'I beg your pardon, Mr. Harry,' said Giles: giving a final polish to his ruffled countenance with the handkerchief; 'but if you would leave the postboy to say that, I should be very much obliged to you.
— from Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

And words like these to Guha spake, That bade Kauśalyá comfort take: “Where lodged the prince that night?
— from The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse by Valmiki

CHAPTER 4 M r and Mrs Quilp resided on Tower Hill; and in her bower on Tower Hill Mrs Quilp was left to pine the absence of her lord, when he quitted her on the business which he had already seen to transact.
— from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

These issues concern, in such cases, only the army itself, whose lives and fortunes are at stake, or the official classes, who lose their places when their leaders fall from power.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

But Siddhartha said in a voice which contained just as much sadness as mockery, with a quiet, a slightly sad, a slightly mocking voice: "Soon, Govinda, your friend will leave the path of the Samanas, he has walked along your side for so long.
— from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Why did words lose their power of expression?
— from Phaedrus by Plato

"Reasoning a thing out" The control of the origin and development of hypotheses by deduction does not cease, however, with locating the problem.
— from How We Think by John Dewey

She uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,' Like the poor cat i' the adage,
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley

Q. I would like very much to know if we are under-paying these roads; we would like to pay them.—A. You ask a question that there is nobody but Omniscience could answer, because there is no possible method by which you can determine accurately what the cost is of carrying traffic.
— from Postal Riders and Raiders by W. H. Gantz

We saw grand scenery, groves of lofty pines, natural parks stocked with wild deer and elks, brooks of clear water where the speckled trout played among its pebbles and had all the harbor to themselves; beautiful springs bursting forth from the mountain side, still higher the majestic peaks stood in bold relief above the mountain pines, where lay the perpetual snow; and to render man’s enjoyment complete, his lungs are filled with 38 pure mountain air perfumed with scent of pines and herbs that grow everywhere.
— from Then and Now; or, Thirty-Six Years in the Rockies Personal Reminiscences of Some of the First Pioneers of the State of Montana by Robert Vaughn

What leads these people to give up a habit which must have been so old that it had become instinctive, and to evolve out of their own minds a principle which indicates a power of discrimination far in advance of anything we are used to attribute to the lower stages of civilization?
— from German philosophy and politics by John Dewey

But the great English historians of the eighteenth century were looking to problems in other fields than that of social history.
— from Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History by Paul Vinogradoff

Have you a mind," with a waggish look, "to play bride's man, M. de Tignonville?
— from Historical Romances: Under the Red Robe, Count Hannibal, A Gentleman of France by Stanley John Weyman

But Francis, having obtained his object by the very alarm created by this negotiation, never sent any troops, never paid the Earl of Desmond any annuity, and the unfortunate chieftain was left to pay the penalty of his rash credulity in the vengeance of the English Government.
— from Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion by Anonymous

In the background, a straight holder, on a level with the ground, upheld the large tapers, which, like the pipes of an organ, formed a row of uneven height, some of them being as large as a man’s thigh.
— from The Three Cities Trilogy: Lourdes, Complete by Émile Zola

Neither Mr. Temple nor his mother had known of his correspondence with her, and the latter had flattered herself that she had been very tactful in managing to break up certain "foolish" relations between the two that were liable to prove very awkward.
— from The Heatherford Fortune a sequel to the Magic Cameo by Sheldon, Georgie, Mrs.

It is equally vain for us to think of discovering any reason, in the nature of the mind itself, which could have enabled us to predict , without actual experience, or, at least, without analogy of other similar instances, any of the mere intellectual changes of state,—that the sight of an object, which we have seen before in other circumstances, should recal, by instant spontaneous suggestion, those other circumstances which exist no longer;—that in meeting, in the most distant country, a native of our own land, it should be in our own power, by a single word to annihilate , as it were, for the moment, all the seas and mountains between him and his home;—or, in the depth of the most gloomy dungeon, where its wretched tenant, who has been its tenant for half a life, sees, and scarcely sees, the few faint rays that serve but to speak of a sunshine, which he is not to enjoy, and which they deprive him of the comfort of forgetting, and to render visible to his very eyes that wretchedness which he feels at his heart,—that even this creature of misery,—whom no one in the world perhaps remembers but the single being, whose regular presence, at the hour at which he gives him, day by day, the means of adding to his life another year of wretchedness like the past, is scarcely felt as the presence of another living thing,—should yet, by the influence of a single thought, enter into the instant possession of a freedom beyond that which the mere destruction of his dungeon could give,—a freedom which restores him not merely to the liberty , but to [499] the very years which he had lost,—to the woods, and the brook, and the fields of his boyish frolics, and to all the happy faces which were only as happy as his own.
— from Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3) by Thomas Brown

While in this way the axe was laid to the root of the old burgess-body and their clan-nobility, and the basis of a new burgess-body was laid, the preponderance in the latter rested on the possession of land and on age, and the first beginnings were already visible of a new aristocracy based primarily on the actual consideration in which the families were held—the future nobility.
— from The History of Rome, Book II From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union of Italy by Theodor Mommsen