It will easily be supposed I did not let her wait, but advancing towards her, I was seized with such a trembling, that having filled the glass too full, I spilled some of the water on her plate, and even on herself.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

But the water in the inlet was salt, and wherever they dug wells it was equally bad.
— 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

But I was embarrassed by being the possessor of a large piece of property in Washington on I Street, near the corner of Third, which I could at the time neither sell nor give away.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

Whenever an account of past events is given, be it written even by a historian, we must take into account the fact that inadvertently something has been interpolated from the present and from intervening times into the past; so that the entire picture is falsified.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

The delicately festooned rim of this shell, supplied by the biggest mollusk in the class Acephala , measured about six meters in circumference; so it was even bigger than those fine giant clams given to King François I by the Republic of Venice, and which the Church of Saint–Sulpice in Paris has made into two gigantic holy–water fonts.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne

The defendant is liable, not because his intent was evil, but because he made false charges without excuse.
— from The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes

I was entertained by observing how he contrived to send Mr. Peyton on an errand, without seeming to degrade him.
— from Boswell's Life of Johnson Abridged and edited, with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood by James Boswell

The example of the Panathenæa was imitated at Delphi; but the Olympic games were ignorant of a musical crown, till it was extorted by the vain tyranny of Nero, (Sueton.
— 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 expression was used as a cant term for a “wild duck” in the reign of James I. As a slang term it was employed by Ben Jonson in his masque of Neptune’s Triumph , which [233] was written for display at Court on Twelfth Night, 1623; “a fine LACED MUTTON or two,” are the words applied to wantons.
— from The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical and Andecdotal by John Camden Hotten

So it will ever be, some of all sorts, good, bad, indifferent, true, false, zealous, ambidexters, neutralists, lukewarm, libertines, atheists, &
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

It was expected, but it was none too welcome.
— from The Khaki Boys Fighting to Win; or, Smashing the German Lines by Gordon Bates

The authority of these fathers of human philosophy still carry great weight, and there is reason to fear that it will even bear hard upon generations yet to come.
— from Elements of Chemistry, In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier

Its significance is well expressed by Turgeneff, who first introduced it in his novel “Fathers and Sons,” published in 1862:—“A Nihilist is a man who bows before no [114] authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has.”
— from Names: and Their Meaning; A Book for the Curious by Leopold Wagner

I was elected by the State central committee at Ellensburg, Wash., I think somewhere about in the middle of December 1944.
— from Investigation of Communist activities in Seattle, Wash., area. Hearings, Part 3 by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities

Not only did he support me on almost every public question in which I was most interested—including, I am convinced, every one on which he felt he conscientiously could do so—but he also at the time of his death gave a striking proof of his disinterested desire to render a service to certain poor people, and this under conditions in which not only would he never know if the service were rendered but in which he had no reason to expect that his part in it would ever be made known to any other man.
— from Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt

[Pg 11] of war, which might have been called the normal condition of the colony, it was exposed by its position to incessant inroads of the Iroquois, or Five Nations, of New York; and no man could venture into the forests or the fields without bearing his life in his hand.
— from France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West by Francis Parkman

Common Faults in Writing English By Prof. A. R. Skemp, M.A. 60.
— from Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement by Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, Dame

It was probably under these circumstances, when Athens owed the recovery of her greatness in no small measure to the Phoenicians, that those relations of friendship and intimacy were established between the two peoples of which we have evidence in several inscriptions.
— from History of Phoenicia by George Rawlinson