For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.
— from Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And Talbot, the gray veteran, delineates his dark, unbelieving, indomitable soul, by a few slight but expressive touches: he sternly passes down to the land, as he thinks, of utter nothingness, contemptuous even of the fate that destroys him, and 'On the soil of France he sleeps, as does A hero on the shield he would not quit.'
— from The Life of Friedrich Schiller Comprehending an Examination of His Works by Thomas Carlyle