Depend upon it, there is some mistake, and that a day or two will clear it up; at any rate, that Henry is blameless, and in spite of a moment's etourderie , thinks of nobody but you.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed that expression in which the two-fold desire to make the speaker be quiet and to preserve, oneself, an appearance of guilelessness in the eyes of the listener, is neutralised in an intense vacuity; in which the unflinching signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence, an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder, the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who have made it, at any rate to him in whose hearing it ought not to have been made.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Thus Kāma, “Desire,” first appears in the Atharva-veda , where the arrows with which he pierces hearts are already referred to; he is the forerunner of the flower-arrowed god of love, familiar in classical literature.
— from A History of Sanskrit Literature by Arthur Anthony Macdonell

The valet bowed and retired, and Albert returned to his inventory.
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

As a rule, the hero is smothered in bric-à-brac and palm-trees, lost in the gilded abyss of Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to a mere midge in the midst of marqueterie; whereas the background should always be kept as a background, and colour subordinated to effect.
— from Intentions by Oscar Wilde

Whether or not, again, under the so-called seven free arts some may be included which ought to be classed as sciences, and many that are akin rather to handicraft, I shall not here discuss.
— from Kant's Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant

‘Stay, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘before you apply those epithets to the gentleman in question, consider, dispassionately, the extent of his fault, and above all remember that he is a friend of mine.’
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

A government strictly limited in its powers and attributions, required to hold its hands from overmeddling, and to let most things go on without its assuming the part of guardian or director, is not to the taste of such a people; in their eyes the possessors of authority can hardly take too much upon themselves, provided the authority itself is open to general competition.
— from Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill

She was supposed, as already related, to have issued from the head of Zeus himself, clad in armour from head to foot.
— from Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E. M. Berens

She looked at the address and recognised the handwriting instantly.
— from The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Men who have time and again run their heads into the jaws of death are often inclined to fatalism.
— from Days of the Discoverers by Louise Lamprey

109 And again, when the servants of God behold the wicked prospering and the just oppressed; when they see the ambitious, the covetous, the unscrupulous preferred and honored, and they themselves plotted against and rejected, their heart is not disturbed, because they know first of all that “to them that love God, all things work together unto good,” 110 and secondly, they are persuaded that the efforts of sinners must finally fail.
— from The Shepherd Of My Soul by Charles J. (Charles Jerome) Callan

Even the Lord, who probably had not always a room to himself in the poor houses he staid at, could not do without solitude; therefore not unfrequently spent the night in the open air, on the quiet, star-served hill: there even for him it would seem to have been easier to find an entrance into that deeper solitude which, it is true, he did not need in order to find his Father and his God, but which apparently he did need in order to come into closest contact with him who was the one joy of his life, whether his hard life on earth, or his blessed life in heaven.
— from What's Mine's Mine — Complete by George MacDonald

let us go to Sicily!’” These new prospects which the speaker opened to them pleased the people, who were tired of the everlasting Sparta and the Persian King; and stimulated by fear of Rome, the growing wolf’s-cub, they received the ill-considered proposal with applause, and raised their hands in token of assent.
— from Historical Miniatures by August Strindberg

She will, unless he amends and reforms, take him, I grant you, at her peril; but be it so.
— from The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain The Works of William Carleton, Volume One by William Carleton

When we see the same person time after time in the same setting, as when we go into the same store every morning and buy a paper from the same man, we cease to have any strong feeling of familiarity at sight of him, the reason being that we are always responding to him in the same setting, and consequently have no feeling of responding to something that is not there.
— from Psychology: A Study Of Mental Life by Robert Sessions Woodworth

For it is as a realist that he is most remarkable.
— from Musical Studies by Ernest Newman

Look here,” he added, with an abrupt return to his imperative style, “can't you give me some dry clothes?” Morse brought him a pair of overalls and a “hickory shirt,” well worn, but smelling strongly of a recent wash with coarse soap.
— from Selected Stories of Bret Harte by Bret Harte

He transgressed the law of his God, and as a result the holy image of the Creator was supplanted by the hideous deformity of sin.
— from The Gospel Day; Or, the Light of Christianity by Charles Ebert Orr

To her this period had been one of breathless suspense, like the moment before the storm, when trees hang lifeless in a stifling atmosphere, and animals raise their heads in frightened expectancy, awaiting with nameless terror the first gust which shall herald the tornado.
— from The Fifth of November A Romance of the Stuarts by Charles S. Bentley