The fear of disgrace was so great that if our literature lacks such eloquence as Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Norfolk, it nevertheless hung like Damocles' sword over the head of every samurai and often assumed a morbid character.
— from Bushido, the Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe

I would endeavour by pleasant conversation to create in my children a warm and unfeigned friendship and good-will towards me, which in well-descended natures is not hard to do; for if they be furious brutes, of which this age of ours produces thousands, we are then to hate and avoid them as such.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

No, indeed, I said, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly; there neither is, nor has been, nor is ever likely to be, any different type of character which has had no other training in virtue but that which is supplied by public opinion—I speak, my friend, of human virtue only; what is more than human, as the proverb says, is not included: for I would not have you ignorant that, in the present evil state of governments, whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power of God, as we may truly say.
— from The Republic by Plato

Ganno is acted by a gentleman whose name I never heard.
— from The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Volume 01 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

To families divided by questions of money and inheritance he said: “Look at the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

I dreaded the thought of going to live with that mysterious “old master,” whose name I never heard mentioned with affection, but always with fear.
— from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

Now, if nature had to make the beak of a full-grown pigeon very short for the bird's own advantage, the process of modification would be very slow, and there would be simultaneously the most rigorous selection of all the young birds within the egg, which had the most powerful and hardest beaks, for all with weak beaks would inevitably perish: or, more delicate and more easily broken shells might be selected, the thickness of the shell being known to vary like every other structure.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

“Your sister asked for it, I suppose?” “No, I never heard of her using it.
— from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Illustrated by Arthur Conan Doyle

At present they think that their serious pursuits should be for the sake of their sports, for they deem war a serious pursuit, which must be managed well for the sake of peace; but the truth is, that there neither is, nor has been, nor ever will be, either amusement or instruction in any degree worth speaking of in war, which is nevertheless deemed by us to be the most serious of our pursuits.
— from Laws by Plato

For their common [Pg 311] nature is no help to friendliness when they are prevented by diversity of language from conveying their sentiments to one another; so that a man would more readily hold intercourse with his dog than with a foreigner.
— from The City of God, Volume II by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

While her husband was trying to give these farmers new ideas, new hopes, new aspirations, the thought came to Mrs. Washington that the Tuskegee village was the place for her to begin a work which should eventually include all the women of the county and of the neighboring counties.
— from Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization by Lyman Beecher Stowe

Sir 45:22 Howbeit in the land of the people he had no inheritance, neither had he any portion among the people: for the Lord himself is his portion and inheritance.
— from Deuterocanonical Books of the Bible Apocrypha by Anonymous

I lay there debating with myself whether or not I needed her.
— from A Man's World by Albert Edwards

A lady (whose name I never heard till a week ago) came here to take a house to be near me.
— from Yesterdays with Authors by James Thomas Fields

He called upon God to pity him in that moment of his awful distress—but that God, whom he had so often blasphemed, now interposed not His power to succor the vile wretch, thus so signally punished.
— from City Crimes; Or, Life in New York and Boston by George Thompson

That little Nanny is not her niece, she’s our Lizzie’s own child, my little grandchild.”
— from Pearl-Fishing; Choice Stories from Dickens' Household Words; First Series by Charles Dickens

On a dark cold night in November, he hears a splash, and in he goes and saves a man.
— from The Hero of the Humber; Or, The History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe by Henry Woodcock

You was wise to get married in Bedford, where not nothing is nearly half so dear....
— from The American Language A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States by H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken