Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a model of virtue, known and highly respected; there could be no question of his being out for amorous adventure, and annoyed at being detected; and my father asked himself how he could possibly have displeased our friend.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Do you know what it means for a man to inherit money, with nothing back of it for two generations but hard work, although back of that there were, perhaps, kings?
— from The Gay Cockade by Temple Bailey

Accordingly, she sent for the most active and intimate 80 of her male friends, and for some of her female cronies, and instructed them as to what part they should play, and waited for the hour when Baccho was accustomed regularly to pass by her house on his way to the wrestling-school.
— from Plutarch's Morals by Plutarch

Vincent de Paul has divinely traced the features of the Sister of Charity in these admirable words, in which he mingles as much freedom as servitude: “They shall have for their convent only the house of the sick; for cell only a hired room; for chapel only their parish church; for cloister only the streets of the town and the wards of the hospitals; for enclosure only obedience; for gratings only the fear of God; for veil only modesty.”
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Mother and daughter sometimes dote on the same man, father and son, master and servant, on one woman.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Already on the 16th two of his associates named Gamaiké and Inaba, accused of combining with him in a plot to murder foreigners, and of extorting money from a rich farmer, had been executed, though they were not actual accomplices in the Kamakura crime.
— from A Diplomat in Japan The inner history of the critical years in the evolution of Japan when the ports were opened and the monarchy restored, recorded by a diplomatist who took an active part in the events of the time, with an account of his personal experiences during that period by Ernest Mason Satow

His return furnished abundant and incontestible proof of a shameful persecution, materials for an appeal to the British Parliament, and a printed report which was circulated through the continent, and which first conveyed correct information to the inhabitants of France.
— from Fox's Book of Martyrs Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs by John Foxe

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, And in due time you shall repay the same service to me, For after we start we never lie by again.
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

[294] 773 Jesus Christ for all, Moses for a nation.
— from Pascal's Pensées by Blaise Pascal

That, instead of such previous inquiry, or tender of good offices, the said Warren Hastings did stimulate the ambition and ferocity of the Nabob of Oude to the full completion of the inhuman end of the said unjustifiable enterprise, by informing him "that it would be absolutely necessary to persevere in it until it should be accomplished"; pretending that a fear of the Company's displeasure was his motive for annexing the accomplishment of the enterprise as a condition of his assistance, and asserting "that he could not hazard or answer for the displeasure of the Company, his masters, if they should find themselves involved in a fruitless war, or in an expense for prosecuting it,"—a pretence tending to the high dishonor of the East India Company, as if the gain to be acquired was to reconcile that body to the breach of their own orders prohibiting all such enterprises;—and in order further to involve the said Nabob beyond the power of retreating, he did, in the course of the proceeding, purposely put the said Nabob under difficulties in case he should decline that war, and did oblige him to accept even the permission to relinquish the execution of this unjust project as a favor, and to make concessions for it ; thereby acting as if the Company were principals in the hostility; and employing for this purpose much double dealing and divers unworthy artifices to entangle and perplex the said Nabob, but by means of which he found himself (as he has entered it on record) hampered and embarrassed in a particular manner .
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12) by Edmund Burke

They were, however, certainly better off in her than in the water; but at any moment, with the slightest increase of wind, she might fill and sink beneath them, and they would again be left to struggle for their lives.
— from Ned Garth; Or, Made Prisoner in Africa: A Tale of the Slave Trade by William Henry Giles Kingston

Here, lay the skeleton of a man, so lightly covered with a thin unwholesome skin, that not a bone in the anatomy was clothed, and I could clasp the arm above the elbow, in my finger and thumb.
— from The Uncommercial Traveller by Charles Dickens

For years past William of Orange had been a mark for assassin after assassin in Philip's pay, and in 1584 the deadly persistence of the Spanish king was rewarded by his fall.
— from History of the English People, Volume IV by John Richard Green

“He was only kept prisoner by the Indians,” says my father, “and sick and ill-used.
— from Who Ate the Pink Sweetmeat? And Other Christmas Stories by Kate Upson Clark

If a reasonable degree of industrial, commercial and colonial progress can be guaranteed, so that the great industrial nations do not live in constant peril, the vast forces which make for an international exploitation of the world's resources will be unchained.
— from American World Policies by Walter E. (Walter Edward) Weyl

The rescuing a man from an ignominious punishment, lays a greater obligation than barely to prevent him from committing a capital crime.
— from The Existence and Attributes of God, Volumes 1 and 2 by Stephen Charnock

The movements of B will indeed have opposite directions, according as B is attracted or repelled; but this does not show that the actions themselves have opposite directions; it shows, on the contrary, that those actions, though directed in the same manner from A to B , are of a different nature, and proceed from opposite principles.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 19, April 1874‐September 1874 by Various

Do as much for any chap.
— from Ruggles of Red Gap by Harry Leon Wilson