“Composed by an unlearned man in the midst of a discussion.
— from The Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“He has his own little methods, which are, if he won’t mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic, but he has the makings of a detective in him.
— from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Illustrated by Arthur Conan Doyle

But the Ministery of a Deacon, which is called (verse 2. of the same Chapter) "Serving of Tables," is a service done to the Church, or Congregation: So that neither any one man, nor the whole Church, could ever of their Pastor say, he was their Minister; but of a Deacon, whether the charge he undertook were to serve tables, or distribute maintenance to the Christians, when they lived in each City on a common stock, or upon collections, as in the first times, or to take a care of the House of Prayer, or of the Revenue, or other worldly businesse of the Church, the whole Congregation might properly call him their Minister.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

One marvel of a day he had walked so far that when he returned the moon was high and full and all the world was purple shadow and silver.
— from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

These ring knots take the place, in macramé, of bead drops, in gimp trimmings; when they are made of a double chain, you cut away 3 threads, when of a single, 1 thread, conceal the ends carefully inside the knot, make a loop with the 4th or 2nd thread, fig.
— from Encyclopedia of Needlework by Thérèse de Dillmont

The truth of this is evinced by the two precedent Propositions: For by the second Proposition there are many Reflexions made by the internal parts of Bodies, which, by the first Proposition, would not happen if the parts of those Bodies were continued without any such Interstices between them; because Reflexions are caused only in Superficies, which intercede Mediums of a differing density, by Prop.
— from Opticks Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light by Isaac Newton

The double cost of a warlike and dissolute prince exhausted the revenue, and multiplied the taxes; and Manuel, in the distress of his last Turkish campaign, endured a bitter reproach from the mouth of a desperate soldier.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

It is true, that while I worked, she would idle; and I thought to myself, “If you and I were destined to live always together, cousin, we would commence matters on a different footing.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

There are incidents in some families so pat to the purpose of what is going to follow,—they are scarce exceeded by the invention of a dramatic writer;—I mean of ancient days.—
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

And when he was come to Rome, all his relations revolted to him; not out of their good-will to him, but out of their hatred to Archelaus; though indeed they were most of all desirous of gaining their liberty, and to be put under a Roman governor; but if there were too great an opposition made to that, they thought Antipas preferable to Archelaus, and so joined with him, in order to procure the kingdom for him.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

"Would you permit a member of another denomination to come to your communion table?"
— from Dorothy Page by Eldridge B. (Eldridge Burwell) Hatcher

Advancing up the river Patuxent to Upper Marlborough, our army destroyed a numerous fleet of gunboats which had molested our commercial interests in these waters.
— from History of the Scottish Regiments in the British Army by Archibald K. Murray

The mitred bishops were in flowing robes, and the pawns each represented a man of a different nation.
— from Napoleon's Young Neighbor by Helen Leah Reed

Measurement of astronomical distances, formula assisting, 43 .
— from On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences by Mary Somerville

des femmes , 117 ff., 124 ff.; Grimm , Rechtsalt. , 441; and especially the monograph of Ashworth , Das Witthum (Dower) im eng.
— from A History of Matrimonial Institutions, Vol. 1 of 3 by George Elliott Howard

Whether we look to the Greek states, or to Rome, or to the Teutonic aristocracies in Ditmarsh which furnished Niebuhr with so many valuable illustrations, or to the Celtic clan associations, or to that strange social organisation of the Sclavonic Russians and Poles which has only lately attracted notice, everywhere we discover traces of passages in their history when men of alien descent were admitted to, and amalgamated with, the original brotherhood.
— from Ancient Law: Its Connection to the History of Early Society by Maine, Henry Sumner, Sir

It was chipped, and a stain had gone under the glaze, so that it looked like the mark of a dirty mouth.
— from The Trespasser by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

The sailors had contrived to effect a passage secretly from their own birth into the store-room beneath, through which, by opening a way in a manner completely eluding suspicion, they got forward into the ship’s hold, and ascended to the entrance of the prison at the fore-hatchway, where, by means of a duplicate key, (which to locks of this description was easily procured,) or by picking the locks, they met the females, who had previously consented to accompany them if they succeeded in getting them out.
— from Two Voyages to New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land by Thomas Reid

Whilst women suffer in every respect from the influence of alcohol as a degrader of their men, most of all do they and the race suffer through the action of alcohol upon the racial instinct.
— from Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles by C. W. (Caleb Williams) Saleeby

I should not trust your strength nor my own a day longer."
— from Gabriel Conroy by Bret Harte