The Abbé Sicard speaks of Sister Simplice in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

The instincts of the herd tend to a stationary state of society; they merely preserve.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and II by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
— from Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) by William Wordsworth

Dated 1783, they are strongly suggestive of Sheffield origin.
— from Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 by Peter C. Welsh

They ran like this: FAIRLY CERTAIN (1) Place where there are several sets of stairs; one that matters distinguished by having thirty-nine steps.
— from The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

They are sad spoilers of sport,—tale-bearers, envious narrow-minded people; making mischief between man and wife.
— from Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray

All the nations which take, not any particular man, but man himself, as the object of their researches and their imitations, are tending in the end to a similar state of society, like these travellers converging to the central plot of the forest.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville

By this means I made the Breadth of the Image pt to be forty times, and sometimes sixty or seventy times less than its Length.
— from Opticks Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light by Isaac Newton

at the end of each soul-and-body wracking stroke was all that was said, but the ’tween-teethed grimness of its utterance was more potent as a verbal scourge than a steady stream of sulphurous curses.
— from Down the Columbia by Lewis R. (Lewis Ransome) Freeman

The lintel has some coats of arms; and there are seven statues of saints in each jamb; and below them were subjects enclosed within quatrefoils, all of which have been destroyed.
— from Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain by George Edmund Street

About the beginning of October Hood cut loose from his communications, abandoning every trustworthy and secure source of supply and, leaving his enemy in overwhelming force in his rear, moved northward.
— from The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2) A Narrative and Critical History by George Cary Eggleston

There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and swift scurrying of stewards.
— from Jaffery by William John Locke

There are still survivals of serfdom in parts of eastern Europe.
— from A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. by Carlton J. H. (Carlton Joseph Huntley) Hayes

The census of the Central Provinces was imperfect enough, but that of the Northwest was the second that had been taken there, and showed signs of scientific arrangement and great care.
— from Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7 by Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir