It is not in my power to believe that passive and dead matter can have brought forth living and feeling beings, that blind chance has brought forth intelligent beings, that that which does not think has brought forth thinking beings.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“I want you to let me call him in—to investigate this matter.”
— from The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

City Tavern or Merchants Coffee House The last of the celebrated coffee houses in Philadelphia was built in 1773 under the name of the City tavern, which later became known as the Merchants coffee house, possibly after the house of the same name that was then famous in New York.
— from All About Coffee by William H. (William Harrison) Ukers

And if the next of kin do not proceed against the perpetrator of the crime, then the pollution shall be deemed to fall upon his own head—the murdered man will fix the guilt upon his kinsman, and he who has a mind to proceed against him may compel him to be absent from his country during five years, according to law.
— from Laws by Plato

Miss Cornelia had always averred that Mr. Arnold had no gumption.
— from Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery

But another law had placed her where she must commit her crime or starve with her child—and before God that law is responsible for both her crime and her ignominious death!
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

The Danes had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed very well for a Methodist missionary.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘In short,’ resumed Tom, as if he had made up his mind, ‘if you come to that, perhaps I was so far from being altogether in his favour, that I took him outside the door to tell him quietly, that I thought he might consider himself very well off to get such a windfall as he had got from my sister, and that I hoped he would make good use of it.
— from Hard Times by Charles Dickens

I have told Miss Bennet several times, that she will never play really well unless she practises more; and though Mrs. Collins has no instrument, she is very welcome, as I have often told her, to come to Rosings every day, and play on the pianoforte in Mrs. Jenkinson's room.
— from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pantagruel then arose from table to visit and scour the thicket, and returned presently; having discovered, on the left, an ambuscade of squab Chitterlings; and on the right, about half a league from thence, a large body of huge giant-like armed Chitterlings ranged in battalia along a little hill, and marching furiously towards us at the sound of bagpipes, sheep’s paunches, and bladders, the merry fifes and drums, trumpets, and clarions, hoping to catch us as Moss caught his mare.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

His happiness! what but misery could he reap from this passion?
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 61, No. 376, February, 1847 by Various

Some eight or ten glasses were set down and filled, when Murphy, snatching a couple of bottles from the shelf behind the bar, handed them out to his men, crying, “Here, ye bluddy thaves, lave the glasses to the gintlemen!”
— from The Man from Glengarry: A Tale of the Ottawa by Ralph Connor

The Athenæum says also: "Upon the whole, we do not think the short story represents Mr. Conrad's true métier " It may be that Mr. Conrad's true métier was, after all, that of an auctioneer; but, after "Youth," "To-morrow," "Typhoon," "Karain," "The End of the Tether," and half a dozen other mere masterpieces, he may congratulate himself on having made a fairly successful hobby of the short story.
— from Books and Persons; Being Comments on a Past Epoch, 1908-1911 by Arnold Bennett

Mrs. Crosbie had been absent, like Eve, ‘on hospitable cares intent,’ a duty which she did not conceive herself exempted from, either by the dignity of her husband’s rank in the municipality, or the splendour of her Brussels silk gown, or even by the more highly prized lustre of her birth; for she was born a Maxwell, and allied, as her husband often informed his friends, to several of the first families in the county.
— from Redgauntlet: A Tale Of The Eighteenth Century by Walter Scott

He didn't trust Sammy, and he took care not to go far from the water when he heard that Old Man Coyote had been hanging around.
— from The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver by Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess

Matt Higgins rolled his overcoat carefully in the crumpled copy of The Morning Call , hid it in a corner of the room and left the building by the main corridor door.
— from The Hospital Murders by Means Davis

At a point such as the southern entrance to Péronne, where the approaches could not be conveniently deviated, the difficulties of such successive reconstructions, while the flow of traffic had to be maintained, can hardly be fully realized.
— from The Australian Victories in France in 1918 by Monash, John, Sir

'Poor faithful old doggie!' murmured Mrs. Currie; 'he thought Tacks was a nasty burglar, didn't he?
— from The Black Poodle, and Other Tales by F. Anstey

Mouth constricted, half as broad as the thorax, with twelve to fifteen divergent, slender, conical, denticulate feet, half as long as the thorax.
— from Report on the Radiolaria Collected by H.M.S. Challenger During the Years 1873-1876, Second Part: Subclass Osculosa; Index Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger During the Years 1873-76, Vol. XVIII by Ernst Haeckel

"I am not in love, I'm cure, yet I am surprised to find myself contented here with you.
— from Nedra by George Barr McCutcheon