"Abnormality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... departs, if we may so express it, from his argument. In fact, the precept which makes it a rule sometimes to disregard rules, is a mystery of the art which it is not easy to make men understand who are absolutely without taste and whom a sort of abnormality of mind renders insensible to those things which ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... its needs. Combative effort was grown impossible to him, as in time it will grow to you all. You drop from the world like dead flies from a wall. He could not physic his soul with woods, and groves, and waters. To his perceptions, life was become an abnormality—a disease of which he sickened, as you all must when the last of the fever of aggression has been diluted out of your veins. You die of your triumph, as the bee dies of his own weapon of offence; and you can find no antidote to the poison in ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... and of two stories the accurate one that interests the greater number of people is the better. The student should examine this definition with care as there is more in it than at first appears. Strangeness, abnormality, unexpectedness, nearness of the events, all add to the interest of a story, but none is essential. Even timeliness is not a prerequisite. If it were learned to-day that a member of the United States Senate had ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... too plain, consists but with a certain balance of my physical elements, which we call health. Even in the light beginnings of my headache, I was already not myself; my thoughts followed no normal course, and I was aware of the abnormality. A few hours later, I was but a walking disease; my mind—if one could use the word—had become a barrel-organ, grinding in endless repetition a bar ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... fairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that ideal our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the "Normal" human being. The very definition of the Poietic class involves a certain abnormality. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the disposal of her body, excitement over the racing motor cars, passion over the kidnapping of the girl, anger over the little detectaphone, and panic at the siege of the bandits, as I showed by the selection of the films that I was getting closer and closer to the truth. And there was the same abnormality of ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... to older childhood we shall find in an increasing percentage of cases evidence of definite neuropathic tendencies which urgently call for investigation and for a precise appreciation of the nature of the abnormality. It may be that the only effective treatment is that which we recognise as essential in the grosser mental disturbances—removal from the surroundings in which the abnormal conduct has had free play, and separation from the relatives ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... not, however, be regarded, when present in a marked degree, as the mere result of old age. Entirely normal people of sound heredity do not tend to manifest signs of pronounced mental weakness or abnormality even in extreme old age. We are justified in suspecting a neurotic strain, though it may not be of severe degree. This is, indeed, illustrated by our records of British genius. Some of the eminent ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... adjust to higher nerve-impulse velocities, and the sheer fatigue engendered by cells which were acting too rapidly for a lagging excretory system, all had contributed to periods of greater or lesser mental abnormality. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... are to be regarded as degenerate Trichias. Of course, the abnormality is exhibited most markedly by the elaters; nevertheless, the sporangia of some of the species have a peculiar habit of heaping themselves upon ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... "The signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of frequent occurrence. They get out of tune with other people; often they will have nothing to do with churches, which they regard as worldly; they become hypercritical towards others; they grow careless of their social, political, and financial ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... discomfitures, to no body. The history of the founder of Christian Science is its best raison d'etre, especially from a psychological stand-point, and the rather strange thing is that a reaction from an abnormality, going as it naturally does to another abnormality, should find a response in the religious cravings of so many; the philosophy undoubtedly would not attract as it does were there not connected with it, in the practical working of the system, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... lived over again as she climbed the stairs to Ward C on the 30th of April, her heart glowing warm with the memory of this man who had first understood; who had freed her mind from the abnormality of her body and the stigma of her heritage; who had made it possible for her to live wholesomely and deeply; and who had set her feet upon a joyous mission. For the thousandth ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... men; she only cares for women and may even loathe men. A homosexual, man or woman, has no right to marry. The wrong committed by a homosexual marrying is a double one: it is wrong to the partner, wrong to the children. The normal partner is bound to discover the abnormality, and if he (or she) does, then the married life is a very unhappy one. Even if the abnormal partner uses the utmost efforts to conceal the abnormality, he cannot afford any pleasure to the normal partner, because the sexual act committed under ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... speculating curiously about her. He had no active dislike for this young woman, and felt a certain respect for her talent, but he thought, as before, how impossible it would be ever to regard her as anything but an abnormality. She was not ill-looking, but seemed to have no single characteristic of her ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... necessity. Motherhood at the present time, though the most important and sacred profession in the world, is almost exclusively carried on by unskilled labor. The maternal instinct is deeply rooted and universal; its absence must be regarded as an abnormality, or as a product of misdirected education. The requisites for the mothers of the future should be absolute physical health and love ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... healthy, able-bodied man, on a night like this too, with all the splendour and glory of sky and woods and river about you, with decent company too, and a good fire, and yet you are incapable of enjoyment. You are an abnormality, and you have made yourself so. You need treatment; I am going to ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... of Athens as to say that he was a pessimist because he wrote Hamlet—the tragedy of an irresolute avenger. This interpretation is contradicted by the very play itself. "At Hamlet's side is the thoroughly healthy Horatio, almost a standard by which his abnormality may be measured. At Lear's side stand Cordelia and Kent, faithful and sound to the core. If the hater of mankind, Timon, had written a play about a rich man who was betrayed by his friends, he would unquestionably have portrayed even the servants as scoundrels. ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... sensations both physical and psychical are rapid. It is the unknown that is terrible to us all, and to the child the changes in its body, the changes in its soul and spirit, which we pass by as commonplace, are full of suggestions of abnormality, of disaster, and of death. Young people suffer much from the want of comprehension and intelligent sympathy of their elders, much also from their own ignorance and too fervid imagination. The instability of the bodily tissues and the variability of their functions find a counterpart in ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... harmony with the actual facts of the situation. Now that we are facing reality and trying to rationalize our thinking, we find that the variation from these masculine and feminine ideals does not necessarily imply biological or psychological abnormality, since the ideals were themselves established without reference to ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... concealment of the awesome fact, a medieval impulse, the ancient instinct of noble houses to defend themselves against all forms of aggression, including curiosity? Or was it merely the usual aversion to being identified with abnormality? Some abnormality is so terrifying that it seals the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... contempt for the man who collects both snuffboxes and clocks. And in this does the specialist reveal that his normal propensity to collect has degenerated. That is to say, it has refined itself into an abnormality, and from the innocent desire to collect, has shifted off into ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... chapters. Surely sufficient evidence has been noted to convince a thinking being that reason is a better guide than theism. Belief is the antithesis of reason; reason is rationality; religious belief is clearly mental abnormality. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... "I was merely going to say that I think there is some basis for all this humbuggery. These mediums don't start from nothing. They nearly all begin with some abnormality. Some submerged power rises to the surface of their minds like a sea-serpent, and that distinguishes them as seers. Curious friends crowd around, then the lying begins. It's going to be worth while to take ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland |
