And of a surety he hath good right to such a title, for all men know for a certain truth that he is the most potent man, as regards forces and lands and treasure, that existeth in the world, or ever hath existed from the time of our First Father Adam until this day.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

“Go to bed,” said I to Le Duc, “and next morning tell the landlord to get me another room, for a wooden partition is too thin a barrier to keep off people whom despair drive to extremities.”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

And when Amphitrite has straightway loosed Poseidon's swift-wheeled car, then do ye pay to your mother a recompense for all her travail when she bare you so long in her womb; and so ye may return to the divine land of Achaea.
— from The Argonautica by Rhodius Apollonius

Look ye, it is a folly to make a rout for a fart and ado; one word is as good as twenty.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

The man who is fitted to make a good curate is not fitted to make a resolute, forcible, and efficient Thursday (hear, hear).”
— from The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

The perpendicular depth of the thorax, measured anteriorly, ranges from A, the top of the sternum, to F, the xyphoid cartilage.
— from Surgical Anatomy by Joseph Maclise

"While this marauding party carried fire and sword in the advance, and lit up the mountain cliffs with the flames of the hamlets, the Master of Santiago, who brought up the rear-guard, maintained strict order, keeping his knights together in martial array, ready for attack or defence should an enemy appear.
— from The Moors in Spain by Stanley Lane-Poole

5,650 adds: “of malefactors,” and reads farther: “and their faces lighted up at seeing those manacles.”
— from The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 33, 1519-1522 Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century by Antonio Pigafetta

None but the ignorant deny the value of medicines.' 'A rat found a piece of turmeric.
— from Kim by Rudyard Kipling

[202] After having presented the two cities, the one founded in the material good of this world, the other in hope in God, but both starting from a common gate opened in Adam into this mortal state, and both running on and running out to their proper and merited ends, Scripture begins to reckon the times, and in this reckoning includes other generations, making a recapitulation from Adam, out of whose condemned seed, as out of one mass handed over to merited damnation, God made some vessels of wrath to dishonour and others vessels of mercy to honour; in punishment rendering to the former what is due, in grace giving to the latter what is not due: in order that by the very comparison of itself with the vessels of wrath, the heavenly city, which sojourns on earth, may learn not to put confidence in the liberty of its own will, but may hope to call on the name of the Lord God.
— from The City of God, Volume II by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

For in narrating that incident of the cod-fish to which I have alluded, he humorously hints that his philosophical conclusion, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we may not eat you," was not uninfluenced by the fact that he had been "a great lover of fish" in early life, and that the fish smelt "admirably well" as it came out of the frying-pan; and he sagely adds that one of the advantages to man of being a "reasonable creature" is that he can find or make a "reason" for anything he has a mind to do.
— from The Logic of Vegetarianism: Essays and Dialogues by Henry S. Salt

If a recruit left a trench it was only to make a rush for another.
— from The Guns of Bull Run: A Story of the Civil War's Eve by Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler

Hitherto, young Mr. Kynaston and other boy-actors had represented with perfect grace and charm all the parts which have been written for Women; and I could not picture to myself any respectable Female allowing herself to be kissed or embraced in full view of a large Audience, or speaking some of those Lines which our great Dramatists have thought proper to write.
— from His Majesty's Well-Beloved An Episode in the Life of Mr. Thomas Betteron as told by His Friend John Honeywood by Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness

But they could not understand why his death should be made a reason for a change in their political convictions.
— from Ulster's Stand For Union by Ronald McNeill

Quentin mounted and remained for a long time contemplating the front of the farmhouse, which was bathed in the moonlight.
— from The city of the discreet by Pío Baroja

At that moment a report from another quarter was beard—a bullet whistled through the air, and Greco fell, shot through the head.
— from Foxholme Hall, and Other Tales by William Henry Giles Kingston

The present political frontier between Serbia and Bulgaria, starting in the north from the mouth of the river Timok on the southern bank of the Danube and going southwards slightly east of Pirot, is ethnographically approximately correct till it reaches the newly acquired and much-disputed territories in Macedonia, and represents fairly accurately the line that has divided the two nationalities ever since they were first differentiated in the seventh century.
— from The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey by Arnold Toynbee

The wrath and the lamentation of the chorus of the Greek singer, the intoning voices of the next-of-kin, the pathetic responses of voices far in the depths of ante-natal night, these the modern novelist, playing on an inferior instrument, may suggest, but cannot give: but here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to yearn for the real music, as, reading from a score, we are satisfied with the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots.
— from Confessions of a Young Man by George Moore