As a man who had seen something of life, and neither a fool nor an invalid, he had no faith in medicine, and in his heart was furious at the whole farce, specially as he was perhaps the only one who fully comprehended the cause of Kitty’s illness.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

''T is no base weed—no planted tree, Nor a seedling of last Autumn; Nor a sapling planted at Beltain; 7 Wide, wide around were spread its lofty branches— But the topmost bough is lowly laid!
— from The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

Lyell has shown that it is hardly possible to resist the evidence on this head in the case of the several tertiary stages; and every year tends to fill up the blanks between them, and to make the percentage system of lost and new forms more gradual.
— from On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin

He had nicknamed Samoylenko “the tarantula,” his orderly “the drake,” and was in ecstasies when on one occasion Von Koren spoke of Laevsky and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna as “Japanese monkeys.”
— from The Duel and Other Stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

They wished to abolish the whole system of logic and natural philosophy, like Aristo of Chios, and thought that men should study nothing but ethics; and what some people assert of Socrates was described by Diocles as a characteristic of Diogenes, for he said that his doctrine was, that a man ought to investigate— Only the good and ill that taketh place Within our houses.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

It is true that, if you can clamber and get to the top of a staircase without using the steps, you will more easily gain them in descending; but certainly, if you begin with the lowest you will with more ease ascend to the top; and I would therefore offer it to the consideration of those who superintend the education of our youth, whether, since many of those who begin with the Latin quit the same after spending some years without having made any great proficiency, and what they have learnt becomes almost useless, so that their time has been lost, it would not have been better to have begun with the French, proceeding to the Italian, etc.; for, tho', after spending the same time, they should quit the study of languages and never arrive at the Latin, they would, however, have acquired another tongue or two, that, being in modern use, might be serviceable to them in common life.
— from Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

"Four great stages of literary and national development may be pointed to as intervening (in the fifteen hundred years) between the great sage and the age called that of the Sung-Ju," 3 from the tenth to the fourteenth century, in which the Confucian system received its modern form.
— from The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji by William Elliot Griffis

In the course of my stumbling upstairs, I fancied I heard a pleasant sound of laughter; and not the laughter of an attorney or barrister, or attorney’s clerk or barrister’s clerk, but of two or three merry girls.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Edas, son of Atli, spoke of love, and Nesta the fair drew close to his breast.
— from Legends of Longdendale Being a series of tales founded upon the folk-lore of Longdendale Valley and its neighbourhood by Thomas C. (Thomas Cooke) Middleton

Then after a pause he added, “I suppose they’ll miss us sooner or later, and no doubt they can get it open; but it may take some little time.”
— from The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

If he was sent out late at night, perhaps to get milk or kerosene, he would pray in feverish fervor to dear God.
— from The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein by Alfred Lichtenstein

310] "God did so punish the realm," said Sir Thomas Smith again, "with quartan agues, and with such other long and new sicknesses, that in the last two years of the reign of Queen Mary, so many of her subjects was made away, what with the execution of sword and fire, what by sicknesses, that the third part of the men of England were consumed."
— from The Reign of Mary Tudor by James Anthony Froude

They aggregated themselves, eventually, into a federal union—a political nationality founded on 'the corner stone' of liberty, and not of slavery.
— from The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 Devoted to Literature and National Policy by Various

And they had learned from a whaler that some medals and a cross of St. Louis had been found in the hands of some savages of Louisiade and New Caledonia.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne

The secrets of life are not shown except to —— and likeness.
— from English Synonyms and Antonyms With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions by James Champlin Fernald

But the thing that embittered me most was that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiated and fled from me as though I was some sort of leper, and not even have taken a chance or so, to give me a good-bye.
— from Tono-Bungay by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells