Every one was sighing and moaning, every one felt sorry and grieved, and yet all wondered how it was a man could be so completely panic-stricken.
— from White Nights and Other Stories The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Volume X by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it has.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

We may also attribute to the inherited effects of use the fact of the mouth in several kinds of flat-fish being bent towards the lower surface, with the jaw bones stronger and more effective on this, the eyeless side of the head, than on the other, for the sake, as Dr. Traquair supposes, of feeding with ease on the ground.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

86 The fleet that sailed from Constantinople to Carthage, consisted of eleven hundred and thirteen ships, and the number of soldiers and mariners exceeded one hundred thousand men.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Nor did he trouble his borrowers with abstract calculations of figures, or references to ready-reckoners; his simple rule of interest being all comprised in the one golden sentence, ‘two-pence for every half-penny,’ which greatly simplified the accounts, and which, as a familiar precept, more easily acquired and retained in the memory than any known rule of arithmetic, cannot be too strongly recommended to the notice of capitalists, both large and small, and more especially of money-brokers and bill-discounters.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

[6571] the Circumcellions in Africa, with a mad cruelty made away themselves, some by fire, water, breaking their necks, and seduced others to do the like, threatening some if they did not, with a thousand such; as you may read in [6572] Austin (for there were fourscore and eleven heresies in his times, besides schisms and smaller factions) Epiphanius, Alphonsus de Castro, Danaeus, Gab, Prateolus , &c. Of prophets, enthusiasts and impostors, our Ecclesiastical stories afford many examples; of Elias and Christs, as our [6573] Eudo de stellis , a Briton in King Stephen's time, that went invisible, translated himself from one to another in a moment, fed thousands with good cheer in the wilderness, and many such; nothing so common as miracles, visions, revelations, prophecies.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

It seemed indeed as if the sullen and malignant eye of Front-de-Boeuf possessed some portion of that supposed power over his unfortunate prisoner.
— from Ivanhoe: A Romance by Walter Scott

He spoke as follows: “Sir, all my endeavors on your behalf have been unsuccessful.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Babbitt, though ordinarily his voice was the surest and most episcopal of all, was silent.
— from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Man's low idea of woman has reacted upon him; her elevation will restore him to his true dignity, as equally entitled to spiritual and moral elevation of soul and refinement of manners with herself.
— from The Education of American Girls by Anna C. (Anna Callender) Brackett

The spirit of the Method of Residues being, it is hoped, sufficiently intelligible from these examples, and the other three methods having already been so fully exemplified, we may here close our exposition of the four methods, considered as employed in the investigation of the simpler and more elementary order of the combinations of phenomena. § 6.
— from A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive by John Stuart Mill

It was Theano who, in order to parody her sister, had bethought her to caricature the "Fable of Danaë," simulating a mad ecstasy of voluptuous delight every time a golden coin penetrated her.
— from Ancient Manners; Also Known As Aphrodite by Pierre Louÿs

Was she a conscious hypocrite, deliberately playing a false part in the world, or was she a monstrous egotist, one in whom the soul of truth had so died out that she thought herself justified in everything that she did, and committed the worst acts from what she supposed to be the most excusable motives?
— from The Life of Bret Harte, with Some Account of the California Pioneers by Henry Childs Merwin

A little way below, the river becomes merged with the Grand Junction Canal, descending at the back of the Asylum by a chain of locks which recall those of Trollhatta or Banavie on a small scale, beside what seems a miniature edition of the Great Wall of China.
— from Middlesex Painted by John Fulleylove; described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff by A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope) Moncrieff

The true nature of this parasite is not yet definitely settled, although many excellent observers have occupied themselves with it.
— from Special Report on Diseases of Cattle by Dr. (Benjamin Tilghman) Woodward

Nor, again, even in the field where music and poetry meet, does music so far cover the ground, as Wagner would contend, as to make non-musical poetry a superfluity, a mere echo of what can be heard in fuller tones in the drama that is a blend of poetry and music.
— from Musical Studies by Ernest Newman

At Tunis, M. Bompain had directed their studies; but at Paris, the Nabob, anxious to give them the benefit of a Parisian education, had sent them to that smartest and most expensive of boarding-schools, the College Bourdaloue, managed by good priests who sought less to instruct their pupils than to make of them good-mannered and right-thinking men of the world, and succeeded in turning them out affectedly grave and ridiculous little prigs, disdainful of games, absolutely ignorant, without anything spontaneous or boyish about them, and of a desperate precocity.
— from The Nabob by Alphonse Daudet

Hitherto, in connection with four-component systems, the attention has been directed solely to the study of aqueous solutions of salts, and more especially of the salts which occur in sea-water, i.e. chiefly, the sulphates and chlorides of magnesium, potassium, and sodium.
— from The Phase Rule and Its Applications by Alexander Findlay