Lying is the strongest acknowledgment of 20 the force of truth.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

“Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe I intimated in the letter which I wrote to you three weeks ago, that this little girl has not quite the character and disposition I could wish: should you admit her into Lowood school, I should be glad if the superintendent and teachers were requested to keep a strict eye on her, and, above all, to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

The Huns still threatened their revolted subjects, but their hasty attack was repelled by the single forces of Walamir, and the news of his victory reached the distant camp of his brother in the same auspicious moment that the favorite concubine of Theodemir was delivered of a son and heir.
— 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

While the critic got the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall, the journalist in the school, and the press in society, art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the most trivial kind, and æsthetic criticism was used as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and moreover piteously unoriginal sociality, the significance of which is suggested by the Schopenhauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there [Pg 173] has never been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it.
— from The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Babylon had been converted into a royal park; but near the ruins of the ancient capital, new cities had successively arisen, and the populousness of the country was displayed in the multitude of towns and villages, which were built of bricks dried in the sun, and strongly cemented with bitumen; the natural and peculiar production of the Babylonian soil.
— 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

In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star, Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands, Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

In the Sulu archipelago and a few points in South Mindanao, many of these Samal have shifted their homes from their boats to the shore.
— from A History of the Philippines by David P. Barrows

Finally, nothing is more trite and familiar than the statement that "human nature is the same all over the world."
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

The gospel shows us that God did wonderfully stoop and condescend for our good; and to do accordingly, it is to stoop and condescend to others.
— from Works of John Bunyan — Complete by John Bunyan

"But that, in the year 1703, when a new assembly was to be chosen, which, by the constitution, is chosen once in two years, the election was managed with very great partiality and injustice, and all sorts of people, even aliens, Jews, servants, common sailors and negroes, were admitted to vote at elections: That, in the said assembly, an act was passed to incapacitate every person from being a member of any General Assembly that should be chosen for the time to come, unless he had taken the sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the church of England; whereby all Protestant Dissenters are made incapable of being in the said assembly; and yet, by the same act, all persons who shall take an oath that they have not received the sacrament in any dissenting congregation for one year past, though they have not received it in the church of England, are made capable of fitting in the said assembly: That this act was passed in an illegal manner, by the governor calling the assembly to meet the 26th of April, when it then stood prorogued to the 10th of May following: That it hath been ratified by the Lords Proprietors in England, who refused to hear what could be offered against it, and contrary to the petition of one hundred and seventy of the chief inhabitants of the colony, and of several eminent merchants trading hither, though the commons of the same assembly quickly after passed another bill to repeal it, which the upper house rejected, and the governor dissolved the house.
— from An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, Volume 1 by Alexander Hewatt

We could fancy it in the spring, at the melting of the snows, with the wild water dashing down the steep pathway, and the white foam gleaming and glittering, as a newly risen Undine, in the sight of the astonished, far-off beholders.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 4, April, 1864 by Various

In a long narrow corridor which runs behind the stalls, panelled all over like an inlaid cabinet, I was shown a beautiful little organ, in a richly chased silver case, which accompanied Charles the Fifth in his African expedition, and must often have gently beguiled the cares of empire, for he played on it, tradition says, almost every evening.
— from Italy; with sketches of Spain and Portugal by William Beckford

She was very fond of being out in the snow and expressed a wish to have some photographs taken of herself on the hillside.
— from Two Years in the Forbidden City by Princess Der Ling

bids we made we had to deposit with the Government some twenty-six or twenty-eight thousand dollars, and I do not know but more, in cash, or what is the same as cash, for the bank certifies that the money is there.
— from The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Complete Contents Dresden Edition—Twelve Volumes by Robert Green Ingersoll

That Dutch boy burnt himself ag'in with a rocket, but it ain't much an' he don't care, for he said the rocket hit a chap named Sobber in the stomach and keeled him over."
— from The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle; or, The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht by Edward Stratemeyer

The canal boats were built in two sections and were taken over the mountains on a railroad.
— from How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon A True Romance of Patriotic Heroism Christian Devotion and Final Martyrdom by Oliver W. (Oliver Woodson) Nixon