My prose writings have been charged with a disproportionate demand on the attention; with an excess of refinement in the mode of arriving at truths; with beating the ground for that which might have been run down by the eye; with the length and laborious construction of my periods; in short with obscurity and the love of paradox.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This object is a concretion of my perceptions in space, so that the redness, hardness, sweetness, and roundness of the apple are all fused together in my practical regard and given one local habitation and one name.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

To begin with, when I carried out my plan I should need to be looking rather more decent, and so I had to think of my get-up.
— from Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“And the other?” “He’s no cousin of mine,” put in Sinang merrily.
— from The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal

Therefore, between reality in a phenomenon and negation, there exists a continuous concatenation of many possible intermediate sensations, the difference of which from each other is always smaller than that between the given sensation and zero, or complete negation.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

On the 23d of January, 1654, Recife, together with the neighboring cities of Mauritsstad, Parayba, Itamarica, Seara, and other Hollandish possessions, was ceded to the Portuguese conquerors, with the condition that a general amnesty be granted.
— from The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen by Simon Wolf

Now I wish to call [pg 315] your attention to this remarkable fact, that all these Liturgies, though compiled by different persons, at different times, in various places, and in divers languages, contain, without exception, in clear and precise language, the prayers to be said at the celebration of Mass; prayers in substance the same as those found in our prayer books at the Canon of the Mass.
— from The Faith of Our Fathers by James Gibbons

The British Museum contains many hundreds of unpublished manuscripts bearing upon the subject—copies of official documents, letters, and "relations" from Philip's Court, petitions and statements of grievance addressed to the King, and vast collections of miscellaneous papers in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, most of which have not yet been consulted for historical purposes.
— from The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies by Martin A. S. (Martin Andrew Sharp) Hume

This practice, together with that of placing the material on unimproved foundations and leaving it thus for traffic to consolidate, has done a great deal to destroy the confidence of many people in stone roads.
— from The Future of Road-making in America by Archer Butler Hulbert

The higher the level of the sea, the less becomes the sum of the resistances of the rheostat, since the column of mercury puts in short circuit all the divisions of the rheostat, whose contacts are comprised in the height of the column.
— from Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 by Various