She desireth not to receive praise for herself or her own, but longeth that God be blessed in all His gifts, who out of unmingled love bestoweth all things."
— from The Imitation of Christ by à Kempis Thomas

e laid her head upon her father's breast, as she had laid his poor head on her own breast, long, long ago.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

If Pierre Bon-Bon had his failings—and what great man has not a thousand?—if Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, had his failings, they were failings of very little importance—faults indeed which, in other tempers, have often been looked upon rather in the light of virtues.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

Don’t you see how our bad luck has worked on me?
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner

Help our brother, Lord!”
— from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Future abundance and male offspring were prognosticated when she had been conducted to her husband’s house, by seating her on the hide of a red bull and placing upon her lap the son of a woman who had only borne living male children.
— from A History of Sanskrit Literature by Arthur Anthony Macdonell

His brother John was in as bad a case, for he was quite out, and had only begged leave of his master, the biscuit-maker, to lodge in an outhouse belonging to his workhouse, where he only lay upon straw, with some biscuit-sacks, or bread-sacks, as they called them, laid upon it, and some of the same sacks to cover him.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London by Daniel Defoe

Every one about her seemed good, and she said to herself that Rome, if she had only been less ignorant, would have been full of beauty: its sadness would have been winged with hope.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

The hermit looked at the heap of bones lying before him, and uttered some words which I well remember.
— from Folk-Tales of Bengal by Lal Behari Day

She would have been less than woman, had the possession of these things failed to meet some need,—some instinct, deep within, which her old, bare life had daily mortified.
— from The Window-Gazer by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

"You have put us here on barren land where we can only live by raising stock.
— from The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop by Hamlin Garland

And you know, lastly, that the observance of this common law of righteousness, commending itself to all the pure instincts of men, and fruitful in their temporal good, is by the religious writers of every nation, and chiefly in this venerated Scripture of ours, connected with some distinct hope of better life, and righteousness, to come.
— from Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work by John Ruskin

[pg 160] practice of churning it, without salt, into huge oblong balls, large as the nave of a wheel, which naturally soon turn rancid.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 29, August, 1873 by Various

Some were beheaded; some were broken on the wheel, and then left to die in horrible agonies; many were buried alive, their heads only being left above the ground.
— from The Boys' Book of Famous Rulers by Lydia Hoyt Farmer

The Sandaracurgium is a mountain hollowed out by large trenches made by workmen in the process of mining.
— from The Geography of Strabo, Volume 2 (of 3) Literally Translated, with Notes by Strabo

On one occasion, however, a shell was thrown into the lines of the 43d, who had since the attack occupied a part of the general bivouack, and which, falling into a hut occupied by Lieutenant Darcy of that regiment, while he lay asleep, carried off both his legs as it fell.
— from Twenty-Five Years in the Rifle Brigade by William Surtees

We prefer to look after our little domestic heroine, our brave little Cap, who, when women have their rights, shall be a lieutenant-colonel herself.
— from Capitola the Madcap by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

But Kate Glendinning noticed this—that as they drew near to the dried-up waste that had once been Loch Heimra, and as they were passing the tumbled-down ruins of the ancient stronghold, he pretended that he did not see anything.
— from Donald Ross of Heimra (Volume 2 of 3) by William Black