I asked for a piece of chamois, strained the liquid through it, filled his own flagon, and the Greek stood astonished at the sight of the fine mercury, about one-fourth of a flagon, which remained over, with an equal quantity of a powder unknown to him; it was the bismuth.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Striving to take each new discovery as quietly as I could, I whispered to myself— "Ah! that portrait used to hang in the breakfast-room, over the mantel-piece: somewhat too high, as I thought.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

The folly of these ejaculations brought Manfred to himself: yet whether provoked at the peasant having observed the resemblance between the two helmets, and thereby led to the farther discovery of the absence of that in the church, or wishing to bury any such rumour under so impertinent a supposition, he gravely pronounced that the young man was certainly a necromancer, and that till the Church could take cognisance of the affair, he would have the Magician, whom they had thus detected, kept prisoner under the helmet itself, which he ordered his attendants to raise, and place the young man under it; declaring he should be kept there without food, with which his own infernal art might furnish him.
— from The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

And lastly; in one passage at least, if interpreted in its natural sense, he declares that the Colossians were personally unknown to him: ‘I would have you know,’ he writes, ‘how great a conflict I have for you and them that are in Laodicea and as many as have not seen my face in the flesh’
— from St. Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon A revised text with introductions, notes and dissertations by J. B. (Joseph Barber) Lightfoot

The Wounded of the Tenth of August, the Widows and Orphans of the Killed petition in a body; and hop and defile, eloquently mute, through the Hall: one wounded Patriot, unable to hop, is borne on his bed thither, and passes shoulder-high, in the horizontal posture.
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

The obscurity in which he has involved himself will not persuade us that he is sublime.
— from Boswell's Life of Johnson Abridged and edited, with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood by James Boswell

Íyang gihulípan ang gisì sa banig, He patched up the holes in the mat.
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

But it is vain to attempt to keep the heart pure, unless the head is furnished with ideas, and set to work to compare them, in order, to acquire judgment, by generalizing simple ones; and modesty by making the understanding damp the sensibility.
— from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects by Mary Wollstonecraft

It was all very vague and intangible as yet, still Beaumont felt in some mysterious way that the knowledge of the blind girl's love for Nestley might prove useful to him in weaving his nets around his son so as to secure him entirely to himself.
— from The Man with a Secret: A Novel by Fergus Hume

When a too ardent wish to succour those pressed upon the hill induced Stewart to hurry Colborne’s brigade into action, without allowing it a momentary pause to halt and form, and in the mist that unluckily favoured the lancer charge the companies were unexpectedly assailed, though fighting at dreadful disadvantage, the men resisted to the last.
— from The Battles of the British Army Being a Popular Account of All the Principal Engagements During the Last Hundred Years by Robert Melvin Blackwood

This was passed up to him in the same way.
— from The Circus Boys on the Plains; Or, The Young Advance Agents Ahead of the Show by Edgar B. P. Darlington

" On return to camp, Capt. Lumsden had orders written for the writer to proceed to Tuscaloosa on this business and started the papers up to headquarters in regular channel.
— from A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. by George Little

When I have reflected upon the prohibition of my parents; the giddy appearance, disgraceful to our sex, that such a preference would have: that there is no manner of likelihood, enflamed by the rencounter, and upheld by art and ambition on my brother's side, that ever the animosity will be got over: that I must therefore be at perpetual variance with all my own family: that I must go to him, and to his, as an obliged and half-fortuned person: that his aversion to them all is as strong as theirs to him: that his whole family are hated for his sake; they hating ours in return: that he has a very immoral character as to women: that knowing this, it is a high degree of impurity to think of joining in wedlock with such a man: that he is young, unbroken, his passions unsubdued: that he is violent in his temper, yet artful; I am afraid vindictive too: that such a husband might unsettle me in all my own principles, and hazard my future hopes: that his own relations, two excellent aunts, and an uncle, from whom he has such large expectations, have no influence upon him: that what tolerable qualities he has, are founded more in pride than in virtue: that allowing, as he does, the excellency of moral precepts, and believing the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, he can live as if he despised the one, and defied the other: the probability that the taint arising from such free principles, may go down into the manners of posterity: that I knowing these things, and the importance of them, should be more inexcusable than one who knows them not; since an error against judgment is worse, infinitely worse, than an error in judgment.
— from Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 1 by Samuel Richardson

It was none the less clear that the party, unable to hunt itself, could not hope to live through the winter on meat from the natives who at times were themselves on the verge of starvation.
— from True Tales of Arctic Heroism in the New World by A. W. (Adolphus Washington) Greely

The dusk Hetty had anxiously waited for was creeping across the prairie when she and Miss Schuyler pulled up their horses in the gloom of the birches where the trail wound down through the Cedar bluff.
— from The Cattle-Baron's Daughter by Harold Bindloss

But I had my doubts, and did not like the appearance of things at all; my former suspicions rushed back with redoubled force, and— “Hoist away that ensign,” I said curtly; and as the man began to pull upon the halyards I lifted the gun to my shoulder, and, pointing it well out to seaward, pulled the trigger.
— from Turned Adrift by Harry Collingwood

Is it not permitted us to hope in Him, as well as to fear Him?
— from The Works of Voltaire, Vol. IV of XLIII. Romances, Vol. III of III, and A Treatise on Toleration. by Voltaire