The chief difficulty of finding a universally applicable theory of the causes of pleasures and pains is easily explained.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

In going about the white man afterward found the silver piece and put it [ 351 ] into his pocket and has prized it ever since.
— from Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by James Mooney

After dinner alone, my Lady told me, with the prettiest kind of doubtfullnesse, whether it would be fit for her with respect to Creed to do it, that is, in the world, that Creed had broke his desire to her of being a servant to Mrs. Betty Pickering, and placed it upon encouragement which he had from some discourse of her ladyship, commending of her virtues to him, which, poor lady, she meant most innocently.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun-dial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porter sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell.
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

My purpose at present is a very different one indeed.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe

every man ingaged either in hunting or Collecting & packing the meat to Camp 5th Day Dispatched one of the party our Interpeter & 2 french men with the 3 horses loaded with the best of the meat to the fort 44 miles Distant, the remaining meat I had packed on the 2 Slays & drawn down to the next point about 3 miles below, at this place I had all the meat Collected which was killed yesterday & had escaped the wolves, Raven & Magpie, (which are verry noumerous about this Place) and put into a close pen made of logs to secure it from the wolves & birds & proceeded on to a large bottom nearly opposit the Chisscheter (heart) River, in this bottom we found but little game, Great No. of wolves, on the hills Saw Several parsels of Buffalow.—Camped.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

In such a case there is invariably recourse to a war on a grand scale with the feeling of depression; let us inform ourselves briefly on its most important practices and phases (I leave on one side, as stands to reason, the actual philosophic war against the feeling of depression which is usually simultaneous—it is interesting enough, but too absurd, too practically negligible, too full of cobwebs, too much of a hole-and-corner affair, especially when pain is proved to be a mistake, on the naïf hypothesis that pain must needs vanish wh
— from The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Orator Henley preached and prayed in Slang, and first charmed and then swayed the dirty mobs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields by vulgarisms.
— from A Dictionary of Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words Used at the Present Day in the Streets of London; the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the Houses of Parliament; the Dens of St. Giles; and the Palaces of St. James. by John Camden Hotten

The public and private injuries were poorly redressed by the tardy rigor of inquiry and punishment; and we must be content to praise the Institutions of Timour, as the specious idea of a perfect monarchy.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Mr. Conroyal now placed the bags of gold, four at a time, on the scales, and announced their weights; and Thure and Bud, pencils and paper in their hands, set down the amounts.
— from The Cave of Gold A Tale of California in '49 by Everett McNeil

PLACE AND POWER IN THE HOUSEHOLD.
— from Grappling with the Monster; Or, the Curse and the Cure of Strong Drink by T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur

Bushel was tried for murder, convicted, and condemned; but instead of undergoing the penalties of the law, he was indulged with a pardon, and promoted in the service.
— from The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. Continued from the Reign of William and Mary to the Death of George II. by T. (Tobias) Smollett

“If you had plotted and planned it in advance,” he none the less firmly pursued, “if you had acted from some uncanny or malignant motive, you couldn’t have arranged more perfectly to incommode, to disconcert and, to all intents and purposes, make light of me and insult me.”
— from The Outcry by Henry James

The French envoys at the Hague exhausted themselves in efforts, both private and public, in favour of the prisoners, but it was a thankless task.
— from Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland : with a view of the primary causes and movements of the Thirty Years' War, 1618 by John Lothrop Motley

This Greek was a certain Philodemus, a few of whose poems are preserved in the Greek Anthology ; and a glance at them will show at once how dangerous such a man would be as the companion of a Roman youth.
— from Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero by W. Warde (William Warde) Fowler

"There is both poetry and painting in such prose as this," said Mary; "
— from Marriage by Susan Ferrier