I don't think either of us could spare the other, or like any one else better, however much we might admire them.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Their professed ideal is to make society the owner of land and of all instruments of production ; but they have been so anxious to carry both points of their programme that they have been a little too slow to consider the special importance of the land question, and have thus missed the true path of reform.
— from Garden Cities of To-Morrow Being the Second Edition of "To-Morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform" by Howard, Ebenezer, Sir

I had forgotten to tell Miss Matty about the pudding, and I was afraid she might not do justice to it, for she had evidently very little appetite this day; so I seized the opportunity of letting her into the secret while Martha took away the meat.
— from Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Summum crede nefas animam præferre pudori, / Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas —Consider it to be the height of impiety to prefer life to honour, and, for the sake of merely living, to sacrifice the objects of living.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

Have you set the oil of luna in kemia? FACE.
— from The Alchemist by Ben Jonson

Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep’s tails, odd pieces of fat.)
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

When he said "Nut" one squirrel leaped on to his right shoulder and when he said "Shell" the other one leaped on to his left shoulder.
— from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

It’s so tiresome of our little sins to look foolish when they’re found out, instead of wicked.
— from Penelope: A Comedy in Three Acts by W. Somerset (William Somerset) Maugham

He did not share the opinion of Lazenby, the Company’s clerk at Fort Luke, who said, when the matter was talked of before him, that it was all hanky-panky,—which was evidence that he had lived in London town, before his anxious relatives, sending him forth under the delusive flag of adventure and wild life, imprisoned him in the Arctic regions with the H. B. C. Lazenby admired Pierre; said he was good stuff, and voted him amusing, with an ingenious emphasis of heathen oaths; but advised him, as only an insolent young scoundrel can, to forswear securing, by the seductive game of poker or euchre, larger interest on his capital than the H. B. C.; whose record, he insisted, should never be rivalled by any single man in any single lifetime.
— from Pierre and His People: Tales of the Far North. Complete by Gilbert Parker

If you have great quantity, as six to one, of Liquor, you will easily draw out the tincture in fourteen or sixteen hours infusion; otherwise you may quicken your liquor with a parcel of Sack.
— from The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened by Kenelm Digby

In speaking of this efficacy of the dogmas inculcated by religion, we are not rash and presumptuous; we do not reject as superfluous the office of law and police.
— from Protestantism and Catholicity compared in their effects on the civilization of Europe by Jaime Luciano Balmes

Those who study the organization of living bodies find the uniform process of development to be, that each organ gradually acquires a definite and limited function: there arises, step by step, a more perfect “physiological division of labour.”
— from Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 3 of 3 Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions. by Herbert Spencer

Now that the uproar of that litigation is silent, and its occasion forgotten, it seems comical that a man for whom fame had already rendered a favorable judgment should be busily seeking the opinion of local courts upon transitory newspaper opinions of him-self and his writings.
— from Literary and Social Essays by George William Curtis

Nay, the very trumpets which sounded the onset often lie buried by the warrior's side, and the bells which adorned his horse's neck bring back to us vividly the Homeric pictures of Bronze Age warfare.
— from Science in Arcady by Grant Allen