It takes but a small exertion of introspection to show [Pg 620] that the latter alternative is the true one, and that we can no more intuit a duration than we can intuit an extension, devoid of all sensible content .
— from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James

A whole mortal hour passed, and he did not come; nothing moved in the brushwood.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

“I don’t deny it,” replied Pencroft, “but the savages must know how to do it or employ a peculiar wood, for more than once I have tried to get fire in that way, but I could never manage it.
— from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires.
— from What's Wrong with the World by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

We tried to find out what sort of fringe, but we could not make it out.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I sat thinking of it long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large watch-case, and still I could not make it out.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality.
— from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

I tried it twenty times by myself, but I could not manage it.
— from The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (Volume 2 of 5) by Fanny Burney

Literature is considered not merely in reference to art—but in relation to the influence it has exerted on the destinies of mankind, and to the various modifications which the religion, the government, the laws, the manners, and habits of different nations have caused it to undergo.
— from The Philosophy of History, Vol. 1 of 2 by Friedrich von Schlegel

Humanity, drunk with blood and drenched with gore, shrieks to Heaven at a single murder, perpetrated to gratify a revenge not more unchristian, or to satisfy a cupidity not more ignoble, than those which are the promptings of the Devil in the souls of Nations.
— from Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry by Albert Pike

One could no more imagine a Lee or a Washington in the Virginia of to-day than one could imagine a Huxley in Nicaragua.
— from Prejudices, Second Series by H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken

Yes, there ahead of him was the recruiting station, he could not mistake it.
— from The Island of Appledore by Cornelia Meigs

He endeavoured to pronounce the name, but could not manage it; and compressing his mouth he held a silent combat with his inward agony, defying, meanwhile, my sympathy with an unflinching, ferocious stare.
— from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

the old Celtic root sen , old, which has direct cognates, not merely in the Indo-European, but also in the Semitic; Arabic, sen , old, ancient— sunnah , institution, regulation; Persian, san , law, right; sanna , Phoenicibus idem fuit quod Arabibus summa , lex, doctrina jux canonicum.—Bochart, Geo.
— from An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 by Mary Frances Cusack

Then Oscar would walk out and hunt up one of those places that Carrie Nation missed in the shuffle and there, with one arm glued tight around the bar rail, he would fasten his system to a jag which would last for a week.
— from Get Next! by George V. (George Vere) Hobart

But there was considerable noise made in the brief scuffle, which waked some of the sleepers.
— from Stand By The Union by Oliver Optic

When he came near me I stopped him.
— from Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangelist by Dwight Lyman Moody