On which account it often needs the help of fortune; whereas knowledge needs neither the help of fortune nor deliberation to gain its ends: for it considers only things which are always the same.
— from Plutarch's Morals by Plutarch

A mountain in Haywood county, near the head of Fines creek, has been noted for its noises and quakings for nearly a century, one particular explosion having split solid masses of granite as though by a blast of gunpowder.
— from Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by James Mooney

But if the natives refuse to conform themselves to their laws they drive them out of those bounds which they mark out for themselves, and use force if they resist, for they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of that soil of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated, since every man has, by the law of nature, a right to such a waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.
— from Utopia by More, Thomas, Saint

hámir n the hammer of firearms.
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

"The anxious anticipation of events, which has engaged so many persons unto such early struggles to supplant me, forces me also to anticipate the dissolution of parliament, in declaring my disposition to continue (if supported by my friends at the next general election) in that situation which I have now the honour of filling in parliament; a situation, which the majority of suffrages which placed me in it, justifies the honest pride of supposing, was not obtained without merit, and inspires the natural confidence of presuming, will not be lost without a fault.
— from Toronto of Old Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario by Henry Scadding

Only old Briggs was moved in the other carriage, and cast her great eyes nervously towards her old friends.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

“But now they have only Filya left, and he is blind.”
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

That it has nothing in it of what we think we there find;” and that of the Epicureans, “That the sun is no bigger than ‘tis judged by our sight to be:—” Quidquid id est, nihilo fertur majore figura, Quam nostris oculis quam cemimus, esse videtur: “But be it what it will in our esteems, It is no bigger than to us it seems:” that the appearances which represent a body great to him that is near, and less to him that is more remote, are both true:— Nee tamen hic oculos falli concedimus hilum.... Proinde animi vitium hoc oculis adfingere noli: “Yet that the eye’s deluded we deny; Charge not the mind’s faults, therefore, on the eye:” “and, resolutely, that there is no deceit in the senses; that we are to lie at their mercy, and seek elsewhere reasons to excuse the difference and contradictions we there find, even to the inventing of lies and other flams, if it come to that, rather than accuse the senses.”
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Mr. Grey thought,—Augustus would not trust his own father.
— from Mr. Scarborough's Family by Anthony Trollope

The Superior noticed that this distant manner of speaking startled her old friend, and she said, with the same composure, that she made no distinction among the relations and acquaintances of her early life; no one was nearer to her or farther from her, and that any one who could not attain this state ought not to devote herself to a spiritual life.
— from Villa Eden: The Country-House on the Rhine by Berthold Auerbach

In 1786 Johann Elert Bode formed a new constellation, named the ``Honours of Frederick,'' after his patron Frederick II., out of certain stars situated in the arm of Ptolemy's Andromeda; this innovation found little favour and is now discarded.
— from The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia Volume 1 of 28 by Project Gutenberg

He attacked a body of the enemy much superior in number to his own force, and fell upon them with scoffs and jeers.
— from Life of Edward the Black Prince by Louise Creighton