She seemed, also, more put out than ever, and swallowed the fruit with an exceedingly comic air of rage.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

We do not worship in that way now: but is it not reckoned still a merit, proof of what we call a "poetic nature," that we recognize how every object has a divine beauty in it; how every object still verily is "a window through which we may look into Infinitude itself"?
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle

In the meantime, I little knew that Satya, in another corner, had, in the space of an hour, caused to root and sprout a mystical plant of his own creation.
— from My Reminiscences by Rabindranath Tagore

If, for example, there should be murders of kinsmen, either perpetrated by the hands of kinsmen, or by their contrivance, voluntary and purely malicious, which most often happen in ill-regulated and ill-educated states, and may perhaps occur even in a country where a man would not expect to find them, we must repeat once more the tale which we narrated a little while ago, in the hope that he who hears us will be the more disposed to abstain voluntarily on these grounds from murders which are utterly abominable.
— from Laws by Plato

The philosophers, Chrysippus and Epicurus, were in this of two quite contrary humours: the first not only in his books mixed passages and sayings of other authors, but entire pieces, and, in one, the whole Medea of Euripides; which gave Apollodorus occasion to say, that should a man pick out of his writings all that was none of his, he would leave him nothing but blank paper: whereas the latter, quite on the contrary, in three hundred volumes that he left behind him, has not so much as one quotation.—[Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Chyysippus, vii.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Now besides from the heavens has dropped such a mighty piece of good luck; and in what place will there be no need of servants?
— from Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book I by Xueqin Cao

It is not surprising that superstition should act most powerfully on the fears of her votaries, since the human fancy can paint with more energy the misery than the bliss of a future life.
— 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

There is implanted in the human mind a perception of pain and pleasure, as the chief spring and moving principle of all its actions.
— from A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

In the southern and middle portions of the range of this Woodpecker, two broods are annually raised, one in June, and the other in August, but further north seldom more than one.
— from Nests and Eggs of Birds of the United States Illustrated by Thomas G. (Thomas George) Gentry

rave fears for the final outcome of the struggle, and made proposals of peace which would practically have annulled his successes of the past few years.
— from Boris the Bear-Hunter by Frederick Whishaw

Universal dearth, and such a mortality, particularly of the poor, followed, that the living could scarcely bury the dead.
— from The Storehouses of the King; Or, the Pyramids of Egypt What They Are and Who Built Them by Jane (Trill) van Gelder

These slaves are mostly prisoners of war, sold by native chieftains in Guinea to Morocco merchants, who drive them, chained together in long strings, from market to market until disposed of for the harems or as laborers.
— from Due West; Or, Round the World in Ten Months by Maturin Murray Ballou

when the summer has at last found it, the old Sault au Matelot puts on a vagabond air of Southern leisure and abandon, not to be matched anywhere out of Italy.
— from A Chance Acquaintance by William Dean Howells

At night paper lanterns dangle from every rickshaw shaft, making the streets a moving panorama of fairyland; and from the low one-storied houses proceeds the quaint barbarous music of the samisen—the native guitar twanged by smiling geishas entertaining their employers' guests with dance and song.
— from Kobo: A Story of the Russo-Japanese War by Herbert Strang

And as I walked through that lofty and most beautiful place and realized the size and majestic proportions of the buildin' I wondered to myself that a small law, a little unjust law could ever be passed in such grand and magnificent surroundin's.
— from Samantha on the Woman Question by Marietta Holley