For the annoyance of the enemy, it was employed with equal effect, by sea and land, in battles or in sieges.
— 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

Next morning, however, when I awoke, my Spaniard announced an officer who had followed him, and told me in good French that I must not be astonished to find myself a prisoner in my room, for being a stranger and engaged in a suit at law it was only right that the opposite party should be assured that I would not escape before judgment was given.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Leading such a life I can’t decide or think properly about anything.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

For instance, we can understand, on the principle of inheritance, how it is that the thrush of tropical South America lines its nest with mud, in the same peculiar manner as does our British thrush; how it is that the Hornbills of Africa and India have the same extraordinary instinct of plastering up and imprisoning the females in a hole in a tree, with only a small hole left in the plaster through which the males feed them and their young when hatched; how it is that the male wrens (Troglodytes) of North America, build "cock-nests," to roost in, like the males of our Kitty-wrens,—a habit wholly unlike that of any other known bird.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

They have been educated for such a life; is it strange that they like it?
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This epithet was commonly used to denote the strongest and liveliest interest in any thing or person, for or against.
— from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

During the continuance of this so ardent love, it befell that the girl, being all alone one summer day on the sea-shore, chanced, as she went from rock to rock, loosening shell-fish from the stones with a knife, upon a place hidden among the cliffs, where, at once for shade and for the commodity of a spring of very cool water that was there, certain young men of Sicily, coming from Naples, had taken up their quarters with a pinnace they had.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

To learn how to speak such a language is a difficult matter.
— from A Complete Grammar of Esperanto by Ivy Kellerman Reed

After long dumb-groaning generations, has the turn suddenly become thine?—To such abysmal overturns, and frightful instantaneous inversions of the centre-of-gravity, are human Solecisms all liable, if they but knew it; the more liable, the falser ( and topheavier )
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

his free speech at Basle, ii. 533. slain at Lipan, ii. 535.
— from A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III by Henry Charles Lea

One's journal, here in one's solitude, is of service at least in this, that it affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience.
— from Imaginary Portraits by Walter Pater

In ancient, as in modern times, the pastoral idyl, as an artistic branch of literature, has arisen, not in a simple age, living in unconscious harmony with Nature, but from the midst of a refined and luxurious, generally, too, a learned or rather bookish society, and has tried to give vent to the feelings of men weary of an artificial life and vaguely longing to breathe a freer air 239 .
— from The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil by W. Y. (William Young) Sellar

I had already seen Cornelius Gleazen in some extraordinary situations, and later I was to see him in certain situations beside which the others paled to milk and water, but never at any other time, from the moment when I first saw him on the porch at the tavern until the day when we parted not to meet again this side of Judgment, did I see Cornelius Gleazen affected in just the way that he was affected then.
— from The Great Quest A romance of 1826, wherein are recorded the experiences of Josiah Woods of Topham, and of those others with whom he sailed for Cuba and the Gulf of Guinea by Charles Boardman Hawes

They sat at lunch in Mrs Lammle's own boudoir.
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

of good mealy potatoes, which have been steamed, or boiled very dry; mix with them, by degrees, 2 quarts of boiling broth, pass the soup through a strainer, set it again on the fire, add pepper and salt, and let it boil for five minutes.
— from Cooley's Cyclopædia of Practical Receipts and Collateral Information in the Arts, Manufactures, Professions, and Trades..., Sixth Edition, Volume II by Richard Vine Tuson

The two girls passed from the room, and the door was shut and locked inside.
— from Cast Adrift by T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur

Others that have been identified through painstaking study of the old archives of the city and contemporary sources are located in the National Gallery at London and in the museum of Rouen.
— from The Spell of Flanders An Outline of the History, Legends and Art of Belgium's Famous Northern Provinces by Edward Neville Vose

I'll try to sleep a little if you would not mind not talking.
— from The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight by Elizabeth Von Arnim