"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 with the latter and still allows their ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... 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
... mania—one of 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
... 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
... mania was at its full height, and so many Bills for the construction of various lines were before Parliament, that what was called a Committee of Selection was appointed by the House of Commons. This Committee ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... 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 |
