As for me, it quite sufficed to my mental tranquillity that I was known where it imported that known I should be; the rest sat on me easily: pedigree, social position, and recondite intellectual acquisition, occupied about the same space and place in my interests and thoughts; they were my third-class lodgers—to whom could be assigned only the small sitting-room and the little back bedroom: even if the dining and drawing-rooms stood empty, I never confessed it to them, as thinking minor accommodations better suited to their circumstances.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

I laid it in your desk with a prayer: I must indeed be a sinner: Heaven will not hear the petitions that come warmest from my heart.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

The yelling and shouting, and whipping and galloping, of all parties interested, made it an exhilarating, exciting, and particularly boisterous race.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

22, and perhaps in Mark i. 15, Rom. iii. 25, and (more doubtfully still) in Joh. iii. 15.
— from St. Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon A revised text with introductions, notes and dissertations by J. B. (Joseph Barber) Lightfoot

Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its own sake free from practical reference, and found its source and organ in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal interests.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey

Now a postulate in mathematics is a practical proposition which contains nothing but the synthesis by which we present an object to ourselves, and produce the conception of it, for example—“With a given line, to describe a circle upon a plane, from a given point”; and such a proposition does not admit of proof, because the procedure, which it requires, is exactly that by which alone it is possible to generate the conception of such a figure.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the keyboard or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page.
— from Dubliners by James Joyce

‘No,’ said he, ‘I have not read any papers, I made it up myself.’
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

“It is singular enough,” said I, “that the only two Welsh poets I have seen have been innkeepers—one is yourself, the other a person I met in Anglesey.
— from Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery by George Borrow

Another fertile cause of accidental poisoning is mistakes in dispensing; but these mistakes seem to happen more frequently on the Continent than in England.
— from Poisons, Their Effects and Detection A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts by Alexander Wynter Blyth

To the actual inventors and producers it may, indeed, be conceded that the interest which they themselves receive has been earned by their own exertions; but no such concession, it will be said, can be made to these men's heirs.
— from A Critical Examination of Socialism by W. H. (William Hurrell) Mallock

Antiope , philologically interpreted, may indicate the moon with face turned full upon us.
— from The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911) Based Originally on Bulfinch's "Age of Fable" (1855) by Thomas Bulfinch

Jean cuddled it up against her cheek, and talked to it and pitied it and promised it much in the way of fat little bugs and a warm nest and her tender regard.
— from Jean of the Lazy A by B. M. Bower

Nevertheless, all restraint is not only annihilated by consent, but so prominently is this carried out, and so well understood by that respectable class of citizens whose interests and feelings are for maintaining a good name for the city and promoting its moral integrity, that in all our conversation with them, we never heard one speak well of those functionaries or the manner in which the police regulations of the city were carried out.
— from Manuel Pereira; Or, The Sovereign Rule of South Carolina by F. Colburn (Francis Colburn) Adams