‘ Ce Pape n’avoit jamais adhéré à la levée des armes de la Ligue, et peu de jours avant sa mort, avoit dit au cardinal d’Est, que la Ligue n’auroit ni Bulle, ni Bref, ni Lettres de lui, jusques à ce qu’il vid plus clair en leurs brouilleries. ’—
— from The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Volumes 1 and 2 by Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq

It causes the post to be desired by vain men, by lazy men, by men of rank; and when that post is one of real and technical business, and when, therefore, it requires much previous training, much continuous labour, and much patient and quick judgment, all such men are dangerous.
— from Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market by Walter Bagehot

Sarah caught hold of Johnny by the loins to pull him back, but Johnny, resisting the interference, turned round on his back as he lay on the table, and kicked Sarah in the face, just as she made another desperate grasp at him.
— from Mr. Midshipman Easy by Frederick Marryat

[12] M. Junod, a Swiss missionary at Delagoa Bay, who made a careful study of the Tonga tribes, told me that they sometimes use the word shikimbo , which properly denotes the ghost of an ancestor, to denote a higher unseen power.
— from Impressions of South Africa by Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount

The sight of him fishing in the stern-sheets re-assures me as to his future, about which I am sometimes fearful, just as some men are depressed by a helpless baby because they foresee, imaginatively, the poor little creature's life and all possible troubles before it.
— from A Poor Man's House by Stephen Sydney Reynolds

On Bogue's testimony he was as sober as a judge at St. Mawes, and drank but one glass of grog there, and from St. Mawes to Percuil is but a step, mainly by footpath over the fields, with no public-house on the way.
— from Poison Island by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Cadaverous is the only word that describes the appearance to which acute suffering and subsequent prostration had reduced him; he looked, indeed, like one returned from the dead, and, in his joy at seeing me again, declared that I had restored him to life, and that my arrival, though he had not known of it, had called him back to existence—a sympathetic theory of convalescence, to which I do not think his doctors gave in their adhesion.
— from Records of Later Life by Fanny Kemble

If I were just a sheer Machiavelli and didn't have any heart but had brains, I would say: "If you mean what you say and are fighting for permanent peace, then there is only one way to get it, whether you like justice or not."
— from Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him by Joseph P. (Joseph Patrick) Tumulty