Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence of restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get beyond our sight.
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

“Pray tell your sister that I long to see her.”
— from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The barber cudgelled Sancho, and Sancho pommelled the barber; Don Luis gave one of his servants, who ventured to catch him by the arm to keep him from escaping, a cuff that bathed his teeth in blood; the Judge took his part; Don Fernando had got one of the officers down and was belabouring him heartily; the landlord raised his voice again calling for help for the Holy Brotherhood; so that the whole inn was nothing but cries, shouts, shrieks, confusion, terror, dismay, mishaps, sword-cuts, fisticuffs, cudgellings, kicks, and bloodshed; and in the midst of all this chaos, complication, and general entanglement, Don Quixote took it into his head that he had been plunged into the thick of the discord of Agramante's camp; and, in a voice that shook the inn like thunder, he cried out: "Hold all, let all sheathe their swords, let all be calm and attend to me as they value their lives!"
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Thus determined, she reconnoitred the field, and practised her address so successfully, that in less than half an hour she was loaded with ermine and embroidery, and disposed to retreat with her burden, when her regards were solicited by a splendid bundle, which she descried at some distance lying on the ground.
— from The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Complete by T. (Tobias) Smollett

A border also was sewed to it, lest the aperture should look too indecently: it was also parted where the hands were to come out.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

And Charley told me that when her father died she had kneeled down and prayed in her first sorrow that he likewise might be raised up and given back to his poor children, and that if she should never get better and should die too, she thought it likely that it might come into Tom's mind to offer the same prayer for her.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I wish the time may be short, but I shall think it long till we see one another.
— from The Love Letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn; With Notes by King of England Henry VIII

“Maybe you wouldn’t call it walking, though; perhaps I ought to say that I like to ‘crutch.’”
— from The Lucky Seventh by Ralph Henry Barbour

While the equinoxes are displaced but fifty seconds (50") in a year, the lunar nodes, during the same period, and in the same direction, move over a space of 19° 20' 29"; so that, in less than nineteen years, they have made the complete circuit of the heavens, to return to exactly the same point, after traversing 360°.
— from Everyday Objects; Or, Picturesque Aspects of Natural History. by W. H. Davenport (William Henry Davenport) Adams

We employed Indian help, and everything we put our hands to prospered, so that in less than ten days we built a fort one hundred feet square, of hammer-faced rock, the wall two feet thick and twelve feet high.
— from Jacob Hamblin: A Narrative of His Personal Experience as a Frontiersman, Missionary to the Indians and Explorer, Disclosing Interpositions of Providence, Severe Privations, Perilous Situations and Remarkable Escapes Fifth Book of the Faith-Promoting Series, Designed for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-day Saints by Jacob Hamblin

The sun, though immensely larger than the moon, is so much farther off that it attracts the waters of the earth much less than the moon does.
— from Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 An Illustrated Weekly by Various

ST. TRESAIN, IN LATIN, TRESANUS, PRIEST, C. He was a holy Irish priest, who, having left his own country, preached with great zeal in France, and died curate of Mareuil upon the Marne, in the sixth century.
— from The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints. January, February, March by Alban Butler

Filled as they are with a land hunger, to which that of the Irish peasant is a weak and colourless sentiment, there is little that they will not do to gratify their taste.
— from The Last Boer War by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard

The Earl of Kildare, who was not impartial but who probably spoke truly, declared that the churches in Tipperary and Kilkenny were generally in ruins through the system of Papal provisions, ‘so as, and if the King’s Grace do not see for the hasty remedy of the same, there is like to be no more Christianity there, than in the midst of Turkey.’
— from Ireland under the Tudors, with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. Vol. 1 (of 3) by Richard Bagwell

But these offers were not at all tempting to the Brethren of the Coast; from pirates rampant to pirates couchant was too great a change, and some of them, who found it impossible to embark on piratical cruises, on account of the increasing difficulties of fitting out vessels, returned to their original avocations of cattle-butchering and beef-drying, and some, it is said, chose rather to live among the wild Indians and share their independent lives, than to bind themselves to any form of honest industry.
— from Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts by Frank Richard Stockton

" Nothing (save truth) is lacking to make this circumstantial narrative all that it should be.
— from By-Ways of War: The Story of the Filibusters by James Jeffrey Roche