|
|
|
More "Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... admitted that the Parisians of all classes are behaving themselves well. The rich residents have fled, and left to their poorer neighbours the task of defending their native city. There have been no tumults or disorders, except those caused by the foolish mania of supposing every one who is not known must necessarily be a spy. Political manifestations have taken place before the Hotel de Ville, but the conciliatory policy adopted by the Government has prevented their degenerating into excesses. Public opinion, too, has pronounced against them. From what ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... excursive instincts, who unconsciously, and perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents of thought than with the general tide of opinion. When quite a lad, in the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to the great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire what was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean, Queen Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... plottings of the pander Brutus. But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici; there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on Alexander, to pretend to be his devoted slave and server of his ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the party asked the meaning of certain tall buildings, he was told that they were pawnbrokers' offices; for the Chinese have a mania for pawning their clothes, or whatever they have, even if not in need of the money, to save the trouble of taking care of the articles. Before the third day of the stay in Canton was over, some of the ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... slight—something a little "off." One glance of that kindly and humorous eye told me such expectation had been nonsense. Odd he might have been—Gadzooks! he looked it—but "queer"? Never. The fact that Miss Apperthwaite could picture such a man as this "sitting and sitting and sitting" himself into any form of mania or madness whatever spoke loudly of her own imagination, indeed! The key to "Simpledoria" was to be sought under some ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... I have the fancy, however, to assure you that what took place that day at the Cafe Grand was not the impulsive act of a man inspired with a homicidal mania, but was the necessary outcome of a long sequence of events. You know the peculiar relations existing between Isobel and myself. I had not the right to approach her, or to assume any overt act of guardianship. Any association with me would at once have imperilled any chance she may have possessed ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... has steadily deteriorated in quality as the output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... seventeenth was a century pre-eminent for quaint conceits and fantastic similes: the literature of that period, whether devotional, poetical, or polemical[1], was alike infected with the universal mania for strained metaphors, and men vied with each other in giving extraordinary titles to books, and making the {486} contents justify the title. Extravagance and the far-fetched were the gauge of wit: Donne, Herbert, and many a man of genius foundered on this rock, as well as Cowley, who acted ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... Don't speak of that. I had the whim to make something for somebody—I have an embroidering mania on me sometimes—and there was a chance to dispose of it, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... aberration of mind. Usually one or more of the direct progenitors, or of the near relatives of the patient, will be found to have manifested unmistakable marks of unsoundness of mind. In the remaining one-half cases no such tendency can be traced, and in these it must be presumed that the mania is a purely local and temporary disorder of the brain. The incurable cases are usually found in the first class of patients, as we might ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... passions they grow unclerical and do mischief. Now he used, though not getting on with the Curtises, to be most successful with the second-rate people; but he has managed to offend half of them during this unhappy mania, which, of course, they all resent as mercenary, and how he is ever to win them back I don't know. After all, curatocult is a shallow ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The later development of Spirit Faces and Spirit Forms, each of which I have examined thoroughly, and made the results of my observations public, fail to afford any adequate idea of the pitch to which the mania—if mania it be—has attained. To many persons Spiritualism forms the ultimatum, not only in science, but also in religion. Whatever the Spirits tell them they believe and do as devoutly as the Protestant obeys his Bible, the Catholic his Church, or the scientific man ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... in its case between them, Trent and the inspector looked into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak. 'This mystery is all wrong,' he observed. 'It is insanity. The symptoms of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any doubt, I believe, about Manderson having dispatched Marlowe in the car to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night, many hours after the murder ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... modern culture would receive its deadliest blow if the tacit support which these natures give it could in any way be cancelled. Among scholars, only those would remain loyal to the old order of things who had been infected with the political mania or who were literary hacks in any form whatever. The repulsive organisation which derives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which it relies—that is to say, from the State and Society—and ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... hurt you," she began. "He's perfectly kind and harmless, aside from his mania for dimples. He still smells the piece under the Teacup." Then, all at once, she grew rigid, and her golden eyes began to leap up and ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... with little better success, Mr. Sponge seeming rather to take a pleasure in finding ridiculous likenesses, instead of helping his host out in his conceits. The stick-mania was a failure, as far as Mr. Sponge was concerned. Neither were the peregrinations about the farms, or ter-ri-to-ry, as Jog called his estate, more successful; a man's estate, like his children, being seldom of much interest to ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... and Reality. The First Gray Jacket returns. General Lee re-enters Richmond. Woman, the Comforter. Lincoln's Assassination. Resulting Rigors. Baits for Sociability. How Ladies acted. Lectures by Old Friends. The Emigration Mania. Fortunate Collapse of Agreement. The Negro's Status. To Work, or Starve. Woman's Aid. Dropping ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Juggernaut was considered to be divinely ordained," said Aubrey, "And the wretched and ignorant populace flung themselves under it in the fit of hysterical mania to which they were excited by the priests of the god, and so perished in their thousands. Not THEY were to blame; but the men who invented the imposture and encouraged the slaughter. THEY had an ideal;—the priests had none! But Juggernaut had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... reasons perhaps why Alfonso, as he complained, would not believe a word be said); and finally, that, whether the madness was or was not so pretended, it unfortunately became a confirmed though milder form of mania, during a long confinement. Alfonso, too proud to forgive the poet's contempt, continued thus to detain him, partly perhaps because he was not sorry to have a pretext for revenge, partly because he did not know what to do with him, consistently either with his own or the poet's safety. He ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... enough and to spare. But we have not, as far as I know, any version of Catullus which can transport the English reader from the teachings of our century to that preceding the Christian Era. As discovery is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry, like the Arab, and of the ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... befallen. Much conversation ensued for days as to the approaching Mayfly carnival. The girls demanded the water to themselves during its period, and as Lamia had landed a small trout that had hooked itself down stream on a submerged olive dun, she was soon as much bitten with the fishing mania as Blind herself. It was comforting to the vicar and cousin to be informed by the girls that they would henceforth accept no services from "hangers-on"—meaning that they would do their own landing and basketing. "We shall see," said cousin to the parson; "meanwhile (after ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... swayed by rage, merely; there would have been something petty in ordinary human resentment at that moment. There was another quality that was devilishly and subtly complex in the sudden mania which obsessed him. He had seen woodsmen leaping and shouting in the ecstasy of drunkenness; liquor seemed to affect the men of the woods in that way—to accentuate their sense of wild liberty. Latisan had been obliged to pitch in and quell riots where woodsmen had heaped their clothes ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... room devoted to children, as distinct from infants, saw one girl of nine with a curious history. This child had been twelve times in the hands of the police before her father brought her to the Army on their suggestion. Her mania was to run away from home, where it does not appear that she was ill-treated, and to sleep in the streets, on one occasion for as long as five nights. This child had a very curious face, and even in ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... is wiped away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the venerable fortress is made to look as spick and span as the last built range of shops at Paris. Among the endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer wantonness, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... prostration of mind and strength, the purse of the Comte de Guiche was getting full again, and when once filled, overflowed into that of De Manicamp, who bought new clothes, dressed himself again, and recommenced the same life he had followed before. The mania of selling his new clothes for a quarter of what they were worth, had rendered our hero sufficiently celebrated in Orleans, a city where, in general, we should be puzzled to say why he came to pass his days of penitence. Provincial debauches, petits-maitres of six hundred livres a ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... or each, or none of these May be the hoarder's principle of action, The fool will call such mania a disease:— What is his own? Go—look at each transaction, Wars, revels, loves—do these bring men more ease Than the mere plodding through each 'vulgar fraction'? Or do they benefit mankind? Lean miser! Let spendthrifts' heirs enquire of ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... and repair the fountain. He will place this arm-chair in an arbor near the fountain; the guest who seats himself in it will be caught, and the salamanders may throw the water upon him as long as they please. It is a mania of our master." ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... well-authenticated cases of houses of 'notorious rebels' burned down by the orders of Sir James Macdonell, Colborne's second-in-command. Colborne himself acquired the nickname of 'the old Firebrand'; and, while he cannot be charged with such a mania for incendiarism as some writers have imputed to him, it does not appear that he took any effective measures to stop the arson or ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... during the winter of 1802-3, that Switzerland took arms against the unitarian constitution which had been imposed upon her. Singular mania of the French revolutionists to compel all countries to adopt a political organization similar to that of France! There are, doubtless, principles common to all countries, such as those which secure ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the habit of saying ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to the house, which was in looks like one of Gainsborough's cottages, and ought to have been at least two hundred years old, instead of two. But Downing's advent had already wrought miracles here and there in our land; and a little while before Mr. Remington had been bitten with an architectural mania. So under the transplanted trees, and beneath trailing vines of Virginia creeper and Boursault roses, there peeped the brown gables of a cottage, which arose and stood there as reposeful and weather-stained as if it had been built before the Revolution. Mr. Remington ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... and hold up their cloaks or their trains. Thus it came that Mignard, Le Bourdon, and other painters of the aristocracy, used to introduce negro boys into all their large portraits. It was a mode, a mania; but so absurd a fashion soon had to disappear after the mishap of which I am about ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it means that you have a persecution—mania. You imagine that every woman you meet has designs on you. . . . I suppose you think that I came here to make ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... 1780, Griffard was nothing more than a pastry-cook in one of the suburbs of the city, and his knowledge of the science of finance was limited to his dealings with the needy students who ate his wares on credit, and paid for them accordingly. The Mississippi mania whirled him along with it also. In those days every man in Paris meant to be a millionaire. In the streets, alleys, and public squares every one was either buying or selling Mississippi shares. Monsieur Griffard left his pastry-shop in the charge of ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... no less famous than M. de Longuerue for his memory, and he was yet more strongly affected by the mania for books. His appetite for them was so voracious, that he acquired the name of the glutton of literature.[44] Before he died, he had swallowed six large rooms full of books. Whether he had time to digest any of them we do not know, but we are sure that he wished it; for the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... North," said the elder gentleman, a little portentously, to conceal an evident embarrassment. "It may be that your conduct might suggest to minds more practical than your own the existence of some aberration of the intellect—some temporary mania—that might force your best friends ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... for many years great favourites with gardeners, both amateur and professional. About two hundred years ago the mania for these plants amounted almost to a national calamity in Holland, and scores of acres are now entirely devoted to their culture. For our own part, we scarcely consider the tulip as in any way justifying ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that is living spirit is being driven westward before gross Matter—westward as light tends, as the progress of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... curiosity of outsiders is not encouraged," said Palliser languidly. "And where if a patient dies in a fit of mania there are always respectable witnesses to explain that his case was ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... took possession of the three—Dorothy, Garrison, the driver. The power to think on normal lines was being swept away. Such mania as drives a lawless comet comes inevitably upon all who ride with such space-defying speed. The one idea is more—more speed—more ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... of the features of the shah-mania that British journalism was overrun and surfeited with Persian topics, Persian allusions and fragments of the Persian language and literature. Every pedant of the press displayed an unexpected and astonishing acquaintance with Persian history, Persian geography, Persian manners and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... has also its appointed value;—this cock is worth forty dollars, this four ounces, this one six ounces,—oh, he is a splendid fellow! No periodal and sporadic hen-fever prevails here, but the gallo-mania is the chronic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... technical gentleman of three descents—but the true gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness, generosity, and fear of God can make. And with what consummate skill are the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from his own premises. And this is the ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the window, watching the German soldiery cleaning up Morsbronn. For that wonderful Teutonic administrative mania was already manifesting itself while ruined houses still smoked; method replaced chaos, order marched on the heels of the Prussian rear-guard, which enveloped Morsbronn in a whirlwind of Uhlans, and left it a silent, blackened landmark in the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the bungalow mania and build them bijoux maisonettes out of biscuit tins, sacking and what-not, but the majority go to ground. I am one of the majority; I go to ground like a badger, for experience has taught me that a dug-out—cramped, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... fraility will allow—conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... the mania which seems to have possessed some men to give away the location of their units in France—the censoring officials declare that the army deserves a great deal of credit for living up to both the letter and the spirit ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... was seized with a mania for collecting: old Haji Wali again gathered bits of quartz, which he once more presented as gold-stone to his friends and acquaintances at Zagazig; and Anton, the dragoman, triumphantly bore away fragments bristling ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... where it had been cut away to admit the stone, as a proof that the stone roof had been an afterthought; and at last turned to me with a look of astonishment. "Mrs. Edgeworth seems to have this taste for mechanics too." He spoke of it as a kind of mania. So I nodded at him very gravely, and answered, "Yes, you will find us all tinctured with it, more or less." At last, to Mr. Smedley's great joy, he got my father alive off this roof, and on his way to Downing, the new college of ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... carried this hostility to the Yankees to the highest pitch, was an attempt made by that all-pervading race to get possession of Communipaw itself. Yes, Sir; during the late mania for land speculation, a daring company of Yankee projectors landed before the village; stopped the honest burghers on the public highway, and endeavored to bargain them out of their hereditary acres; displayed lithographic maps, in which their cabbage-gardens were ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Committee on Public Accounts was further investigated. The Committee had reported that a certain stationery contract for the Air Ministry had been extravagant and improper. The AIR MINISTER at the time was the noble Lord who has lately been so eloquent about "squander-mania," but he has since, in a letter to the Press, declared that he never signed or initialled the order. Lieut.-Colonel ARCHER-SHEE and Mr. ORMSBY-GORE sought the opinion of the Treasury on the transaction, and Mr. BALDWIN replied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... back of all such physical conditions as nervousness, prostration, temporary insanity, nervous disorders, pains resembling rheumatism, hay fever, heart troubles, mental symptoms, nervous chills, morbid forebodings and mild mania, there lurks the abnormal activity of the psychic or "thought body" caused by thoughts and feelings acting abnormally upon the vital centers of the nervous system ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... her, and the furniture, instead of losing its value in her eyes, became ever more precious. To use things without hurting them or soiling them or scratching the woodwork or clouding the varnish, that was the problem which soon became the mania of the old maid's life. Sylvie had a closet full of bits of wool, wax, varnish, and brushes, which she had learned to use with the dexterity of a cabinet-maker; she had her feather dusters and her dusting-cloths; and she rubbed away without fear of hurting herself,—she was so strong. The glance ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... Cezanne, done in his earliest manner. This he had to sell on account of pressing need. Dark days followed. He moved across the street into smaller quarters. The old crowd began to drift away; some died, some had become famous, and one, Van Gogh, shot himself in an access of mania. This was a shock to his friend. A second followed when Van Gogh's devoted brother went mad. Good Father Tanguy, as he was affectionately called, sickened. He entered a hospital. He suffered from a cancerous trouble of the stomach. One day he said to his wife, who was visiting him: "I am ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... keep the line in order. But the telegraph company had already had occasion several times to reprimand him for neglect, and had again offered the post to Isak. No, it was not the telegraph that was in Brede's mind all the time, but the ore up in the hills; it was his one idea now, a mania. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... a channel by which some portion of it might have been drawn off to the northern coast. But such were not the views entertained by the authorities concerning this matter. They seemed apprehensive of incurring the blame of encouraging the speculating mania which raged so extensively at Sydney, and which has reacted with so pernicious an effect upon the colony.* the expedition accordingly retained its purely military character. However, I may add, that the Bishop of Australia attended to the spiritual wants of the settlement by ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... epidemic, which is, like fashion, a form of social contagion, has a different origin and a different connotation. J. F. C. Hecker, whose study of the Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, published in 1832, was an incident of his investigation of the Black Death, was perhaps the first to give currency to the term.[295] Both the Black Death and the Dancing Mania assumed ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to get the postmaster to accept them as mail. I told him that it was mail and that I had no other place to deposit it. Nevertheless he said he would not have them left at the postoffice and told me do anything I wanted to with them, saying at the time that people all around there had a mania for ordering those books, but never intended to take them when they ordered them. I took the books around to the stage station and discovered four ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... collector, however, that he is by no means the "homo unius libri." There is always something or other turning up for him, so long as he keeps within moderate bounds. If he be rich and ravenous, however, there is nothing for it but duplicating—the most virulent form of book-mania. We have seen that Heber, whose collection, made during his own lifetime, was on the scale of those public libraries which take generations to grow, had, with all his wealth, his liberality, and his persevering energy, to invest himself with duplicates, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... insanity are delirium, mania, hypochondriasis, melancholia, irresponsible impulses, and the ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... are a richer girl than I knew," said Emma's worthy husband, coming forward, with his round pleasant face. "I congratulate you; at this particular crisis, when hundreds are being ruined by last year's mania for railway speculation, it is most fortunate to have safe ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the author and his wife are both haunted by the fact that there is a masterpiece which is lying—not fallow, but unused and sterile. They grow dissatisfied. The savour of life is lost for them. They develop persecution mania, grow very conceited, and finally come to believe that only they of all the men and women alive truly grasp the essentials of life. They say, if this were the silly muck that most authors write, it would be produced, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... embraced every opportunity of indulging secretly in those flesh-pots to which they had been accustomed. It was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher's ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... hearing a new word. He was most anxious to learn English, and he had a mania for spelling. "'Smart!' What is ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... patriotic and half-educated young men and boys, called Soshi. These hot-headed youths took it upon themselves to dictate national policy to cabinet ministers, and to reconstruct society, religion and politics. Something like a mania broke out all over the country which, in certain respects, reminds us of the Children's Crusade, that once afflicted Europe and the children themselves. Even Christianity did not escape the craze for reconstruction. Some of the young believers and pupils of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... their full brilliancy before our "occupation," but I suppose one would have had to crawl on all fours or lose one's head at the nod of Supayalat. She and Thebaw and their parents were very much in-bred, and, though she was otherwise particularly charming, she had a strongly-developed homicidal mania. However, the people wept when they saw their king and queen being so unexpectedly hurried away in a gharry to go "Doon the Water" in Denny's steamer, in November 1885. They had far more fun, they say, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... admitted that it was possible he had really not looked into the purse, and so didn't know what was in it when he hid it under the stone. But they immediately drew the deduction that the crime could only have been committed through temporary mental derangement, through homicidal mania, without object or the pursuit of gain. This fell in with the most recent fashionable theory of temporary insanity, so often applied in our days in criminal cases. Moreover Raskolnikov's hypochondriacal condition ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... even reverence, every apparent approach, every pretension, even, to a divine inspiration and guidance in the age in which he lived. "'The greatest blessings which men receive come through the operation of phrensy ([Greek: mania]—inspired exaltation), when phrensy is the gift of God. The prophetess of Delphi, and the priestess of Dodona, many are the benefits which in their phrensies (moments of inspiration) they have bestowed upon Greece; but ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... "Persecutional mania is a dangerous hallucination," stated the sallow man. "Mr. Craig has accomplished certain definite results in the north country. We have used the word Consolidated in our corporation name with full knowledge of what we are after. We assure ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... little quarrels.... The Yellow Peril was a peril after all! They've got thousands of airships. They're all over the world. We bombarded London and Paris, and now the French and English have smashed up Berlin. And now Asia is at us all, and on the top of us all.... It's mania. China on the top. And they don't know where to stop. It's limitless. It's the last confusion. They're bombarding capitals, smashing up dockyards and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... thing else but every other man's intolerance'; and it is with his consent and by his instructions that I go like Ruth, gleaning in the great fields of literature." "Take care you don't find Boaz instead of barley. After all, the universal mania for match-making schemes and manoeuvers which continually stir society from its dregs to the painted foam-bubble dancing on its crested wave, is peculiar to no age or condition, but is an immemorial and hereditary female proclivity; for I defy Paris or London to furnish ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... wilderness with its mighty wand and made it blossom like the rose. We owe a vast debt to De Witt Clinton," he digressed to add. "He was our Moses, and I can never think upon his great achievement without a thrill of gratitude. I confess to a mania ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... sure to result in the deterioration of her offspring and disaster to the race. So, for the sake of the generations unborn, we—that is, the male men of the earth—who still retain our grip on affairs, have about decided to put a stop to this foolish mania among our young women. We will probably pass laws, setting a limit in the several branches of study beyond which girls shall not be allowed to go, either ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... didn't she blow to the various tea and toast coteries, scandal and slang express women—and the various knots of anxious crowds who stood about Bowdoin Square during the Lind mania! Aunt Nabby had had a genuine tete-a-tete with the Nightingale—and, ecod, an invitation to call again! But Jenny Lind, and her cordon of sentinels, secretaries and suckers, were "fly" for the old screech owl, when again and again she beset the clark ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... and beautiful;—richly dressed in white, with flowing locks. She is wan and exhausted.—The dance-mania, as it seizes her, makes her circle slowly and dazedly with a certain pitiful silliness. The nuns and monks accompanying her point in horror. But they, too, dance off with each other, willy-nilly,—like leaves in a tempest. BARBARA is left alone, still circling ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody
... the doctor, "it's become a habit with him now, or a mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mentioning it were a sort of conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn't venture to check him in his way of talking. He ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... to you and Miss Lawton—of matters which have not yet been fully substantiated by the attorneys. I know only from Mr. Lawton's own private statements that he was interested, to the point one might almost say of mania, in a gigantic scheme from which we, his friends, tried in vain to dissuade him. He urged me especially to go in on it with him, but because of the very position I hold, it would have been impossible for me to consider it, even if my better judgment ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... general nervousness. In still other cases, unpleasant delusions and elementary hallucinations precede the stupor, which may follow immediately after this prodromal state or may be again preceded by a short attack of mania with clouded consciousness. In contrast to the genuine catatonia, Raecke's stupor as well as Ganser's twilight state, are characterized by a high grade of impressionability to things in the environment, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... walls, without crying babies and scolding wives clattering around. This heat every summer costs us thousands of dollars in delays, from wear and tear and extra strain—tempers and nerves giving out, men getting frantic and jerking things. I believe it breeds a form of acute mania when it keeps on ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... madnesses most afflict the sanest men. There was a case once—but I will tell you of that later on. You cannot account for the mania, except under a theory directly contradicting the one about the Place wherein marriages are made. Peythroppe was burningly anxious to put a millstone round his neck at the outset of his career and argument had not the least effect on him. He was going to marry Miss Castries, and the business ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... other's absence in uncontrollable agony, the conditions are serious enough for the consultation of a physician. It is an abnormal state of affairs, and if probed thoroughly might be found to be a sort of perversion, a sex mania, needing immediate ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... result of the nineteenth century's absurd exaltation of rude untrammelled nature. It really amounts to anarchy, because it is always accompanied by a certain feeling of hostility towards law and culture. Hence the love of wild rugged moors and mountains which is a modern mania." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... a mania with Manson, and as his opportunities had been limited to the peaceful seclusion of brooks, or the calm waters of mill ponds, it is needless to say that he admitted he was fond ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... was an outcast. He told me of his childhood in the tidy brick house, and of his mother's passionate orderliness. Her kitchen was a miracle of clean brightness. Everything was always in its place, and no where could you see a speck of dust. Cleanliness, indeed, was a mania with her. I saw a neat little old woman, with cheeks like apples, toiling away from morning to night, through the long years, to keep her house trim and spruce. His father was a spare old man, his hands gnarled after the work of a lifetime, silent and upright; in the evening he read the paper aloud, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould, fix and shape their subsequent destinies. Hysteria in the mother may develop insanity in the child, while drunkenness in the father may impel epilepsy, or mania, in the son. Ungoverned passions in the parents may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of their children, and the bad treatment of the wife may produce ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... appreciation, and he can therefore only rejoice in having provided something worthy of it. The manner of their expression, the observations they make, the very wording of their compliments will reveal, quickly enough, whether he has a case of real appreciation before him, or a mere morbid mania to hobnob with celebrities, or at least with people who by nature of their professional work are often compelled against their own desires to hold a more or less exposed position in the public eye. If he deals ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... an early riser, and had once been very fond of hunting. But now for a great portion of the year he applied himself wholly to reading the old books of knighthood, and this with such keen delight that he forgot all about the pleasures of the chase, and neglected all household matters. His mania and folly grew to such a pitch that he sold many acres of his lands to buy books of the exploits and adventures of the knights of old. These he took for true and correct histories, and when his friends the curate of the village, ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... This mania for building, which has always directed the government, has unfortunately communicated itself to the colonists, particularly those who inhabit the various towns, and they are at present in the condition ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... were open at that time in Paris, the mania for play was so widely spread that the public gambling-rooms did not suffice for the general ardour, and gambling went on in private houses as much as if there had been no public means for gratifying the passion. At Crawley's ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... same tormenting dream," he thought. "Before it was a vision; now it is a voice. It is generated by solitude and separation. I must resist it I must be strong. It will drive me into an oppression as of madness. Men do not 'see their souls' until they are bordering on madness from religious mania or crime." ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... we find Madame D'Orleans in her "Princesse de Paphlagonia"—a romance in which she describes her court, with the little quarrels and other affairs that agitated it—giving the following amusing picture, or rather caricature, of the extent to which Madame de Sable carried her pathological mania, which seems to have been shared by her friend the Countess de Maure (Mademoiselle d'Attichy). In the romance, these two ladies appear under the names of Princesse Parthenie and ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... nerve stimulation is of the nature of mania. In proportion to its intensity is the certainty that it will be followed by its subjective reaction, the "Nuit Blanche," the "dark brown taste," by the experience of "the difference in the morning." ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... no hard epithet that Evelyn did not apply to Mr. Basil Bainrothe during her hysterical mania, and before the doctor's arrival; but, on her recovery, she begged me to repeat nothing of the sort, if she had been indiscreet enough to let out her true opinion of him and his measures, in a moment of irrepressible emotion. "For," she pursued, "it is expedient for ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Chinese and Japanese porcelains: this Claes was eager after rare furniture, that one for silver-ware; in fact, each and all had their mania, their passion,—a trait which belongs in a striking degree to the Flemish character. The father of Balthazar, a last relic of the once famous Dutch society, left behind him the finest known collection ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... if you knew how innocent is his pastime!" she exclaimed, laughing. "He collects and studies moths and butterflies. Is there, if you please, a mania more harmless in the world?... And now I must return ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... cannot see any fastenings, or imagine how on earth the owner gets in or out. There's a model in this week's Queen which will be just the thing, and I have a piece of flowered pink silk upstairs which will do for you as well as for me. It is a remnant which I bought in Paris. I have a mania for remnants. I always think they will come in usefully, but somehow they don't. This will be the exception, however, and it will be nice ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... its natural food of truth and freedom of growth, develops an unnatural craving for success; and our students have fallen victims to the mania for success in examinations. Success consists in obtaining the largest number of marks with the strictest economy of knowledge. It is a deliberate cultivation of disloyalty to truth, of intellectual dishonesty, of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... succeed; the patients become exceedingly nervous, as it is termed, and are unusually susceptible of ordinary impressions; pain in the head, often of great violence, follows, which, in some cases, is succeeded by delirium, in others, by absolute mania. Nor is this the whole catalogue of ills to which in such cases the unfortunate mother is subjected: the appetite fails, distressing languor is experienced by day, while copious perspirations deluge her by night, and dissipate the last remains of strength—producing a state which may easily ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... "You have a creed-mania, Knowles. You have a confession of faith ready-made for everybody, but yourself. I only meant for you to take care what you do. That woman looks as the Prodigal Son might have done when he began to be in want, and would fain have fed himself with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... formed in a ring about him, half stooped with bended knees, joined in the whistle, and beat time upon their knees and clapped hands, till the figure was gone through, and Joe Cross brought his terpsichorean bit of frantic mania to an end, by bringing his right foot down upon the deck with a tremendous stamp which was followed by a ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... have survived even such horrors as these had it not been for the out-breaking of another craze more terrible far than an army with gattling guns, I refer to the most destructive of all scourges, the mania for stock-gambling. The crafty, unscrupulous managers of bucket-shops, stock-exchanges, and brokerages filled the columns of the press with manufactured accounts of vast fortunes made in an hour by imaginary investors of small sums, and at once multitudes of farmers, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... the tea-pot and the jar of honey, which Marthe had had for breakfast, on the tray; and, with her mania for tidying, obeying some mysterious principle of symmetry, settled her daughter-in-law's things and any piece of furniture in the room that had been moved from its place. This done, with her hands hanging before her, ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... bass voice, which all the world declared to be as fine as Porto's, and who shared the applause of Baroski's school with Mr. Bulger, the dentist of Sackville Street, who neglected his ivory and gold plates for his voice, as every unfortunate individual will do who is bitten by the music mania. Then among the ladies there were a half-score of dubious pale governesses and professionals with turned frocks and lank damp bandeaux of hair under shabby little bonnets; luckless creatures these, who were parting with their poor little store of half-guineas ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cany out his wishes. Tepi also said that once the king knew that Niabon was on board he would use every effort to gain possession of her. Then, too, the firearms we carried were a further incentive to treachery—the king's mania to increase his stock of arms and ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... use of the children under their care in the gratification of their sexual desires. It is an indefinite impulse towards children which is here operative, and sometimes determines the choice of occupation. I have seen cases in which there seemed to be a sort of mania for giving education and instruction, but in which on closer examination it appeared that the interest in the children was a sexual one. Two cases which have been reported to me show that in the case of women also opportunity very easily awakens the sexual impulse; in these cases the giving of ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... irrelevant, for the object to be explained is not really a wheel but a barrel, large or small, containing written prayers, or even a whole library. Those who turn the barrel acquire all the merit arising from repeating the prayers or reading the books. In Tibet this form of devotion is a national mania. People carry small prayer wheels in their hands as they walk and place large ones in rivers to be turned by the current. In China, Japan and Korea we find revolving libraries and occasional praying machines, though not of quite the same form as in Tibet,[1050] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... soundness make them pioneers. It is note-worthy, however, that insanity is as frequent in the Pacific States as in New England, the explanation being that vice and indulgence prevail to an exceptional extent among the population drawn to the Pacific by the mania for gold. The average in Massachusetts, for instance, is 1 to 348; in California 1 to 345. It is also remarkable that the ratio of insanity decreases as we go west and south of New England, as these ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... baneful influences and impulses, formidably stimulating as a powerful drug. There came, amongst other evils, materialism and covetousness and irreligion; overweening arrogance, an impatient contempt for the rights of the weak, a mania for world dominion, and a veritable lunacy of power worship. There came also a fixed and irrational distrust of the intentions of other nations, for the evil which had crept into their own souls made them see evil ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... most beautiful, the books themselves being perhaps the largest in Italy, but an endless number of other books which may still be found in Rome and in Venice and many other places, notably in S. Michele and S. Mania at Murano, a monastery of the Camaldoline order. By these works the good father has richly deserved the honours accorded to him many years after he had passed to a better life, his celebration in many Latin verses by D. Paolo Orlandini, a very ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... orators is to me a more fearful thought than that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception is positively stunning. Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late Town-Crier in bell-metal, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... be said the man was mad—I suppose he was; and so is every body whilst under the influence of an absorbing passion, whether the mania be love, jealousy, fanaticism, or revenge. The following tale will illustrate one phase of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... man nicknamed "Johnny Appleseed." His neighbors called him a "crackpate." He had a mania for planting tree seeds wherever he went. As a rule they were haphazardly ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... mind either an imbecile or a paid agent provocateur. The failure of Herwegh's project forced Bakounin to admit later that Marx had been right. Yet, as we know, with Bakounin's advancing years the passion for insurrections became with him almost a mania. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... is an all-pervading mania, and as man is "a bundle of habits," the most moral persons in this country (always excepting one or two ladies who express their opinions strongly against it) see nothing in it to condemn, and are surprised at the effect it produces on a stranger; and, indeed, after a few years' residence here, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... wheel, had settled to his business. Certainly his nerve was going; the mania for escape had caught him; he took startling chances on his curves and turns. Still, he knew the country, it seemed. We drove on, fast and furiously, by lanes, by mere paths set among thickets, by narrow brushwood ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... occasionally gather some interesting and curious hints, as to the cost of books and writing materials in those times. As may be supposed, the monkish librarians often became great bibliophiles, for being in constant communication with choice manuscripts, they soon acquired a great mania for them. Posterity are also particularly indebted to the pens of these book conservators of the middle ages; for some of the best chroniclers and writers of those times were humble ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... heroic stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for the bleached, the double- refined,—white houses, white china, white marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour in order to have white bread, and are bolting our literature ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... himself with the companionship of ruffianly prize-fighters, belonging to this or that speculator in the flesh of ferocious savages. He must find some outlet for his energies and interests and is carried away by the fashionable mania, which is corrupting our whole population, especially our young nobles, and which, even at his tender age, fills the thoughts of my son, to the despair of ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... see he is a lunatic, prince?" whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch in his ear. "Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends to pass the examinations. I am expecting ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... implicated Zeke as having had a share in the fellow's escape. Old Dick Siddon, Plutina's grandfather, heard. He had hated the "revenuers" always. Since the death of his only son at their hands, his hatred had become a mania. He was a strong man, fierce in anger. When he bade his grandchild dismiss her favored suitor, she feigned obedience. She, and Zeke as well, knew the futility of fighting the old man's prejudices. But, with the optimism of youth, ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... snapshots taken during the outing; she copied a joke she had read in the paper that morning and discussed the serial story in the boarding-house magazine which all the boarders were reading; she wrote out the directions for a new crocheted tidy her sister had made—Miss Marshall had a mania for crocheting; and she finally wound up with "all the good will and good wishes that Nora Jane will consent to carry from your ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The "German spy" mania attacked Round Hill after the visit to the boy scouts of Clavering Gould, the war correspondent. He was spending the week-end with "Squire" Harry Van Vorst, and as young Van Vorst, besides being ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... invariable custom, had departed, in spite of the heat, upon one of his long rides immediately after breakfast. His quest for the girl whom he had so fondly loved was becoming almost a mania. ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... he is supposed himself to have done, and to cause the failure of his own scheme? Why should he on such a supposition send energetic messages to Johannesburg forbidding the British to co-operate with the raiders? The whole accusation is so absurd that it is only the mania of party spite or of national hatred which could ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Play were to be brought out at all,—and with that mania for classical subjects which then prevailed, what could be more natural?—how could one object to that which, by the supposition, was involved in it? And what but the most boundless freedoms and audacities, on this very question, could one look for here? ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... agreed to come to a compromise by steering W. by N. one watch and W. by S. the next, and so on until the land was made. After this knotty question was settled an incident almost incredible in its awful gruesomeness took place. Ralph became smitten by a revengeful mania. He went below, took his deceased commander's clothes off, put his body on the table and commenced to lash at it with a piece of rope, exclaiming at every stroke, "You thrashed me, you tiger, when you were living, and I'll thrash you now that you're dead." ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... and his momentary rainbow as he emerged from the water and shook himself with my stick still in his mouth; Timmie with his ineradicable hatred for cats; Maxie with all his tricks and his singsong of howls when the piano played; Schnider, with his mania for my slippers and undies, which he carried into most unexpected quarters; and Gyp, God bless him, who was so homely of face and form but so true blue in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... inevitable Chinese fire-crackers, without which noisy accessories no Paraguayan holiday would be complete. Throughout South America a passion for fire-crackers and fireworks prevails; and as an example of this mania, M. Forgues relates that when the Argentine troops were on their return to Buenos Ayres after the close of the war, great preparations were made by the authorities to greet them on their arrival at three ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... German on a back street here, who owns a bar-room with a hotel attached. He has a mania to run for office; in fact, there's several candidates announced already. Now, the convention don't meet until May, which is in our favor. If my game succeeds, we will be back at work before that time. That will let ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... on paying supertax, on remaining Ministers, on making wheels go round, on preventing their neighbours from being divorced, on conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church dogma, paradox and superiority to everybody else, with other forms of ego-mania—all are unstable compared with him or her whose fixed idea is the possession of some her or him. And though Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and whose business is pleasure, she was—as Winifred ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was at the time of life when enterprise was necessary for my existence, and so keenly did I join in the slave-hunting mania that I found it dangerous to land in the town of Rio for fear ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... hobby, then? Your letters have amused us immensely, for each one had a new theory or experiment, and the latest was always the best. I thought Uncle would have died of laughter over the vegetarian mania it was so funny to imagine you living on bread and milk, baked apples, and potatoes roasted in your own fire," continued Rose, changing the ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... sake of need. The profit-grabber has grown superfluous just as his patron, the state, which at present serves by means of its taxes and revenues, his anti-humanitarian purposes and hinders the reasonable consumption of goods. From the governing mania the foundation will be withdrawn; for those strata in society will be lacking which therefore had grown rich and fat by monopolizing the earth and its production. They alone needed legislatures to make laws against the disinherited. They needed courts of justice to condemn; ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... have a ray of light strike him through a rift in the clouds. The next day he was brought into court and fined for "his ungodly conduct." With persons accused of witchcraft the Puritans were still more ruthless. When a mania of persecution swept over Massachusetts in 1692, eighteen people were hanged, one was pressed to death, many suffered imprisonment, and ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... this, for only the day before Eva had announced in melancholy tones that she had spent her last penny, and could buy no more pictures, for which she had developed a mania. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... with dark circles round his eyes, Joseph Godard took little care of his person; his clothes were ill-cut, his trousers bagged, he wore white stockings at all seasons of the year, a hat with a narrow brim and laced shoes. He was always complaining of his digestion. His principal vice was a mania for proposing rural parties during the summer season, excursions to Montmorency, picnics on the grass, and visits to creameries on the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse. For the last six months Dutocq had taken to visiting Mademoiselle Godard from time to time, with certain ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... mania for wood-cuts, particularly when used to illustrate the indispensable psychological crisis of some outworn romance. There is in my possession at this minute a masterful depiction of a tall, bearded, horrified man who, clad in an anonymous ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... given for this kind and liberal treatment was certain evidence touching the iron-trade of Ayrshire, which I poured into the drowsy ears of five worthy gentlemen, about as familiar with that subject as you are with the mythology of the Chinese. Long life to the railway mania, say I! It has been treasure-trove to some of us. The only thing I regret is my inability to carry the war into the enemy's country, and make my fortune out of the English companies. I have the appetite but not the power; and, after all, it would hardly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... signs by which one gropes one's way through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn't it strike you, sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about him? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always calling me you—dear you, every ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... became general. A Canada mania pervaded the middle ranks of British society; thousands and tens of thousands for the space of three or four years landed upon these shores. A large majority of the higher class were officers of the army and navy, with ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... fevers, for instance from typhoid fever, is very similar to that arising from the excessive use of intoxicants and narcotics; similar in these respects; that the mania is only temporary, and that the exciting cause ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... insanity. He had owned that he had been deranged to within a month ago. Everything that he had said might be quite true. He probably had been the dead man's friend and in love with Maisie at the time of her first marriage. The misfortunes that had befallen him had exaggerated his love into mania—a mania which the news of Gervis and then of Lockwood had rendered active. He felt an immense compassion for the man. There, save for the grace of God, sat himself. But what was to be done? Already Maisie was overdue. Not a second could be wasted. He must humor him and get him out of the ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... LEISURE. How the speed mania is born of a vain desire to enjoy a leisure that never comes or, on the contrary, how the seeming haste of the world has given men shorter hours off labor and more time for rest, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... and Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight, pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first—the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... actress (it was always an actress, a virtuoso, or a part) and left poor Ophelia, and went off with Marie Recio, the Ines of Favorite, the page of Comte Ory—a practical, hardheaded woman, an indifferent singer with a mania for singing. The haughty Berlioz was forced to fawn upon the directors of the theatre in order to get her parts, to write flattering notices in praise of her talents, and even to let her make his own melodies discordant at the concerts ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... authors, tried to get at the real meaning,—the idea between the lines. Gorky's philosophy has often been discussed; a great many men of letters have tried to unravel what there was of pessimism, of indifference or of mystic idealism in the soul of Tchekoff. This everlasting habit, not to say this mania, of analyzing the mind or soul of an author in order to get at his conception, his personal doctrine of life, often leads to partial and erroneous conclusions, especially when, as in most cases, the critic has only a very vague idea of the main current of thought which ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... temptation to overstep the bounds of seemliness is so great that it is seldom the collector stops at a mere frontispiece. In most cases the Grangerite soon loses his self-control, and develops an acute mania for embellishing his volume with all and every print upon which he can lay his hands, apposite in the slightest degree to the subject of the book. Every year the sale-rooms witness these monstrosities. Biographies issued in a single volume ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... bibliomania, the unquenchable thirst for possession. And yet, despite these self-accusations, bibliophily rather than bibliomania would be the word to characterize his conscientious purpose. If he purchased quaint and rare books it was to own them to the full extent, inwardly as well as outwardly. The mania for books kept him continually buying; the love of books supervened to make them a part of himself and ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... subjects have dropped out of sight without apparent cause or reason and have left behind them untarnished reputations. Of these a small percentage are found to have met with violence; others have been victims of a suicidal mania ; and sooner or later a clue has come to light, for the dead are often easier to find than the living, Of the remaining small proportion there are on record a number of carefully authenticated cases ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... wonderful cures. Shell-shock, insomnia, nervous depression, lumbago, suicidal mania, family life—anything." Neville's attention was straying to Grandmama, who was coming slowly towards them down the path, leaning on her stick, so she did not see Mrs. Hilary's curious, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... that Mr Fleming's dislike of Jacob has become a sort of mania with him, and that he would not yield to him even if it were for his own advantage—he has brooded over his trouble so long and so sadly, poor ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... same name, which has risen up with the general intercourse of the sexes, and chivalrous manners of modern Europe. It is represented rather as a fever, as a fit of insanity, than any thing else; and is usually held forth as the withering blast inflicted by an offended deity, or the mania bequeathed as an inheritance on an accursed race. The refined and ennobling passion, so well-known and exquisitely described by the great masters of the human heart in modern times, that of Othello for Desdemona, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... as with a sponge—utterly erased and cancelled; and many others lost their reason; some in a gentle form of pensive melancholy, some in a more restless form of feverish delirium and nervous agitation, and others in the fixed forms of tempestuous mania, raving frenzy, or moping idiocy. Two great commemorative monuments arose in after years to mark the depth and permanence of the awe—the sacred and reverential grief with which all persons looked back upon the dread calamities attached to the year of the Tiger—all who had ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... against the lotteries, these uncontradicted statements from Wall Street came as a rude awakening,—a most painful revelation; for evil as lotteries are, in common with everything that fosters a love for chance and the mania for gambling, it could not be truthfully urged that the lottery was nearly so pernicious in its influence, as that great maelstrom of moral death, that realm of professional gamblers,—Wall Street. The lottery took from one to ten dollars ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... perplexities to think much just then of the boy's views on this burning question. And after all, had he thought of them, he would probably have guessed, as the reader may have done, that Wyndham's present cricket mania made him dread any reopening of the old soreness between Parrett's and the schoolhouse, which would be sure to result, among other things, in his exclusion, as a member of the latter fraternity, from the ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... herd as to throw them into the wildest panic. Amongst the thousands of herds like ours which were driven over the trail during its brief existence, none ever made the trip without encountering more or less trouble from runs. Frequently a herd became so spoiled in this manner that it grew into a mania with them, so that they would stampede on the slightest provocation,—or no provocation ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... The mania for taking it or anything else sufficiently mysterious and unpleasant to give a value to its possession remains to this day. But the prescriptions made up by the chief magistrate had a double efficacy for a time that believed a king's touch held instant ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... vers brise (run-over lines, enjambement) that they are making so much noise about. "From 1830 to 1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (genre historique) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought it was the genre intime, about which there ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... afflicted with syphilis, and Giuliano had suffered from epilepsy from the age of seven. At this age he began to indulge in alcohol and self-abuse, and stole from his parents in order to buy sweets. He appears to have been subject to an ambulatory mania, which caused him to wander aimlessly about the country, and if kept within doors he would let himself down from the windows, climb up the chimney, or, failing in these attempts to escape, would break the furniture and attract the attention of the neighbours by ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... monarchy, with herself the sovereign. She was very near-sighted, and it was a mystery how she managed to know all about everything until we discovered she kept a pair of powerful field-glasses trained on the scene most of the time. The poor lady had a mania for selling discarded clothing at top prices. We used to ask each other when we met at supper, "Did you buy anything today?" I refused point-blank to buy her wreckage, but the rangers were at a disadvantage. They wanted to be gentlemen and ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... only to ourselves and our families, but to our fellow-creatures at large; it is the best and most certainly beneficial exercise of philanthropy. It is not, it is true, very flattering to self-love to be told, that instead of mending the world, (the mania of the present day,) the best service which we can do that world is to mend ourselves. "If each mends one, all will be mended," says the old English adage, with the deep wisdom of those popular sayings,—a wisdom ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... have the fancy, however, to assure you that what took place that day at the Cafe Grand was not the impulsive act of a man inspired with a homicidal mania, but was the necessary outcome of a long sequence of events. You know the peculiar relations existing between Isobel and myself. I had not the right to approach her, or to assume any overt act of guardianship. Any association with me would at ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fine oxen for a dog which struck his fancy. The Damaras take great delight in having whole droves of cattle of the same colour, and they prize their oxen in proportion to the size of their horns. "The Namaquas have a perfect mania for a uniform team; and almost all the people of Southern Africa value their cattle next to their women, and take a pride in possessing animals that look high-bred." "They rarely or never make use of a handsome animal ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... when he was a grown man, and thus suggested to him that children ought to be provided with materials for building among their playthings. He often noticed also, in later years, that all children seem to have the building instinct, corresponding to what Dr. Seguin calls "the building mania in the infancy of peoples," and that "to make a house is the universal ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... genuineness with which questions as to that doctrine are discussed. The Court is not to blame for this result; to do it justice, it has generally sought to decide as little as it could; and the interference of law with the province of pure theology is to be rather attributed to that mania for deciding, which of late has taken possession pretty equally of all parties. But the indisputable result is seen to be, after the experience of fifteen years, that law is taking a place in our ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied nor not one is demented with the mania of many things. Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is respectable or unhappy, over the whole earth." And that is not irony on nature, he means just that, life meant no more to him. He accepted the world just as it is and glorified it, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... his return from the second voyage and his going to Portugal he was married to a charming lady of Seville. This lady, Dona Maria Cerezo, was his betrothed during the time he was engaged with the house of Berardi, but the mania for exploring having seized him, their marriage was not consummated until after the two voyages had been made. She went with him to the court, sharing there the honors heaped upon him by the king; but after this little is heard of her, though it is known that ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... well-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and—as far as human fraility will allow—conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor and ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... old Danbury's, and he was very sorry to see his son going to the devil; so he improved the occasion by taking his case very seriously, and lecturing him upon the danger of his ways. He shook his head and talked about the possibility of delirium tremens, or even of mania, if he continued to lead such a life. Wat Danbury ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... extraordinary skill, with the strange effect of not having left the room, yet Mrs. Batty sighed. Charles had wandered back to the piano, and his mother, after compressing her lips and whispering, 'It's a mania,' drew Henrietta into the depths of ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... question what prompted Melanchthon to make his alterations will embrace also the following points: 1. Melanchthon's mania for changing and remodeling in general. 2. His desire, especially after the breach between the Lutherans and the Papists seemed incurable, to meet and satisfy the criticism that the Augustana was too mild, and to reenforce the Lutheran position over against the Papists. 3. Melanchthon's doctrinal ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... clothes were ill-cut, his trousers bagged, he wore white stockings at all seasons of the year, a hat with a narrow brim and laced shoes. He was always complaining of his digestion. His principal vice was a mania for proposing rural parties during the summer season, excursions to Montmorency, picnics on the grass, and visits to creameries on the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse. For the last six months Dutocq had taken ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... bad enough, but anatomy, which she had been encouraged to take up by Deschartres, himself a proficient in medical science, was worse—sacrilegious, for a person understood to be professedly of a devotional turn of mind. She went game-shooting with the old tutor; he had a mania for the sport, which she humored though she did not share. But when quails were the object, she owns to have enjoyed her part in the chase, which was to crouch in the furrows among the green corn, imitating the cry of the birds to entice them within gunshot of the sportsman. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... which it was with great difficulty that she could be controlled. Several times she threatened the lives of her nurses, and even on one occasion attempted to execute her threat, the person's life being saved by mere accident. Everything was done for her that could be done, but the mania increased to such a degree of violence that she was sent to an asylum for the insane. Here she remained for months before she became sufficiently tractable to be taken to her home and cared for by friends. Too close application to study was the cause at first assigned for her mental ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... doctor, "it's become a habit with him now, or a mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mentioning it were a sort of conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn't venture to check him in his way of talking. He may ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... It doesn't seem the best moment to begin your Italy mania. I thought you were cured of it by now. Instead, will you kindly tell me what you are going to do when you arrive. I do beg you will not be taken ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... attitude of the British authorities. There are well-authenticated cases of houses of 'notorious rebels' burned down by the orders of Sir James Macdonell, Colborne's second-in-command. Colborne himself acquired the nickname of 'the old Firebrand'; and, while he cannot be charged with such a mania for incendiarism as some writers have imputed to him, it does not appear that he took any effective measures to stop the arson or to punish ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... a man nicknamed "Johnny Appleseed." His neighbors called him a "crackpate." He had a mania for planting tree seeds wherever he went. As a rule they were haphazardly ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Vega and Calderona had unjust and envious Critics, and He modestly conceives himself to be exactly in their predicament. But I am conscious that all these sage observations are thrown away upon you. Authorship is a mania to conquer which no reasons are sufficiently strong; and you might as easily persuade me not to love, as I persuade you not to write. However, if you cannot help being occasionally seized with a poetical paroxysm, take at least the precaution of communicating ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... to pieces with rapacious analysis to satiate their ravenous curiosity. But as to the fact of his being a stranger, was added the piquancy of a reputation for eccentricity, and the irresistible recommendation of wealth, the Tchitchikof mania spread over all ranks of society, and raged with the fury of a tornado by the evening of the very day upon which the host of the Eagle first delighted them with the news. In fact, so intense was the rage regarding him, that the landlord of that hostelry reaped a fortune from the constant drain ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... Jean's brain was wrong in some way. Heloise devoted herself to him with infinite patience,—though she felt no special affection for him, only pity,—and while he was with her he seemed sane and quiet. But at night some strange mania took possession of him. If he had worked on his Prix de Rome picture in the daytime, while Heloise sat by him, reading aloud or singing a little, no matter how good the work, it would have vanished in the morning, and he would again ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... health and disease is a very different belief from that involved in "demoniacal possession." Travellers in remote parts of the East at the present day tell of alleged cases of demoniacal possession, but investigation does not reveal any difference between these cases and epilepsy or acute mania. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... what I am doing.' My dear friend, this is all I have to tell. The rest is of no interest except in medical statistics. Le Mansel, shut up in an insane asylum, remained for fifteen days a prey to the most violent mania. Whereupon he fell into a state of complete imbecility, during which he became so greedy that he even devoured the wax with which they polished the floor. Three months later he was suffocated while trying to ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... rebound and counter-growth of internal dignity from the everlasting commerce with lofty speculations, these agencies in constant operation had imbittered my school disgust, until it was travelling fast into a mania. Precisely at this culminating point of my self-conflict did that scene occur which I have described with Miss Bl——. In that hour another element, which assuredly was not wanted, fell into the seething caldron of new-born impulses, that, like the magic caldron ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... people talking about German spies, he laughed in their faces, he told them they were a bunch of fools, they belonged in the nursery; for Jimmie classed German spies with goblins, witches and sea-serpents. And here suddenly the bewildered little man found himself in the midst of a German spy mania, the like of which ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... and it was her only food between meals; packages arrived daily with the regularity of the Vancouver Province. She had a standing order there for hats, dresses and kimonas, to be rushed out the moment the fashions changed. While before Hance had taken a pleasure in saving, he now had a mania for spending money; and their merry marriage bells continued to ring for a few sweet ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... owe the remarkable series of writings known now as the "Drapier's Letters." These are fully discussed in the volume preceding this. But Swift found other channels in which to continue rousing the spirit of the people, and refreshing it to further effort. The mania for speculation which Law's schemes had given birth to, reached poor Ireland also. People thought there might be found a scheme on similar lines by which Ireland might move to prosperity. A Bank project was initiated for the purpose of assisting small tradesmen. But a scheme that in itself ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... a superstitious cast, and as soon as my wonder-scared imagination regained its consciousness, and resumed its functions, I cast about what this mania of yours might portend. My foreboding ideas had the wide stretch of possibility; and several events, great in their magnitude, and important in their consequences, occurred to my fancy. The downfall of the conclave, or the crushing of the Cork rumps; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was opposed to the other, Vargrave's exposition of views and motives had in them so much of the self-seeking of the professional placeman, that they might well have offended any man tinged by the lofty mania of political Quixotism. It was with a strange mixture of feelings that Maltravers listened: at one moment he proudly congratulated himself on having quitted a career where such opinions seemed so well to ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... suffices for his earthly destiny, never can become a source of embarrassment to the government: rather would he be a martyr. O beloved religion! is it necessary that a bourgeoisie which stands in such need of you should disown you? . . . Into what terrible struggles of pride and misery does this mania for universal instruction plunge us! Of what use is professional education, of what good are agricultural and commercial schools, if your students have neither employment nor capital? And what need to cram one's self till the age of twenty with ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... for the person who had called his name, it amazed him that Jim Pink could be so utterly insane; that he performed some buffoonery instantly, by reflex action as it were, upon the slightest provocation. It was almost a mania with Jim Pink; it verged ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... for one minute pulled themselves up and conquered their mania for money and machine excitement, the whole thing would be solved.—Would you like me to find Winnie and tell her to say good ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... But he has almost a mania for spying on his companions, and pointing out to the teacher every little action that might ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... Bowen, you are a richer girl than I knew," said Emma's worthy husband, coming forward, with his round pleasant face. "I congratulate you; at this particular crisis, when hundreds are being ruined by last year's mania for railway speculation, it is most fortunate to ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... numberless inquiries as to Mr. Reade's private life, with which, whether they have the right or not, the public will concern itself. So at home is he on every subject that each appears to be his specialty. One asserts that he follows Galen: witness his mania on medicine. Certainly not, another replies; are not his principles erroneous, and second-hand at that? Does he not dredge the science with ridicule? No practitioner would gravely assert the feasibility of transfusion, an operation never yet performed with success, since the red globules ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he found seven "From Jest to Earnest." Hence he had to undo every parcel. However, the work was easy. He first wrote the inventory in pencil, then he copied it in ink; then he folded it, and wrote very carefully on the back, because his father had a mania for endorsing documents in the legal manner: "Inventory of Sunday school prize stock." And after an instant's hesitation he added his own initials. Then he began to tie up and restore the parcels and the single volumes. None of all this literature had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... column began to reflect the effects of his mania for and about collecting. For a short time he showed little preference between both "the newe and old" books; but ere 1889 was three months gone, "newe" books, however, "jollie goode" were almost banished from ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... piracy, they might at the same time be acquiring information respecting countries little known, and adding to our stock of geography and science. A few severe examples and constant harassing would soon cure this hereditary and personal mania for a rover's life; and while we conferred the greatest blessings on the rest of the Archipelago, Magindano itself would be ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... anyone wanted anything doing in the way of literary sport—in the concoction of a squib or the sketching of a caricature— Wake was always ready to take the work upon himself, and let who liked take the credit. He had a mania for verses and epigrams; he was reputed a bit of a conjuror, and no one ever brought a new puzzle to Grandcourt which Wake, of Railsford's, could not, ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... in his "Life of the Bee" has an eloquent and profound chapter on the "Spirit of the Hive." In the domestic and international policy of the Prussian State, in the Hohenzollern dynastic tradition, we discover such a collective spirit, the "Spirit of the Prussian Hive," the evil spirit of war mania and megalomania, the treachery, the brutality, the greed, and, above all, the predatory instinct dignified into the name of Real Politik. And Europe will only enjoy permanent peace and security if she succeeds in destroying ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... He followed it up by a proclamation to restrain 'the disorderly trading in tobacco,' as tending to a general and new corruption of both men's bodies and minds. Parliament also took the fate of this weed into their most solemn deliberation. Various members inveighed against it, as a mania which infested the whole nation; that plowmen took it at the plow; that it 'hindered' the health of the whole nation, and that thousands had died of it. Its warmest friends ventured only to plead that, before the final anathema was pronounced against it, a ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... over a new leaf in the province, and seems to have been a model wife and parent, she yet retained a sore heart against the mother country. The feeling of these two was early inculcated into the minds of their children, and their eldest son, in whom it amounted almost to a mania, transmitted it on to his own successor, our Mr. Faringfield of ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... dropping off, and, as we observe with pleasure, are generally succeeded by frothy coxcombs, whom it would not be very difficult to gain over. But what we most rely upon as an instrument to bring the Dissenters over to us is the mania for gentility, which amongst them has of late become as great, and more ridiculous than amongst the middle classes belonging to the Church of England. All the plain and simple fashions of their forefathers ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... his beauty vanished, his eyes seeming to grow closer like an ape's. The mania for murder that obsessed him tautened his sinews. Cheeks, neck, forearms swelled with knotted strength. Ungovernable passion ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... sisters, and one day they had a quarrel, which goes to show that sisters in Bible times were much the same as now. Mary and Martha had a different attitude toward life. Martha was a housekeeper—she reveled in housecleaning—she had a perfect mania for sweeping and dusting. Mary was a thinker. She looked beyond the work, and saw something better and more important, something more ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... heard that gold had been struck. He went to a bank, deposited his scrip certificates, and raised upon them all the money he could borrow. He bought more shares. They trebled in value. He held on. They trebled again. At last, when the gold was being got almost by the bucket, and a great mania for the shares had set in, the cobbler sold out at 250l. a share, and found himself a rich man. The mine was, I think, the Sir William Don, one of the most successful in Ballarat, now yielding a dividend of about ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... London, Paris, or elsewhere. People go to his house; they receive him! And you wish me to believe in the devoutness of that man's daughter!.... No, a thousand times no; and you yourself, Dorsenne, with your mania for paradoxes and sophisms, you have the right spirit in you, and these people horrify you in reality, as ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... diamond ring. Moreover, of these transmogrifications we have already enough and to spare. But we have not, as far as I know, any version of Catullus which can transport the English reader from the teachings of our century to that preceding the Christian Era. As discovery is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry, like the Arab, and ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... for this heavenly body. In many a description and in many of the speeches which he has put into the mouths of his heroes, has Ludwig Tieck, who also has sung of the "moon-lustered magic night," given artistic expression to this quite remarkable love mania—this is the correct designation for it. Ricarda Huch in her "Bltezeit der Romantik" makes the striking statement that from this poet's figures one must "tear away the labels stuck upon them and name them altogether ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... symptoms were the same, with the addition of a strong desire to stick the royal arms over the shop-door, and a great rage for mahogany, varnish, and expensive floor-cloth. Then, the hosiers were infected, and began to pull down their shop-fronts with frantic recklessness. The mania again died away, and the public began to congratulate themselves on its entire disappearance, when it burst forth with tenfold violence among the publicans, and keepers of 'wine vaults.' From that moment it has spread among them with ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... them from policy as a rising member of the legislature, to gain favor with his constituents. Yet he and his colleagues were all crude and inexperienced legislators, and it is no discredit to Lincoln that he was borne along with the rest in an enthusiasm for "developing the country." The mania for speculation was nearly universal, especially in the new Western States. Illinois alone projected 1,350 miles of railroad, without money and without credit to carry out this Bedlam legislation, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... personally into the story, being the head of a formidable combination to supplant the King of Pontus, detain Mandane, and, if possible (as the well-known oracle, in the usual ambiguity (v. inf.), encourages him to hope), conquer the Medo-Persian empire and make it his own. But the Histoire mania—now further excited by consistence in working the personages so obtained in generally—is in great evidence, and "Lygdamis and Cleonice" supply a large proportion of the early and all the middle of the eighth volume, the second of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... also to go and spend several days with my mother. Marshal Augereau lent me a fine carriage and I set off on the road to Paris. But the heat and insomnia so excited my poor companion that he went from a state of idiocy to one of mania and nearly killed me with a blow from a coach spanner. I have never made a more disagreeable journey. I arrived at last in Paris, and I took Lieutenant N... to Murat, who was staying for the summer at the Chateau de Neuilly. The marshal asked me to take the lieutenant ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... noise of the campus tired her, spent the rest of the term at Miss Harrison's boarding place on Main Street, where she could watch over the poor girl and minimize the risk of her indulging her fatal mania again while she was at Harding. She was nonchalant over having been caught stealing, but her failure in scholarship had almost broken her heart. She had worked so hard and so patiently up to the very last minute in the hope of winning ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... ill-luck, my passion for gambling grew into a veritable mania, and I no longer felt any inclination for those things which at one time had lured me to student life. I became absolutely indifferent to the opinion of my former companions and avoided them entirely; I now lost myself ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the future, when Madelinette should return and see him as he was and cease to love him—to build up his Seigneurial honour to an undue importance, to give his position a fictitious splendour, became a mania with him. No ruler of a Grand Duchy ever cherished his honour dearer or exacted homage more persistently than did Louis Racine in the Seigneury of Pontiac. Coincident with the increase of these futile extravagances was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of which there is most in the world, a blind belief in religious dogmas, or a presumptuous and ignorant cavilling on revelation. The impression has gone abroad, that France was an example of the last, during the height of her great revolutionary mania; a charge that was scarcely true, as respects the nation, however just it might be in connection with her bolder and more unquiet spirits. Most of the excesses of France, during that momentous period, were to be attributed to the agency ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... would be if such a rule were followed with all great men, who seem so great at the time of their death, and who, a hundred years later, are almost forgotten, or at all events appreciated by a small number of admirers only. This Monument- and Society-mania is indeed becoming very objectionable, for if for some time there has been no room for tombs and statues in Westminster Abbey, there will soon be no room for them in the streets of London. The result is that many of the people who walk along the Thames Embankment, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... that which is not revealed to him; and Vautrot could not be long in discovering that his patron's success did not arise, morally, from too much principle—in politics, from excess of conviction—in business, from a mania for scruples! The intellectual superiority of Camors, refined and insolent as it was, aided to blind Vautrot, showing him evil which was not only prosperous, but was also radiant in grace and prestige. For these ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Plato's two higher forms of "divine" mania—has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the "defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... a spell of wondrous power: it is most like what we should call in England a rage, a mania, a torrent sweeping down the bounds between good and evil, sense and nonsense, upon whose surface straws and egg-shells float into notoriety, while the gold and the marble are buried and hidden till its force be spent. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... her. Only his terror of the hours of night grew on him, obsessed him like a mania. He slept fitfully, with constant wakings of anguish. The fear wore away the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... with a note-book and did spiritual and economical sums in the way of dividing the number of "people in the free seats" by the number of bread tickets annually distributed. There was the layman with a passion for homoeopathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with a mania for preaching down trades' unions, the layman with an educational mania. All however agreed in one point, much as they differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in their individual nostrums ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... arbitration rests. But the season doesn't get much older than "Rus's" mania begins to break out in a new channel. He's so anxious to see all the boys proficient in the gentle art of falling on the ball that he takes to ragging them ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... brilliant of uniforms, should appear at miraculous moments in her career, bringing shame and jealousy to armies of ill-mannered rivals. After the first three months in the Catherine Institute, this style of amusement also changed, and she was overcome by a religious mania which, being encouraged on every hand, might possibly have become really dangerous. It was by finally emerging from it unscathed, and having, at the age of thirteen years and six months, resolved herself into an agreeably normal young person whose quiet ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Aurelianus gave it description. The cancer of to-day is the cancer known to Paulus Eginaeta. The Black Death, though its name is gone, lingers in malignant typhus. The great plague of Athens is the modern great plague of England, scarlet fever. The dancing mania of the Middle Ages and the convulsionary epidemic of Montmartre, subdued in their violence, are still to be seen in some American communities, and even at this hour in the New Forest of England. Small-pox, when the ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... and catch-pennyism of the one division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and humour, and above all the pseudo-scientific tendency to generalisation, classification and, to use a familiar word, "pottering" of the other. In particular he had a mania in his more serious moods for defining and sub-defining things and putting them into pigeon-holes under the sub-definitions. Thus the so-called Demetrius Phalereus, who (or a false namesake of his) has left ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for them. Soured on the one ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... be my God," said Paul, once more suspicious—and now hideously so—of religious mania. "And possibly the real God is somebody else's God altogether. Anyway, England's the only God I've got left, and I'm going to fight ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Testament Possible, Credible, and Historical"—one of the volumes issued by the Christian Evidence Society in answer to "Supernatural Religion"—deals fully with this difficulty; it has been urged that possession was simply a form of mania, and on this Mr. Row say: "Now, on the assumption that possession was simple mania, and nothing more, the following suppositions are the only possible ones. First, that our Lord really distinguished ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... the stomach-pump, will sometimes avert. It is apt to be forgotten by people's feelings, even if remembered by their understandings, that human actions are in this last predicament: they are never (except in some cases of mania) ruled by any one motive with such absolute sway that there is no room for the influence of any other. The causes, therefore, on which action depends, are never uncontrollable; and any given effect is only necessary provided that the causes tending to produce it are ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the result of his work a large Sunday-school is to-day in operation. There is abundance of such testimony, I believe, to be furnished throughout our land, which we should have before our heart as an answer to the anti-Chinese mania which now and then sweeps over this country. Help us to carry the gospel to these men of unmeasured possibilities, whom God in his mercy has brought across the seas ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed forever. With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Each century has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grace; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Genevieve. Each country has its Saint-Peter's of Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has two or three. The insignificant ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... felt that recognition by the magazines would commend him to the book-publishing houses. "Ephemera" he likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden's prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print. He did not intend, however, to publish it without the other's permission. His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and, thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... influenced the conversation at meals, the habits of the household, the names of the pet animals, and even of the children. I was called Mary, in a fever of chivalrous enthusiasm for the fair and luckless Queen of Scotland, and Fatima received her name when the study of Arabic had brought about an eastern mania. My father had wished to call her Shahrazad, after the renowned sultana of the 'Arabian Nights' but when he called upon the curate to arrange for the baptism, that worthy man flatly rebelled. A long discussion ended in my father's making a list of eastern names, from ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... The autographic fan mania had left its mark over the divan in the shape of a gigantic fan constructed of little fans and opening out towards the ceiling. A few pen-and-ink and pencil sketches and studies, apparently the cast-off of many studios, were tacked up ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... Nay, many times worse than destitute. We must not suppose that habits once formed are any more easily broken off in the other form of life than they are in this. If one voluntarily grows a certain mania here, we must not suppose that the mere dropping of the body makes all conditions perfect. All is law, all is cause and effect. As we sow, so shall we also reap, not only in this ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... nobility, Mademoiselle Cormon had another and very excusable mania: that of being loved for herself. You could hardly believe the lengths to which this desire led her. She employed her mind on setting traps for her possible lovers, in order to test their real sentiments. Her nets were so well laid that the luckless suitors were all caught, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... that they are more successful in its requirements. The distractions of more numerous social interests may actually accompany the later years of school age. In reference to the social distractions of girls, Margaret Slattery says,[23] "This mania for 'going' seizes many of our girls just when they need rest and natural pleasures, the great out-of-doors, and early hours of retiring." But surely such distractions are not peculiar to the girls alone. The economic needs ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... terrible secrets learned from Exili, and which he revealed to his fair, frail mistress, who, mad to make herself his wife, saw in these a means to remove every obstacle out of the way. She poisoned her husband, her father, her brother, and at last, carried away by a mania for murder, administered on all sides the fatal poudre de succession, which brought death to house, palace, and hospital, and filled the capital, nay, the whole ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... strong enough to stand alone? Why weaken myself just to gratify your mania for owning and bossing? But let me finish what I was saying. I never got any quarter because I was a woman. No woman does, as a matter of fact; and in the end, the more she uses her sex to help her shirk, the worse her punishment is. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... effect of recent experience and sufferings still more recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal in those who did not think them ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
