" Like the Irish pilot, on one occasion when the captain, thinking he was considerably out of his course, asked, "Are you certain you understand what you are doing?
— from The Art of Money Getting; Or, Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum

de la Milice Francoise, tom. i. p. 17—21) has exhibited a fanciful representation of this battle, somewhat in the manner of the Chevalier Folard, the once famous editor of Polybius, who fashioned to his own habits and opinions all the military operations of antiquity.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

And I pray you greet them all from me, Sir Lancelot of the Lake, and tell them that I bid them help themselves to any treasures they can find within the castle; and that I pray my brethren, Lionel and Ector, to go to King Arthur’s court and stay there till I come.
— from The Legends of King Arthur and His Knights by Knowles, James, Sir

In our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, "education" and "culture" MUST be essentially the art of deceiving—deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul.
— from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Sidonius pronounced, with assurance and success, a panegyric which is still extant; and whatever might be the imperfections, either of the subject or of the composition, the welcome flatterer was immediately rewarded with the præfecture of Rome; a dignity which placed him among the illustrious personages of the empire, till he wisely preferred the more respectable character of a bishop and a saint.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

tom. i. p. 100, 101.)
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Their numbers, however, were scarcely sufficient to be a nucleus for the population of the important points of the territory acquired by that war.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

For fire can win when from the infinite Has risen a larger throng of particles Of fiery stuff; and then its powers succumb, Somehow subdued again, or else at last It shrivels in torrid atmospheres the world.
— from On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus

In the interior provinces the Moors or Berbers, 162 so feeble under the first Cesars, so formidable to the Byzantine princes, maintained a disorderly resistance to the religion and power of the successors of Mahomet.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

They expend no time nor trouble in providing their equipment, since it consists merely of a straw hat and a piece of white or colored cotton girded about their loins.
— from Journal of an African Cruiser Comprising Sketches of the Canaries, the Cape De Verds, Liberia, Madeira, Sierra Leone, and Other Places of Interest on the West Coast of Africa by Horatio Bridge

In the same way he lost not a moment's time in probing the wound and extracting the projectile whenever it had lodged in some locality where it might do further mischief, as in the muscles of the neck, the region of the arm pit, the thigh joint, the ligaments of the knee and elbow.
— from The Downfall by Émile Zola

One slight and evanescent sketch of the relations which subsisted between Cæsar and his mother, caught from the wrecks of time, is preserved both by Plutarch and Suetonius.
— from The Caesars by Thomas De Quincey

Of course everything had to be explained to inquisitive people—how I hate them all!
— from In the Year of Jubilee by George Gissing

I know it is, and I hate to think of it," replied Barney; "but why in the world do you have to play bridge if you don't want to?" "I promised Margaret that I'd go.
— from The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Nevertheless, in spite of the unfavourable predictions current on the Graben with regard to the turn of the discussions of the Congress, the Imperial Palace from nine that evening was scarcely able to hold the enormous crowd seeking admittance.
— from Anecdotal Recollections of the Congress of Vienna by La Garde-Chambonas, Auguste Louis Charles, Comte de

"Who the intruder was I neither knew nor cared, except that I [Pg 7] did not like the trouble of going over my work so many times, but now I was determined to complete it.
— from The Wizard of West Penwith: A Tale of the Land's-End by William Bentinck Forfar

And if he had done so much good to the blind girl, to Christophe, and doubtless to many others who would be forever unknown, it was because, instead of bringing the customary words of the revolt of man against nature, he brought something of the indifferent peace of Nature, and reconciled the submissive soul with her.
— from Jean-Christophe, Volume I by Romain Rolland