Sense, art, religion, society, express nature exuberantly and in symbols long before science is added to represent, by a different abstraction, the mechanism which nature contains.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

John's Brook, which flows into the Au Sable near the farmhouse at which we stayed, bears wild marks of this desolating freshet; indeed, one can scarcely credit the fact that the pretty little stream and smoothly purling river could ever have met in such desperate conflict as is evidenced by the scars and rifts still existing near their confluence.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 Devoted To Literature And National Policy by Various

The men average perhaps five feet three or four inches in height, have broad flat faces, prominent cheek bones, small and rather sunken eyes, no beards, long, lank, black hair, small hands and feet, very slender limbs, and a tendency to enlargement and protrusion of the abdomen.
— from Tent Life in Siberia A New Account of an Old Undertaking; Adventures among the Koraks and Other Tribes In Kamchatka and Northern Asia by George Kennan

My Dear Malthe, We two are friends, are we not, and I think we shall always remain so, even now that fate has severed our ways?
— from The Dangerous Age: Letters and Fragments from a Woman's Diary by Karin Michaëlis