Allow me to explain my meaning: Objects are differently seen when in the water and when out of the water, when near and when at a distance; and the painter or juggler makes use of this variation to impose upon us.
— from The Republic by Plato

While I continued to mark out a different starting place for each competitor, he did not notice that I had made the distances unequal, so that one of them, having farther to run to reach the goal, was clearly at a disadvantage.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

“I'll stick up for the pretty women preachin'; I know they'd persuade me over a deal sooner nor th' ugly men.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

‘He is right, sir, without correction,’ returned Mr. Mell, in the midst of a dead silence; ‘what he has said is true.’
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

So to my office, and did some business, and finished my Journall with resolutions, if God bless me, to apply myself soberly to settle all matters for myself, and expect the event of all with comfort.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

In the midst of a dead silence, Ralph sat down, pressing his two hands upon his temples.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Monsieur would see Madame Romayne— cette pauvre madame , of a demeanour so beautiful, yes, even in these frightful circumstances, so beautiful and so distinguished?
— from A Valiant Ignorance; vol. 1 of 3 A Novel in Three Volumes by Mary Angela Dickens

But the Burnses were men of a different stamp.
— from Robert Burns by Gabriel Setoun

Too much of a drop scatters the material and undoes the work of thorough mixing.
— from Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 by Various

It appears, therefore, that the method of all Deductive Sciences is hypothetical.
— from A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (Vol. 1 of 2) by John Stuart Mill

Give it a bath, dress its hair, and use up the money on a dress, shoes, and stockings, underclothing, and a hat."
— from The Wreck of the Titan or, Futility by Morgan Robertson

Was it not merely some illusion of my overwrought and distracted spirit?
— from The Child of Pleasure by Gabriele D'Annunzio

The king professed a willingness to make some concessions: he was only gaining time for measures of a different sort.
— from Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading by George Park Fisher

The contents of the converter may now be drawn off as liquid steel into molds of any desired shape and size, and when cooled will be ready for shipment.
— from Every-day Science: Volume 6. The Conquest of Nature by Edward Huntington Williams

We are in the very middle of a deep sea of treachery and corruption.
— from The White Rose of Memphis by William C. (Clark) Falkner