Did you ever, my most acute professor of vivisection, employ your trenchant blade in the splitting of hairs?
— from Cobwebs from an Empty Skull by Ambrose Bierce

From the pains that appear to have been bestowed on the penmanship, and from many rhetorical defects and blemishes which do not appear in any of his published works, it may be inferred that this is a production of very early years, and properly applicable to this period of his life; although its matured thought, and clear systematic analysis, might, in other circumstances, have indicated it as the fruit of a mind long and carefully cultivated.
— from Life and Correspondence of David Hume, Volume 1 (of 2) by John Hill Burton

Smooth Thallus, inly softer you than any furry rabbit, Or glossy goose's oily plumes, or velvet earlap yielding, Or feeble age's heavy thighs, or flimsy filthy cobweb;
— from The Poems and Fragments of Catullus Translated in the Metres of the Original by Gaius Valerius Catullus

There are customs of the Orient that shock our Western intelligences when we read of women placidly accepting their tyrannies; but no almond-eyed daughter of pasha or vizier ever yielded more complaisantly to harem-discipline than Pauline now yielded to the cold, commercial spirit of the marriage decreed for her.
— from The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel by Edgar Fawcett

To prove your doctrine from any particular passages or verbal expressions, you must prove that those particular passages and expressions are not themselves errors.
— from Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors by James Freeman Clarke

Mr. Gay's Fables , which were written to benefit that amiable prince, the Duke of Cumberland, the warrior of Dettingen and Culloden, I have not, I own, been able to peruse since a period of very early youth; and it must be confessed that they did not effect much benefit upon the illustrious young prince, whose manners they were intended to mollify, and whose natural ferocity our gentle-hearted Satirist perhaps proposed to restrain.
— from Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges by William Makepeace Thackeray

Even now I fancy, if the official papers of every one of the nations lay side by side, with their own case stated from their own point of view, even you might feel a little confused about that.
— from The Zeppelin's Passenger by E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim