I sought out the best fencing master in Paris, I made an agreement with him to take a lesson every day, and every day for a year I took that lesson.
— from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

[6680] Latet plerumque sub tristi amictu lascivia, et deformis horror vili veste tegitur ; ofttimes under a mourning weed lies lust itself, and horrible vices under a poor coat.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thou shalt and Thou shalt not .
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle

When they came to be lodg’d in Cape Corso-Castle , their Hopes of this kind all cut off, and that they were assured they must there soon receive a final Sentence; the Note was changed among most of them, and from vain insolent jesting, they became serious and devout, begging for good Books, and joyning in publick Prayers, and singing of Psalms, twice at least every Day.
— from A General History of the Pyrates: from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence, to the present time by Daniel Defoe

An emotion may be very strong, but it will have little tendency to induce movements of any kind, if it has not commonly led to voluntary action for its relief or gratification; and when movements are excited, their nature is, to a large extent, determined by those which have often and voluntarily been performed for some definite end under the same emotion.
— from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

New and improved varieties will inevitably supplant and exterminate the older, less improved and intermediate varieties; and thus species are rendered to a large extent defined and distinct objects.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

'Tis true All long eulogium does but tire: I, a poor player on the lyre, With flattering songs, and little verse, Amuse the mighty universe, Or win a distant nation's praise.
— from The Fables of La Fontaine Translated into English Verse by Walter Thornbury and Illustrated by Gustave Doré by Jean de La Fontaine

The only exceptions were the clergy, who taught a lesson even deeper.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

It is the custom of theatrical managers—the lowest order of intelligence, with the possible exception of the limax maximus or garden slug, known to science—to omit from their calculations the fact that they are likely every day to receive a large number of visitors, whom they will be obliged to keep waiting; and that these people will require somewhere to wait.
— from The Little Warrior by P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse

When asleep the voluntary guidance of attention ceases; its direction is to a large extent determined by the contents of the mind at the moment.
— from Illusions: A Psychological Study by James Sully

The rising birth-rate of the middle of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to a large extent doubtless produced, the organisation of labour, trades unions, the political activity of the working classes, Socialism, as well as the extreme forms of Anarchism and Syndicalism.
— from Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene by Havelock Ellis

Here the [80] foreign settlements are traversed in all directions by excellent highways, which extend through the suburbs for several miles into the adjoining country, and which the Chinese avail themselves of to a large extent, driving out in thousands every afternoon to tea-houses and pleasure-gardens.
— from Life and sport in China Second Edition by Oliver George Ready

The wealth of a person seems to have been, to a large extent, determined by the number of old jars in his possession.
— from A Study in Tinguian Folk-Lore by Fay-Cooper Cole

Indeed, it may be safely predicted that future progress in dairying will, to a large extent, depend upon bacteriological research.
— from Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying by H. L. (Harry Luman) Russell

He could not forgive the "lions" or "panthers" of the piano.—But he was not very indulgent either towards the town pedants, famous in Germany, who, while they are rightly anxious not to alter the text of the masters, carefully suppress every flight of thought, and, like E. d'Albert and H. von Bülow, seem to be giving a lesson in diction when they are rendering a passionate sonata.
— from Jean-Christophe, Volume I by Romain Rolland

The continuous line shows the former; the dotted line and shading, the latter; from which it will be observed that the original island has to a large extent disappeared.
— from Volcanoes: Past and Present by Edward Hull

[Pg 776] night in reading the Book of Job, and the sublimity of his thoughts at length entirely dispelled the gloomy ideas that had beset me.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 14, October 1871-March 1872 A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science by Various

The public have long heard that a late English Dictionary is a most masterly performance; but is there a single man in England who ever read it half through?
— from Deformities of Samuel Johnson, Selected from His Works by James Thomson Callender