XXIII As an unperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put beside his part, Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart; So I, for fear of trust, forget to say The perfect ceremony of love's rite, And in mine own love's strength seem to decay, O'ercharg'd with burthen of mine own love's might.
— from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Therefore since a certain created wisdom was created before all things, the rational and intellectual mind of that chaste city of Thine, our mother which is above, and is free and eternal in the heavens (in what heavens, if not in those that praise Thee, the Heaven of heavens?
— from The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

“Gentlemen, I shall ask you to go with me away from this court room and its minions of the law, away from the scene of this tragedy, to a distant, I wish I could say a happier day.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner

Wherever our troops have shown themselves with these teules, they have been treated with the utmost respect; and if many of our countrymen have lately perished in Mexico, they certainly fared no worse than the teules themselves.
— from The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 1 (of 2) Written by Himself Containing a True and Full Account of the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain. by Bernal Díaz del Castillo

I advised her to lodge her husband's gun in a place of safety, by handing it to the committee of the Vaterlands-Verein in return for a receipt, as it might otherwise soon be requisitioned by the mob.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

Rememberance sad, whose image to review, Alas, I must open all my wounds anew!
— from The Odyssey by Homer

] Note 74 ( return ) [ An Imperial manufacture of shields, &c., was established at Hadrianople; and the populace were headed by the Fabricenses, or workmen.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

I knew I had old sails, or rather pieces of old sails, enough; but as I had had them now six-and-twenty years by me, and had not been very careful to preserve them, not imagining that I should ever have this kind of use for them, I did not doubt but they were all rotten; and, indeed, most of them were so.
— from The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Still more remarkable are the corresponding portraits of individuals: there is the family picture of the father and mother and the old servant of the timocratical man, and the outward respectability and inherent meanness of the oligarchical; the uncontrolled licence and freedom of the democrat, in which the young Alcibiades seems to be depicted, doing right or wrong as he pleases, and who at last, like the prodigal, goes into a far country (note here the play of language by which the democratic man is himself represented under the image of a State having a citadel and receiving embassies); and there is the wild-beast nature, which breaks loose in his successor.
— from The Republic by Plato

“I admire the activity of your benevolence,” observed Mary, “but every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”
— from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

IV When Charity awoke next morning the sun was shining cheerfully in upon the smooth yellow floor of her little room and its mats of braided rags.
— from Around the Yule Log by Willis Boyd Allen

The salt lake conteyneth fiftéene miles in breadth and fiftéene in length, and more than fiue and fortie in circuite, and the lake of swéete water conteyneth euen as muche, in such sort, that the whole lake conteyneth more than thirtie leagues, and hath about fiftie townes scituated round about it, many of whyche Townes doe conteyne fiue thousand housholdes, and some tenne thousande, yea and one Towne called Tezcuco , is as bigge as Mexico .
— from The pleasant historie of the conquest of the VVeast India, now called new Spayne atchieued by the vvorthy Prince Hernando Cortes, marques of the Valley of Huaxacac, most delectable to reade by Francisco López de Gómara

There had once been a time when I would have enlisted willingly under such a banner,—glad to reach the upper story of life, even by such a back stair; but now that I had tasted the glorious supremacy of command myself, that I had revelled in the mastery of a great household, that I had rolled along in my own chariot, clothed in fine linen and faring sumptuously every day, I felt my return to a menial situation a degradation unendurable.
— from Confessions Of Con Cregan, the Irish Gil Blas by Charles James Lever

If the real author is made of so little account by the modern critic, he is scarcely more an object of regard to the modern reader; and it must be confessed that after a dozen close-packed pages of subtle metaphysical distinction or solemn didactic declamation, in which the disembodied principles of all arts and sciences float before the imagination in undefined profusion, the eye turns with impatience and indifference to the imperfect embryo specimens of them, and the hopeless attempts to realise this splendid jargon in one poor work by one poor author, which is given up to summary execution with as little justice as pity. '
— from Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners by William Hazlitt

To do so would have required that I should take two, and sometimes three, evenings to the delivery of one play; a circumstance which would have rendered it necessary for the same audience, if they wished to hear it, to attend two and three consecutive readings; and in many other respects I found the plan quite incompatible with the demand of the public, which was for a dramatic entertainment, and not for a course of literary instruction.
— from Records of Later Life by Fanny Kemble

[Lewis, July 21, 1804] July 21, 1804 by a boiling motion or ebolition of it's waters occasioned no doubt by the roling and irregular motion of the sand of which its bed is entirely composed.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

Some of the men were busily engaged in getting the guns and ammunition ready and in making other arrangements that would aid to success in the approaching battle.
— from Winter Adventures of Three Boys in the Great Lone Land by Egerton Ryerson Young