Had death in itself possessed horrors for the human mind, the priest need not have conjured up beyond it those tortures that haunted Hamlet with the dreams of possible evils beyond which make even the wretched rather bear the ills they have than fly to others they know not of.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway

Secondly, an empirical judgement never exhibits strict and absolute, but only assumed and comparative universality (by induction); therefore, the most we can say is—so far as we have hitherto observed, there is no exception to this or that rule.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

“No woman with a man concealed in her sitting-room,” said Carpentaria to himself, “could behave so calmly upon being informed that the house was on fire.
— from The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes by Arnold Bennett

Among her connections and acquaintances, however, she maintained her individual dignity and the dignity of the blood of the Barnacles, by diligently nursing the pretence that it was a most unfortunate business; that she was sadly cut up by it; that this was a perfect fascination under which Henry laboured; that she had opposed it for a long time, but what could a mother do; and the like.
— from Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

The ermine of kings and judges, the white rabbit-tails with which the university graduate adorns his left shoulder on solemn occasions carry us back in thought to the age of the cave-dwellers.
— from The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles by Jean-Henri Fabre

None are earlier than the seventeenth century, yet they certainly take the place of more ancient figures, and they carry us back in thought to the period when the horse or horse-head was the ornament proper to every gable.
— from Strange Survivals: Some Chapters in the History of Man by S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

The whole story contained in these verses carries us back in thought to the time when Peter denied the Lord.
— from Memoranda Sacra by J. Rendel (James Rendel) Harris

Mansfield was killed and Hooker borne from the field wounded, Sumner coming up barely in time to prevent a rout.
— from History of the United States, Volume 4 by Elisha Benjamin Andrews

The carriers were all attempting to sleep, huddled as close as possible to each other for warmth; they refused to move, saying they would rather die, and we found it convenient to believe them, and get what warmth and sleep we could under blankets in the tent.
— from In the Forbidden Land An account of a journey in Tibet, capture by the Tibetan authorities, imprisonment, torture and ultimate release by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

If I am a provincial or a peasant, I pay for maintaining an "Opéra" which I never attend and for a "Sèvres" and "Gobelins" of which I never see a vase or a piece of tapestry.—In times of tranquility the extortion is covered up, but in troubled times it is nakedly apparent.
— from The Modern Regime, Volume 1 by Hippolyte Taine

That incestuous intercourse takes place under these circumstances, there is too much reason to believe; and that when unmarried young men and women sleep together in the same room, the women become common to the men, is stated as a positive fact; but I regard another inevitable effect of this state of things as no less pernicious; it is one of the instances which, for want of a better term, may be called unhumanizing , because it tends to weaken and destroy the feelings and affections which are distinctive of the human being, and which raise him above the 68 level of the brute.
— from The Pennsylvania Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy (Vol. IV, No. II, April 1849) by Pennsylvania Prison Society

Throughout, the visitor’s pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered her wondering question: “And you have made all this, Ban?”
— from Success: A Novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams