The dearth of great libraries, books and periodicals is one reason why the country boy makes the most of good books and articles, often reading them over and over again, while the city youth, in the midst of newspapers and libraries, sees so many books that in most instances he cares very little for them, and will often read the best literature without absorbing any of it.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden

The party now strayed onward from hall to hall of that rich gallery, pausing here and there, to look at the multitude of noble and lovely shapes, which have been dug up out of the deep grave in which old Rome lies buried.
— from The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 1 by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Courtesy is never wasted on men or Nats, at least, so a Burman tells me.
— from The Soul of a People by H. (Harold) Fielding

The Pope had been a pirate; at Bologna he had plundered and oppressed his people and sold licenses to usurers, gamblers, and prostitutes; his cruelty thinned the population; in the first year as [Pg 25] legate at Bologna he outraged two hundred maidens, wives, or widows, and a multitude of nuns; at least so Catholic historians say.
— from John Hus: A brief story of the life of a martyr by William Dallmann

I need only say that the Suez Canal is to-day an extremely profitable waterway, and that although the work was commenced and brought to completion without a single English shilling, through French enterprise and upon the judgment of French engineers, it was only a comparatively few years later when, as a matter of necessity and logical sequence, the controlling interest in the canal was purchased by the English government, which has since made of that waterway the most extensive use for purposes of peace and of war.
— from The American Type of Isthmian Canal Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the United States, June 14, 1906 by John F. (John Fairfield) Dryden

The new charter, whether it introduced any change in older methods or no, at least seems to have awakened no resistance.
— from Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2 (of 2) by Alice Stopford Green