These articles of dress were just like what my companions wore; certainly not one whit smarter—perhaps rather plainer than most—but Monsieur had now got hold of his text, and I began to chafe under the expected sermon.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

The notion of a supreme god even depends so closely upon the entire system of the totemic beliefs that it still bears their mark.
— from The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Émile Durkheim

Arrived now, definitely, at an apex for these Vistas, I confess that the promulgation and belief in such a class or institution—a new and greater literatus order—its possibility, (nay certainty,) underlies these entire speculations—and that the rest, the other parts, as superstructures, are all founded upon it.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

A chemical synthesis results, which concentrates, unifies, the elements synthetized, and by that very process transforms them....
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

We may as bootless spend our vain command Upon th' enraged soldiers in their spoil, As send precepts to the Leviathan To come ashore.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Fast climbing up the eastern sky
— from Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

“It only shows,” said one of my missionary friends, commenting upon the East Side incident, “that we are all at sixes and at sevens here.”
— from The Children of the Poor by Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis

Though new in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations of men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men came upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries.
— from Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery — Complete by Filson Young

The water which condensed upon the earth settled down in the hollows, which had been produced previously by the immense pressure of the water-vapour envelope.
— from The Autobiography of an Electron Wherein the Scientific Ideas of the Present Time Are Explained in an Interesting and Novel Fashion by Charles R. (Charles Robert) Gibson

Time would fail me were I to try to count up the Epistles, Sermons, Homilies, Orations, Opuscula and dissertations of the Fathers, in which they have laboriously, earnestly and with much learning supported the doctrines of us Catholics.
— from Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious Members of Our Universities by Campion, Edmund, Saint

I was ordered to move the Sixth forward as skirmishers, and did so till we came upon the enemy strongly intrenched, and established our picket line in close rifle range of the enemy.
— from Four Months in Libby and the Campaign Against Atlanta by I. N. (Isaac N.) Johnston

103 In spite of this control “under Tshaka every sneezing or hawking in the presence of the tyrant, as well as every lack of tears at the death of some royal kinsman, was punished with death.”
— from The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically by Franz Oppenheimer