This would serve two ends, both of them acceptable to many; for as those whose avarice led them to transgress would be severely fined, so the selling licences dear would look as if a prince were tender of his people, and would not easily, or at low rates, dispense with anything that might be against the public good.
— from Utopia by More, Thomas, Saint

He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperanc
— from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Genial and lively, as Ingres represents him in his celebrated portrait, Monsieur Bertin loved to divine, promote, and, where needful, encourage their vocations and plans.
— from Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo Edited with a Biography of Juliette Drouet by Louis Guimbaud

If the present equilibrium of forces were eternal all adaptations to it would have already taken place and, while no essential catastrophe would need to be dreaded, no essential improvement could be hoped for in all eternity.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Do not all the motives that assail us, all the futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?[ 5 ]
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

His favorite motto, " Loquendum est cum vulgo, sentiendum cum sapientibus " (the crowd may talk about it; the wise decide it), says Robinson, "expresses well their colloquial purpose, and was natural enough on the lips of one whose experience had been world wide."
— from All About Coffee by William H. (William Harrison) Ukers

That he had once, by way of experiment, privately removed a heap of these stones from the place where one of his Yahoos had buried it; whereupon the sordid animal, missing his treasure, by his loud lamenting brought the whole herd to the place, there miserably howled, then fell to biting and tearing the rest, began to pine away, would neither eat, nor sleep, nor work, till he ordered a servant privately to convey the stones into the same hole, and hide them as before; which, when his Yahoo had found, he presently recovered his spirits and good humour, but took good care to remove them to a better hiding place, and has ever since been a very serviceable brute.”
— from Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Jonathan Swift

Secondly, in cosmology, we must investigate the conditions of all natural phenomena, internal as well as external, as if they belonged to a chain infinite and without any prime or supreme member, while we do not, on this account, deny the existence of intelligible grounds of these phenomena, although we never employ them to explain phenomena, for the simple reason that they are not objects of our cognition.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group have descended from one progenitor, apply with nearly equal force to the earliest known species.
— from On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin

Stung with shame at the reproach cast in her teeth by the parrot, the princess went into the grief-chamber of the palace, and would neither eat nor drink.
— from Folk-Tales of Bengal by Lal Behari Day

Vague rumours about the nature of that sacramental feast, to which none but the baptised Christian was suffered to penetrate, and which no ecclesiastic was permitted to explain either to the catechumens or to the world, were probably the origin of the charge of cannibalism; while the Agapæ or love feasts, the ceremony of the kiss of love, and the peculiar and, to the Pagans, perhaps unintelligible, language in which the Christians proclaimed themselves one body and fellow-members in Christ, may have suggested the other charges.
— from History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne (Vol. 1 of 2) by William Edward Hartpole Lecky

The latter construction is not so common with pronouns as with nouns, especially with such nouns as do not readily take the possessive form.
— from The Verbalist A Manual Devoted to Brief Discussions of the Right and the Wrong Use of Words and to Some Other Matters of Interest to Those Who Would Speak and Write with Propriety. by Alfred Ayres

Paper, ink, slates, and pencils, also, were not easily procured.
— from Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 by Various

That other madness is called flank madness 114 , for they be so sore and tucked up by the middle of the flanks as though they never ate meat, and pant in their flanks with much pain, and will not eat, but stoop low with the head and always look downwards, and when they go they take up their feet high and go rolling as a drunken man .
— from The Master of Game: The Oldest English Book on Hunting by of Norwich Edward

He pointed out the impossibility of continuing the high pressure at which nearly every man 8 in the force had been working during the past few days; that the tension was becoming too severe to last; and that every hour [Page 123] that passed without assaulting was a loss to us and a gain to the enemy.
— from Forty-one years in India: from subaltern to commander-in-chief by Roberts, Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Earl

These errors of a government unused to war, though continually remarked by the officer commanding the troops, were slowly perceived by those in power, and were never entirely corrected.
— from The Life of George Washington: A Linked Index to the Project Gutenberg Editions by John Marshall

He had no property, and was not enlightened enough to appreciate the intangible benefits of sovereignty.
— from Socialism and Democracy in Europe by Samuel Peter Orth

Right after his short talk with the old man, he had wandered about the place, and when no eye was turned his way he had one by one rid himself of the emergency articles he had brought along.
— from Dave Dawson with the R.A.F. by Robert Sidney Bowen

Even more serious conditions exist on the southern coast of Korea, which contains the magnificent harbor of Masampo, which constitutes the Gibraltar between the Russian fleets at the ice-bound and remote Vladivostok and the incommodious and not altogether ice-free Port Arthur, with no effective means of connecting them.
— from The Russo-Japanese Conflict: Its Causes and Issues by Kan'ichi Asakawa

The days of popular agitation were not entirely over, and appeals to the populace as well as debates and harangues in public places were by no means rare, so a crowd speedily gathered around the judge and the countryman, who, in spite of his gigantic stature, had not succeeded in freeing himself from the iron grasp of Cloarek, who, shaking him violently, continued in even more vociferous tones: "I am judge of the court in this town, and this wretch has offered me gold to acquit a criminal.
— from Avarice--Anger: Two of the Seven Cardinal Sins by Eugène Sue