He keeps to his proper place and makes no attempt to depart from it; he does not waste his strength in getting what he cannot keep; and his whole strength being devoted to the right employment of what he has, he is in reality richer and more powerful in proportion as he desires less than we.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

‘If I chose I could make any one of my scullions richer and more powerful than you.
— from The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang

Perhaps you will wonder I did not make this discovery long before; but women will suggest a thousand excuses to themselves for the folly of those they like: besides, give me leave to tell you, it requires a most penetrating eye to discern a fool through the disguises of gaiety and good breeding.
— from History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

He required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of every human effort.
— from The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad

She laid the rose across my palm, but I scarcely closed my fingers upon it, so deeply was I absorbed in thinking what might be the meaning of her words, and what I ought to do or say upon the occasion; whether to give way to my feelings or restrain them still.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Ground-rents seem, in this respect, a more proper subject of peculiar taxation, than even the ordinary rent of land.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Every system of unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to every one, not only sins against good taste, but is also an incentive to sins of omission, an ADDITIONAL seduction under the mask of philanthropy—and precisely a seduction and injury to the higher, rarer, and more privileged types of men.
— from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

—It should be a matter of great interest to Filipinos that the great scientist, Baron [ 91 ] William von Humboldt, considered the Tagálog to be the richest and most perfect of all the languages of the Malayo-Polynesian family, and perhaps the type of them all.
— from A History of the Philippines by David P. Barrows

Then the Goth's people reared a mighty pile With shields and armour hung, as he had asked, And in the midst the warriors laid their lord, Lamenting.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

The indoor exercises, formerly intermittently practised, subsequently abandoned, prescribed in Eugen Sandow’s Physical Strength and How to Obtain It which, designed particularly for commercial men engaged in sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in front of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of muscles and produce successively a pleasant rigidity, a more pleasant relaxation and the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

"No one but Mrs. Ashley and possibly her son know about the bill," said I, "and no one shall, if you will go with that lady to her room, and make plain to her, in the only way you can, that the extremely valuable article which has been lost to-night is not in your possession."
— from The House in the Mist by Anna Katharine Green

These trails, upon which considerable labor had been expended at the crossing of ravines and marshy places, extended only a short distance, seldom exceeding two miles, branching off here and there to the base of great cedars from which they had selected a choice section, and rough-hewn before dragging out.
— from Official Report of the Exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands for the Government of British Columbia by Newton H. Chittenden

Sophia hinted that they should like a country house near Town for summer residence, and Mr. Piozzi has requested them to accept ours , which he could have easily have let, I trust, for £500 o'year; but generously—as I think—preferred the future possessors as present inhabitants of old Streatham Park, which will not now look melancholy because we live in Wales.
— from The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788-1821 by Penelope Pennington

I shall, however, continue at Birmingham if possible , and resume all my pursuits, in which case I must thank you for a fresh stock of retorts , tubes, etc., etc., etc.
— from Joseph Priestley by T. E. (Thomas Edward) Thorpe

They are very large, about two inches and a half long, and run about my pillows and sheets in the most disgusting manner.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 by Various

"Lillian is rich, and my poor brother wished to obtain a title for her.
— from The Mystery Queen by Fergus Hume

Surely if some men are pillars, and others rockets, and more poets, professors and preachers, some are hand-rails, and only the man who has just been standing on a dizzy height looking sheer into the bottomless pit where nothing is safe and where life crumbles and fear is too close to the consciousness, knows the value and even the beauty of a hand-rail, and knows that there is no need to mock at its limitations.
— from The Pointing Man A Burmese Mystery by Marjorie Douie

The all-inclusiveness embraced, I remember, a master picture of cold dawn in the Rockies, with [27] pack ponies snorting, biting, and bucking; and I sang blithely of every other sort of first morning start, embroidering the memories of their roaring language and their unpackable dunnage.
— from Samurai Trails: A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road by Lucian Swift Kirtland

Peace was for me no more, joy was gone from the world, and only mockery remained as my portion.
— from The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer

On the other hand, we meet them again in another form in that large group of strange compounds, of which ‘Il Rè Moro,’ p. 97, &c., are the Roman representatives, and ‘Marienkind,’ pp. 7–12, ‘Grimm Kinder und Hausmährchen,’ ed. 1870, the link between them.
— from Roman Legends: A collection of the fables and folk-lore of Rome by Rachel Harriette Busk