All along I had been dreading the fulfilment of this promise,—I had been looking out daily for the “Coming Man,” whose information respecting my past life and conversation was to brand me as a bad child for ever: now there he was.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

Those are people whom it's a satisfaction to help, for if they've got genius, it's an honor to be allowed to serve them, and not let it be lost or delayed for want of fuel to keep the pot boiling.
— from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

ATHENIAN: Then of one of them let us speak, and the same argument will apply to all. CLEINIAS: Which will you take? ATHENIAN: Every one sees the body of the sun, but no one sees his soul, nor the soul of any other body living or dead; and yet there is great reason to believe that this nature, unperceived by any of our senses, is circumfused around them all, but is perceived by mind; and therefore by mind and reflection only let us apprehend the following point.
— from Laws by Plato

One could make out but little of detail; but he could note that a black mass was piling itself up beyond the second fence.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.
— from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

The blessed light of day itself peeps in, an ugly phantom face, through the unchangeable crevice which is his prison window.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens

The dissolute youth of Constantinople adopted the blue livery of disorder; the laws were silent, and the bonds of society were relaxed: creditors were compelled to resign their obligations; judges to reverse their sentence; masters to enfranchise their slaves; fathers to supply the extravagance of their children; noble matrons were prostituted to the lust of their servants; beautiful boys were torn from the arms of their parents; and wives, unless they preferred a voluntary death, were ravished in the presence of their husbands.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

As the divinity whose power is developed in the broad light of day, he brings joy and delight to nature, and health and prosperity to man.
— from Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E. M. Berens

Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and clothes—but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York who can talk to her about what she really cares for."
— from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Here and there were torches of pitch pine that threw a smoky splendor over the scene and hid all the squalor and sordid poverty that had been so evident in the broad light of day.
— from Bert Wilson at the Wheel by J. W. Duffield

The vegetation of the Campos Mimosos is characterized in the first place, by the forests being of that nature called Catinga; these are the forests which I have already spoken of as losing their leaves in the dry season; it is remarkable that they form buds like other deciduous trees, but should no rain fall they can remain for several years without producing foliage.
— from Travels in the Interior of Brazil Principally through the northern provinces, and the gold and diamond districts, during the years 1836-1841 by George Gardner

He was busy enough with his adjustment to the business life of "Delafield and Madison county," this being the declared commercial sphere of the John W. Farwell Hardware Company.
— from John Wesley, Jr. The Story of an Experiment by Dan B. (Dan Brearley) Brummitt

I was often at the mill, and he often came to town, when I saw that he was growing gradually more desperate and wretched, and uneasy in his manner, but I was not prepared for the announcement which Damon Barker made to me by letter one day that he had secured a divorce from his wife, and that the case was more serious than I supposed.
— from The Story of a Country Town by E. W. (Edgar Watson) Howe

But he held by the shadow of it, with a deadly Hapsburg tenacity; refused for twenty years, under all pressures, to part with the shadow: "The Spanish Hapsburg Branch is dead; whereupon do not I, of the Austrian Branch, sole representative of Kaiser Karl the Fifth, claim, by the law of Heaven, whatever he possessed in Spain, by law of ditto?
— from History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 05 by Thomas Carlyle

They are quite naked, and pierce holes in their ears large enough to pass the fist through; in these they insert gourds of a medium size, afterwards replacing them by larger ones, distending the lobe of the ear till it hangs down to the shoulder.
— from The Conquest of the River Plate (1535-1555) by Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, active 16th century

Locked within that tiny brute brain was the secret of what waited for him on the morrow: love and the glories of a big life, or death and oblivion.
— from The Seventh Noon by Frederick Orin Bartlett