For the ordinary mind is so perfectly at home in the narrow circle of its own ideas and way of grasping things that no one can control it in that circle; its capacities always remain true to their original purpose, namely, to look after the service of the will; therefore it applies itself unceasingly to this end without ever going beyond it.
— from Essays of Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer

return Footnote 3: Congreve's Mourning Bride was first acted in 1697; Rowe's Tamerlane (with a hero planned in complement to William III) in 1702; Rowe's Ulysses in 1706; Edmund Smith's Phædra and Hippolitus in 1707.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

Of the vast numbers of these MS. books in the libraries of Patan and Jaisalmer, many are of the most remote antiquity, and in a character no longer understood by their possessors, or only by the supreme pontiff and his initiated librarians.
— from Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, v. 1 of 3 or the Central and Western Rajput States of India by James Tod

Durn me, but I took a piece of his hide from one of his skinnin' posts an' had it made into a pocket-book.
— from Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker

It is necessary to show whence we hold this surprising prerogative and how it comes that we can see certain relations in things which the examination of these things cannot reveal to us.
— from The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Émile Durkheim

CHAPTER 48 P opular rumour concerning the single gentleman and his errand, travelling from mouth to mouth, and waxing stronger in the marvellous as it was bandied about—for your popular rumour, unlike the rolling stone of the proverb, is one which gathers a deal of moss in its wanderings up and down—occasioned his dismounting at the inn-door to be looked upon as an exciting and attractive spectacle, which could scarcely be enough admired; and drew together a large concourse of idlers, who having recently been, as it were, thrown out of employment by the closing of the wax-work and the completion of the nuptial ceremonies, considered his arrival as little else than a special providence, and hailed it with demonstrations of the liveliest joy.
— from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

There was a pathetic expression of sorrow, prayer, and hope in it.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

The next morning when they went to hunt they met the Sultan in the same place, and he inquired what advice their sister had given.
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang

Ursula was much more carefully dressed, but she was self-conscious, always falling into depths of admiration of somebody else, and modelling herself upon this other, and so producing a hopeless incongruity.
— from The Rainbow by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

She put a head in at my tent last night, and ‘Listen, MacCailein,’ said she, ‘and keep on high roads,’ said she, ‘and Inverlochy’s a perilous place,’ said she, ‘and I’d be wae to see the heather above the gall.’
— from John Splendid: The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn by Neil Munro

There was scarce a monument in the place which had not suffered from ruthless violence, for at that time or not long before, the choristers made a playground of the venerable abbey, and the Westminster scholars played at hockey in the cloisters.”
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 15, Nos. 85-90, April 1872-September 1872 A Monthly Magazine by Various

"I could have almost wished I had not been so precipitate, as here is a young volunteer who will accompany me."
— from The Sylph, Volume I and II by Cavendish, Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire

The knot being untied, the Old Sailor took from the handkerchief a very small parcel in silver paper, and handed it to Joshua in perfect silence.
— from Joshua Marvel by B. L. (Benjamin Leopold) Farjeon

If we are discovered, we shall be sentenced to the same punishment as he is, as receivers, and you too.
— from The Mysteries of Paris, Volume 4 of 6 by Eugène Sue

She pointed a hand in the direction she supposed the girl to be.
— from The Moon Rock by Arthur J. (Arthur John) Rees

He turned to me with that horrible trick of his of commenting upon Mills as though that quiet man whom I admired, whom I trusted, and for whom I had already something resembling affection had been as much of a dummy as that other one lurking in the shadows, pitiful and headless in its attitude of alarmed chastity.
— from The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes by Joseph Conrad

Therefore I regard this paragraph, p. 223-4, as a specimen of admirable special pleading ad hominem in the Court of eristic Logic; but I condemn it as a wilful resignation or temporary self-deposition of the reason.
— from The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As this was a hand-written thesis, the spelling, punctuation and hyphenation is very inconsistent.
— from On Sulphonfluoresceïn and Some of Its Derivatives by C. W. (Charles Willard) Hayes