They became, however, so considerable, that the sovereign could impose no tax upon them, besides the stated farm-rent of the town, without their own consent.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

"By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible.
— from Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy

The less I was able to maintain the standard of comfort due to our position by working and making the most of my talents, the more did Minna, to my insufferable shame, consider it necessary to take this burden upon herself by making the most of her personal popularity.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

Socrates was still living when a school of post-rational morality arose among the Sophists, which after passing quickly through various phases, settled down into Epicureanism and has remained the source of a certain consolation to mankind, which if somewhat cheap, is none the less genuine.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

Mr. St. Clair is now thirty-seven years of age, is a man of temperate habits, a good husband, a very affectionate father, and a man who is popular with all who know him.
— from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Some table can be procured to write on; some chair, if not to sit on, then to stand on.
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

However strong the aversion he inspired, Sally could ignore neither that impression nor yet its correlative, that if he was not an over-righteous scorner of lies, he was the sort that would suffer much rather than seek to profit by a lie.
— from Nobody by Louis Joseph Vance

The great odds against the two men—their bravery in the face of death, their grave danger—and last and greatest, the fact that one was the father of the beautiful creature he worshipped, wrought a sudden change in Number Thirteen.
— from The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Even the highest manifestation of collective dictatorship—“the Soviet of People’s Commissars”—which reached a level of despotism and had suppressed social life and all the live forces of the country to an extent unknown in history, and reduced the country to a graveyard, still considered it necessary to create a kind of theatrical travesty of such a representative institution by periodically convoking the “All-Russian Congress of Soviets.”
— from The Russian Turmoil; Memoirs: Military, Social, and Political by Anton Ivanovich Denikin

The decanted liquor, if still coloured, is now treated with 0096.png fresh alumina until exhausted, and thus a lake of a second quality is obtained.
— 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

She considered it needful to visit the sick in the Béguinage daily, “to comfort them with the lovely words of God, and to refresh them also in a gentle way with earthly things, for God is very rich.
— from Matelda and the Cloister of Hellfde Extracts from the Book of Matilda of Magdeburg by of Magdeburg Mechthild

Determined to make good the step I had taken for freeing my family from the prying curiosity and dictation of droning priests, I met her advances with affectionate warmth; but after listening to her expressions of revived sympathy, I with conscious power, never before realized, asked her if she was willing to seek another priestly adviser; if she still considered it necessary to bar her husband from his affectionate privilege?
— from The Manatitlans or, A record of recent scientific explorations in the Andean La Plata, S. A. by R. Elton Smile

He would have been a person of strong constitution indeed not to have been "put out of tune" by such drenching; and it is no small proof of Dr. Tonstall's skill that he should have been able to restore Mr. Westro the blessings of sound sleep and a good appetite in so short a time as a week.
— from The Ports, Harbours, Watering-places and Picturesque Scenery of Great Britain Vol. 1 by W. (William) Finden