However, in order that the foregoing proposition may be fully explained, I will draw attention to a few additional points, and I will furthermore answer the objections which may be advanced against our doctrine.
— from Ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza

So one finds in this literature of the lower classes the principal legendary episodes of which we have studied the origin and followed the development; accommodated to a fiction, woven into a web of intrigue, they have undergone new transformations; they have lost every indication of their source; they are transposed in the new circumstances imagined for them; they have usually been dissociated from the circumstances which individualize them and fix their time and place.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

My mind has been much disturbed, and too agitated for conversation.
— from An Advanced English Grammar with Exercises by George Lyman Kittredge

Above the muffled roar of conversation, the dismal wailings of babies at night, the thumping of feet in unseen corridors and rooms, mingled with the sound of varied hoarse shoutings in the street and the rattling of wheels over cobbles, they heard the screams of the child and the roars of the mother die away to a feeble moaning and a subdued bass muttering.
— from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane

And this confirms the saying of Xenocrates about true philosophers, that they alone do willingly what all others do unwillingly at the compulsion of the law, as dogs are turned away from their pleasures by a blow, or cats by a noise, looking at nothing but their danger.
— from Plutarch's Morals by Plutarch

Now these rivers are many, and mighty, and diverse, and there are four principal ones, of which the greatest and outermost is that called Oceanus, which flows round the earth in a circle; and in the opposite direction flows Acheron, which passes under the earth through desert places into the Acherusian lake: this is the lake to the shores of which the souls of the many go when they are dead, and after waiting an appointed time, which is to some a longer and to some a shorter time, they are sent back to be born again as animals.
— from Phaedo by Plato

Emile will not learn anything by heart, not even fables, not even the fables of La Fontaine, simple and delightful as they are, for the words are no more the fable than the words of history are history.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

You know the first lines of the Iliad, in which the poet says that Chryses prayed Agamemnon to release his daughter, and that Agamemnon flew into a passion with him; whereupon Chryses, failing of his object, invoked the anger of the God against the Achaeans.
— from The Republic by Plato

"The theatre of all my actions is fallen," said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Top darted after them as fast as his four legs could carry him, but the emus distanced him with ease, so prodigious was their speed.
— from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

The disadvantages are those arising from the necessity of bringing into rapid existence a new defensive system on a frontage of 7,000 yards and also the particular incidence, at the present juncture, of the inevitable losses, small or large, of such an operation in this Corps.
— from The Australian Victories in France in 1918 by Monash, John, Sir

Here is the fact: that Mr. Crawley has the cheque, and brings it into use some considerable time after it is drawn; and the additional fact that the drawer of the cheque had lost it, as he thought, in Mr. Crawley's house, and had looked for it there, soon after it was drawn, and long before it was paid.
— from The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope

As a result the city of Alba was destroyed, and the Albans forced to come and live in Rome, the Cælial Hill being given them for a dwelling-place.
— from Historic Tales: The Romance of Reality. Vol. 11 (of 15), Roman by Charles Morris

There were desks and tables and file cabinets; it looked almost like any branch of the Company, with whirring mimeographs and clattering typewriters.
— from Preferred Risk by Edson McCann

They forbid it in the pulpit, and are forced to hear it in the palace; poor ministers cannot announce it, and great princes proclaim it; the servants are forbidden to listen to it, and their masters are compelled to hear it; they will have nothing to do with it during the whole course of the diet, and they are forced to submit to hear more in one day than is heard ordinarily in a whole year......
— from History of the Great Reformation, Volume 4 by J. H. (Jean Henri) Merle d'Aubigné

When they entered together the room of the sick woman, the light had burned down and threw a faint light on the quiet, pale face.
— from Erick and Sally by Johanna Spyri

This is the fourth and last type to be described, although these animals from the Bitter Root Mountains were the first goat known to transcontinental explorers.
— from The Rocky Mountain Goat by Madison Grant

I’m master now, and—” He stopped short, for the old housekeeper entered the room with a card, the ring at the front door and the answering footsteps having passed unnoticed in the drawing-room.
— from The Mynns' Mystery by George Manville Fenn