I may remark in passing that when people say that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity.
— from What's Wrong with the World by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

In every classroom I saw sentences on the blackboard, which evidently had been written to illustrate some grammatical rule, or for the purpose of using words that had previously been taught in the same, or in some other connection.
— from The Story of My Life With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy by Helen Keller

And then to what end were those tearings and dismemberments of the Corybantes, the Menades, and, in our times, of the Mahometans, who slash their faces, bosoms, and limbs, to gratify their prophet; seeing that the offence lies in the will, not in the breast, eyes, genitals, roundness of form, the shoulders, or the throat?
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

In the Number for May 30, 1793, we have ten guineas reward offered for the recovery of a Government grindstone:—"Ten Guineas Reward is offered to any person that will make discovery and prosecute to conviction, the Thief or Thieves that have stolen a Grindstone from the King's Wharf at Navy Hall, between the 30th of April and the 6th instant.
— from Toronto of Old Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario by Henry Scadding

After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

Let us now see how the times of the city of God run on from this point among Abraham's descendants.
— from The City of God, Volume II by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

Nor is it vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the approach to Tahiti.
— from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset (William Somerset) Maugham

High on his car the giant rode, On foot the son of Raghu strode.
— from The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse by Valmiki

The old man was still sitting in the ornamental garden, like a fly impassive on the face of a loved one who is dead, tapping the last on which he was making the bast shoe, and two little girls, running out from the hot house carrying in their skirts plums they had plucked from the trees there, came upon Prince Andrew.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

As we approached, a groom ran out from them.
— from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Spires there were not then, but blunt, cone-headed turrets, pyramidal, denoting the Houses of God, rose often from the low, thatched, and reeded roofs.
— from Harold : the Last of the Saxon Kings — Volume 01 by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

These great Rodents occasionally frequent the islands in the mouth of the Plata, where the water is quite salt, but are far more abundant on the borders of fresh-water lakes and rivers.
— from Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage Round the World of H.M.S. Beagle Under the Command of Captain Fitz Roy, R.N. by Charles Darwin

So far, again, as religion was concerned, he had a great horror of darkness and the unknown, and his deity would appear to have been a god rather of fear than of love.
— from Modernities by Horace Barnett Samuel

The valley winds sharply, and gives room only for the river and the road, and sometimes only for one of them.
— from In the Levant Twenty Fifth Impression by Charles Dudley Warner

By his orders there is a little garden railed off for the Dauphin to amuse himself in and a small room is built in it to retire to in case of rain; here he was at work with his little hoe and rake, but not without a guard of two Grenadiers.
— from Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1 by H. Sutherland (Henry Sutherland) Edwards

“See that prickly branch growing right out from the edge of the tower?
— from The Boy Scouts at the Panama Canal by John Henry Goldfrap

And thus blindly are brought about the parricidal tragedies that Zola, Guy de Maupassant and other novelists have utilized in fiction, and with which we are familiarized in French criminal reports—parents and grandparents got rid of for the sake of their coveted hoardings.
— from East of Paris: Sketches in the Gâtinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne by Matilda Betham-Edwards

During the past twenty-four hours he had experienced a gradual reawakening of faculties that had previously lain dull or dormant.
— from A Prince to Order by Charles Stokes Wayne

The first ten chapters, if of a kind of satire which has now grown rather obsolete for the nonce, are of a good kind and good in their kind; the history of the metempsychoses of Julian is of a less good kind, and less good in that kind.
— from The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon by Henry Fielding

A tiny Burmese gong rang out from the hall.
— from The Yellow House; Master of Men by E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim