When I was a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady, who is yet living, the widow of a prince, wore somewhat more ornament in her dress than our laws of widowhood allow, and being reproached with it, she made answer that it was because she was resolved to have no more love affairs, and would never marry again.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

Do you want to find that out, like other women, at forty, when you’ve thrown yourself away and lost your chances; or won’t you take it in good time now from your own mother, that loves you and swears to you that it’s truth: gospel truth?
— from Mrs. Warren's Profession by Bernard Shaw

It is not the same thing at all as the treachery of living on with a husband and playing him false…
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

I made one brown and the other fair, one lively and the other languishing, one wise and the other weak, but of so amiable a weakness that it seemed to add a charm to virtue.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

42 The Syrian bishop deplores the misfortunes of Caelestian, who, from the state of a noble and opulent senator of Carthage, was reduced, with his wife and family, and servants, to beg his bread in a foreign country; but he applauds the resignation of the Christian exile, and the philosophic temper, which, under the pressure of such calamities, could enjoy more real happiness than was the ordinary lot of wealth and prosperity.
— 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

The Syrian bishop deplores the misfortunes of Cælestian, who, from the state of a noble and opulent senator of Carthage, was reduced, with his wife and family, and servants, to beg his bread in a foreign country; but he applauds the resignation of the Christian exile, and the philosophic temper, which, under the pressure of such calamities, could enjoy more real happiness than was the ordinary lot of wealth and prosperity.
— 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

On the 7th, the day after the fall of Fort Henry, I took my staff and the cavalry—a part of one regiment—and made a reconnoissance to within about a mile of the outer line of works at Donelson.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

Or shall we say the old love of work, and of using the powers and faculties that God had given him?
— from Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals by William Davenport Hulbert

Willesden Church, standing in the remotest corner of the parish, had once a noted image of the Virgin, which brought many pilgrims to “Our Lady of Willesden”; and though it has suffered enlargement and restoration, it enshrines interesting monuments, brasses, and other relics of an antiquity that goes back to Norman times, beset by a show of later tombstones, among them that of Charles Reade the novelist.
— from Middlesex Painted by John Fulleylove; described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff by A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope) Moncrieff

Miss Dunreddin was already off on her pleasuring, he took the gray little governess for duenna, and a blither three never sat out a tragedy, or laughed over wine and oysters in the midst of a garden with its flowers and fountains afterwards.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 63, January, 1863 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

With sympathies that would naturally seek the ordinary lot of woman as the ideal of earthly happiness, with no natural taste for notoriety or public action, with tastes for art, and imaginative and quiet literary pursuits, I have, for all that period, been doing what, as to personal taste, I least wished to do, and leaving undone what I should most like to do.
— from Woman's Profession as Mother and Educator, with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage by Catharine Esther Beecher

Two and two make four; and if every one of us would go, according to the old law of warfare, and each of us slay our man, or rather each of us give life by God's grace to some one, or try to do it, our congregations and our churches would grow as fast as, according to the old problem, the money grew that was paid down for the nails in the horse's shoes.
— from Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIV by Alexander Maclaren

Up-stairs the door was opened for him by the old landlady, of whom Angelica hired her lodgings.
— from In Paradise: A Novel. Vol. II by Paul Heyse

We suppose, therefore, that the daughter of Jephtha was simply taken from the ordinary life of woman, and made an offering to the Lord.
— from Woman in Sacred History A Series of Sketches Drawn from Scriptural, Historical, and Legendary Sources by Harriet Beecher Stowe

In the Vision of Pierce Plowman pilgrimages to our Lady of Walsingham, are thus noticed.
— from The Privy Purse Expenses of King Henry VIII from November MDXXIX, to December MDXXXII by Nicolas, Nicholas Harris, Sir

And the drinking among women is not confined to the class mentioned, for can you not think of ladies of wealth and position in your community, whose names are always spoken in a sort of twilight tone and with a little sigh?
— from Why and How : a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada by Addie Chisholm

In the case of Tropæolum majus , the ordinary leaves of which are peltate and orbicular, the petals when frondescent have not the peltate arrangement, but are spathulate, and provided with very long, narrow stalks, so that, in some cases, they are, more properly speaking, enlarged virescent petals than true leaves; in other instances, however, the arrangement of the veins is more like that of the true leaves than that of the petals.
— from Vegetable Teratology An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants by Maxwell T. (Maxwell Tylden) Masters