The duration of the hard, sharp outlines of things is a grief to him, and passing his wearisome days among the ruins of ancient Rome, he is consoled by the thought that all must one day end, by the sentiment of the grandeur of nothingness—la grandeur du rien.
— from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

There has never been any mark which, as a matter of course and of mere motion, could attach itself automatically to a shield, as is the case with the English marks of difference, e.g. the crescent of the second son or the mullet of the third.
— from A Complete Guide to Heraldry by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies

Talking Fabius will be tired before he can tell half of them; they are the subject of whole volumes, and shall (some of them) be more opportunely dilated elsewhere.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

One afternoon, after twenty minutes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other according to set rules that did not permit kicking, striking below the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese-Face, panting for breath and reeling, offered to call it quits.
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

The fabric of social life is interwoven with a multitude of delicate evasions, of small hypocrisies, of matters of tinsel sentiment; social intercourse would be impossible, if it were not so.
— from Essays of Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer

But even this would have availed little against a more deadly medium of death employed four days ago, which is generally but too fatal.”
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

That I couldn’t conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

For them Methodisses make folks believe as if they take a mug o' drink extry, an' make theirselves a bit comfortable, they'll have to go to hell for't as sure as they're born.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

No client can accuse me of desiring either his flesh or his blood.
— from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol IV. No. XX. January, 1852. by Various

Democracy, the immediate government of all by all, he rejects as too perfect for men; it requires a state so small that each citizen knows all the others, manners so simple that the business may be small and the mode of discussion easy, equality of rank and fortune so general as not to allow of the overriding of political equality by material superiority, and so forth.
— from Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2) by John Morley

Long years of practice have made you familiar with the shortest, neatest, most expeditious method of doing every household office, so that really for the greater part of the time in your house there seems to a looker-on to be nothing to do.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

Lord Daventry had indeed re-appeared on the scene; his sole attendant was one of the little girls with a big bonnet and a baby, before mentioned, who had evidently followed him to the police-station, watched him in, and then accompanied him home, staring at him as at a man of dark experiences, a man not to be lost sight of on any account, lest some new and exciting thing should befall him meanwhile.
— from Ravenshoe by Henry Kingsley

A running commentary of international criticism, fine feasts, ostensible negotiations about projects that probably no one expected would come to pass, and an undercurrent, persistent and mandatory, of demands emphatically made on one side, feebly accepted by the other while the two principals were together, and petulantly disliked [page 347] by the emperor as soon as he was alone again —such was the course of the conference.
— from Charles the Bold, Last Duke of Burgundy, 1433-1477 by Ruth Putnam

When God looked on this world, and pronounced all to be "very good"—which implies the completion of his purpose, and the perfection of his work—is it possible to conceive, that he looked only on the germs of production, on plains covered with eggs, or seas filled with spawn, or forests still buried in the capsules of seeds; on a creation utterly shapeless, lifeless, and silent, instead of the myriads of delighted existence, all enjoying the first sense of being?
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 402, April, 1849 by Various

The idea of being dragged out of his miserable concealment by wretches whose trade was that of midnight murder, without weapons or the slightest means of defence, except entreaties, which would be only their sport, and cries for help, which could never reach other ear than their own; his safety entrusted to the precarious compassion of a being associated with these felons, and whose trade of rapine and imposture must have hardened her against every human feeling—the bitterness of his emotions almost choked him.
— from Guy Mannering, Or, the Astrologer — Complete by Walter Scott

When he attended a provincial congress and had listened to the description of some local antiquity, some mound, or divisional earthbank, or semi-Saxon church, he at once strove to show the general evidence to be deduced from them, and how it bore upon the boundaries or formation of some Celtic or Saxon province or diocese, if not upon the general history of the kingdom itself....
— from Studies in Contemporary Biography by Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount