‘Firstly, he is at least forty years old—considerably more, I should think—and I am but eighteen; secondly, he is narrow-minded and bigoted in the extreme; thirdly, his tastes and feelings are wholly dissimilar to mine; fourthly, his looks, voice, and manner are particularly displeasing to me; and, finally, I have an aversion to his whole person that I never can surmount.’
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

In our own day the trader goes and settles in distant places, and receives the weary traveller hospitably at first, but in the end treats him as an enemy and a captive, whom he only liberates for an enormous ransom.
— from Laws by Plato

The heart of Poland hath not ceased To quiver, tho' her sacred blood doth drown The fields; and out of every smouldering town Cries to Thee, lest brute Power be increased, Till that o'ergrown Barbarian in the East Transgress his ample bound to some new crown: ­ Cries to thee, "Lord, how long shall these things be?
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron

She could not be alone, prostrate, powerless as she was,—a cloud of faces looked up at her, giving her no idea of fierce vivid anger, or of personal danger, but a deep sense of shame that she should thus be the object of universal regard—a sense of shame so acute that it seemed as if she would fain have burrowed into the earth to hide herself, and yet she could not escape out of that unwinking glare of many eyes.
— from North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

But in the evening their hopes were again excited by a hint from their host, who was the king's drummer, and one of the principal men in the country; he assured them, that there was at least one book saved from Mr. Park's canoe, which was then in the possession of a very poor man in the service of his master, to whom it had been entrusted by the late king during his last illness.
— from Travels of Richard and John Lander into the interior of Africa, for the discovery of the course and termination of the Niger From unpublished documents in the possession of the late Capt. John William Barber Fullerton ... with a prefatory analysis of the previous travels of Park, Denham, Clapperton, Adams, Lyon, Ritchie, &c. into the hitherto unexplored countries of Africa by Robert Huish

Indeed, I had high hopes of capturing almost the whole of Early's army before it reached New Market, and with this object in view, during the manoeuvres of the 21st I had sent Torbert up the Luray Valley with Wilson's division and two of Merritt's brigades, in the expectation that he would drive Wickham out of the Luray Pass by Early's right, and by crossing the Massanutten Mountain near New Market, gain his rear.
— from Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army — Complete by Philip Henry Sheridan

But if they expected to have a succession and continuation of that good luck they were disappointed, for they tramped on for about three miles more without seeing anything.
— from Tom Fairfield's Hunting Trip; or, Lost in the Wilderness by Allen Chapman

Now it is well known, that if a piece of glass is so much warmed as to convey the impression of heat to the hand, it will retain some part of that heat for a minute or more; but in this experiment the heat will vanish in a moment: it will not, therefore, be the heated pane of glass that we shall feel, but heat which has come through the glass in a free or radiant state.
— from Curiosities of Science, Past and Present A Book for Old and Young by John Timbs

Like one who travels round the world and circles the vast circumference of the globe, he comes back in the end to his starting-point.
— from Émile Verhaeren by Stefan Zweig

If those principles bade him resist the enforcement of the Black Bill, the apostle of non-resistance was sorry enough, but in this emergency, though he possessed the gentleness of the dove, he also practised the wisdom of the serpent.
— from William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist by Archibald Henry Grimké

If the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is certainly true of any piece of gossip.
— from Vanishing Roads and Other Essays by Richard Le Gallienne

And on the other hand, but for the existence of such a connexion, it would be impossible to explain the historical phases.
— from A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life by Auguste Comte

not all of these, the barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the musket, the moustache and the soldier's jacket bound, in the end, to hit upon the idea that they might as well save, society once for all, by proclaiming their own regime as supreme, and relieve bourgeois society wholly of the care of ruling itself?
— from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx