151* The Twelve Idle Servants Twelve servants who had done nothing all the day would not exert themselves at night either, but laid themselves on the grass and boasted of their idleness.
— from Household Tales by Brothers Grimm by Wilhelm Grimm

During the campaign the Prussians did not exhibit the activity necessary for success.
— from The Art of War by Jomini, Antoine Henri, baron de

The Arabian Nights Entertainments The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Selected and Edited by Andrew Lang after the edition of Longmans, Green and Co, 1918 (1898) Contents Preface
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang

Yet thou dost not exclaim; thou art not offended with him.
— from Meditations by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

God idea of, 14 ; no idea of except what we learn from reflection on our own faculties, 57 ; theory that God is cause of all motion and thought, causes being only occasions of his volition, 54 -57; by doctrine of necessity either there are no bad actions or God is the cause of evil, 78 -81.
— from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

We then arrange thus:— “No | existing Things | are | not-brave men deserving of the fair.” (6) “All bankers are rich men.”
— from Symbolic Logic by Lewis Carroll

Yet Nikolai earns the approval neither of the educated gentry, who speak with affected jauntiness of the coming "'mancipation" [2] (they invariably give the syllable "an" a nasal inflection), nor of those uneducated landowners who roundly curse what they term "that ——' mun cipation."
— from Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Men would not have found the means of independent life; they would simply have invented (no easy task) a new dress for servitude.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville

Some later critics, on the contrary, hold that the novelist has given us stage-dames with heavy graces and a bizarre free-and-easiness as being the nearest equivalent to aristocratic nonchalance.
— from Balzac by Frederick Lawton

But the forcing of Dick Prescott out of the West Point cadet corps was not easy to accomplish nor were ways of doing it to be come upon quickly.
— from Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point; Or, Two Chums in the Cadet Gray by H. Irving (Harrie Irving) Hancock

It is also of importance to a clear understanding of this subject to recognize at this point another fundamental fact, namely, that there is no evidence that any nation or people has ever adopted, in the first instance, any article or commodity to use as money which did not possess, by reason of some inherent or intrinsic desirable qualities, a natural purchasing power or value.
— from Robinson Crusoe's Money; or, The Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community by David Ames Wells

tê pros arthra tôn skelôn hypokrisei, Nyn eis tonous agousi, nyn eis hypheseis, Tas pantodapas ekdromas tou thêriou.
— from Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon by Tennent, James Emerson, Sir

You would take care not to attribute to the Creator an imaginary waste of time in “the slow and gradual labor” of peopling the earth with organic beings, nor entertain the absurd notion that he would have rendered himself “dependent upon the natural phases of the development of the earth,” merely because his action [pg 078] harmonized with the order of things he had created.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 20, October 1874‐March 1875 by Various

The classic masters, needless to say, do not stoop to the colouring of boys and girls; but as soon as the Romantiques arise, the cradle is there, and no soft hair ever in it that is not of some tone of gold, no eyes that are not blue, and no cheek that is not white and pink as milk and roses.
— from The Children by Alice Meynell

But they are not England, they are not the English reality, which is a thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful, a thing humorous and wise and adventurous—Shakespeare, Dickens, Newton, Darwin, Nelson, Bacon, Shelley—English names every one—like the piercing light of lanterns swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees at night.
— from The Passionate Friends by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells