First, a very small State, where the people can readily be got together and where each citizen can with ease know all the rest; secondly, great simplicity of manners, to prevent business from multiplying and raising thorny problems; next, a large measure of equality in rank and fortune, without which equality of rights and authority cannot long subsist; lastly, little or no luxury—for luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness; it sells the country to softness and vanity, and takes away from the State all its citizens, to make them slaves one to another, and one and all to public opinion.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Hence on important occasions the behaviour of friends and relations at a distance is often regulated by a more or less elaborate code of rules, the neglect of which by the one set of persons would, it is supposed, entail misfortune or even death on the absent ones.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

This one, so old, so long ago gone down into oblivion, reads with the same freshness and charm that attach to the news in the morning paper; one’s spirits go up, then down, then up again, following the chances which the fakeer is running; now you hope, now you despair, now you hope again; and at last everything comes out right, and you feel a great wave of personal satisfaction go weltering through you, and without thinking, you put out your hand to pat Mithoo on the back, when—puff!
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

Which is the last character of the law of nature? A. That it is alone sufficient to render men happier and better, because it comprises all that is good and useful in other laws, either civil or religious, that is to say, it constitutes essentially the moral part of them; so that if other laws were divested of it, they would be reduced to chimerical and imaginary opinions devoid of any practical utility.
— from The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires and the Law of Nature by C.-F. (Constantin-François) Volney

That is what John Earle, writing after Beaumont's own death, some four years later, says of the Elegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland .
— from Francis Beaumont: Dramatist A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, And of His Association with John Fletcher by Charles Mills Gayley

In the most seemingly trivial, as in the most stupendous work, everything obeyed that law; each created object reproduced in little an exact image of that nature—the sap in the plant, the blood in man, the orbits of the planets.
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

Though the metrical structure of these popular Spanish ballads had been demonstrated as far back as 1815 by Grimm in his Silva de romances viejos , so good a scholar as Agustín Durán—to whom we owe the largest existing collection of romances —has printed them in such a shape as to give the impression 78 that they were written in octosyllabics of which only the even lines (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.) are assonanced.
— from Chapters on Spanish Literature by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

The men wore dress-suits and patent-leather pumps; the ladies, evening costumes, of red, white, yellow, and other bright-hued silks.
— from The Yoke of the Thorah by Henry Harland

They, as well as we, had the art of noting their tunes, which they performed by means of letters either contracted, or reversed, placed upon a line parallel to the words, and serving for the direction, the one of the voice, the other of the instrument.
— from The Every-day Book and Table Book. v. 3 (of 3) Everlasting Calerdar of Popular Amusements, Sports, Pastimes, Ceremonies, Manners, Customs and Events, Incident to Each of the Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days, in past and Present Times; Forming a Complete History of the Year, Month, and Seasons, and a Perpetual Key to the Almanac by William Hone

Condé, in despair, having no longer either centre or right to depend upon, collected the remnants of his battalions, and directed his march to the left, where Turenne was still engaged.
— from The Officer's Manual: Napoleon's Maxims of War by Emperor of the French Napoleon I

This one, so old, so long ago gone down into oblivion, reads with the same freshness and charm that attach to the news in the morning paper; one's spirits go up, then down, then up again, following the chances which the fakeer is running; now you hope, now you despair, now you hope again; and at last everything comes out right, and you feel a great wave of personal satisfaction go weltering through you, and without thinking, you put out your hand to pat Mithoo on the back, when—puff!
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 5 by Mark Twain