The pale streaks of foam, clinging to the black rocks, whose countless peaks rise up out of the water, look like bits of rag floating and drifting on the surface of the sea.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as Hobbes; nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain, as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general; nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley teaches—nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various shapes,—as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established,—images out both past and present.
— from Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Since those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended to distress and utterly overwhelm.
— from The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

And in like manner, religion is at its best when it is most anthropomorphic; indeed, the two most spiritual religions, Buddhism and Christianity, have actually raised a man, overflowing with utterly human tenderness and pathos, to the place usually occupied only by cosmic and thundering deities.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

But it announced that it was Acacia Cottage by means of a small brass plate upon one of the gate-posts, which was sufficient indication for the sharp-sighted cabman, who dropped Mr. Audley upon the pavement before the little gate.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man?
— from The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

The difficulty or impossibility of conceiving may be subjective and conditional, and may prevent us from understanding the relation of a series of events only because some otherwise proximate {177} condition is unknown or overlooked.
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross

Raw , x, 2 , unpracticed, out of training.
— from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser

Seven Traders arrived from the fort on the Ossinaboin from the N W Companey one of which Lafrances took upon himself to speak unfavourably of our intentions &.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

It seemed infinitely pure and remote, and yet somehow good and kind, as it had to Dante when he climbed up out of hell.
— from Olive in Italy by Moray Dalton

[Pg 301] "Yes," he exclaimed, "the boy has acted straight enough, though he would have been wiser to put us on our guard instead of trusting that Nugent had abandoned the plot.
— from A Traitor's Wooing by Headon Hill

[10] Spiro Peterson Miami University Oxford, Ohio
— from The Notorious Impostor (1692); Diego Redivivus (1692) by Elkanah Settle

Did there not fall a rain of hairy locks in the suburbs of Osaka only a few days after that mountain rose up out of the water?
— from The Usurper: An Episode in Japanese History by Judith Gautier

He offered to set apart a tract for them either in the upper Bitter Root valley in Victor’s country, or the Horse Plains and Jocko River in the Pend Oreille territory, as they might prefer, and urged them to decide and agree among themselves upon one of these locations; but neither tribe was willing to abandon its wonted region, where they were accustomed to pitch their lodges, and where their dead were buried.
— from The Life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens, Volume 2 (of 2) by Hazard Stevens

Before his time the anatomy professors of the most celebrated schools both at home and abroad used one or at most two subjects to illustrate their courses of lectures, and were in the habit of demonstrating the performance of surgical operations not on human bodies but on those of lower animals.
— from The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia Volume 1 of 28 by Project Gutenberg

In the uniformity of our own space-conceiving faculty we have a pledge of the absolute and necessary uniformity (or internal agreement among themselves) of all future or possible determinations of space; because they could no otherwise become to us conceivable forms of space than by adapting themselves to the known conditions of our conceiving faculty.
— from The Collected Writing of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II by Thomas De Quincey

Amy, still sewing, said, without looking up: "One of you boys go rummage the store room for the corn popper.
— from The Rules of the Game by Stewart Edward White

So Bonny boldly picked up one of several idle trucks that lay near by, and rattled it down the gang-plank with every appearance of bustling activity.
— from Rick Dale, A Story of the Northwest Coast by Kirk Munroe