My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.
— from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

But precisely through its pure objectivity because it stands quite beyond the subjective antitheses of pity and cruelty, this unpitying type of struggle, as a whole, rests on the presupposition of a unity and a community of the parties never elsewhere so severely and constantly maintained.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

35 The dark in soul see in the universe their own shadow; the shattered spirit can only reflect external beauty, in form as untrue and broken as itself.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

GUIs (graphical user interfaces) like Windows and Macintosh have hastened the process (and indeed it's no secret that it was Microsoft's marketing strategy to use their operating system to make computers easy to use for the average person).
— from Entretiens / Interviews / Entrevistas by Marie Lebert

Although he obliged persons of fortune, both male and female, to give up their slaves, and they received their manumission at once, yet he kept them together under their own standard, unmixed with soldiers who were better born, and armed likewise after different fashion.
— from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete by Suetonius

He must shew a strange inclination to deny evident matter of fact, when it agrees not with his hypothesis, who will not allow, that the beginning of Rome and Venice were by the uniting together of several men free and independent one of another, amongst whom there was no natural superiority or subjection.
— from Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

Give the Philippine people the independence they of right ought to have, instead of secretly hoping to unload them on somebody else, through the medium of your next great war.
— from The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 by James H. (James Henderson) Blount

“Ah, please you sir, it hath no direction from here; by reason that the road lieth not straight, but turneth evermore; wherefore the direction of its place abideth not, but is some time under the one sky and anon under another, whereso if ye be minded that it is in the east, and wend thitherward, ye shall observe that the way of the road doth yet again turn upon itself by the space of half a circle, and this marvel happing again and yet again and still again, it will grieve you that you had thought by vanities of the mind to thwart and bring to naught the will of Him that giveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth Him, and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castles and all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving the places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning His creatures that where He will He will, and where He will not He—” “Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right, give us a rest; never mind about the direction, hang the direction—I beg pardon, I beg a thousand pardons, I am not well to-day; pay no attention when I soliloquize, it is an old habit, an old, bad habit, and hard to get rid of when one’s digestion is all disordered with eating food that was raised forever and ever before he was born; good land!
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

Then the whole body of savages appeared swarming over the fields, so confident of success that they neglected their usual tactics of surprise.
— from France and England in North America, Part V: Count Frontenac, New France, Louis XIV by Francis Parkman

During the week ending with [128] that Saturday evening upon which the disaster occurred the rolling stock of the road had been heavily taxed, not only to accommodate the usual tide of summer travel, then at its full flood, but also those attending a military muster and two large camp-meetings upon its line.
— from Notes on Railroad Accidents by Charles Francis Adams

Thus when, in October 1554, another band of three hundred French privateers swooped down upon the unfortunate town of St. Jago de Cuba, they were able to hold it for thirty days, and plundered it to the value of 80,000 pieces of eight.
— from The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century by Clarence Henry Haring

In the first place, he was on what is sometimes styled a “savage island”—an island that lay far out of the usual track of ships, that had only been discovered a little more than a year at that time, and was inhabited by a blood-thirsty, savage, cruel, and ignorant race of human beings, who had renounced idolatry and embraced Christianity only a few months before.
— from Jarwin and Cuffy by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne

They obtained the unattractive title of sea-coffins, from the number of them which had been lost with all hands.
— from The Three Midshipmen by William Henry Giles Kingston

In that vast heap, no doubt many of the storming party found a grave, where they still lie buried, under tons upon tons of shattered masonry.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 67, No. 411, January 1850 by Various

And now the world will have to pause a little, and take up that other side of the problem, and in right earnest strive for some solution of that.
— from Past and Present Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. by Thomas Carlyle

No wonder that the Asiki remained a secret and hidden people when their frontier was protected by such a marsh as this upon the one side and, as he understood, by impassable mountains upon the other.
— from A Yellow God: An Idol of Africa by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard

“They do, auntie—it’s the machine that tears up the old shreds at the mills—and saying grandpa ought to have been made Baron Shoddy.”
— from Sir Hilton's Sin by George Manville Fenn