he demanded, “There’s no one can do a better cancan, believe me,” and he himself raised his arms above his head and favored us with an impersonation of Syrus the actor; the whole household chanting: Oh bravo Oh bravissimo in chorus, and he would have danced out into the middle of the room before us all, had not Fortunata whispered in his ear, telling him, I suppose, that such low buffoonery was not in keeping with his dignity.
— from The Satyricon — Complete by Petronius Arbiter

We are thy sons, and not so impious or so thoughtless as that comes to, though perhaps more unfortunate than is convenient for thee.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

In a corner below the mangle, on a couple of stools, sat two very little children: a boy and a girl; and when the very long boy, in an interval of staring, took a turn at the mangle, it was alarming to see how it lunged itself at those two innocents, like a catapult designed for their destruction, harmlessly retiring when within an inch of their heads.
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Owing to the fact that the scenes in this opera were generally strung together somewhat clumsily and without any apparent connection, it was necessary to recast them completely, in order so to animate the representation as to give to the dramatic action the life it lacked.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

Then she looked round the room, and gathering up, as it were, into one single thought all the untold bliss of that day, she made a picture of her memories, and dwelt upon it until she slept, the happiest creature in Paris.
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

When a Common-wealth is once settled, then are they actually Lawes, and not before; as being then the commands of the Common-wealth; and therefore also Civill Lawes: for it is the Soveraign Power that obliges men to obey them.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

[47] In the present treatise ‘Desire’ is primarily regarded as a felt impulse or stimulus to actions tending to the realisation of what is desired.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

In all these towns the beautiful white plastered temples rose above the smaller ones, like so many towers and castles in our Spanish towns, and this, it may be imagined, was a splendid sight.
— from The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 1 (of 2) Written by Himself Containing a True and Full Account of the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain. by Bernal Díaz del Castillo

I have, in former Papers, endeavoured to expose this Party-Rage in Women, as it only serves to aggravate the Hatreds and Animosities that reign among Men, and in a great measure deprive the Fair Sex of those peculiar Charms with which Nature has endowed them.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

Percy and Norah are spending the winter in London (at Kensington)—and we can get round by train in half an hour; so I often see them and the dear little man.
— from The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman

In the year 1713 he gradually drew away from them and came under the influence of Swift, then at the height of his power in political and social life.
— from The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems by Alexander Pope

But precisely because European civilisation is so elaborate and complex, it 30 would be an error to suppose that catastrophic causes are needed in order seriously to affect the conditions of our comparative civility.
— from Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885 by Various

"I will admit, for argument's sake, that you obtain the money," he resumed; "you will lose the double of it, having a hundred thousand francs' pension to receive instead of sixty thousand, and that for a period of ten years."
— from The Vicomte de Bragelonne Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" by Alexandre Dumas

They méeting also & togither with the shiriffes, doo hold their aforesaid sessions at foure times in the yeare, whereof they are called quarter sessions, and herein they inquire of sundrie trespasses, and the [Page 263] common annoiances of the kings liege people, and diuerse other things, Petie sessions.
— from Chronicles (1 of 6): The Description of Britaine by William Harrison

After this, the duke of Lancaster appointed sir Robert Knols to repaire againe to Calis, and by the waie (if occasion serued) to attempt the recouerie of Ponthieu.
— from Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (11 of 12) Edward the Third, Who Came to the Crowne by the Resignation of His Father Edward the Second by Raphael Holinshed

But the difference, apparently so wide, which renders the juxtaposition of those two vegetables so suitable an illustration of a bad arrangement, depends, to the common eye, mainly on mere size and texture; now if we made it our study to adopt the classification which would involve the least peril of similar rapprochements , we should return to the obsolete division into trees, shrubs, and herbs, which though of primary importance with regard to mere general aspect, yet (compared even with so petty and unobvious a distinction as that into dicotyledons and monocotyledons) answers to so few differences in the other properties of plants, that a classification founded on it (independently of the indistinctness of the lines of demarcation) would be as completely artificial and technical as the Linnæan.
— from A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive by John Stuart Mill

Hearing that a body of Italian pilgrims were to be received by the pontiff at the Vatican, and having assured ourselves that the function was one which would involve no official recognition of the Pope on our part, and that we should be merely Protestant spectators, we gladly accepted the offer of tickets for the audience, and, supposing in our simplicity that, as the reception was set for noon, we should be sufficiently early if we went at eleven o'clock, we drove up to the main entrance of the Vatican at that hour.
— from A Year in Europe by Walter W. (Walter William) Moore