They always make their pens out of the hardest, toughest, troublesomest piece of old brass candlestick or something like that they can get their hands on; and it takes them weeks and weeks and months and months to file it out, too, because they’ve got to do it by rubbing it on the wall.
— from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

For one's being satisfied with one's own good opinion 276 and not despising it, but rejoicing in it and acquiescing in it as competent to see and decide on what is honourable, proves that reason is rooted and grounded within one, and that, to borrow the language of Democritus, one is accustomed to draw one's delights from oneself.
— from Plutarch's Morals by Plutarch

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions, But really I am neither for nor against institutions, (What indeed have I in common with them?
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The next day passed; no information: but on the day following, a young gentleman of good mien, dressed in black, rode into the town, stopped at the Red Lion Inn, and asked to see X. X.
— from What Will He Do with It? — Complete by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

The Archbishop imputes the converse of this doctrine to those who venture to deny the supreme importance of the objects of political economy, and then proceeds to demolish it by reducing it to absurd consequences.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 422, December 1850 by Various

Naturalisation of the husband includes that of his wife, and naturalisation of the father, or mother in case she is a widow, includes naturalisation of such children as have during infancy become resident in the United Kingdom at the time of their father's or mother's naturalisation (section 10).
— from International Law. A Treatise. Volume 1 (of 2) Peace. Second Edition by L. (Lassa) Oppenheim

It is a fallacy that reading strengthens the mind—it enervates it; reading sometimes stimulates the mind to original thinking, and this develops it, but reading itself is a passive exercise, because the thought of the reader is for the time being in abeyance in order that the thought of the writer may enter.
— from Architecture and Democracy by Claude Fayette Bragdon

But if this delusive impression be removed, it will be found that, notwithstanding the greatness of the force, the points to which it must be destined are so numerous and dispersed as to put it all in requisition.
— from Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 4 (of 16) by United States. Congress

"One tam Dog is bin run B'er Rabbit, tel 'e do git tire; da' Dog is bin run 'im tel him ent mos' hab no bre't' in 'e body; 'e hide 'ese'f by de crik side.
— from Nights With Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris

Dear Bahá’í Brother: Attached is a copy of a dispatch issued by Reuters in December, giving the conclusions of the persecutions in Persia.
— from The Unfolding Destiny of the British Bahá'í Community : the Messages from the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith to the Bahá'ís of the British Isles by Effendi Shoghi

the infant Dionysos is being rocked in one of these objects instead of a cradle, by a Satyr and a Nymph.
— from A Guide to the Exhibition Illustrating Greek and Roman Life by British Museum. Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities

It is very frequently used as a Round-song or roundelay, in which each person must sing a fresh verse, and when the known verses are at an end, some one extemporizes, so that every day it becomes richer in strophes.
— from The Student-Life of Germany by William Howitt

So if we turn in horror now (we may feel sad and charitable, though) from the bad, the future life will feel that horror and develop it by reaction into a reïncarnation in a body and place where we must in material life go through the very thing we hate now.
— from Letters That Have Helped Me by Julia Wharton Lewis Campbell Ver Planck Keightley