All the systems of morals which address themselves with a view to their "happiness," as it is called—what else are they but suggestions for behaviour adapted to the degree of DANGER from themselves in which the individuals live; recipes for their passions, their good and bad propensities, insofar as such have the Will to Power and would like to play the master; small and great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque and absurd in their form—because they address themselves to "all," because they generalize where generalization is not authorized; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all of them flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but rather endurable only, and sometimes even seductive, when they are over-spiced and begin to smell dangerously, especially of "the other world."
— from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Monks drew the little packet from his breast, where he had hurriedly thrust it; and tying it to a leaden weight, which had formed a part of some pulley, and was lying on the floor, dropped it into the stream.
— from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

These were Nature--pure and anarchic as the conservative Christian anarchist saw Nature--active, vibrating, mostly unconscious, and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first glimpse one caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning, of the Polish Jew at the accidental railway station, in all his weird horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his candle and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin in the station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended.
— from Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy

It was rather late; he had pushed away all the books, and was looking at the fire with his hands clasped behind his head in forgetfulness of everything except the construction of a new controlling experiment, when Rosamond, who had left the piano and was leaning back in her chair watching him, said— "Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house already.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

But she becomes, in spite of her protests, "another who looks divine on a horse."
— from Etiquette by Emily Post

They paused and were looking doubtfully at one another, when another shot came crashing through an upstairs window.
— from My Antonia by Willa Cather

And so the procession of exhibiting managers talking bad French, and of exhibited Frenchmen talking bad English, passed on; all but good old Elkanah Ogden—God bless him!—who happened to have come there with the governor's party, and who loitered a minute to talk with Sally Eaton about me.
— from If, Yes and Perhaps Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact by Edward Everett Hale

The King despatched a courier to Paris, and wrote letters himself to Vienna, by the Queen’s bedside; and part of the rejoicings ordered took place in the capital.
— from Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, Complete Being the Historic Memoirs of Madam Campan, First Lady in Waiting to the Queen by Mme. (Jeanne-Louise-Henriette) Campan

A solution of pure soda, and another of pure ammonia, were likewise prepared, of such strengths that a measure of either should be exactly neutralized by a measure of the prepared sulphuric acid.
— from Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 by Michael Faraday

The old Roman road, denominated Ikenield-street, that extends from Southampton to Tyremouth, enters this parish near the observatory in Ladywood-lane, crosses the road to Dudley at the Sand Pits, and proceeding along Warstone-lane, leaves the parish in Hockley-brook; but is distinctly to be seen at the distance of five miles, both in Sutton park and on the Coldfield, in perfect repair, as when the Romans left it.
— from A Description of Modern Birmingham Whereunto Are Annexed Observations Made during an Excursion Round the Town, in the Summer of 1818, Including Warwick and Leamington by Charles Pye

“I think there is material for a pleasant half-gossiping sort of paper on social Italy—‘Life in Italian Cities,’—those strange wildernesses where rare plants and weeds live together on a pleasant equality, and where you may find the cowslip under a glass and the cactus on a dunghill.
— from Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. I by Charles James Lever

Onward we went, our old engine puffing and wheezing like a heavy horse, for by this time the engines on Southern railroads began to show the need of the mechanics who had been driven north by the war.
— from Fifteen Months in Dixie; Or, My Personal Experience in Rebel Prisons by William W. Day

"The assault upon the Jap-occupied Solomons," he went on presently, "will be a two part affair with land, sea, and air forces cooperating throughout.
— from Dave Dawson on Guadalcanal by Robert Sidney Bowen

The name "Providence" apparently was less favored than the traditional Virginia style of referring to the seat of county government.
— from The Fairfax County Courthouse by Ruby Waldeck

"And they put a whole lot of white damp into a mine.
— from The Boy With the U.S. Miners by Francis Rolt-Wheeler