| 1. | But thou shalt face thy fortunes, thy diseases, and surmount them all. - from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman |
| 2. | His face all at once took an expression of anger from the effort he was making to surmount his shyness. - from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy |
| 3. | The ascent is precipitous, but the path is cut into continual and short windings, which enable you to surmount the perpendicularity of the mountain. - from Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley |
| 4. | She was resolved against any sort of conversation with him, and turned away with a degree of ill-humour which she could not wholly surmount even in speaking to Mr. - from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen |
| 5. | His arm across his head thus should the hero repose thus should he also surmount his repose. - from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche |
| 6. | My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks it was those I longed to surmount all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile limits. - from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte |
| 7. | "As to that," cried d'Artagnan, after a moment of reflection, "I shall surmount it, be assured.. - from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
| 8. | Before, dark and opaque bodies had surrounded me, impervious to my touch or sight but I now found that I could wander on at liberty, with no obstacles which I could not either surmount or avoid. - from Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley |
| 9. | The word reached his ear as a wave which he no longer had the strength to surmount passed over his head. - from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
| 10. | This is dispenc't, and what surmounts the reac. - from Paradise Lost by John Milton |
| 11. | And far surmounts our labour to attain it. - from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare |
| 12. | He is always accompanied by an eagle, which either surmounts his sceptre, or sits at his feet he generally bears in his uplifted hand a sheaf of thunder-bolts, just ready to be hurled, whilst in the other he holds the lightning. - from Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E.M. Berens |
| 13. | It is the type that takes life and itself too seriously, that never surmounts the camel-stage mentioned in the first discourse, and that is obdurately sublime and earnest. - from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche |