But as thou hast not a bad heart, and as I mean well by thee, there is one thing I will grant thee; if thou fallest into any difficulty, come to the forest and cry, 'Iron John,' and then I will come and help thee.
— from Household Tales by Brothers Grimm by Wilhelm Grimm

Loss is naught but change; in change is the joy of universal Nature, and by her all things are ordered well.
— from The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus A new rendering based on the Foulis translation of 1742 by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

Botheric, the general of those troops, and, as it should seem from his name, a Barbarian, had among his slaves a beautiful boy, who excited the impure desires of one of the charioteers of the Circus.
— 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

For a young man is a sort of puppy who only plays with an argument; and is reasoned into and out of his opinions every day; he soon begins to believe nothing, and brings himself and philosophy into discredit.
— from The Republic by Plato

Her mind was bent on other questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an invalid.
— from Howards End by E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster

Of late memory,—[In 1523]—the Seigneur de Frauget, lieutenant to the Mareschal de Chatillon’s company, having by the Mareschal de Chabannes been put in government of Fuentarabia in the place of Monsieur de Lude, and having surrendered it to the Spaniard, he was for that condemned to be degraded from all nobility, and both himself and his posterity declared ignoble, taxable, and for ever incapable of bearing arms, which severe sentence was afterwards accordingly executed at Lyons.—[In 1536]
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

[112] Nam quod L c, Edd.; namque A B H a b. [113] Prodicus Manutius, Edd.; prodigus L c; prodigum B H b.
— from De Officiis by Marcus Tullius Cicero

While the Peloponnesians and their allies in Attica were engaged in the work of fortification, their countrymen at home sent off, at about the same time, the heavy infantry in the merchant vessels to Sicily; the Lacedaemonians furnishing a picked force of Helots and Neodamodes (or freedmen), six hundred heavy infantry in all, under the command of Eccritus, a Spartan; and the Boeotians three hundred heavy infantry, commanded by two Thebans, Xenon and Nicon, and by Hegesander, a Thespian.
— from The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

"No, but you will not always be here; and if you practise the little tricks I show you now with the ball of worsted and the tips of our tails, then, when the great hour comes, and a career is open to you, and you see before you the glorious prize—the MOUSE—you will be quick enough and clever enough to satisfy the highest needs of your nature."
— from Pussy and Doggy Tales by E. (Edith) Nesbit

Yet not all blameless he, A woman is quick to feel What man would fain conceal;
— from The Path of Dreams Poems by Leigh Gordon Giltner

“But I shall not always be here, and when I die—” “Don’t talk of dying, sire,” said Dick.
— from Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia: Being the Adventures of Prince Prigio's Son by Andrew Lang

Daniel, very shortly, by his natural ability, brought himself and his comrades into favor with the chief eunuch, who finally presented them to Nebuchadnezzar, who conversed with them and found them “ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm.”
— from The Emancipation of Massachusetts by Brooks Adams

We need another bank here, anyway, and I'll get one started.
— from The Hills of Refuge: A Novel by Will N. (Will Nathaniel) Harben

Morphy, nevertheless, after beating him at even, at pawn and move, and pawn and two, offered him the knight, which was accepted "for trial's sake;" and out of five games there was a difference of the odd victory, but my memory fails me as to whether it was won by Morphy or not.
— from The Exploits and Triumphs, in Europe, of Paul Morphy, the Chess Champion by Frederick Milnes Edge

He had no Arabic, but he appreciated the speaker's fluency.
— from The Wheel O' Fortune by Louis Tracy

Moreover, he had not a bad heart, and preferred if possible to be on good terms with everybody.
— from Sant' Ilario by F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford

The corners of her lips drew down pitifully, and suddenly she slipped from her chair, and running to him threw her arms around his neck and buried her averted face, revealing two forlorn little flaxen pigtails devoid of ribbons.
— from Jewel: A Chapter in Her Life by Clara Louise Burnham