For the natural fervour which, abounding in ripe, fresh, recent fruits, cometh by the quickness of its ebullition to be with ease evaporated into the animal parts of the dreaming person—the experiment is obvious in most—is a pretty while before it be expired, dissolved, and evanished.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

Let it be entirely destroyed, thou wilt resolutely begin to make another till it is completed.
— from Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen

All the rules of this nature are very easy in their invention, but extremely difficult in their application; and even experimental philosophy, which seems the most natural and simple of any, requires the utmost stretch of human judgment.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

I had my horses to buy, my establishment to arrange, my entree into the genteel world to make; and, having announced my intention to purchase horses and live in a genteel style, was in a couple of days so pestered by visits of the nobility and gentry, and so hampered by invitations to dinners and suppers, that it became exceedingly difficult for me during some days to manage my anxiously desired visit to Mrs. Barry.
— from Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray

But when a severe frost succeeded this wet period, the wood, its fibers acquiring the hardness of iron, became extremely difficult to work, and about the 10th of June shipbuilding was obliged to be entirely discontinued.
— from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

[28] which such judgments contain expressly or by implication, being essentially different from all notions representing facts of physical or psychical experience.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

As it becomes extremely difficult to discern and to analyze the reasons which, acting separately on the volition of each member of the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the old mass, men are led to believe that this movement is involuntary, and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville

In this active devotion, the minds and bodies were invigorated by exercise: danger was the incentive, novelty the recompense; and the prospect of the world was decorated by wonder, credulity, and ambitious hope.
— 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

After supper home, it being extraordinary dark, and by chance a lanthorn came by, and so we hired it to light us home, otherwise were we no sooner within doors but a great showre fell that had doused us cruelly if we had not been within, it being as dark as pitch.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

Everyone agrees that a secret should be kept intact, but everyone does not agree as to the nature and importance of secresy.
— from Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims by François duc de La Rochefoucauld

These were deposited in a remarkable manner, precisely similar to that adopted by most of the continental Innuit, but equally different from the modern Aleut fashion.
— from An Introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians by H. C. (Harry Crécy) Yarrow

If we are reading the signs of the present and the indications of the future aright, we readily conclude that it is but early day yet in the history of humanity,—we mean in its moral and spiritual history.
— from Fifty Notable Years Views of the Ministry of Christian Universalism During the Last Half-Century; with Biographical Sketches by John G. (John Greenleaf) Adams

That summer I also saw on his own deck the original old Vanderbilt himself, who was then the captain of a Sound steamboat; and I bathed every day in salt-water, and fished from the wharf, and smoked a great deal, and read French books; and after a while we went into Massachusetts and visited the dear old villages and Boston, and so on, till I had to return to Princeton.
— from Memoirs by Charles Godfrey Leland

But not One in a Thousand can imagine, tho' it be equally demonstrable, that in the Civil Society the Avarice of Some and the Profuseness of Others, together with the Pride and Envy of most Individuals, are absolutely necessary to raise them to a great and powerful, and, in the Language of the World, polite Nation.
— from A Letter to Dion by Bernard Mandeville

The former is being enacted daily, but we do not stage it, we do not know how.
— from Plays by Anton Chekhov, Second Series by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements.
— from The Acquisitive Society by R. H. (Richard Henry) Tawney

I be ez disapp'inted ez any on ye, not ter see them fellers licked.
— from The Duke of Stockbridge: A Romance of Shays' Rebellion by Edward Bellamy