These wonderful temples of enormous size, of natural wood filled with paintings and sculpture of an ancient and unknown kind, fascinate one to the point of feeling there must be many more worlds when such multiplicity of ideas and feelings can exist on a single planet, and we live unconscious of the whole of it or even of any part of its extent.
— from Letters from China and Japan by Harriet Alice Chipman Dewey

After this manner was Hercules sovereign possessor of the whole continent, relieving men from monstrous oppressions, exactions, and tyrannies; governing them with discretion, maintaining them in equity and justice, instructing them with seasonable policies and wholesome laws, convenient for and suitable to the soil, climate, and disposition of the country, supplying what was wanting, abating what was superfluous, and pardoning all that was past, with a sempiternal forgetfulness of all preceding offences, as was the amnesty of the Athenians, when by the prowess, valour, and industry of Thrasybulus the tyrants were exterminated; afterwards at Rome by Cicero exposed, and renewed under the Emperor Aurelian.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

“Stand firm,” said Peter, “and wave like mad!
— from The Railway Children by E. (Edith) Nesbit

Finally, he will find that in the world it is the same as in the dramas of Gozzi, in all of which the same persons appear, with like intention, and with a like fate; the motives and incidents are certainly different in each piece, but the spirit of the incidents is the same; the actors in one piece know nothing of the incidents of another, although they performed in it themselves; therefore, after all experience of former pieces, Pantaloon has become no more agile or generous, Tartaglia no more conscientious, Brighella no more courageous, and Columbine no more modest.
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

Monks drew the little packet from his breast, where he had hurriedly thrust it; and tying it to a leaden weight, which had formed a part of some pulley, and was lying on the floor, dropped it into the stream.
— from Cruikshank's Water Colours by William Harrison Ainsworth

In other cases it was not a religious house, but a castle of some powerful and wealthy lord, which drew a population together under the shelter of its walls—as at Norwich, where the lines of the old streets follow the line of the castle-moat; or Ludlow, on the other side of the kingdom, which gathered round the Norman Castle of Ludlow.
— from Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages Third Edition by Edward Lewes Cutts

I recalled that when only a boy, in my mountain home, I had connected myself voluntarily with a party of kind-hearted mountaineers who had joined in a body to search those mountain fastnesses for two little children of six and eight years old, who had strayed from their home a day or so previously, and were lost in the woods.
— from The Boy Spy A substantially true record of secret service during the war of the rebellion, a correct account of events witnessed by a soldier by Joseph Orton Kerbey

Mr. Carrington was lying in precisely the same position as when Laurence had left him.
— from The House of Strange Secrets: A Detective Story by A. Eric Bayly

The point at issue is that a shipping company of Hamburg, by its offer of valueless titles in exchange for hard British cash, was attempting such a form of sharp practice as would land any British trader in the criminal courts for fraud.
— from The German Spy System from Within by Anonymous