This sign I give unto you: every people speaketh its language of good and evil: this its neighbour understandeth not.
— from Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

And demon pipes that wail— In long, outlandish garments, Torn, though of antique worth, With Druid beards and Druid spears, As a resurrected race appears Out of an elder earth.
— from The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

Distributive are those that determine the Rights of the Subjects, declaring to every man what it is, by which he acquireth and holdeth a propriety in lands, or goods, and a right or liberty of action; and these speak to all the Subjects.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

At first the caliph declared himself a zealous Mussulman, the founder or benefactor of moschs and colleges: twelve hundred and ninety copies of the Koran were transcribed at his expense in letters of gold; and his edict extirpated the vineyards of the Upper Egypt.
— 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

The intellectual love of God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge, is eternal.
— from Ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza

Knights Grand Commanders and Knights Commanders encircle their shields with the circlet of the order, which is of purple inscribed in letters of gold, with the motto of the order, "Imperatricis auspiciis."
— from A Complete Guide to Heraldry by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies

For on the door was written in letters of gold, "Whoso meddles in affairs that are no business of his, will hear truths that will not please him.
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang

Their unconquerable love of freedom, rising against despotism, provoked them into hasty rebellions, alike fatal to themselves and to the provinces; 49 nor could these artificial supplies, however repeated by succeeding emperors, restore the important limit of Gaul and Illyricum to its ancient and native vigor.
— 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

Add to the apathy of the masses dragging out their vacant lives amid the shadows of religious superstition and to the unrest of the few, the fact that the orders were in absolute control of the political machinery of the country, with the best part of the agrarian wealth amortized in their hands; add also the ever-present jealousies, petty feuds, and racial hatreds, for which Manila and the Philippines, with their medley of creeds and races, offer such a fertile field, all fostered by the governing class for the maintenance of the old Machiavelian principle of “divide and rule,” and the sum is about the most miserable condition under which any portion of mankind ever tried to fulfill nature’s inexorable laws of growth.
— from The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal

I concealed nothing from the king; I told him all that I have now told you; and his majesty was so surprised and charmed with it, that he commanded my adventures to be written in letters of gold, and laid up in the archives of the kingdom.
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments - Volume 01 by Anonymous

The abolitionists may have a legal right to its use for distributing their papers in New York, where it is lawful to distribute them, but it does not follow that they have a legal right to that privilege for such a purpose in Louisiana or Georgia where it is unlawful.”
— from The postal power of Congress: A study in constitutional expansion by Lindsay Rogers

I read yesterday a sentence which should be written in letters of gold and adamant; it is the very motto of the new philosophy of Empire.
— from Heretics by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

Genishau at that time was a large Seneca town, thickly inhabited, lying on Genesee river, opposite what is now called the Free Ferry, adjoining Fall-Brook, and about south west of the present village of Geneseo, the county seat for the county of Livingston, in the state of New-York.
— from A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison by James E. (James Everett) Seaver

The owner, a man advanced in life, of gentlemanly refined manner, received Maître Leroux in a friendly way, and on hearing from him who Nigel was, welcomed him cordially.
— from Villegagnon: A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution by William Henry Giles Kingston

Percy Popjoy drives up in a private hansom with an enormous grey cab horse and a tiger behind, and Mrs. Bacon is looking out grimly from the window on the opposite side of the street.
— from Interludes being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses by Horace Smith

How, indeed, it came to have this name does not seem to be very clear, for what natural connection can be established between a diminutive horse, and a discreditable method of reducing the difficulties of a lesson in Latin or Greek?
— from Bert Lloyd's Boyhood: A Story from Nova Scotia by J. Macdonald (James Macdonald) Oxley

Right now, the thing that's worrying me is the ease with which I seem to have talked Farnsworth into laying off Gresham.
— from Murder in the Gunroom by H. Beam Piper