When at last you succeed in being received by her, her features recall such pleasing feelings, that the entire reality which surrounds her, however little nobility it may sometimes possess, is instantly invested with romantic and touching colours.
— from On Love by Stendhal

I put it into my pocket, and came home, but could not find an opportunity to broil it, for fear they would get it from me, and there it lay all that day and night in my stinking pocket.
— from Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson by Mary White Rowlandson

If then a government of many, and all of them good men, compose an aristocracy, and the government of one a kingly power, it is evident that the people should rather choose the first than the last; and this whether the state is powerful or not, if many such persons so alike can be met with: and for this reason probable it was, that the first governments were generally monarchies; because it was difficult to find a number of persons eminently virtuous, more particularly as the world was then divided into small communities; besides, kings were appointed in return for the benefits they had conferred on mankind; but such actions are peculiar to good men: but when many persons equal in virtue appeared at the time, they brooked not a superiority, but sought after an equality and established a free state; but after this, when they degenerated, they made a property of the public; which probably gave rise to oligarchies; for they made wealth meritorious, and the honours of government were reserved for the rich: and these afterwards turned to tyrannies and these in their turn gave rise to democracies; for the power of the tyrants continually decreasing, on account of their rapacious avarice, the people grew powerful enough to frame and establish democracies: and as cities after that happened to increase, probably it was not easy for them to be under any other government than a democracy.
— from Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle

O the world does us injustice, And for thanks I look quite vainly; For the finest chords of feline Nature, it mistakes so plainly.
— from The Trumpeter of Säkkingen: A Song from the Upper Rhine. by Joseph Victor von Scheffel

But now I must speak particularly to you, my dear Sister—for I know you love a little quizzing better than a great bit of apple dumpling.
— from Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends by John Keats

But, to give the devil his due, I must needs own Mr Bayes has a most powerful and luxurious hand at satire, and may challenge all Christendom to match him; for indeed I never, in my slender province, met any that was worthy to compare to him, unless that unknown, but supposed worthy author, that writ to him upon his at last turning Roman Catholic; for Bayes, like the Vicar of Bray, in Henry VIII.
— from The Works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 10 by John Dryden

I thought I had brought plenty of pencils, but they were not in my small portmanteau, and after going [101] to the baggage-car and putting everybody to great trouble to get out my large one, they were not there either.
— from Betty Leicester: A Story For Girls by Sarah Orne Jewett

Her name is Maria, some persons call her Robinetta.'
— from Little Johannes by Frederik van Eeden