But if you plod along, for half an hour, over this soft, easy carpet—giving way at every step, yielding the more the harder you press,—you’ll find it rather wearisome work, and be glad enough to come to a bit of good, firm rock, that won’t budge an inch whether you stand, walk, or stamp upon it; and, though it be hard as the nether millstone, you’ll find it the easier footing after all.’
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Mr. Lock's Account of Wit, with this short Explanation, comprehends most of the Species of Wit, as Metaphors, Similitudes, Allegories, Ænigmas, Mottos, Parables, Fables, Dreams, Visions, dramatick Writings, Burlesque, and all the Methods of Allusion: As there are many other Pieces of Wit, (how remote soever they may appear at first sight, from the foregoing Description) which upon Examination will be found to agree with it.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

As the portion of this story given here has in various forms circulated orally in Sussexville, she has consented to my use of her name, on condition that I make it distinctly known that she emphatically contradicts every detail of Plattner's account of her husband's last moments.
— from The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

At this saying, Ella conjectured that some of his sons were yet alive, and bade that the executioners should stop and the vipers be removed.
— from The Danish History, Books I-IX by Grammaticus Saxo

In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
— from Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville

The analogy between the legislator and the craftsman on which Plato insists, breaks down because the legislator is dealing with men like himself, men who can to some extent conceive their own end in life and cannot be treated merely as means to the end of the legislator.
— from Politics: A Treatise on Government by Aristotle

After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron clamps.
— from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

He is happy—and he will still be happy for many long, long years amid his reckless companions; if the time should ever come of which you speak, most worshipful lady, even then he will care no more for Ann, bloomless and faded, than for the threadbare bravery in which he once arrayed himself.
— from Margery (Gred): A Tale Of Old Nuremberg — Complete by Georg Ebers

'While the king is on his march, the officer who is before him on the same elephant cries from time to time, with a loud voice, "Behold the great monarch, the potent and redoubtable Sultan of the Indies, whose palace is covered with a hundred thousand rubies, and who possesses twenty thousand crowns of diamonds."
— from Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights by E. Dixon

The silent, stolid action of the one country and the confused bustle of the other were the strongly evident contrasts.
— from The War in the East: Japan, China, and Corea by Trumbull White

When that opinion is backed by documentary proof that from one village thirty persons, from another fifty, from another the whole population, were displaced, though of course we cannot say that such displacement was general, we can say that it was not unknown, and that if contemporaries were guilty of exaggeration (as they probably were), their exaggeration took the form not of inventing extreme cases, but of suggesting that such extreme cases were the rule.
— from The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century by R. H. (Richard Henry) Tawney

And I read the scrap entitled— CHAIRLEY BURKE
— from The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley — Volume 10 by James Whitcomb Riley

On this subject everybody can bring forth a quotation, not only from the philosophers, who are a cold, heartless tribe, but from tender, gentle, or sentimental poets.
— from All Things are Possible by Lev Shestov

The second essay contains the psychology of conscience: this is not, as you may believe, "the voice of God in man"; it is the instinct of cruelty, which turns inwards once it is unable to discharge itself outwardly.
— from Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Our old wide siding had been laid directly on the bare timbers, the studding; every crevice under the windows, every crack in the plaster, was a short circuit with zero.
— from Dwellers in Arcady: The Story of an Abandoned Farm by Albert Bigelow Paine