Everyone got up, moved about, and began talking.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

For if vicious propensity is, as it were, a disease of the soul like bodily sickness, even as we account the sick in body by no means deserving of hate, but rather of pity, so, and much more, should they be pitied whose minds are assailed by wickedness, which is more frightful than any sickness.'
— from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

But, poor fellow!’ added he, with a sentimental sigh—‘his heart’s broken—that’s the truth of it—and his head’s—’ ‘Will you be silent now ?’ cried I, starting up, and eyeing the fellow so fiercely that my mother, thinking I meant to inflict some grievous bodily injury, laid her hand on my arm, and besought me to let him alone, and he walked leisurely out, with his hands in his pockets, singing provokingly—‘Shall I, because a woman’s fair,’ &c. ‘I’m not going to defile my fingers with him,’ said I, in answer to the maternal intercession.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Can man be a free moral agent, and be free from the duties inherent therein?
— from Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation Including Some Strictures Upon the Theories of Rev. Henry L. Mansel and Mr. Herbert Spencer by Jesse Henry Jones

His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

But since the imagination takes less lofty flights and every man's thoughts are centred in himself, moralists are alarmed by this idea of self-sacrifice, and they no longer venture to present it to the human mind.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville

These securities were originally introduced for the encouragement of trade, by providing a sure and speedy remedy for the recovery of debts between merchants, and afterwards became common assurances, but have now become obsolete.
— from The Devil is an Ass by Ben Jonson

Miss M., as a belle, will, perhaps, take the liberty of telling some ten or twelve of her most devoted admirers where she may be seen on the evening of your ball, and, though strangers, they will, one after another, bow over your hand.
— from The Ladies' Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society by Florence Hartley

In the year 1471, [45] the 11th of Edward IV., Thomas, the bastard Fawconbridge, having assembled a riotous company of shipmen and other in Essex and Kent, came to London with a great navy of ships, near to the Tower; whereupon the mayor and aldermen, by consent of a common council, fortified all along the Thames side, from Baynard’s castle to the Tower, with armed men, guns, and other instruments of war, to resist the invasion of the mariners, whereby the Thames side was safely preserved and kept by the aldermen and other citizens that assembled thither in great numbers.
— from The Survey of London by John Stow

Accordingly, on the 6th of April, I issued a general order, limiting the use of the railroad-cars to transporting only the essential articles of food, ammunition, and supplies for the army proper, forbidding any further issues to citizens, and cutting off all civil traffic; requiring the commanders of posts within thirty miles of Nashville to haul out their own stores in wagons; requiring all troops destined for the front to march, and all beef-cattle to be driven on their own legs.
— from Project Gutenberg Edition of The Memoirs of Four Civil War Generals by John Alexander Logan

Believing in this, I can see no improbability (but from analogy of domestic animals a strong probability) that variations leading to beauty must often have occurred in the males alone, and been transmitted to that sex alone.
— from More Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 2 A Record of His Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters by Charles Darwin

By that post where you are standing a mule was cut in two by a fragment of the burst machinery, and a bit of the chimney-stove in that first-floor window of the coffee-house, killed a negro who was cleaning knives in the top-room!”
— from Roundabout Papers by William Makepeace Thackeray

The people were civil beyond measure, and a bed was made up for me in a back parlour, into which I sank half starved, and very completely tired.
— from Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red men by Mrs. (Anna) Jameson

My dear little foolish child, I am not the Law; I am only its minister, and am bound, under oath, to perform its functions faithfully," said Mr. Fielding, opening his eyes wide with astonishment at May's strange proposition.
— from May Brooke by Anna Hanson Dorsey

With nitrate of cobalt on charcoal the finely powdered mineral assumes a blue color.
— from A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe Being A Graduated Course Of Analysis For The Use Of Students And All Those Engaged In The Examination Of Metallic Combinations by Anonymous

And while the more active among business men run into this sort of danger, those less exposed to it still do little or nothing to give themselves sound, vigorous bodies, so as to gain consequent energy and health, and so they go through life far less efficient and useful men than they might have been.
— from How to Get Strong and How to Stay So by William Blaikie

The ruins of these, or of subsequent monasteries, remain to-day brooding over a few Tudor cottages and hamlets, with a mill and a bakery and an inn or two to sustain life in the occasional undergraduate who lazes by in his canoe.
— from An American at Oxford by John Corbin

The Romanists, on the contrary, wore generally a look of stolid indifference, or made an abject bow.
— from The Golden Grasshopper: A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham by William Henry Giles Kingston