Kleomedes, we are told, was a man of unusual size and strength, but stupid and half-crazy, who did many deeds of violence, and at last in a boy's school struck and broke in two the column that supported the roof, and brought it down.
— from Plutarch's Lives, Volume 1 (of 4) by Plutarch

These are the words in which many of us, Sunday after Sunday, pray for our gracious Queen.
— from The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 by Various

It may then become one, who in no sense a scholar has strayed into these secret places, to try to distribute some lessons of the medieval thought which, to many of us, seems as sere and outworn as did the relics of Gothic shrines to our great-grandfathers.
— from Science and Medieval Thought The Harveian Oration Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 by T. Clifford (Thomas Clifford) Allbutt

Whether it was because the afternoon had become a little clouded, or that the tendency of my mind inclined me to melancholy ideas, the fact is that I felt cold and sad, and noticed a silence about me which reminded me of utter solitude, as sleep reminds us of death.
— from Romantic legends of Spain by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

With a whole sky-full of worlds on His hands to manage, I'm not believing that He has time to look down on ours, and pick you out of all the millions of us sinners, and set a special kind of torture to eating you.
— from A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter

It occurred to him that if he lent money on unimpeachable security at something under the market rates, he could not fail to make a large fortune.
— from Tales of Bengal by S. B. Banerjea

It was thus that, in his essay on La Physique de l'Amour , Gourmont, in order to disassociate the idea of love, which, rationalized, has itself become a sort of religion, with poets for priests, sought to "situate" man's sexual experience in the vast vital milieu of universal sexuality, and such were the aim and method of all his disassociations.
— from Decadence, and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas by Remy de Gourmont

Talking of these pine-landers—gypsies, without any of the romantic associations that belong to the latter people—led us to the origin of such a population, slavery; and you may be sure I listened with infinite interest to the opinions of a man of uncommon shrewdness and sagacity, who was born in the very bosom of it, and has passed his whole life among slaves.
— from Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation: 1838-1839 by Fanny Kemble

He detected a heart-wrenching anxiety in her voice, which belied the picture she made of unruffled simplicity as she commanded in a tense whisper, "Go on, I'm hearkenin'." "Go back into the house," he directed evenly.
— from When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry by Charles Neville Buck

"Many of us," said a Sergeant, "did not need to come back because owing to having received serious wounds the first time we were excused from further military service—but they all came back none the less.
— from The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 by Various