so solemn, that he had taken the Holy Sacrament upon it, I believe had he but once deceived us by breaking in upon the vow, we should hardly ever after be prevailed upon to trust that man again, though we still continue to trust our own fears, against reason and against experience.
— from The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. — Volume 04 Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church — Volume 2 by Jonathan Swift

So thinking, and seeing the way in which her husband's reason was entrenched against the facts of his own life, in a citadel defended by human experience at bay, she wavered in her resolution of a few hours since—or, rather, she saw the impossibility of forcing the position, thinking contentedly that at least if it was so impracticable to her it would be equally so to other agencies, and he might be relied on to remain in the dark.
— from Somehow Good by William De Morgan

And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavouring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?
— from The Republic by Plato

and if for ever—— Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with the stage driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion."
— from In the Track of R. L. Stevenson and Elsewhere in Old France by Hammerton, John Alexander, Sir