For there is not only pleasure, but, moreover, glory, in conquering and debauching that soft sweetness and that childish modesty, and to reduce a cold and matronlike gravity to the mercy of our ardent desires: ‘tis a glory, say they, to triumph over modesty, chastity, and temperance; and whoever dissuades ladies from those qualities, betrays both them and himself.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Like fauns, they combine a certain wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy, a delight in rapid motion as they revel amid clouds and flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the painter's style.
— from Renaissance in Italy, Volume 3 (of 7) The Fine Arts by John Addington Symonds

He heard the roar of the mob at the rear, and caught a glimpse of the helmeted police and the lurching meat waggons.
— from The Strength of the Strong by Jack London

The French Government contemplated the withdrawal of the lightship marking the Minquiers, as these rocks are called, and the substitution in its stead of a number of powerful automatic buoys which would indicate the exact position of the most conspicuous dangers, whereas the lightship only indicated their general whereabouts, compelling mariners to calculate their distances from the peril, which, by the way, was no easy matter owing to the short range of the beacon.
— from Lightships and Lighthouses by Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot

I waited five minutes, according to rule, and cast again.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 by Various

Now it was contemplated to sustain the island for months, and this required a continuous as well as a lavish expenditure of spirit power.
— from The Goddess of Atvatabar Being the history of the discovery of the interior world and conquest of Atvatabar by William Richard Bradshaw

They have, therefore, declared the grammar, together with the reading book and vocabulary, published by Zamenhof under the title of Fundamento de Esperanto , to be sacrosanct, and go so far in this matter as to revere as "correct" and "classical" Esperanto the infringements of his own rules, the grammatical errors, and even the misprints to be found in the Fundamento .
— from International Language and Science Considerations on the Introduction of an International Language into Science by Richard Lorenz

Similarly, recognizing the exclusive right of the Mongols of Outer Mongolia to carry on the internal administration of autonomous Mongolia and to regulate all commercial and industrial questions affecting that country, China undertakes not to interfere in these matters, nor to dispatch troops to Outer Mongolia nor to appoint any civil or military officer nor to carry out any colonization scheme in this region.
— from The Fight for the Republic in China by B. L. (Bertram Lenox) Putnam Weale

This is what is the matter with the country—the conventional automatic assumption that millions of men—even men who are not in business merely to make money themselves—make in general, that we must arrange to run a civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are merely working for money.
— from The Ghost in the White House Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want by Gerald Stanley Lee

He read a lot of learned matter about the rapidly approaching comet, and he went to bed with his brain in a whirl.
— from Mr. Poskitt's Nightcaps: Stories of a Yorkshire Farmer by J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher