I perceived now something of languor and exhaustion stealing over her, and hastened to bid her good night.
— from Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

All the delights of life in Paris seemed to be implied by this visible and manifest sign of luxury and extravagance.
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

She was nice only from natural delicacy, but he had been brought up in a school of luxury and epicurism.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

One surfeit, another starve, one live at ease, another labour, without any hope of better fortune?
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

There are six main stories, or legends, and each contains several digressions and involved episodes.
— from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser

The enemy was now within two hundred and fifty miles of Rome; and every moment diminished the narrow span of life and empire allotted to Julian.
— 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

Like a prophet he gazes on the sky, where in the clouds there are many signs that the hunter's eye can see; or like an enchanter he talks with the earth, which, though deaf to city-dwellers, whispers into his ear with a multitude of voices.
— from Pan Tadeusz Or, the Last Foray in Lithuania; a Story of Life Among Polish Gentlefolk in the Years 1811 and 1812 by Adam Mickiewicz

But already an age has come when things purely Celtic have begun to be studied; and the close observer can see the awakening genius of the modern Celt manifesting itself in the realm of scholarship, of literature, and even of art—throughout Continental Europe, especially France and Germany, throughout Great Britain and Ireland, and throughout the new Celtic world of America, as far west as San Francisco on the great calm ocean of the future facing Japan and China.
— from The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. (Walter Yeeling) Evans-Wentz

Motor transport is an expensive item for which there is no return, and very large sums of money are spent on lectures and educational work.
— from The Romance of the Red Triangle The story of the coming of the red triangle and the service rendered by the Y.M.C.A. to the sailors and soldiers of the British Empire by Arthur K. (Arthur Keysall) Yapp

Sooner or later almost every successive ruling class has had this dilemma in one of its innumerable forms presented to them, and few have had the genius to compromise while compromise was possible.
— from The Theory of Social Revolutions by Brooks Adams

For centuries Spain had been the centre of civilization, the seat of arts and sciences, of learning, and every form of refined enlightenment.
— from The Moors in Spain by Stanley Lane-Poole

After complaining of white duplicity in obtaining sales of land, and endeavoring to sow strife between the tribes, Tecumseh added: "How can we have confidence in the white people?
— from The Land We Live In The Story of Our Country by Henry Mann

The idea, as it comes to an artist, is not a law imposing itself from without; it is a seed of life and energy springing from within.
— from English literary criticism by Charles Edwyn Vaughan

But there was no sign of life anywhere else; the village might have been a place of the dead, for all the life there was about it.
— from The Second Dandy Chater by Tom Gallon

To the antiquarian and the student of language and ethnology an invaluable treasure, it yet can hardly in such a form win its way to popular acquaintance.
— from The Age of Chivalry by Thomas Bulfinch

In our rambles through the streets of London after evening has set in, we often pause beneath the windows of some public hospital, and picture to ourself the gloomy and mournful scenes that are passing within.
— from Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People by Charles Dickens

The Germans thrash them with whips to make them work, and every now and then some run away into the Bush, as the forest is called, and build little sheds of leaves, and eat nuts and roots and fruit, and dwell there by themselves in the great desert.
— from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 25 by Robert Louis Stevenson

Sad, however, is it when the flock turns off and pushes far out to the open water; sadder still when the aim is not true and the bird goes by uninjured; sad when the chase is unsuccessful and the weeds hide the prey, or he dives to grasp a root and never reappears; and saddest of all to fall overboard out of your frail bark—a fate that sooner or later awaits every one that shoots ducks from little boats.
— from The Game-Birds of the Coasts and Lakes of the Northern States of America A full account of the sporting along our sea-shores and inland waters, with a comparison of the merits of breech-loaders and muzzle-loaders by Robert Barnwell Roosevelt