For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare: it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.
— from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Assuredly it does not prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether ignorant of the vis medicatrix," said he, with his usual superiority of expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

"Go back, nephew," cried my uncle in a tone of alarm, "you are not surely thinking of anything so absurd or cowardly.
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

For the dice are no sooner thrown on the board, and the greedy gazing sparks have hardly said, Two sixes, Frank; but Six devils damn it!
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

Day and night she thought of the matter, but although the thing she wanted so earnestly was something very warm and close it had as yet no conscious connection with sex.
— from Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson

He went straight upstairs, and the stranger's door being ajar, he pushed it open and was entering without any ceremony, being of a naturally sympathetic turn of mind.
— from The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

But it more often happens that the correction of one premise, and the knowledge of chance events which have arisen, are not sufficient to overthrow our plans completely, but only suffice to produce hesitation.
— from On War — Volume 1 by Carl von Clausewitz

She could not sleep at night; she thought of it the whole day long, and in the evening, when her work was done, she would sit in front of the fire and gaze at it intently, as people do whose thoughts are far away.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

Every man who knows to the minutest details all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, cannot help imagining that the complexity of these conditions, and the difficulty of making them clear, is something exceptional and personal, peculiar to himself, and never supposes that others are surrounded by just as complicated an array of personal affairs as he is.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

If she can see you as you are to-day, all heaven cannot dry her tears, for all heaven itself cannot give you a name, since the one on her own tombstone is not hers by any right.
— from The White Sister by F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford

The flies used are never smaller than our sea-trout size, and they are more often larger; but the best anglers catalogue you as a lubber if you wield anything heavier than a boy's rod.
— from Lines in Pleasant Places: Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler by William Senior

The fact is, I find that I have—er—left my tobacco pouch at home,—most unfortunate; very seldom forget it; completely lost without it; I was wondering—er—ahem!—if you happened to have such a thing about you as a—" "No!" said the other old man, changing at once from beaming benevolence to stern severity.
— from The Old Tobacco Shop A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure by William Bowen

Then, with all the zest of seeing London from a new standpoint, that of moneyed idleness, he strolled towards Hyde Park.
— from The Wheel O' Fortune by Louis Tracy

"Someone ate it!" Winifred had heard, and now she turned on the unfortunate Charlie.
— from Brother and Sister by Josephine Lawrence

In the struggle there came to the front one who had been a conspicuous general under the Omayyads, afterwards had kept himself in concealment, and now seized this opportunity to gain favour with the Caliph.
— from Sketches from Eastern History by Theodor Nöldeke

The great body of theoretical and practical knowledge which has been accumulated by the labours of some eighty generations, since the dawn of scientific thought in Europe, has no collective English name to which an objection may not be raised; and I use the term "medicine" as that which is least likely to be misunderstood; though, as every one knows, the name is commonly applied, in a narrower sense, to one of the chief divisions of the totality of medical science.
— from Science & Education: Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley

“I’ll give you a name,” said the Old Woman of Beare, “but you must stand before me and strip off the goatskin that covers you.”
— from The King of Ireland's Son by Padraic Colum

The happy wife of a fair-haired Yorkshireman; with her fondest wishes concentred in her namesake the bay filly, which was to run in a weight-for-age race at the York Spring, and was entered for the ensuing Derby; interested in a tan gallop, a new stable; talking of mysterious but evidently all-important creatures, called by such names as Scott and Fobert and Chiffney and Challoner; and to all appearance utterly forgetful of the fact that there existed upon the earth a divinity with fathomless gray eyes, known to mortals as the heir of Bulstrode.
— from Aurora Floyd, Vol. 1 Fifth Edition by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

I am not sure that other authors do not do the same thing--that Lytton has not always, or very nearly, a philosophizing libertine--Dickens, a very charming young girl, with dear little pockets; and Lever, a bold dragoon.
— from The Fate: A Tale of Stirring Times by G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James