It is undeniably true that the recipes which it recommends that men use to act upon things are generally found to be ineffective.
— from The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Émile Durkheim

The sums I have spent upon the Orphanage, year by year, make up the amount—I have reckoned it up precisely—the amount which made Lieutenant Alving "a good match" in his day.
— from Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

Whilst she was calculating she said over and over again, with a smile, “I have not made up the answer.”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Like Luther, and like Leibniz, Kant was one brake the more upon the already squeaky wheel of German uprightness.
— from The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist Complete Works, Volume Sixteen by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

This was forty rods, or poles, and four of these furrows made up the acre.
— from English Villages by P. H. (Peter Hampson) Ditchfield

At two o’clock he bade me good-day, complimented me upon the amount that I had written, and locked the door of the office after me.
— from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Life holds the mirror up to A
— from Intentions by Oscar Wilde

But for Auxerre—I could go on for ever: for in my grand tour through Europe, in which, after all, my father (not caring to trust me with any one) attended me himself, with my uncle Toby, and Trim, and Obadiah, and indeed most of the family, except my mother, who being taken up with a project of knitting my father a pair of large worsted breeches—(the thing is common sense)—and she not caring to be put out of her way, she staid at home, at Shandy Hall, to keep things right during the expedition; in which, I say, my father stopping us two days at Auxerre, and his researches being ever of such a nature, that they would have found fruit even in a desert—he has left me enough to say upon Auxerre: in short, wherever my father went—but 'twas more remarkably so, in this journey through France and Italy, than in any other stages of his life—his road seemed to lie so much on one side of that, wherein all other travellers have gone before him—he saw kings and courts and silks of all colours, in such strange lights—and his remarks and reasonings upon the characters, the manners, and customs of the countries we pass'd over, were so opposite to those of all other mortal men, particularly those of my uncle Toby and Trim—(to say nothing of myself)—and to crown all—the occurrences and scrapes which we were perpetually meeting and getting into, in consequence of his systems and opiniotry—they were of so odd, so mix'd and tragi-comical a contexture—That the whole put together, it appears of so different a shade and tint from any tour of Europe, which was ever executed—that I will venture to pronounce—the fault must be mine and mine only—if it be not read by all travellers and travel-readers, till travelling is no more,—or which comes to the same point—till the world, finally, takes it into its head to stand still.—
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Two of the strongest monkeys caught Mowgli under the arms and swung off with him through the treetops, twenty feet at a bound.
— from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

“In the first place two young fools quarrel and turn sulky; then Steve Irving goes to the States and after a spell gets married up there and is perfectly happy from all accounts.
— from Anne of Avonlea by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery

The Jaguar wishes to bury the hatchet between his warriors and those of my brother, in order that peace may unite them, and that, instead of fighting with each other, they may pursue the buffalo on the same hunting grounds, and avenge themselves on their common enemies.
— from The Border Rifles: A Tale of the Texan War by Gustave Aimard

Some one of the world's greatest painters, chancing to enter, might worthily have desired to paint him—putting no questions as to who the man was or what he was; or what darkening or brightening history stretched behind him; or what entanglement of right and wrong lay around and within: painting only the unmistakable human signs he witnessed, and leaving his portrait for thousands of people to look at afterwards and make out of it what they could—through kinship with the good and evil in themselves: Velasquez, with his brush moving upon those areas of lonely struggle which sometimes lie with their wrecks at the bottom of the sea of human eyes; Franz Hals, fixing the cares which hover too long around our mouths;
— from The Doctor's Christmas Eve by James Lane Allen

And with length of their days waxen weak, Thou slewest; and sentest moreover Upon Tyro an evil thing, Rent hair and a fetter and blows Making bloody the flower of the cheek, Though she lay by a god as a lover,
— from Atalanta in Calydon by Algernon Charles Swinburne

If there is one place more unendurable than another it is the fashionable watering-place.
— from Only One Love; or, Who Was the Heir by Charles Garvice

Those terrible oaths of secrecy, made under the assured menace of assassination, attended with all that sanguinary gibberish, the lie involved in which is not known until the “seared conscience” is already in the chains of hell—surely, if anything is, these are “secundum operationem Satanæ.”
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 22, October, 1875, to March, 1876 A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science by Various

But now these melodies, unknown to all the world beside, rang in his ear, mingled with his thoughts—set, as it were, his whole life to music.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 425, March, 1851 by Various

My uncle, the Abbe, has said so, and no one will dare to dispute his word.
— from French and English: A Story of the Struggle in America by Evelyn Everett-Green

Then he was forced to relinquish his ten-cent cot and move upstairs to a seven-cent bunk.
— from McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 4, August 1908 by Various

But the chain was of no more use than a straw rope: it snapped, and the vessel came ashore, broadside on to the rocks.
— from The Romance of the Coast by James Runciman

Behold, here, is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man, because that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light.
— from The Mormon Doctrine of Deity: The Roberts-Van Der Donckt Discussion To which is added a discourse, Jesus Christ, the revelation of God; also a collection of authoritative Mormon utterances on the being and nature of God by B. H. (Brigham Henry) Roberts