From time to time, however, in a fit of absentmindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life.
— from Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic by Henri Bergson

To proceed was almost hopeless, and we were forced to rest upon some timber and mark our future course between piles oozing with turpentine.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 29, August, 1873 by Various

One of them spoke of the utter impossiblity of making a railway upon so treacherous a material as Chat Moss, which was declared to be an immense mass of pulp, and nothing else.
— from Lives of the Engineers The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson by Samuel Smiles

There are many forms capable of realisation under surface tension, and many of them doubtless to be recognised among organisms, which we cannot touch upon in this elementary account.
— from On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

That pedestal, destined to remain unfilled, stood there, a monument of disappointed ambition.
— from Two Years on Trek: Being Some Account of the Royal Sussex Regiment in South Africa by Louis Eugène Du Moulin