A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local voice: "You've been a-settin' a long time on that plinth-stone, young man.
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Put three Frenchmen into the deserts of Libya, they will not live a month together without fighting; so that you would say this peregrination were a thing purposely designed to give foreigners the pleasure of our tragedies, and, for the most part, to such as rejoice and laugh at our miseries.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

We are to manage human enterprises more superficially and roughly, and leave a great part to fortune; it is not necessary to examine affairs with so much subtlety and so deep: a man loses himself in the consideration of many contrary lustres, and so many various forms: “Volutantibus res inter se pugnantes, obtorpuerunt.... animi.”
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

No, he would be a soldier, and return after long years, all war-worn and illustrious.
— from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The business of finding a play that would suit everybody proved to be no trifle; and the carpenter had received his orders and taken his measurements, had suggested and removed at least two sets of difficulties, and having made the necessity of an enlargement of plan and expense fully evident, was already at work, while a play was still to seek.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

The military force of the Turks and their allies marched in seven equal and artificial divisions; each division was formed of thirty thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven warriors, and the proportion of women, children, and servants, supposes and requires at least a million of emigrants.
— 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

The second of the two was that they were not far from expecting that they themselves, also, might yet suffer some terrible injury, so unholy were both his words and his actions: therefore many, cut to the heart with grief at the thought of reality and possibility, wished that they themselves belonged to the number of men already dead outside, and so might secure a respite at last from fear.
— from Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek during the Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English Form by Cassius Dio Cocceianus

'O Opportunity, thy guilt is great: 'Tis thou that executest the traitor's treason; Thou set'st the wolf where he the lamb may get; Whoever plots the sin, thou 'point'st the season; 'Tis thou that spurn'st at right, at law, at reason; And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him, Sits Sin, to seize the souls that wander by him.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Away with all arid investigation, away with the cold algebra of sense and reason, and let us have instead a direct conversation with heaven, an unclouded vision of the purposes and goodness of God; as if there were any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness than to study the ways of nature and man.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Outside the fortified wall, which girt the city with its cincture of grey rock, a smooth plain stretched rearward to the foot of the hill on which we stood, and right and left along the crest of the ridge from Punta Hornos to Vergara, ranged a line of dark forms—the picket sentries of the American outposts, as they stood knee-deep in the soft, yielding sand-drift.
— from The Rifle Rangers by Mayne Reid

To the right of the chairman sat Robert Burns, Esq., the eldest son of the poet; Major Burns, his youngest son; on the left, Colonel Burns, second son of the poet; Mrs. Begg, Burns's sister; and right and left, other members of the family, amid many noble and distinguished persons: as Mrs. Thomson, of Dumfries, the Jessie Lewars of the poet; Sir John M'Neill, late plenipotentiary to the court of Persia; the lord-justice-general, the Countess of Eglinton, Alison, the historian, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Robert Chambers, of Edinburgh, Douglas Jerrold, William Thom, the poet of Inverury, &c., &c.
— from Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 1 (of 2) by William Howitt

Some of the Indians, however, are employed in fishing, and as lightermen, to carry goods from place to place by water; and some are rich, and live with much of the splendour of their country, which chiefly consists in the number of their slaves.
— from A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 13 by Robert Kerr

He turned the knob and would have entered rather breezily, but that Johnson Boller, fully groomed and ready for the day, walked out suddenly and resistlessly and looked around with: "Where's the kid?" "Er—dressing," said Anthony.
— from In and Out by Edgar Franklin

He soon is absorbed {273} in the works of such writers as Strauss and Renan; and little by little their spirit becomes his own.
— from Memoirs of Life and Literature by W. H. (William Hurrell) Mallock

c. Culminates in an attempt to secure a righteous and lasting peace through the instrumentality of a league of nations.
— from College Teaching Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College by Paul Klapper

"Well, Jake, we're all ready for a start," announced Roy, at last.
— from The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly by Margaret Burnham