In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler.
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle

There was a dead silence as Tom's pen moved along the paper; Mrs. Tulliver looked scared, and Maggie trembled like a leaf.
— from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

You could make no discovery in reference to me that would do me the least service or give me the least pleasure.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

You must not laugh at me, darling, but it had always been a girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest.
— from The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People by Oscar Wilde

This wall was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

I remember how the world looked from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning: the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff willow bushes.
— from My Antonia by Willa Cather

At the foot of the stairs, however, she met this Lascar scoundrel of whom I have spoken, who thrust her back, and, aided by a Dane, who acts as assistant there, pushed her out into the street.
— from Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Illustrated by Arthur Conan Doyle

By CHARLES MACKAY, LL.D. AUTHOR OF “EGERIA,” “THE SALAMANDRINE,” ETC. ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS. N’en déplaise à ces fous nommés sages de Grèce, En ce monde il n’est point de parfaite sagesse; Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgré tous leurs soîns Ne diffèrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
— from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

It was particularly painful to me, on Tichatschek's account, to respond alone to the calls of the audience after almost every act; however, I had at last to submit, as my refusal would only have exposed the vocalist to fresh humiliations, for when he appeared on the stage with his colleagues without me, the loud shouts for me were almost insulting to him.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

"I know where you mean," the Lieutenant said.
— from The Alembic Plot: A Terran Empire novel by Ann Wilson

In doing so she saw her Bible, lying where she had placed it that morning, the leaves still open at the 91st Psalm.
— from The Wings of the Morning by Louis Tracy

And if you think what an effort you make to leap six feet, with the earth for a fulcrum, the dart either of a trout or a swallow, with no fulcrum but the water and air they penetrate, will seem to you, I think, greatly marvelous.
— from Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds by John Ruskin

As you say, I did not know him and I never met him, but evil tongues might give me the lie, seeing what I stood to gain.
— from In Queer Street by Fergus Hume

Then when the 'Astral' reflects only the conquered man, the still living but no more the longing, selfish personality, then the brilliant Augœides , the divine SELF, can vibrate in conscious harmony with both the poles of the human Entity—the man of matter purified, and the ever pure Spiritual Soul—and stand in the presence of the MASTER SELF, the Christos of the mystic Gnostic, blended, merged into, and one with IT for ever.
— from H. P. Blavatsky; A Great Betrayal by Alice Leighton Cleather

At a distance of a mile and a half from the city was the British camp, with its white tents; and an irregular black mass marked the low shelters of the camp followers and the enormous concourse of draught animals.
— from At the Point of the Bayonet: A Tale of the Mahratta War by G. A. (George Alfred) Henty

The tendency in recent years in biological work has been far too much to lay stress upon the curiously mathematical laws Mendel discovered, and consequently to concentrate attention upon the physical chromosomes as containing the factors which carry hereditary qualities.
— from Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future by Marie Carmichael Stopes

A fine drizzling rain was now falling, but they were too warm within to mind this light sprinkling on their shoulders.
— from L'Assommoir by Émile Zola