Unfortunately, however, contrary to our expectations, we never reached the proper close of this season, which had been fixed for the end of April; for already in March, owing to irregularity in the payment of salaries, the most popular members of the company, having found better employment elsewhere, tendered their resignations to the management, and the director, who was unable to raise the necessary cash, was compelled to bow to the inevitable.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

We follow because the others follow, without considering that the same feeling ought not to be equally embarrassing to all kinds of persons, and that it should attach itself more or less firmly, according as persons agree more or less with those who follow them.
— from Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims by François duc de La Rochefoucauld

Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with substances that would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thought they were out of their minds.
— from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

“I think him horrible; but everybody else thinks he is a fine man.”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

They had to wait a while, but eventually everything turned out as they desired.
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

Although the speed could not be exactly estimated, the sledge could not be going at less than forty miles an hour.
— from Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

That Titan rose to runne his daily race; But early ere the morrow next gan reare Out of the sea faire Titans deawy face, Up rose the gentle virgin from her place, And looked all about, if she might spy 295 Her loved knight to move ° his manly pace: For she had great doubt of his safety, Since late she saw him fall before his enemy.
— from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser

What is that second function called, which with this first one as a basis, etc. etc, "That which provokes the same sensations as another thing is equal to that other thing": but what is that called which makes sensations equal, which regards them as equal?—There could be no judgments if a sort of equalising process were not active within all sensations: memory is only possible by means of the underscoring of all that has already been experienced and learned.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

6, 7—peace shall, at some future period, be extended even to the irrational creation, and the strife which has come upon earth by the fall, shall entirely cease from it.
— from Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, Vol. 1 by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

Lord Winterbourne , all his life, had been a man of guile; he was so long experienced in it, that dissimulation became easy enough to him, when he was not startled or thrown suddenly off his guard.
— from The Athelings; or, the Three Gifts. Complete by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

This marrying of a girl "of the people"—forty years distant from him and yet in her land of boy-and-girl—which had been easy enough to do in theory, in his study-chair, was a "bit of a pull" in actual execution.
— from Daisy Herself by Will E. Ingersoll

The chorus, retained in this edition, is the most common and popular; but Mrs Brown's copy bears a yet different burden, beginning thus:— There were twa sisters sat in a bour, Edinborough, Edinborough; There were twa sisters sat in a bour, Stirling for aye; There were twa sisters sat in a bour, There cam a knight to be their wooer, Bonny St Johnston stands upon Tay.
— from Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Volume 3 (of 3) Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads, Collected in the Southern Counties of Scotland; with a Few of Modern Date, Founded Upon Local Tradition by Walter Scott

It was fortified by earthworks, except the cliff above the river, which was set with palisades and the principal dwellings of the fort.
— from The Story of Tonty by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

She felt as if she had seen something in his eyes and acknowledged it in her own, as if she had inadvertently shown him her heart in that glance, and that heart of hers was leaping and bounding with an uncontrollable joy, while her conscience sought by every effort to get it in control.
— from The Enchanted Barn by Grace Livingston Hill

Heavenly charity will, we trust, be everywhere equal to the tasks laid upon her.
— from The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, January 1885, No. 4 by Chautauqua Institution

As has been elsewhere explained, the condition of the South did not enable the Confederacy to meet the enemy on the water except at great odds.
— from The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 2 by Jefferson Davis

"Here, too, we have the clear exegetical insight, the lucid expository style, the chastened but effective eloquence, the high ethical standpoint, which secured for the earlier series a well-nigh unanimous award of commendation."— Academy.
— from Our Journey to the Hebrides by Joseph Pennell