The hot air danced over the golden stillness of the land, farm after farm was left behind, each reminding Margaret of German Idyls—of Herman and Dorothea—of Evangeline.
— from North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

“Really, is bad enough,” returned Miss Pross, “but better.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

There was the comfort of thinking that this housekeeper had been in the service of Rigg also, and might accept the idea that Mr. Bulstrode entertained Raffles merely as a friend of her former master.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

The boldness of my grandiloquent and bombastic expressions roused my uncle Adolph's alarm and astonishment.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

What gunpowder did for war, the printing-press has done for the mind; and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

Est Dicaearchi liber de interitu hominum, Peripatetici magni et copiosi, qui collectis ceteris causis eluvionis, pestilentiae, vastitatis, beluarum etiam repentinae multitudinis, quarum impetu docet quaedam hominum genera esse consumpta, deinde comparat, quanto plures deleti sint homines hominum impetu, id est bellis aut seditionibus, quam omni reliqua calamitate.
— from De Officiis by Marcus Tullius Cicero

For how could they win applause from other men by eating raw meat?
— from The Works of the Emperor Julian, Vol. 2 by Emperor of Rome Julian

To complete my timidity, I perceived I had not the good fortune to please Madam de Breil; she not only never ordered, but even rejected, my services; and having twice found me in her antechamber, asked me, dryly, “If I had nothing to do?”
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My brave “ego” ridiculed my coward “ego,” and never did I realize, as on that day, the existence in us of two rival personalities, one desiring a thing, the other resisting, and each winning the day in turn.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

But, ecce ridiculus mus!
— from The Modern Athens A dissection and demonstration of men and things in the Scotch Capital. by Robert Mudie

Our Little Canadian Cousin By Elizabeth R. Macdonald
— from Our Little Spanish Cousin by Mary F. Nixon-Roulet

These four textures, which, it will be observed, are determined by the forms and sizes of the constituent particles, may be called the primary textures, because every rock must possess one of them.
— from Common Minerals and Rocks by William O. (William Otis) Crosby

The difficulty is to find some means of distinguishing that part of the legislative responsibility which should be retained by the people and that part which, in order to be effectively redeemed, must be delegated.
— from The Promise of American Life by Herbert David Croly

A single infusorian becomes in a week the ancestor of millions, that is to say, of far more individuals than could proceed under the most favourable conditions from a pair of elephants in five centuries, while Huxley calculated that the progeny of a single parthenogenetic aphis, under favouring circumstances, would in a few months outweigh the whole population of China.[2] That proviso—"under favouring conditions"—is of great importance, for it reveals the weak point in this early method of Nature's for conducting evolution by enormously rapid multiplication.
— from Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene by Havelock Ellis

In the prologue to this beautified edition, Ravenscroft modestly tells us: Like other poets, he'll not proudly scorn To own, that he but winnowed Shakespeare's corn: So far was he from robbing him of's treasure, That he did add his own, to make full measure.
— from The Works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 04 by John Dryden

Head r. HENRY BROUGHAM ESQ RE , M.P. MDCCCXII.
— from A Guide to the Exhibition of English Medals by British Museum. Department of Coins and Medals

About height, he said, he would say nothing, for that was a thing which no one could give or take away from himself, but every reasonable man could in time obtain the proper amount of breadth.
— from In the Year '13: A Tale of Mecklenburg Life by Fritz Reuter