Independently of our not finding fossil remains of such infinitely numerous connecting links, it may be objected, that time will not have sufficed for so great an amount of organic change, all changes having been effected very slowly through natural selection.
— from On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin

Some little influence may be attributed to climate, food, etc.: thus, E. Forbes speaks confidently that shells at their southern limit, and when living in shallow water, are more brightly coloured than those of the same species further north or from greater depths.
— from On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin

Are we going, do you fancy, to the house of our wenches, like gallants who come and knock and go in at any hour, however late it may be?" "Let us first of all find out the palace for certain," replied Don Quixote, "and then I will tell thee, Sancho, what we had best do; but look, Sancho, for either I see badly, or that dark mass that one sees from here should be Dulcinea's palace."
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Once my heart sat lightly in my bosom; all the beauty of the world was doubly beautiful, irradiated by the sun-light shed from my own soul.
— from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"If I bear witnesse of my self, my witnesse is not true," much lesse if Moses bear witnesse of himselfe, (especially in a claim of Kingly power over Gods people) ought his testimony to be received.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

With more light it may be that seeming discrepancies would disappear and we should find at last that the Cherokee, in ancient times as in the historic period, were always the southern vanguard of the Iroquoian race, always primarily a mountain people, but with their flank resting upon the Ohio and its great tributaries, following the trend of the Blue ridge and the Cumberland as they slowly gave way before the pressure from the north until they were finally cut off from the parent stock by the wedge of Algonquian invasion, but always, whether in the north [ 185 ] or in the south, keeping their distinctive title among the tribes as the “people of the cave country.”
— from Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by James Mooney

They were not alarmed by the fact that Moscow had been abandoned by its inhabitants (grave as that fact seemed), but by the question how to tell the Emperor—without putting him in the terrible position of appearing ridiculous—that he had been awaiting the boyars so long in vain: that there were drunken mobs left in Moscow but no one else.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

In the development of a science, it is wrong for the same word to designate two very different things; and, if we continue to apply the term order of battle to the disposition of troops in line, it must be improper to designate certain important maneuvers by the terms oblique order of battle , concave order of battle , and it becomes necessary to use instead the terms oblique system of battle , &c. I prefer the method of designation I have adopted.
— from The Art of War by Jomini, Antoine Henri, baron de

I named to each an amount something less than the sum set down by the notary, partly as a reserve, lest any tenants holding under these leaseholders should afterwards require to be paid, and partly lest it might be supposed we were yielding to a legal claim already granted.
— from The Land-War in Ireland: A History for the Times by James Godkin

If I consent to give you my hand, and nominally the claim of a husband, in exchange for the privilege of merging Orme in Laurance, it must be upon certain solemn conditions, to the fulfilment of which your traditional honour is pledged.
— from Infelice by Augusta J. (Augusta Jane) Evans

Now, in order to be able seriously to assert the existence of this Something, either we must have acquired some knowledge of it, however slight and indistinct, and this, therefore, would prove that it cannot be unknowable, since we actually know it, and nothing then would justify us in declaring beforehand that our present knowledge of it, however little it may be, will not be extended and deepened; or else we have no knowledge, even of the minutest character, of the philosopher’s Unknowable, in which case it cannot exist for us.
— from Degeneration by Max Simon Nordau

It was this sympathetic Virginian who took Cass aside with the following generous suggestion: "If you find that you and the old gal couldn't hitch hosses, owin' to your not likin' red hair or a game leg" (it may be here recorded that Blazing Star had, for no reason whatever, attributed these unprepossessing qualities to the mysterious advertiser), "you might let ME in.
— from Found at Blazing Star by Bret Harte

As for the little lord, it must be owned that he took after his father in the matter of learning, liked marbles and play and sport best, and enjoyed marshalling the village boys, of whom he had a little court; already flogging them, and domineering over them with a fine imperious spirit that made his father laugh when he beheld it, and his mother fondly warn him.
— from Boys and Girls from Thackeray by Kate Dickinson Sweetser

[110] LXXVI Slow streamed the progress vast of human kind, Out of the primal dark I watched it wind, Like a full river gleaming towards the sun, Crested with light, but lost in mists behind.
— from Renascence: A Book of Verse by Walter Crane