There are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise without loss or injury to his meaning.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He never went out, saw no one, refused even to visit his patients.
— from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

You see a few men, women, and children on horseback in Berlin, but not many; and in most German towns you see no one riding except cavalry officers.
— from Home Life in Germany by Sidgwick, Alfred, Mrs.

In mortises in them, two feet behind the third long wall, are set the ends of the same number of rafters erected opposite to the rafters of the other inclined wall of the second furnace hood, and in this manner is made the third inclined wall, exactly similar to the others.
— from De Re Metallica, Translated from the First Latin Edition of 1556 by Georg Agricola

On several of them, encircled in a scarlet ring, was the sole name of Rose Euclid—impressive!
— from The Regent by Arnold Bennett

The evidence of the Greek historian is confirmed by the text of the cuneiform inscriptions: “I conceived the idea,” says Nebuchadnezzar, “of restoring E-saggil, the temple of Marduk.
— from Manual of Oriental Antiquities by Ernest Babelon

But, when I see every consideration of the public welfare swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice; when I shall behold men of real merit daily turned out of office for no other cause but independence of sentiment; when I shall see men of firmness, merit, years, abilities, and experience, discarded on their application for office, for fear they possess that independence; and men of meanness preferred for the ease with which they take up and advocate opinions, the consequence of which they know but little of; when I shall see the sacred name of religion employed as a State engine to make mankind hate and persecute one another, I shall not be their humble advocate."
— from Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 2 (of 16) by United States. Congress

Excepting only such as have the true light, and are blest with Christian civilization, we adopt the statement “No other race ever did so many things well as the Greeks.”
— from The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, November 1883 A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture. Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. by Chautauqua Institution

This was done to demonstrate human normal cleanliness and inoffensiveness; neither [Pg 150] stain nor odour remaining, either in the rectum or upon the hand.
— from The New Glutton or Epicure by Horace Fletcher

However, my Lord, it shall never alter the course of our friendship, for if, my Lord, either in history or romance, either in nature or the fancy, there be any stronger names or rarer examples of friendship than these your Lordship does me the honour to name in your kind and generous letter, I am resolved not only to equal them, but surpass them, in the sincerity and firmness of the friendship I have resolved for your Lordship.
— from Viscount Dundee by Louis A. Barbé

Klaus did not say so, but from all that I gathered I surmised that it was not altogether impossible that the old man himself had cast an eye upon his pretty adopted daughter; at least I could see no other reasonable explanation of the fact that year by year, and day by day, he had grown more morose and rancorous towards Klaus, and at last, after much snarling and storming over his gadding about, and his shameful waste of time, had ended by forbidding him the house, without the good fellow--as he solemnly asseverated, and I believed him--having ever given him the slightest cause of complaint.
— from Hammer and Anvil: A Novel by Friedrich Spielhagen