It made me quite start when Mrs. Bretton, turning to Mr. Home, and speaking out of a kind impulse of memory, said,—"I wonder what my steady little Lucy would say to all this if she were here?
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

his mind was above all transitory things; that he rose superior to all that is subject to change; that he used to think of nothing but what was heavenly; that, whilst detained by the body, he broke through the bonds of the flesh by contemplation; and that he even loved death, which is a penalty to almost all men, as the entrance into life, and the reward of his labours.
— from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England by Bede, the Venerable, Saint

It appeared that he must have waited for a few days to see whether I returned, that he then considered it safe to assume that I should never do so, and had accordingly made up a story about my having fallen into a whirlpool of seething waters while coming down the gorge homeward.
— from Erewhon; Or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler

At last Periander made a proclamation that whosoever should either receive him into their houses or converse with him should be bound to pay a fine 43 to Apollo, stating the amount that it should be.
— from The History of Herodotus — Volume 1 by Herodotus

Thence walked to the Temple, and there at my cozen Roger Pepys’s chamber met by appointment with my uncle Thomas and his son Thomas, and there I shewing them a true state of my uncle’s estate as he has left it with the debts, &c., lying upon it, we did come to some quiett talk and fair offers against an agreement on both sides, though I do offer quite to the losing of the profit of the whole estate for 8 or 10 years together, yet if we can gain peace, and set my mind at a little liberty, I shall be glad of it.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

We may say that a truth is self-evident, in the first and most absolute sense, when we have acquaintance with the fact which corresponds to the truth.
— from The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

This reason for the resolution I took, much stronger than all those I stated in my letter to Madam de Francueil, was, however, the only one with which I dared not make her acquainted; I chose rather to appear less excusable than to expose to reproach the family of a person I loved.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The truly wise commandant of highly strung troops allows them, in seasons of waiting, to hear the sound of their own voices uplifted in song.
— from Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People by Rudyard Kipling

that there is no bondage of man except his own ignorance; and the jail prisoners are not under such thraldom, as the intellectual servitude of freemen under their errors and prejudice.
— from The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, vol. 3 (of 4) part 2 (of 2) by Valmiki

It will be seen that the different blocks of demesne land are often separated from each other by two or three strips belonging to the smaller tenantry, and that if such strips were removed they could be fitted together into a wide and unbroken expanse of territory.
— from The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century by R. H. (Richard Henry) Tawney

I sleep ill, lying awake till late at night, to think sad thoughts and to imagine sombre things, and awaking before light with the same thoughts and fancies still in my mind.
— from Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The poor animals were soon wounded in several places, so that all the immediately surrounding water was stained with their blood.
— from Mrs. Loudon's Entertaining Naturalist Being popular descriptions, tales, and anecdotes of more than Five Hundred Animals. by Mrs. (Jane) Loudon

I ran one of the strands through and tied it so as to keep the blanket from falling down over her shoulders.
— from The Border and the Buffalo: An Untold Story of the Southwest Plains The Bloody Border of Missouri and Kansas. The Story of the Slaughter of the Buffalo. Westward among the Big Game and Wild Tribes. A Story of Mountain and Plain by John R. Cook