We furnish our minds as we furnish our houses—with the fancies of others, and according to the mode and age of our country; we pick up our ideas and notions in common conversation as in schools.
— 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.

There are many by-streets, almost as neutral in clean colours, and positive in dirty ones, as by-streets in London; and there is one quarter, commonly called the Five Points, which, in respect of filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles’s.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens

Our lines are now in close contact, and the fighting is incessant, with a good deal of artillery-fire.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

The foreign churchmen likewise aided in uniting sovereign, clergy, and nobility in common cause against the Saracen infidels now so firmly ensconced in the Peninsula.
— from Cathedrals of Spain by John A. (John Allyne) Gade

In the Orange Free State they are nearly twice as numerous, in Cape Colony and the Transvaal more than thrice as numerous, in Natal ten times as numerous, while in the other territories, British, German, and Portuguese, the disproportion is very much greater, possibly some four or five millions of natives against nine or ten thousand Europeans.
— from Impressions of South Africa by Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount

Our prediction [Pg 516] of the direction of social development is a prediction of his will; he will will in certain ways constant in the broad sense in which all nature is constant, constant as character and reason are constant.
— from A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution by Cora May Williams

All nature is constantly changing and progressing.
— from Strange Visitors A series of original papers, embracing philosophy, science, government, religion, poetry, art, fiction, satire, humor, narrative, and prophecy, by the spirits of Irving, Willis, Thackeray, Brontë, Richter, Byron, Humboldt, Hawthorne, Wesley, Browning, and others now dwelling in the spirit world; dictated through a clairvoyant, while in an abnormal or trance state by Henry J. Horn

About him is a distinguished gathering—dames and damsels in rich attire and languid elegance; gallants and nobles in court costume and dashing pose, jewelled hand on jewelled sword.
— from Virginia: the Old Dominion As seen from its colonial waterway, the historic river James, whose every succeeding turn reveals country replete with monuments and scenes recalling the march of history and its figures from the days of Captain John Smith to the present time by Frank W. Hutchins

The Nazis placed all Allied nationals in concentration camps and forced them, along with the other inmates of the concentration camps, to work under conditions which were set actually to exterminate them.
— from Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremburg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946, Volume 3 by Various

Her husband, she said, was apt to stay [Pg 192] out very late at night in convivial company and I might be disturbed by his noise when he came home.
— from Letters from a Son to His Self-Made Father Being the Replies to Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son by Charles Eustace Merriman

But Dona Ignacia's unresting heart had an intelligence of its own, and no inner convulsion could alter the superb dignity of mien which Nature had granted her.
— from Rezanov by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton