"Insanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... among the Salisbury adherents. The men bawled, the women screamed, the boys shrieked, and all waved their hats and flags, and jumped up and down, and manifested symptoms of baseball insanity. ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the two ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... you talking about? Mother has lost her wits. Please do not be angry, your Excellency. She has a touch of insanity. Her mother ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... restitution. She has, oh, she has become a kleptomaniac. With every luxury, with her fine home on the Lake Shore Drive, with all her father's wealth, with no want money can gratify, she takes things. In her circumstances it is out of the question to call it stealing. It is a mania, a form of insanity. When she is doing it, she seems to be in the grasp of some other mind, to be another person, and her actions are involuntary, unconscious. Then she seems to come to herself, when her agony ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... World's Neglected or Forgotten Leaders and Pioneers Social Conditions—Expenses at Harvard; European Wages; India as a Wheat Producer; Increase of Insanity; Temperance; Flamboyant Animalism Transcendental Hash Just Criticism Progress of discovery and Improvement—Autotelegraphy; Edison's Phonograph; Type-setting Eclipsed; Printing in Colors; Steam Wagon; Fruit Preserving; Napoleon's Manuscript; Peace; Capital ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain specially marked tendencies ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the term applied to an infantry soldier. Hal and Noll, being in an infantry regiment, had thereby become doughboys. The "happy house" is the part of a military hospital where mild cases of insanity are confined. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... fear fatal effects from drinking half the quantity of water which some of them take of beer. The drunkenness produced by beer is at least a very different thing from that produced by distilled spirits. The one may be a stupor, the other is a brief and sudden insanity. Beer holds no one captive by such spell as that which seizes some natures on the first taste of ardent spirits, throwing them beyond their own control until their week's frolic is ended. The cases are rare, if they ever occur, in which the beer-drinker is enticed from the prosecution of his business, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... streaming from his shoulders, and in his hand a long whip, which he waved. He was big but loosely jointed, and as he passed he turned his face also, and we saw that it was that of a madman. There could be no doubt of it; insanity blazed in those hollow eyes and rang in that savage, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... the contiguous population in Sherman, Conn., to the highly organic communal life of Quaker Hill. Connecticut people, some of them of the same original Quaker stock, have settled on small holdings of lands, and held them till isolation and poverty have driven them to suicide, insanity or other miseries. Quaker Hill was from the beginning differentiated into a healthier diversity, and it has been the better ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... rates had been imposed like a yoke of iron. The monster had killed Harran, had killed Osterman, had killed Broderson, had killed Hooven. It had beggared Magnus and had driven him to a state of semi-insanity after he had wrecked his honour in the vain attempt to do evil that good might come. It had enticed Lyman into its toils to pluck from him his manhood and his honesty, corrupting him and poisoning him beyond redemption; it had hounded Dyke from ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... this into consideration, M. le President, and the affidavits subjoined, the petitioner desires that it may please you, inasmuch as the foregoing facts sufficiently prove the insanity and incompetency of the Marquis d'Espard herein described with his titles and residence, to order that, to the end that he may be declared incompetent by law, this petition and the documents in evidence may be laid before the King's public prosecutor; ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... life of the hills went on all about us in the sunshine, the pressure of the encircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not in the mud and jokes and every-day activities of the trenches that one most feels the damnable insanity of war; it is where it lurks like a mythical monster in scenes to which the mind has ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... on examination of the proofs that the supposed murderess was totally irresponsible, because of hereditary idiocy and insanity. Her father had died of drunkenness in a Cincinnati hospital, and her mother went about under the insane hallucination that she was a prophetess. Nancy's conduct and conversations while employed in the wholesale poisoning business showed that she had no moral comprehension of what she was ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... general warning to the people of the Hebrides not to drink tea as black as porter, and, above all, not to boil it. The pale anaemic faces one so often sees in the north and west, the mental prostration and actual insanity so alarmingly on the increase in the Long Island, are unquestionably due, in great measure, to the abominably strong tea that is swilled in such quantities there. A Tarbert doctor told me that the medical profession now talk quite familiarly ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... misjudging his intentions, and roused to a fit of temporary insanity by her wrongs and sorrows, sprang at her supposed foe like a wildcat. She was naturally a strong woman, and violent passion ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... developed a curiously unrestrained passion for puzzles. He neglected his business, and soon his position was taken from him. His days and nights were now passed with the subject that fascinated him, and this little maze seems to have driven him into insanity. He had been puzzling over it for some time, and finally it sent him mad and caused him to fire a bullet through his brain. Goodness knows what his difficulties could have been! But there can be little doubt that he had a disordered mind, and that if this little ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... annulled on account of the consanguinity or affinity of the parties, or because of impotency, the issue shall be illegitimate, but when on account of non-age, or insanity, or idiocy, the issue is the legitimate issue of the party capable of ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... the weight of the lifeless body of Mivanway, and the sight not unnaturally alarmed her. Charles's suggestion of brandy, however, sounded human, and the urgent need of attending to Mivanway kept her mind from dwelling upon problems tending towards insanity. ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... those frowning mountains over there echo with my shouts—and I'll have none of your English stiffness and reserve and curbing of enthusiasm to-day. I am a lunatic if you will—an escaped lunatic—if to be mad with joy be a proof of insanity. Clyffurde, my dear friend," he added more soberly, "I am honestly sorry for ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... my reader, that it was not all hopelessly bad in solitary. Given three minds such as ours, there was much with which to while away the time. It might well be that we kept one another from insanity, although I must admit that Oppenheimer rotted five years in solitary entirely by himself, ere Morrell joined him, and yet ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the unfortunate young lady, and fearing alike to awaken her passions and his own. Whatever he might have proposed to say, was disconcerted by the plain indications that her mind was clouded, more or less slightly, with a shade of insanity, which deranged, though it had not destroyed, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... pockets to this day: but the English have more completely forgotten it than any other People. "Battle of Dettingen, Battle of Fontenay,—what, in the Devil's name, were we ever doing there?" the impatient Englishman asks; and can give no answer, except the general one: "Fit of insanity; DELIRIUM TREMENS, perhaps FURENS;—don't think of it!" Of Philippi and Arbela educated Englishmen can render account; and I am told young gentlemen entering the Army are pointedly required to say who commanded at ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lady of them all,—how often he said all these things, we need not enumerate; nor need we say with what unquestioning trust, and deafness to all the suggestions of probability, Jenny believed. Does not love, in fact, always believe what it hopes? Who would do away with the blessed insanity that clothes the marriage day with such enchantment? Who would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... in the insanity of fear, he fought with his bonds until the blood came, even throwing himself down, until the men, out of patience, pricked him savagely, and drove him, venting choked cries of pain, to his feet again. After the second attempt, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... The old fellow never left me, nor I him, until his death three years later. He taught me many valuable points in practical mining, and I think his rough but kindly care was all that saved me from insanity ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... destitution and exposure is coming a nervous shock, culminating in insanity, pneumonia, fever and all the other forms of disease. When these people came back to Johnstown on the day after the wreck of the town they had to live in sheds, barns and in houses which had been but partially ruined. They had to sleep without any covering, in their wet clothes, and ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Spurr'd by contumely, Cold inhumanity, Burning insanity, Into her rest.— Cross her hands humbly, As if praying dumbly, ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... which the person supposes he is the subject of arises from a certain spiritual exaltation, which, though it does not wholly unfit him for the ordinary avocations and duties of life, still verges upon insanity, and often finally lapses ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... closely to her bosom at the mention of my name? In one word, for years have I not been a BUCCANEER? And yet you talk to me of quietness!—Sir, sir, the soul so steeped in sin has but two resources—madness, or the grave; the last even I shrink from; so give me war, war, and its insanity." ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state—the helpless though gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy—weighed heavily on his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very year—1848—to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the late Duke of Argyll, the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... never doubted one moment that the poor fellow had gone completely mad. He was at first tempted to ring the bell and have him put out; but, noticing his firm demeanor, his determined look, the fermier-general took pity on so inoffensive a case of insanity. He merely told his daughter to retire, so that she might be no longer exposed to ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... flash of the lightning, but no direct stroke descended upon any one. He was angry that such a repulsive and offensive thing as his marriage to Maria Port should be mentioned, or even thought of, but he was enraged when he heard that his niece had believed him capable of such disgusting insanity. With a jerk he ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... compulsory manual training; the honor system; compulsory education; vivisection; reciprocity; an enlarged army; the educational voting test; strikes; bounties and subsidies; capital punishment; Hamlet's insanity; municipal government; permanent copyright; athletics; civil service; military training; Panama canal; jury system; foreign acquisitions; Monroe Doctrine; forest reserves; ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... put my hand fearfully upon it—it was a sort of unctuous, pitchy cinder. I screamed with horror—my little senses reeled—I staggered from the cabin and fell down on the deck in a state amounting almost to insanity: it was followed by a sort of stupor, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and Dorothy did not look at the young woman who had taken her place. There was something so humiliating about being suspected of insanity! ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... coiled about her; it strangled her. Her candle failed; the wick in the socket flickered and died; but Elma danced on, unheeding, in the darkness. Dance, dance, dance, dance; never mind for the light! Oh! what madness was this? What insanity had come over her? Would her feet never stop? Must she go on till she dropped? Must she go ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... Sir John had shrugged his. This was common sense carried to the verge of insanity. There must fall a time when there is no further room for reasoning, and surely it ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... having trouble with a lunatic," he explained, after greeting me, and inquiring why I had come down to consult him. "The woman's people are anxious to place her under restraint; yet, for the present, there is not quite sufficient evidence of insanity to sign the certificate. Did you overhear her in the next room?" And, seating himself at his table, he looked at me through his glasses with those keen penetrating eyes that age had not dimmed or ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... helped him out of the waggon she had said: "Are you prepared? I thought not; but there's no time to lose. Remember there are aged parents; two brothers living—one railroading in Spokane Falls, the other clerking in Washington, D.C. Don't mention the Universalists—there's be'n two in the fam'ly; nor insanity—there's be'n one o' them. The girl in the corner is the one that the remains has be'n keeping comp'ny with. If you can make some genteel allusions to her, it'll be much ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... arterial blood is sent to the brain of those who are prematurely talented, and hence it becomes more than ordinarily developed. Such advantages are not unmixed with danger; this same arterial blood may exite and feed inflammation, and either convulsions, or water on the brain, or insanity, or, at last, idiocy may follow. How proud a mother is in having a precocious child! How little is she aware that precocity is frequently an indication ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity." ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... bony structures, muscles and ligaments; weakening and loss of reason, will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of insanity, epilepsy, petit ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... nature like Hetty's will for ever remain a mystery. One would have said that she was the last woman in the world to commit a morbid or ill-regulated act. But the act she was meditating now was one which seemed like the act of insanity. Yet had Hetty never in her life seemed farther removed from any such tendency. She was calm, cheerful, self-contained. If any one saw any change in her, it seemed like nothing more than the natural increase of quiet and decorum coming with her increased age. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... of insanity—a delusion of power, a feeling that he could escape? He could never know, if it was. He had to assume ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... "If insanity does not rule the Q. R. camp, they will embrace the offer with open arms in their present Erebus state of dullness," he tells Borrow, then, with a burst of confidence continues, "But, barring politics, I confidentially tell you that the Ed[inburgh] ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Restoration of Property, while perhaps a better name still was The Outline of Sanity. This Chesterton had chosen for a series of articles that became a book. He was asking for a return to the sanity of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and starvation. "We are destroying food because we do not need it. We are starving men because we do ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... first thought was that the strain of eccentricity in his humble little friend had developed into actual insanity. But, on further consideration, he was disposed to take another view. He felt bound to admit that, though there had been a strangeness in the behaviour of the little man throughout his visit, it had not ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... recall all this? There was insanity on both sides. For him, the prince, to love this woman with passion, was unthinkable. It would be cruel and inhuman. Yes. Rogojin is not fair to himself; he has a large heart; he has aptitude for sympathy. When he learns the truth, and finds ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... tricking him with weirdly absurd hallucinations. So what happened in almost that same breath did not startle him as it might otherwise have done. It was for a brief moment simply another assurance of his insanity; and if the mountains had suddenly turned over and balanced themselves on their peaks their gymnastics would not have frozen him into a more speechless stupidity than did the Girl who rose before him just then, not twenty paces away. She had emerged like an apparition ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... alley—thereby doing away with the necessity of cluttering up the store with a debris of packing. His primal instinct of the moment was to get right out of that with all the expedition practicable. He didn't want to be alone with old Sam another second. The essential insanity of which he had just done was patent; there was no excuse for it, and he was like to suffer severely as a consequence. But he wasn't sorry, and he did not want to ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... this period. During his residence in the colony, he had conducted himself with singular propriety of conduct; and, by his industry, had saved some money; but, for a considerable time previous to his death, he was in a state of insanity, and was constantly attended by a trusty person. The general opinion of those around him was, that he brought on this malady, so destructive to the majesty of man, by his serious and sorrowful reflexions on his former career of iniquity. His death, however, was that of a good man, and a ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... was like no fighting ever I had done before, a mad, furious melee, amid which I lost all consciousness of action, all guidance of thought, struggling as a wild brute, with all the reckless strength of insanity. It is a dim, vague recollection; I am sure I felled Sanchez with one blow of my pistol-butt, stretching him apparently lifeless at my feet; in some way that deadly cleaver came into my hands and I trod on his body, swinging the sharp blade with ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... synonymous with expense these days, when the general patterns and colors of costly papers are successfully reproduced in the cheaper grades. Tapestry papers are too heavy for bedrooms. Those figured with that mathematical precision which drives the beholder to counting and thence to incipient insanity, and others on which we fancy we can trace the features of our friends, are always distracting, especially during illness, when restfulness is so essential. The plain cartridge-papered wall with frieze and ceiling either flowered or of a light shade of the same or a contrasting ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... music-hall, the Valentino dancing-hall, the Porte St. Martin theatre, and the hall of the College de France, were mostly frequented by moderate Republicans, and attempts were often made there to discuss the situation in a sensible manner. But folly, even insanity, reigned at many of the other clubs, where men like Felix Pyat, Auguste Blanqui, Charles Delescluze, Gustave Flourens, and the three Ms—Megy, Mottu, and Milliere—raved and ranted. Go where you would, you found a club. There was that ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... hand on his arm, and speaking in a low voice, but with much earnestness; "this darkness is an emblem of our present life. You cannot see me, but you hear my voice and feel the touch of my hand. For any thing you know, I may be seized with a sudden fit of insanity. I may be about to stab you in this darkness; such things have been. You have lost, with the light, more than half the indications of affection which that would disclose. But you trust to the probable; your pulse does not ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... have thought nothing of it if Lady Mason had been seen there every day for a week together, and regarded Mrs. Furnival's suspicions as an hallucination bordering on insanity. A woman be in love with Mr. Furnival! A very pretty woman endeavour to entice away from his wife the affection of such a man as that! As these ideas passed through Mrs. Orme's mind she did not perhaps remember that Sir Peregrine, who was more than ten years Mr. Furnival's senior, had ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... hanged and one burned alive, they were hurried into eternity amid prayers, and imprecations, and shrieks of agony. The hauling of wood to the stake, and the preparation of the gallows, kept the inhabitants in a state bordering on insanity. Business was suspended, and every face wore a terrified look. The voice of pity as well as justice was hushed, and one desire, that of swift vengeance, filled every heart. Had the press of to-day, with its system of interviewing, ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... and Mr. Walker, the minister of the parish, found the poor man refreshing the epitaphs on {p.196} the tombs of certain Cameronians who had fallen under the oppressions of James the Second's brief insanity. Being invited into the manse after dinner to take a glass of whiskey-punch, "to which he was supposed to have no objections," he joined the minister's party accordingly; but "he was in bad humor," says Scott, "and, to use his own phrase, had no freedom for conversation. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the Oxford residence upon Johnson's mind was characteristic. The lad already suffered from the attacks of melancholy, which sometimes drove him to the borders of insanity. At Oxford, Law's Serious Call gave him the strong religious impressions which remained through life. But he does not seem to have been regarded as a gloomy or a religious youth by his contemporaries. When told in after years that he had been described ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... to the parlor, "don't be cast down too much about Harman—I think, considering everything, that his case is far from being hopeless. There is Father Roche—as for poor Mary O'Regan, in consequence of her insanity, she unfortunately can be of no use—and one of the blood-hounds are against the two others. Now, two to two, is surely strong evidence ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the main land into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and the Cathedral of Como, (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Philip the Regent would have worshiped. When she had no one better to corrupt, I have seen her take in hand an older, sadder, wiser, uglier man than myself, and in three days bring him to the verge of insanity, so that he would scowl at his wife, his companion for forty years, the blameless mother of six grown-up children, with a hideous expression indicative of carving-knives and strychnine. Guy suits her best. His thews and sinews awe her a little sometimes; and he has a certain hardness of character ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... day I went on reading it by stealth, and every day I wondered more and more at its marvellous suitableness to my own case. And then I began to do that which a few weeks back I should have looked upon as simply an evidence of insanity in a man of my views. I began to pray. I hardly dared make the attempt at first. It seemed to me that were I to venture to address the great Being whose existence I had denied, and whose name I had constantly blasphemed, a flash of lightning or some other sudden exertion of his power would strike ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... physical activity, so the less turbulent nature of Chekhov has made him reproduce in his creatures of the imagination his own sufferings and fears. I think he was afraid of mental as well as physical decay, for he has studied insanity with the same assiduity as that displayed by Andreev in his nerve-wrecking ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... disagreeable than to live by (or for) themselves. Like bees, they acted with one impulse for the public good, and always assembled about their prince. They were possessed with a thirst of honour, an enthusiasm bordering upon insanity, and had not a wish but for their country. These sentiments are confirmed by some of their aphorisms. When Paedaretus lost his election for one of the "three hundred," he went away "rejoicing that there were three hundred better men than himself found in ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... able, and probably it is impossible, to define madness, or to give a clearly marked indication of the boundary line between sanity and insanity. Mental soundness is merged in unsoundness by degrees of decadence which are so small as to be practically inappreciable. It is with the mind-state which precedes the development of recognized form of insanity the therapeutist and the social ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... the matter; conceding, however, that they were at liberty to be amused at the theatre, provided they could achieve that end in strict accordance with the prescription of the court and its Chamberlain. In George III.'s time King Lear was prohibited, because it was judged inexpedient that royal insanity should be exhibited upon the stage. In 1808 a play, called "The Wanderer," adapted from Kotzebue, was forbidden at Covent Garden, in that it dealt with the adventures of Prince Charles Edward, the Pretender. Even after the accession of Queen Victoria, a license was refused to an English version ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... occurrence in ancient mythology, at least as adapted to tragedy; but it generally takes place, if not in a state of insanity, yet in a state of agitation, after some sudden calamity which leaves no room for consideration. Such self-murders as those of Jocasta, Haemon, Eurydice, and lastly of Dejanira, appear merely in the light of a subordinate appendage in the tragical pictures of Sophocles; but the suicide ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... a letter came with steamer-tickets for the two of them. The song would not serve him any further, for in the song they perished during the voyage, and the poor young man spent the rest of his days on the sea-shore, gazing, through the shadow of insanity, upon every rising sail. She and Lasse arrived safely—after all sorts of difficulties, that went without saying—and Pelle stood on the shore and welcomed them. He had dressed himself up like a savage, and he carried on as though he meant to eat them ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Chambers was counsel for a widow who had been put in a lunatic asylum, and sued the two medical men who signed the certificate of her insanity. The plaintiff's case was to prove that she was not addicted to drinking, and that there was no pretence for treating hers as a case of delirium tremens. Dr. Tunstal, the last of plaintiff's witnesses, described one case in which he had cured a patient of delirium ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... which you have treated Psalmanazar's story. You tell me things respecting Chatterton which were new to me, and of course interested me much. It may be worth while, when you prepare a copy for republication, to corroborate the proof of his insanity, by stating that there was a constitutional tendency to such a disease, which places ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... fastened across her shoulders, and she had no other clothing except a petticoat. Her arms and feet were uncovered, and of almost skeleton thinness. Her features were meagre, and ghastly white, and had the fixed and horrible stamp of insanity. Her head had been shaved, and around it was swathed a piece of rag, in which a few straws were stuck. Her thin fingers were armed with nails as long as the talons of a bird. A chain, riveted to an iron belt encircling ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... disease, you goose," drawled Grace. "Unless," she added, as a second thought, "you can call insanity a disease—" ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... prejudicial to her own interests, and her incessant and stilted talk, were proof to his mind of a certain degree of insanity, and he had heard that people in this condition often united to their unnatural ways a wonderful degree of cunning. Her child was almost as uncanny as herself and gave him a shivering sense of discomfort whenever he caught her small, greenish ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... habits and irritable temper, others to the meagre support of the magazines, still others to Poe's restless disposition and desire to establish a periodical of his own. His uncontrolled and high-strung nature, so sensitive that a single glass of wine or swallow of opium caused temporary insanity, the uncertainty of his means of subsistence, his wife's frail health and her death in 1847, were causes sufficient to render unsteady even a more solid character than Poe seems to ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... them back to their room, as the verdict was flatly against the law and the evidence. They retired again, with stolid and unabashed patience, and soon reappeared with a verdict of acquittal, on the ground of "emotional insanity." But this remarkable jury determined to do nothing by halves, and fearing that the reputation of being queer might injure Sam in his business prospects, added to their verdict these thoughtful and considerate words, which yet remain on the record, to the lasting honor and glory of ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... 2. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... tremens at Katleean. Silvertip, when in liquor, was fond of detailing the last, violent days of the old bookkeeper. . . . Sometimes, Harlan fancied, he too was beginning to see those fearful shadowy images that dance on the borderland of insanity. How else could he account for that spectre of the tundra which he saw, sometimes, as he went home in the dusk—that dark, almost imperceptible figure far off toward the south cliffs where the lone tree of Kon Klayu stood ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... whom he bestowed a salute. At Portsmouth, he drank to the health of the English in the presence of an immense concourse of people assembled beneath his windows.—The general rejoicing was solely clouded by the domestic circumstances of the royal family, by the insanity of the aged and blind king and by the disunion reigning between the prince-regent and his thoughtless consort, Caroline of Brunswick.—Although the whole of the allied sovereigns, some of whom were unable to speak English, understood German, French was adopted as the ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... to the throne, and was at that moment engaged upon the task of divorcing his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The eighth line must be read probably with a medical eye. The concluding three lines refer to George III.'s insanity. As a political satirist Lamb ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... "you wish to push me to extremities! And yet I have told you there are certain hours of feverish insanity in which I am capable of ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... the mind of many a thinking man, worn keen as it were by poor living, sickened by foulness and monotony, makes fantastic efforts to reach beyond its environment, and occasionally hurries its owner to the brink of what some call insanity, and ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... Fourteenth, whose gloomy distrust often amounted to insanity, thought that the nobility aimed at his life. His favourite, Goran Persson, found it to his advantage to strengthen him in this belief. He hated most the popularly favoured race of the Stures, and of them, the light-haired Niels ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... to be Maria Monk, daughter of W. Monk, of this city, in custody. She said, that although she was not my daughter, she was the child of respectable parents, in or very near Montreal, who from some light conduct of hers, (arising from temporary insanity, to which she was at times subject from her infancy.) had kept her confined and chained in a cellar for the last four years. Upon examination, no mark or appearance indicated the wearing of manacles, or any other mode of restraint. She said, on my observing this, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... know the Slav temperament, with its strange mixture of sensuality and devotion, of barbarous cruelty and over-civilized cunning, seldom far removed from the brink of insanity, the incident I have recorded will appear incredible. I have narrated it, simply because I have undertaken to narrate everything bearing on the business in which I was engaged. I am well aware that truth is stranger than fiction, and I should have little difficulty, if I were so disposed, ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... started to her eyes. She kept murmuring the words abstractedly to herself, and for a few moments seemed quite unconscious of the General's presence. He still watched her, on his part, and gradually the thought arose within him that the easiest solution for all this was possible insanity. Insanity, he saw, would account for every thing, and would also give some reason for his own strange feelings at the sight of her. It was, he thought, because he had seen this dread sign of insanity in her face—that sign only less terrible ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... insanity in the domesticated animals in any of our modern authors, whether treating on agriculture, horsemanship, or veterinary medicine, and yet there are some singular and very interesting cases of aberration of intellect. The inferior animals are, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... miserable school of imported thought which had sent its revolting influences to the very Grandissime hearthstone; he wrote a "Phillipique Generale contre la Conduite du Gouvernement de la Louisiane" and a short but vigorous chapter in English on "The Insanity of Educating the Masses." This accomplished, he had gone to bed in a condition of peaceful elation, eager for the next day to come that he might take these mighty productions to Joseph Frowenfeld, and make him a present of them for insertion in his ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... "A species of insanity it is," he muttered, "to bring such a woman to a hole in the ground." He bit his lip and frowned, "fo' theah ah women in whom the love of home, of country, is pa'amount. Above all human things, above husband, above children, she loves her home. Child! Celia has no child. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... defended as "Proverbs, sir, Proverbs." Giving up part of his business to his nephew, he still sat up at night baking, for the nephew, he said, was only in the A B C book of baking, and he also had other troubles: there was insanity in his family, and he was much harassed. His kindness and simplicity were sometimes abused. He never had the heart to refuse to lend money, or to deny bread on credit to hopeless debtors; and altogether debts, distress, baking, and watching his sisters all night, and school ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... I've been shooting into a covey of publishers for twelve years and never have touched a feather. Perseverance is a good quality, but there is such a thing as insanity." He stared unconsciously at ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... not come to paint," Elfrida answered quickly. "I have put away the insanity of thinking I ever could. I told you that, I think, in a letter. But there are—other things. You may remember that you thought ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... that the present inhabitants of England are mentally fit, and could therefore not have descended from an ancestry of undiluted lunacy he brushes aside with the assertion that insanity is not necessarily hereditary; and that even though it was, in many cases a return to natural conditions from the state of high civilization, which is thought to have induced mental disease in ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... school my sex life continued for some years on the same lines: a struggle for chastity, morbid fears and regrets about the past, efforts to cope with the neurasthenia, and a haunting dread of coming insanity. These troubles were increased by my sedentary life. However I obtained medical aid, and put as good a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... others who have fallen from a state of sanity into a state of insanity. And with regard to these we must be guided by their wishes as expressed by them when sane: so that, if then they manifested a desire to receive Baptism, it should be given to them when in a state of madness or imbecility, even though then they refuse. If, on the other hand, while sane they ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... brethren, whilst utter diffidence is right for us, and is the condition of all our reception of energy according to our need, the most absolute confidence—a confidence which, to the eye of the man that measures only visible things, will seem sheer insanity—is sobriety for a Christian. The world is perfectly right when it says: 'If you believe you can do a thing, you have gone a long way towards doing it.' The expectation of success has often the knack of fulfilling itself. But the world does not know our secret, and our secret is that our humble ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... was engaged to be married, but an attack of insanity prevented the union, though it did not destroy the ardent friendship of the lovers. Cowper could never wholly throw off the fear of the future. "Day and night," he once wrote, "I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Surprise may be said to be the mother of a panic, which is the worst form of fear. In such a case unreasoning fear sometimes turns into temporary insanity. Panic is most infectious, but, on the other hand, a panic can often be averted or stayed by the courageous action of one or more individuals, who can thus impose their will on the mass and bring ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... all persons in whom there is an hereditary taint of feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, and the like ought, therefore, to be forbidden by law. But unless these defective classes were segregated in institutions, the only result of this might be to increase illegitimacy; therefore, any step in eradicating degeneracy and pauperism must look ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... ease in a boat, I have been struck with horror at the bare idea of being lost in them; as, from the great similarity of one cove to another, the recollection would be bewildered in attempting to determine any relative situation. It is certain, that if destroyed by no other means, insanity would accelerate the miserable ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... cost her something! She wrote back with a broad quill pen that covered a whole page with three lines, "You are evidently as cracked as ever, and rude and ungrateful into the bargain." It had always been my special terror lest the insanity in my father's family should leap across the generations and appear in me. This thought haunted me, and she knew it. So after this little exchange of civilities the door slammed, never to open again. I heard the crash it made, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... fragments from a journal written up every day by that poor young man, by that poor fool! For it is in the presence of a fool, gentlemen, that we now find ourselves, and the case is all the more curious, all the more interesting, seeing that, in many points, it recalls the insanity of the unfortunate prince who recently died, of the witless king who reigned platonically over Bavaria. I shall hence designate this ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... time to sense the meaning of the officer's strange statement, "she did not steal a diamond, or anything. It was good of you to bring her home to me. The dear child—she suffers from,—er—what you call emotional insanity, I think. A little too much love for an old man and his daughter, possibly. That is what I think. It is nothing worse than that. Thank you, very much, for bringing her to me. Take this, sir, for your trouble." He handed him, with ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... easily. Once, and he had thought it a passing light mood, when he had let down the bars for her to come in. Now that recklessly he flung open the flood gates which had dammed his own emotions, allowing the headlong torrent to sweep away everything with it. It was madness; it was folly; it was insanity for a man like David Drennen to let his heart be snared out of him by the girl upon whom he had looked so few times. And yet, be it what else it might be, it was the ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... further. "Leading lady" and "chorus belle" change places for a while—imaginary success keeps us from worrying about real failure. Dissociation, day-dreaming, and mental epilepsy are but few of the many milestones on a road, the end of which is insanity, or complete and permanent dissociation, instead of the partial and fleeting dissociation from which we all suffer. The lunatic never "comes to", but in a world of dreams dissociates himself forever from realities he is not ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Mrs. Ranger plunged into the household duties that were saving her from insanity. Adelaide and Arthur went to the side veranda. When Arthur had lighted a cigarette, he looked at it with a grim smile—it was astonishing how much stronger and manlier his face was, all in a few hours. "I'm on my last thousand of these," said he. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... reason for remaining in Egypt, since he had failed in his undertakings; yet he did not quit the country, and through repeated delays his departure was retarded a whole year. Meanwhile his long sojourn in Africa, the report of his failures, and perhaps whispers of his insanity, had sown the seeds of discontent in Asia; and as Darius said in after-years, when recounting these events, "untruth had spread all over the country, not only in Persia and Media, but in other provinces." Cambyses himself felt that a longer absence would be injurious to his interests; ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... sonata. This remark did not strike Swann as ridiculous; rather, it puzzled him. For, since a purely musical work contains none of those logical sequences, the interruption or confusion of which, in spoken or written language, is a proof of insanity, so insanity diagnosed in a sonata seemed to him as mysterious a thing as the insanity of a dog or a horse, although instances may ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Temple, a man, therefore, who must have been accustomed to weigh evidence, and who would not have been likely to decide upon insufficient grounds, wrote a life of Mr. Blake, in which he strenuously and ably opposed the theory of insanity. From this book, chiefly, we propose to lay before our readers a slight sketch of the life of a man who, whether sane or insane, was one of the most remarkable productions of his own ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... in this opinion; for when she reperused the letter, and considered the firm, regular characters, and the style,—calm and cold, even in requesting such a sacrifice,—she felt that there was nothing like insanity here. In fine, she came gradually to the belief that there were strong reasons, though incomprehensible by her, for the secrecy that her ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... talent like hers often means a tendency to insanity. I must watch her; she is a curious ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... Barsally brought a troop of his kinsmen and subjects to the Joar factory where Moore was in charge, got drunk, seized the keys and rifled the stores.[15] But the company's chief trouble was with its own factors. The climate and conditions were so trying that illness was frequent and insanity and suicide occasional; and the isolation encouraged fraudulent practices. It was usually impossible to tell the false from the true in the reports of the loss of goods by fire and flood, theft and rapine, mildew and white ants, or the loss of slaves by death or mutiny. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... with stern displeasure, "the other is the very incarnation of the haughtiness, the luxury pushed to insanity, and the infamous depravity of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory. A stirring appeal has lately been made by a recognized ethical lecturer who has declared that "It is insanity to expect to receive the data of wisdom by looking on. We arrive at moral knowledge only by tentative and observant practice. We learn how to apply the new insight by having attempted to apply the old and having found ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... like a demoniacal plague appeared in Germany in 1347, and spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping, furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, which gave to the individuals affected all the appearance of insanity. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... achieved by the most hideous route—insanity. Restless, travelling incessantly, fearful of darkness, of his own shadow, he was like an Oriental magician who had summoned malignant spirits from outer space only to be destroyed by them. Not in Corsica or Sicily, in Africa nor ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... beginning as far as I could remember. A thing the origin of which you cannot trace cannot be seriously considered. It is an illusion. Or perhaps mine was a physical state, some sort of disease akin to melancholia which is a form of insanity? The only moments of relief I could remember were when she and I would start squabbling like two passionate infants in a nursery, over anything under heaven, over a phrase, a word sometimes, in the great light of the glass rotunda, disregarding the quiet entrances and exits of the ever-active ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... which he took from dread of poison—all this, in the most fearful heat of summer, affected him bodily and completely turned his head. His actions can only be explained by their being the beginning of insanity. If a crowd of people did not please him, he attacked and wounded them right and left. All the persons, amounting to a thousand, that lived near his cottage on the market-place he expelled from their dwellings, that these might be destroyed and he might build a large ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... must have been thrashing about—absolutely thrashing about, like a dashed salmon on a dashed hook. He must have had a paroxysm of some kind—some kind of a dashed fit. A doctor could give you the name for it. It's a well-known form of insanity. Paranoia—isn't that what they call it? Rush of blood to the head, followed by a general ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... cloudiness of his insanity he saw some antagonism in me, for he at once fell back on the last refuge of such as he, a dogged silence. After a short time I saw that for the present it was useless to speak to him. He was sulky, and so I ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... pulses throbbed with a sort of divine insanity, and Frank Audaine was as much out of his senses as any madman now in Bedlam, and as deliriously perturbed as any lover is by ordinary when he meditates upon the ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... and certain it is, that the general effect of drinking fermented or spirituous liquors is an inflamed, schirrous, or paralytic liver, with its various critical or consequential diseases, as leprous eruptions on the face, gout, dropsy, epilepsy, insanity. It is remarkable, that all the diseases from drinking spirituous or fermented liquors are liable to become hereditary, even to the third generation; gradually increasing, if the cause be continued, till ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... brows. 'Tis the city of Lacedaemon; 'tis a stack of bayonets. There are asking eyes, asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate,—some of good, and some of sinister omen. The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a victory achieved in the will before it can be signified in the eye. 'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... a time, indeed, of youthful impetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography I read very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view that Newton was largely responsible for the poet's periodical attacks of insanity. ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... possessions were obtainable mainly through fraud, he commenced that strange career which none but a mind so little instructed could have failed to see must end in disaster. There can hardly be a doubt that insanity, if not born with him, was settling upon his understanding and that no degree of careful guidance or successful venture would have imparted ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... married, the details of the affair being appropriately unconventional, not to say exciting. The marriage was, practically, an elopement. Lady Burton's description of the event, and of every event in their lives, ever after, discloses an idolatry of the man that was almost an insanity. She reveals herself as a help-mate, with no will but her husband's, no thought that was not for, and of, him. She annihilated herself as an individual, and she has left in her own papers a set of "Rules For a Wife," that will make many ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... meadow that he rehearsed his readings, and his talking, laughing, weeping, and gesticulating here "all to himself" excited among his neighbors suspicion of his insanity. From the front lawn a tunnel constructed by Dickens passes beneath the highway to "The Wilderness," a thickly-wooded shrubbery, where magnificent cedars up-rear their venerable forms and many ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... remarkable degree his father's independence of mind. In both cases, this quality was coupled with a corresponding eccentricity of conduct, which occasionally, to puzzled onlookers, wore the appearance of something very near insanity. Many stories are related of the queer behaviour of Dr. Beddoes. One day he astonished the ladies of Clifton by appearing at a tea-party with a packet of sugar in his hand; he explained that it was East Indian sugar, and that nothing ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... girls when their car went out of a race. There is a mark on my car now where Ralph Stanton once scraped off the paint in passing because I was slow in getting out of his way. I suppose you judged mine such a case and forgave a moment's insanity. No one else ever will. You," his violet-blue eyes suddenly sought the other man's, "you won't think I am trying to excuse any such thing as was done to you or to justify ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... time the captain informed us that the man's life had only been restored by constant rubbing; and that the poor creature seemed so violent, he had been obliged to have him locked up, probably a case of temporary insanity, which the captain attributed to the moon! For some days the poor deluded creature was very violent, and made many efforts to escape from his confinement. On one occasion he succeeded in getting half his body through a ventilating hole in his prison, from which he was extricated with great ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... insanity," cried Stephen so strongly as to surprise the little man; "then I wish we had more insane generals. It just shows how a malicious rumor will spread. What Sherman said about Pope's and Steele's forces is ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... by filmy, red-veined lids, were predestined to aid hypocrisy. Two scanty locks of hair of an undecided color overhung the large ears, which were long and without rim, a sure sign of cruelty, but cruelty of the moral nature only, unless where it means actual insanity. The mouth, very broad, with thin lips, indicated a sturdy eater and a determined drinker by the drop of its corners, which turned downward like two commas, from which drooled gravy when he ate and saliva when he talked. Heliogabalus ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... Physician to the Infirmary at Bristol. Three years before his death he was made a Commissioner in Lunacy. He not only wrote much on Ethnology, but also made sound contributions to the science of language and on medical subjects. His treatise on insanity was remarkable for his advanced views on "moral insanity." -on immutability. -quotations from his ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the drama. A single play sometimes requires months for representation, being, like a serial story, "continued" night after night. He never dances. There is no melody in the Mongolian foot. Dancing he regards as a species of Caucasian insanity. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... may be so!" answered M. Fanjat, who seemed to be affected by this incident. Since insanity had interested him, he had known several cases in which a spirit of prophecy and the gift of second sight had been accorded to a disordered brain—two faculties which many travelers tell us are ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... little in mental or bodily health. The fearful scenes of that long night of horror and rapine still seemed vividly before her in her few hours of fitful slumber, and were this state of things to continue long, said the doctor, insanity would be a merciful refuge. An hour or so each day these ministering angels gave to the young officers. Harris, severely shot, was mending fast, his perfect physical condition lending itself admirably to his restoration. Willett, but slightly injured, should be sitting up, with his shoulder ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... would have done it for Phillida's sake that afternoon. But with every hour of the doctor's absence suspicions multiplied. Phillida herself was a prey to them. She was almost as ready to recall symptoms of incipient insanity as instances of personal kindness; if one lost one's reason, she broke a long silence to contend, there could be no question of regret and wrong. She was not so sure about crime and punishment. Pocket, of course, said there could be no question of that either; but in his heart ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... met the woman on the stairs felt a creeping sensation. Some thought Brierly was an accomplice, and that he had set the woman on to kill his rival. Some said the woman showed the calmness and indifference of insanity. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... cheese. "Aha, you think that that is the inheritance of a dislike for cheese," cries the critic, "but we will teach you better." An interesting example of this sort of teaching is furnished by Boris Sidis, whose feelings are outraged because geneticists have represented that some forms of insanity are hereditary. He declaims for several ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... prejudiced, they mistake also the effects of moral and spiritual perturbation and misery for further sign of intellectual disorder—even for proof of moral weakness, placing them in the same category with the symptoms of the insanity which he simulates, and ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... know, but I was in the narrow passage beside the stairs alone. Out of the clangor and confusion, the yells and oaths, there came a memory of Billie. My God! I had forgotten! and she was there, crouching in the blackness, not five feet away. The thought gave me the reckless strength of insanity. My feet were upon a rubbish heap of plaster, where a shell had shaken the ceiling to the floor. It gave me vantage, a height from which to strike. Never again will I fight as I did then. Twice they came, and I beat them back, the iron club sweeping a death circle. Somewhere ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... and miracles is patent to minds that have learned to scan history more critically than when a scholar like John Milton began his History of England with the legend of the voyage of "Brute the Trojan." One may reasonably believe that Jesus healed a case of violent insanity at Gadara, and reasonably disbelieve that the fire of heaven was twice obedient to Elijah's call to consume the military companies sent to arrest him. Cultivated discernment does not now put all Biblical miracles on a common level of credibility, any more than the historical work of Herodotus ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... they say that genius is to madness close allied. When I built this house I was in a state bordering on insanity, I suppose. I pleased my whims—my whims were my only company—I pleased my whims in building an American castle. These whims begin to seem childish to me now. I put in a secret stairway. No human foot but my own has ever trodden it. August, whom I love more than any other, and who is one ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... "this is too much! Heaven knows what pleasure I have in my life, that I should be denied my only consolation. These shameful proclivities must be trod down; we are already a mark and an eye-sore in the neighbourhood. I will not endure this fresh insanity." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Great Isabel? Everybody had given up. Even Don Carlos had given up. The hurried removal of the treasure out to sea meant nothing else than that. The Capataz de Cargadores, on a revulsion of subjectiveness, exasperated almost to insanity, beheld all his world without faith and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... always painful and irritating to him, and it was perhaps the irksomeness of his tasks that drove him into something not unlike madness.[Footnote: There is little doubt that Rousseau was at one time really insane, subject to the delusion that he was being persecuted. His insanity did not become very marked until the time of the real persecutions undergone after the publication of Emile. See his Biographies and Le Docteur Chatelain, La folie de J. J. Rousseau, Paris, 1890. He was, of course, always eccentric ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Kama again, but found her in a state touching on insanity. She hid herself in the darkest room of the villa; she was hungry, her hair was not dressed, she was even unwashed. She gave the most contradictory commands to her servants; at one time she ordered all ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are strong; the human organisms through which they play are but—as we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of fountaining ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Niekerk restored peace, so that both supper and narrative were finished without further interruption. But Niekerk, who had been unable to understand the words which gave rise to the disturbance, was confirmed in his ideas as to the essential insanity of the English. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... to this double representation, "that no seaman would give such an opinion honestly. To anchor on a lee shore in a gale of wind would be an act of madness that I could never excuse to the underwriters, under any circumstances, so long as a rag can be set; but to anchor close to breakers would be insanity." ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... cop were impossible, impassable. Corson found the thing too outrageously ridiculous to be handled by sane argument; his insanity in declamation was ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... only spectator, quietly made himself the same explanation as they did—that Ursus was gone mad; which was, for that matter, but another sad item added to his misery. The good tavern-keeper growled out, "What insanity!" And he was serious as a man might well be who has the fear of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... made their appearance after Apicius' time. We recall, Petronius, describing some of these "stunts" is a contemporary of Nero (whom he satirizes as "Trimalchio"). So is Seneca, noble soul, another victim of Caesarean insanity; he, too, describes Imperial excesses. These extremely few foolish creations are really at the bottom of the cause for this misunderstanding of true Roman life. Such stupidity has allowed the joy of life which, as Epikuros and Platina believe, may be indulged in with perfect virtue ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... recovered the wretch; but, when he had collected strength, the ungrateful Dominique, forgetting at once his duty and the signal service which we had rendered him, went and rejoined the rebels. So much baseness and insanity did not go unrevenged; and soon after he found, in a fresh assault, that death from which he was not worthy to be saved, but which he might in all probability have avoided, if, true to honour and gratitude, ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... said to himself that he was glad she could have enjoyable times and congenial friends, and he was. But as the letters became fewer, paper paragraphs more frequent, and approaching spring worked its old insanity in the blood, gradually an ache crept into his heart again, and there were days when he could not ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... evil in his conduct through life had its origin in congenital disorder; and in his days of apparent sanity, the character of his eccentric actions is to be palliated, if not entirely excused, on the plea of insanity. Additional force is given to this judgment by the fact that, when he died, it was found that he had left his money to found a hospital for the insane, illustrating ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... about the means of avoiding future wars and conquering the mutual distrust of nations can be considered only after peace has again been concluded. But we must most vigorously reject the proposition of voting approval to a resolution in which the war is declared to be an "insanity" that was made possible only through a "mass psychosis." Shall the German women deny the moral force that is impelling their husbands and sons into death, that has led home countless German men, amid a thousand dangers, from foreign lands, to battle for their threatened Fatherland, by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... camp-hospital, that being deemed the spot where I should be most likely to recover. I had been nursed and attended there with the utmost assiduity, and the brain-fever eventually left me; but it left me insane, in which dreadful condition I had remained for nearly eight months. The brain-fever and the insanity were both attributed— rightly, no doubt—to my frightful sufferings; and no effort had been spared to secure the restoration of my reason, which, by God's mercy, had at length been achieved. I learned, further, that the "Astarte" was still upon the station, but was then at ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood |
