Nature gives us, then, passions and desires suitable to our present state.
— from Pascal's Pensées by Blaise Pascal

sition of their believing the corpse to be that of the perfumery-girl—we shall now proceed as if the question of identity were settled to our perfect satisfaction.”
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

Seven independent thrones, the Saxon Heptarchy, 1301 were founded by the conquerors, and seven families, one of which has been continued, by female succession, to our present sovereign, derived their equal and sacred lineage from Woden, the god of war.
— 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

The demagogues, to curry favour with the people, drive the nobles to conspire together, either by dividing their estates, or obliging them to spend them on public services, or by banishing them, that they may confiscate the fortunes of the wealthy.
— from Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle

Dean Conybeare, in his able “Essay on Church Parties,” [48] has noticed this addition of Slang to our pulpit speech.
— from The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical and Andecdotal by John Camden Hotten

O, my dear friend, I say nothing against them regarded as the serving-men of the State; and I do think that they were certainly more serviceable than those who are living now, and better able to gratify the wishes of the State; but as to transforming those desires and not allowing them to have their way, and using the powers which they had, whether of persuasion or of force, in the improvement of their fellow citizens, which is the prime object of the truly good citizen, I do not see that in these respects they were a whit superior to our present statesmen, although I do admit that they were more clever at providing ships and walls and docks, and all that.
— from Gorgias by Plato

We are expected to stick to one predetermined subject—doubtless for fear we might wander off into the improper—and we are almost encouraged to bring our sewing.
— from The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 An Illustrated Monthly by Various

"The mere statement of these facts shows that our present system is seriously defective.
— from State of the Union Addresses by Theodore Roosevelt

She knew every turn of his features, and saw that what had once been a passing freak under some sudden thought or puzzling speculation in his work
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 22, October, 1875, to March, 1876 A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science by Various

We stated that 'Much to its credit, the parliament of Italy have before them a bill to abolish the system of apprenticing children of less than eighteen years of age to strolling trades or professions, such as mountebanks, jugglers, charlatans, rope-dancers, fortune-tellers, expounders of dreams, itinerant musicians, vocalists or instrumentalists, exhibitors of animals, and mendicants of every description, at home or abroad, under a penalty of two pounds to ten pounds for each offence, and from one to three months' imprisonment.
— from Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 718 September 29, 1877 by Various

I still can smell the sawdust, the orange peel, see the myriad of faces and hear the crack of the ring-masters' whips, the cries of the clowns and the crash of the music....
— from Melomaniacs by James Huneker

“From the camp,” they stated that “they had gone to the fleet; where they learned, that part of the seamen had perished by sickness; that others, particularly such as came from Sicily, had gone off to their own homes; and that the ships were in want of men, while those who were on board had neither received pay nor had clothing: that Eumenes and his fleet, as if driven thither by the wind, had both come and gone away, without any apparent reason; nor did the intentions of that king seem to be thoroughly settled.”
— from The History of Rome, Books 37 to the End with the Epitomes and Fragments of the Lost Books by Livy

words:—"Were a glacier composed of a solid crystalline cake of ice, fitted or moulded to the mountain bed which it occupies, like a lake tranquilly frozen, it would seem impossible to admit such a flexibility or yielding of parts as should [Pg 335] permit any comparison to a fluid or semifluid body, transmitting pressure horizontally, and whose parts might change their mutual positions so that one part should be pushed out whilst another remained behind.
— from The Glaciers of the Alps Being a narrative of excursions and ascents, an account of the origin and phenomena of glaciers and an exposition of the physical principles to which they are related by John Tyndall

Gulf Stream, temperature of Polar Sea affected by, II, 711.
— from Farthest North, Vol. II Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 by Fridtjof Nansen

With this idea in his head, Otterburn became anxious to return home, and Laxton, being somewhat tired of primeval simplicity, consented to leave the wide rolling prairies for the delights of Pall Mall.
— from Whom God Hath Joined: A Question of Marriage by Fergus Hume