"I too never eat but one thing at dinner"—was his reply—then after a pause—"reckoning fish as nothing."
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

But this union on the side of the woman was rigorous and unequal; and she renounced the name and worship of her father's house, to embrace a new servitude, decorated only by the title of adoption, a fiction of the law, neither rational nor elegant, bestowed on the mother of a family 117 (her proper appellation) the strange characters of sister to her own children, and of daughter to her husband or master, who was invested with the plenitude of paternal power.
— 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 will have nothing else but only this; And now, methinks, I have a mind to it.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

In the picture, the inland natives exchange bundles of taro directly for fish, without observing the rites and ceremonies obligatory in a wasi .
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea by Bronislaw Malinowski

Some things he knew thoroughly, namely, the slovenly habits of farming, and the awkwardness of weather, stock and crops, at Freeman's End—so called apparently by way of sarcasm, to imply that a man was free to quit it if he chose, but that there was no earthly "beyond" open to him.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Then why the devil—my name is not Bryerson, by the way—why the mischief didn’t the compa—why what in the nation ever became of the appropriation?
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner

For it is evident enough, that Words have no effect, but on those that understand them; and then they have no other, but to signifie the intentions, or passions of them that speak; and thereby produce, hope, fear, or other passions, or conceptions in the hearer.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Wild rubber, the gathering of which loosed the storm about King Leopold's head, is nearly exhausted because of the one-time ruthless harvesting.
— from An African Adventure by Isaac Frederick Marcosson

Their adversaries at once zealously availed themselves of this favourable crisis; nearly every Bishop of the minority was plied with various intermediate formulas and conciliar proposals.
— from Letters From Rome on the Council by Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger

It was wonderful how it was known that it was a slap, and the miracle could not have been more cruel, not especially because of the insignificance of the fault committed, inasmuch as it dealt with a Moro who did not believe nor did he understand this Christian superstition.
— from The Legacy of Ignorantism by T. H. (Trinidad Hermenegildo) Pardo de Tavera

The corporation was not only torn by internal dissensions, but soon had on hand a quarrel with New England because of the establishment of a Dutch fur-trading post at Hartford, on the Connecticut (1633), and the vain assertion of a right to [Pg 200] exclude English vessels from the Hudson river.
— from The Colonies, 1492-1750 by Reuben Gold Thwaites

We sometimes forget that the largest colony across the Atlantic in those early years was not in Virginia , not in New England , but on the small eastern islands of the Caribbean , called the Caribbees.
— from Caribbee by Thomas Hoover