In his earlier years his excitable, impatient temperament seems to have involved him in various wars.
— from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England by Bede, the Venerable, Saint

"It would have been better never to have embarked in the scheme at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going, or what I am aiming at…
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

If Henry Wilson, working early and late on a farm with scarcely any opportunities to go to school, bound out until he was twenty-one for only a yoke of oxen and six sheep, could manage to read a thousand good books before his time had expired; if the slave Frederick Douglass, on a plantation where it was almost a crime to teach a slave to read, could manage from scraps of paper, posters on barns, and old almanacs, to learn the alphabet and lift himself to eminence; if the poor deaf boy Kitto, who made shoes in an alms-house, could become the greatest Biblical scholar of his age, where is the boy or girl to-day, under the American flag, who cannot get a fair education and escape the many disadvantages of ignorance?
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

When, therefore, a man is very sick and past all hopes of recovery, it is customary to put him out of the house in an extempore hut erected in the scrub, so that death may not take place in the kongsi amongst the living.
— from Malay Magic Being an introduction to the folklore and popular religion of the Malay Peninsula by Walter William Skeat

No human being could by any possibility have existed in that subterranean world!
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

As the contemporary de Luchet has expressed it: The system of the Illuminés is not to embrace the dogmas of a sect, but to turn all errors to its advantage, to concentrate in itself everything that men have invented in the way of duplicity and imposture.
— from Secret Societies And Subversive Movements by Nesta Helen Webster

33 b ), who interprets ‘Baithusians’ as ‘the school of the Essenes’ (ביח איסיא): while subsequent writers, going a step further, have explained it ‘the school of the physicians’ (ביח איסיא).
— from St. Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon A revised text with introductions, notes and dissertations by J. B. (Joseph Barber) Lightfoot

And I have heard, through Dr. Innes, from a lady who has lately had charge of her, that she does shrug her shoulders, turn in her elbows, and raise her eyebrows in the same manner as other people, and under the same circumstances.
— from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

The bolder and more powerful chiefs invaded Syria, and violated the holy sepulchre of Jerusalem: the more humble engaged in the service of Aladin, sultan of Iconium; and among these were the obscure fathers of the Ottoman line.
— 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

And it is surely here in the spiritual things, in the heart and centre of human existence, in the stress of [Pg lxxii] sin and suffering, rather than amongst the gentle growing things, and flaming lights, and songs, and blameless creatures of Nature that the Beatific Vision on earth is at its highest.
— from Revelations of Divine Love by of Norwich Julian

The men pointed to windward, and to our surprise the captain turned his eyes in the same direction.
— from Peter Trawl; Or, The Adventures of a Whaler by William Henry Giles Kingston

The fair damsel also wears all her worldly wealth on her head and neck, and hanging from her ears, in the shape of long strings of gold or silver coins.
— from Turkish Harems & Circassian Homes by Andrée Hope

THE YELLOW THIRST The old woodchuck hole—it was one whose owner had been killed by Red Fox himself earlier in the season—served very well, when enlarged, for the rest of the summer.
— from Red Fox The Story of His Adventurous Career in the Ringwaak Wilds and of His Final Triumph over the Enemies of His Kind by Roberts, Charles G. D., Sir

Although so many years had elapsed in total seclusion, it continued to be my strong impression that we should one day be restored to the society of our fellow men.
— from Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

The hands had begun naturally to adjust themselves to their enforced companionship, and it wasn't such a very hard matter, though it cost him some painful wrenches and much twisting of the fingers, for Mr. Trimm to get his coat unbuttoned and his eyeglasses in their small leather case out of his upper waistcoat pocket.
— from The Escape of Mr. Trimm His Plight and other Plights by Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb

For, not to enumerate how many and what persons of the adverse party he pardoned, received into favour, and suffered to rise to the highest eminence in the state; he thought it sufficient to punish Junius Novatus and Cassius Patavinus, who were both plebeians, one of them with a fine, and the other with an easy banishment; although the former had published, in the name of young Agrippa, a very scurrilous letter against him, and the other declared openly, at an entertainment where there was a great deal of company, “that he neither wanted inclination nor courage to stab him.”
— from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete by Suetonius

She was reclining on her side, her hand supporting her head, her elbow in the sand.
— from Nedra by George Barr McCutcheon

cried Tom, for the joy of battle was upon him and his heart exulted in the struggle that was going on about him, in the pressure of bodies against his, the labored breathing, the panting, the fierce grips that were broken only to be made anew.
— from The Rival Pitchers: A Story of College Baseball by Lester Chadwick

The length and breadth of the mercy-seat is the same with that of the ark: perhaps to show us, that the length and breadth of the mercy of God to his elect, is the same with the length and breadth of the merits of Christ (Exo 25:10,17).
— from Works of John Bunyan — Volume 03 by John Bunyan