The difference between the great house with twenty to fifty guest rooms, all numbered like the rooms in a hotel, and the house of ordinary good size with from four to six guest rooms, or the farmhouse or small cottage which has but one "best" spare chamber, with perhaps a "man's room" on the ground floor, is much the same as the difference between the elaborate wedding and the simplest—one merely of degree and not of kind.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post

I knew it was my own doing, and no one else’s; but I was too miserable to repent.
— from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

She was a specialist in the matter of deputations, and no one knew better than she how to manage them, and put them in the way they should go.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

Among Desgenais's companions were several young men of distinction, a number of artists.
— from The Confession of a Child of the Century by Alfred de Musset

A matter of discovery and not of inheritance, that very inferiority of the title makes the faculty still more precious, lays the possessor under a lifelong obligation to remain worthy of his great fortune.
— from Notes on My Books by Joseph Conrad

It is true that heinous and appalling crimes are less frequent;—but every kind of social, domestic, political, and commercial intrigue grows more into vogue: human ingenuity is more continually on the rack to discover the means of defrauding a neighbour or cheating the world;—the sacred name of religion is called in to aid and further the nefarious devices of the schemer;—hypocrisy is the cloak which conceals modern acts of turpitude, as dark nights were trusted to for the concealment of the bloody deeds of old: mere brute force is now less frequently resorted to; but the refinements of education or the exercise of duplicity are the engines chiefly used for purposes of plunder.
— from The Mysteries of London, v. 1/4 by George W. M. (George William MacArthur) Reynolds

Then this man of deeds and not of words clambered into the sleigh and drew up the windows, hiding his head as he drove through his own village, where every man was dependent for life and being on his charity.
— from The Sowers by Henry Seton Merriman

Every attempt to bring him to reason, to show that the men in question spent their money on drink and not on the preachers, to secure a patient hearing for the gracious message, was met only with violent abuse directed against myself.
— from The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Proverbs by Robert F. (Robert Forman) Horton

Only from the land may one draw a note of warning—on shore there are visible signs of warfare.
— from Merchantmen-at-arms : the British merchants' service in the war by David W. (David William) Bone

It is these three transformations—the abandonment of the old abstract notions and the testing of democracy by its results, the expansion of its application over the entire population, and the invention and development of representative government—it is these three changes that make our democracy a new order of society, new in its problems, its menaces, its solutions.
— from The Soul of Democracy The Philosophy of the World War in Relation to Human Liberty by Edward Howard Griggs

The difficulty, however, remains, that whilst the intellectual class has no wish to offend either those who believe in the infallibility of the Pope, or those who believe in the infallibility of the author of Genesis, it is compelled to conduct its own investigations as if those infallibilities were matters of doubt and not of certainty.
— from The Intellectual Life by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

horse all the time with the reins half tight, except [71] when he wishes to correct a false movement, or determine a new one.
— from New Method of Horsemanship Including the Breaking and Training of Horses, with Instructions for Obtaining a Good Seat. by François Baucher