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More "Insanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sentiments of republics, ancient or modern, as to Britain, I abjured the idea!—That a CONSTITUTION, which, in its original principles, experience had proved to be every way fitted for our happiness in society, it would be insanity to sacrifice to an untried visionary theory:—that, in consideration of my being situated in a department, however humble, immediately in the hands of people in power, I had forborne taking any active part, either personally, or as an author, in ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... play of yours as security?' He looked at me almost fearfully, as if detecting the first symptoms of insanity. 'Do you understand anything of business?' he enquired mildly. I laughed ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... herself that for such a one as her to do such a thing as this, would be to insure for herself the ridicule of all who knew her name. What would Sir Hugh say, and her sister? What Count Pateroff and the faithful Sophie? What all the Ongar tribe, who would reap the rich harvest of her insanity? These latter would offer to provide her a place in some convenient asylum, and the others would all agree that such would be her fitting destiny. She could bear the idea of walking forth, as she had said, penniless ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... eating, especially the use of overdrawn tea. A gentleman of over twenty years' experience, as governor of a lunatic asylum, assured the writer that next to drink, overdrawn tea was the most responsible agent for insanity. That week he had received a farmer's wife and five strapping sons all stark mad from the poison stewing by so ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees. The individuals of the same species graduate in intellect from absolute imbecility to high excellence; they are also liable to insanity, though far less often than in the case of man."[53] Nevertheless, in the face of these facts, many authors have insisted that man is divided by an inseparable barrier from all the lower animals in his mental faculties. It only shows the improper or imperfect ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... her and endeavoured to grasp her hand. She shrunk from him with dread, for there was a glare in his eye, and a wildness in his look which suggested the horrible idea that he was attacked with insanity. She looked round with the intention of escaping from the cabin, when the door opened and Donna Julia entered. Hernan was calm in an instant, and bowing to the Spanish lady, he said in English—"Cousin, soothe that poor girl. The blow that I have to strike will ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... consider themselves so superior to anybody that their sacred duty as they saw it in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English com-plex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would tell you—-it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... Voltaire is a living indictment of the madness of politicians and the insanity of parties and sects. It brings us back to the commonsense of honest men, who "care for none ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the beaming man observed zestfully. "Of the Interstellar Medical Service, to which all problems of public health may be referred! But here we have a real problem for you! A contagious madness! A transmissible delusion! An epidemic of insanity! ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... son of a clergyman, was born at Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, Eng., Nov. 15, 1731, and died at Dereham, Norfolk, April 25, 1800. Through much of his adult life he was afflicted with a mental ailment inducing melancholia and at times partial insanity, during which he once attempted suicide. He sought literary occupation as an antidote to his disorder of mind, and besides a great number of lighter pieces which diverted him and his friends, composed "The Task," an able and delightful moral and domestic ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... Nobody had mentioned Zan, so this simply didn't make sense. His conscience was wholly clear except about his native planet. This was insanity! He went curiously into the building and into the hearing room. His guards, there, surrendered him to courtroom guards and went away with almost hysterical haste. Nobody wanted to be ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... before his fierce eyes. She thought his exertions, his disappointment and the heat had combined to topple him over into insanity. She retreated toward the farther of the open windows. With a curse at her stupidity Stevens kicked over the table, used his foot vigorously in thrusting it to the wall. "Now!" exclaimed he, taking his stand in the center of the room and gauging the distance of ceiling, floor ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... men around them bore up with less fortitude. Rude oaths were muttered from time to time, and teeth ground together, with that strange wild look that heralds insanity. Once or twice I fancied that I observed a look of still stranger, still wilder expression, when the black ring forms around the eye—when the muscles twitch and quiver along gaunt, famished jaws—when men ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the memorable Quixottical insanity of the Russian Emperor Paul, having operated, with the intrigues of France, to produce an intended naval confederacy of the northern nations against the maritime power of Great Britain, it was wisely determined, by the then British government, instantly ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... insanity of her woe and despair, she lifted her gray face and vacant eyes to the vast, empty vault, beyond which dwelt her Maker afar off, and said the words aloud—spat them at Him through ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... paid princely sums to study for him the penal code, and legislatures have even revised it for his benefit. Eviction, destruction, suicide and insanity have even trod in his train. A picture of him makes you think of that dark and gloomy canvas where Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon ride slowly side by side through a sea of stiffened corpses. Bribery, coercion, violence and even murder have been this man's weapons. He is the richest man in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... incoherence and confusion. Finally he gave it up on the advice of George Pelham, who said that A.'s spirit would not be clear for some time yet. This A. had suffered from violent headaches and nervous exhaustion for some years before his death, though the troubles had not amounted to insanity. Now, just at the time when A. was incapable of manifesting clearly, other spirits were manifesting with all desirable lucidity in identical circumstances. Another case quoted by Dr Hodgson is that of a Mr B. who ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... the interest which it now does. The bhikshu was evidently rather out of his mind; and the verdict of a coroner's inquest of this nineteenth century would have pronounced that he killed himself "in a fit of insanity." ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... either insanity or intoxication,' said Miss Murdstone, in a perfect agony at not being able to turn the current of my aunt's address towards herself; 'and my suspicion is ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... vision in the tapestried chamber, the duel, the horrible secret, and the death of old Elspeth, the drowned fisherman, and above all the tremendous situation of the tide-bound party under the cliffs; and in 'St. Ronan's Well,' the long-drawn mystery, the suspicion of insanity, and the catastrophe of suicide;—determine whether an epithet which it would be a profanation to apply to the structure of any, even the most exciting of Sir Walter Scott's stories, is fairly applicable to tales which, though illimitably inferior in execution, yet observe the ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Lucy will drive with you, and talk to you, and sing your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest and ultimatum, you must attune your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... thinker, should have been misled into an opposite conclusion by the mental weakness, the paralytic imbecility, which gradually enveloped his brain like a growth of mould. And the foolish youths, who esteem the expressions of this incipient insanity as the revelations of a vigorous genius, swear by his later hallucinations about the ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the prisoner by means of signs, and found that he was deaf and dumb, and totally uneducated, but certainly of sound mind. The police surgeon again appeared, and said he had examined the man, and had come to the conclusion that there was no indication of insanity about him. The prisoner was discharged and handed over to Mr. Roe, who promised to take care of him till something was heard from his friends.—Derby ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... peculiar. At least it appears to differ from that of the Anglo-Saxon. A Japanese seems to lose all self-control when the supreme moment comes; he throws himself into the fray with a frenzied passion and a fearless madness allied to insanity. Such is the impression I have gathered from the descriptions I have heard and the pictures I have seen. Even the pictures of the late war with China give ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... is a tragic experience and prophecy. It was insanity that robbed the world of its most finished short story writer, the author of this tale; and even before his madness became overpowering, de Maupassant complained that he was haunted by his double—by a vision of another Self confronting and threatening him. He had run ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... and Insanity—Captain Robert Slivers, of the Sickles Brigade, makes his Appearance at Judge Owen's—He draws Graphic Pictures of the War, for the Edification of Colonel Bancker—A Controversy, with further inquiries ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the bard, the stammerer, the fat, and the simple, distinguished the tame and uniform features of a crowd of kings alike deserving of oblivion. By the failure of the collateral branches, the whole inheritance devolved to Charles the Fat, the last emperor of his family: his insanity authorized the desertion of Germany, Italy, and France: he was deposed in a diet, and solicited his daily bread from the rebels by whose contempt his life and liberty had been spared. According to the measure of their force, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... 1859. Assistant-Surgeon Judson B. Andrews graduated at Yale in 1855. He was captain in a New York regiment in the early part of the war, and became afterward superintendent of the Buffalo State Hospital, and a recognized authority on insanity before his death ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... of all came the appalling admission that an officer suffering from insanity had taken out three prisoners and caused them to be shot without trial on his own responsibility, none of these men having any complicity with the rebellion. This incident would have inflamed public opinion in any community; in Ireland its effect was beyond words poisonous. ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... are now so old, Good Dame, that 'tis already told: Yet for your money, in a trice I will repay you in advice. Astonished at your childish vanity, Your Friends all tax you with insanity, And grieve to see you use your art To catch some youthful Lover's heart. Believe me, Dame, when all is done, Your age will still be fifty one; And Men will rarely take an hint Of love, from two grey eyes that squint. Take then my counsels; ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... were ever to recover, it would be the last time they were likely to be afflicted by the same disease,—at least on board that embarkation. Not from any virtuous resolve on their parts, but simply from the fact that the cause of their insanity no longer existed. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... opportunity of thoroughly knowing and therefore sympathising with and guiding them, and on this, successful treatment largely depends. The majority of the patients in these hospitals are suffering from acute forms of insanity, and this adds both to the strenuousness and to the interest of the nursing work: the fact that such patients frequently recover, acts as a ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... the charms for which she was afterwards so conspicuous, and which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, made Gore House in London famous for its hospitality. A marriage at an early age to a man subject to hereditary insanity was terminated by her husband's sudden death, and in 1818 she married the Earl of Blessington. Everything goes to prove that, in those few years during her first husband's life, she set herself earnestly to cultivating charm of manner and the art ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... average person this would have sounded like the wildest insanity. But not to Captain Obed Bangs of East Wellmouth. The captain sprang from the truck and ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of nothing else, neither was Cecilia disposed to change the subject, for the remains of insanity which seemed to hang upon him were affecting without being alarming, and her desire to know more of him ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... thought this was but a return of his disorder, entered, and forcing him from Miss Aubrey, desired her to leave him. He fell upon his knees to them, he implored, he begged of them to delay but for one day. They, attributing this to the insanity they imagined had taken possession of his mind, endeavoured to ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... gives us the Almighty's views about them; they mean that "the forces with which God built the universe have been put into the hands of man." Likewise by divine authority we learn that "the sympathy given to Socialism is appalling. It is insanity." We learn that the income tax is "a doctrine suited to the dark ages, only no age ever has been dark enough." Somebody raises the issue of "tainted money", and the Chancellor disposes of this matter also. As a Deputy of Divinity, he settles it by Holy Writ: "Paul permitted ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... alarmed at once when I heard this, for thou art in Rome, carissima. I laugh now at that alarm, and I think that Caesar and his friends, though mad, would not dare to permit such insanity. Still, see how a man fears for his love; I should prefer that the house of Linus were not in that narrow Trans-Tiber alley, and in a part occupied by common people, who are less considered in such a case. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... baby could not be stopped until the tobacco-pipe was placed between its lips." Dr. Pidduck asserts that in no instance is the sin of the father more strikingly visited upon his children than the sin of tobacco using. "The enervation, the hypochondriasis, the hysteria, the insanity, the dwarfish deformities, the consumption, the suffering lives, and early deaths of the children of inveterate smokers bear ample testimony to the feebleness and unsoundness of the constitution ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... proclaimed guilty. More than all, he thought that his proud name, his stainless character, and even his wealth and position, would have shown the world that the charges were simply impossible. He thought that all men would have seen that for him to have done such things would involve insanity." ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... found General Butzou in better spirits, still poring over his journal. This book seemed to be the representative of all which had ever been dear to him. He dwelt upon it and talked about it with a doating eagerness bordering on insanity. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... 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 ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... who lives in America, and in its great roaring current of events, needs but a glance at Sala to feel that here he is on a darting stream ever hurrying more gloriously into the world and away from the dull inanity—which the merest sibilant of aggravation will change to insanity. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... be. The youth asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre. What private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the suggestion of rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies, some swing and verge for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here, driving ardent natures to insanity and crime, if it do not find vent. Without the great and beautiful arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him. Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ability to judge what he says we declare him a libeler. We read our Le Bon and declare off-hand that it is absurd and wicked to say that the crowd has no more sense than a flock of sheep. When we hear of an alienist who cites the increase of murder, suicide and insanity as evidence that mankind is losing its mental balance, we declare that the man is ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... exasperating one known as "the first two weeks," when coaches are continually upon the border of insanity and players wonder dumbly if the game is worth the candle. To-day Joel, one of a squad of unfortunates, was relearning the art of tackling. It was Joel's first experience with that marvelous contrivance, "the dummy." One after another the squad was sent at a sharp ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... persons, however, a reaction from the romantic is almost inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot long keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, although he hovered at times near the border of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his profane sea-captains and the carnal-minded superannuated employees of the Salem Custom House. "The weary weight of all this unintelligible world" presses too hard on most of those who stop to think about it. The simplest way of relief is to shrug ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... these symptoms, on hearing these reproaches, a great wave of joy swept over my heart. Manifestly, Philippa was indeed, as Mrs. Thompson had said, 'as mad as a hatter.' Whatever she might have done did not count, and was all right. We would plead insanity. ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... bring a plot against the Count Fortunatianus, who was especially obnoxious as being represented to be the principal demander of this restitution. He, being a man of naturally harsh temper, was thereupon inflamed almost to insanity, and exercising the authority of the office which he filled, he delivered up to trial before the tribunal of the prefect a person of the lowest birth, named Palladius, for being a poisoner in the train of Anatolius and Spudasius; Heliodorus, also an interpreter of the Fates from the events ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... of a great mind; a man's calibre is shown by the way in which he attempts to realize his idea. A great design planted in a little mind frequently bursts it, and nothing is more pitiable than the spectacle of a man staggering into insanity under a thought too large for him. Ellsworth chose to begin his work simply and practically. He did not write a memorial to the President, to be sent to the Secretary of War, to be referred to the Chief Clerk, to be handed over to File-Clerk No. 99, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... hope," said Miss Gardine. "Ze doctair has said if my brother could once remember zat last year he might be cured entierement. It is brooding on zat subject that brought on his insanity: he needs a shock. Now, if you will go with me when I visit him, and show him suddenly ze star buttons—who knows?—all may come back to him. I have told ze doctair all ze story, and he thinks it a plan ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the Irish this justice now, in the present state of Europe, and in the summer months, just as the season for destroying kingdoms is coming on, is (beloved Abraham), whatever you may think of it, little short of positive insanity. ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... I did. There was nothing else to be done, unless, indeed, I had throttled the old gentleman; in which case I am confident that one of our modern model juries would have brought in the popular verdict of justifiable insanity. But, being a peaceable man, I was averse to extreme measures. So I did the next best thing,—consulted my wife, and ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... is as detestable as any known in the annals of the American colonies. Many of his acts, and all the closing scenes of his career, seem hardly compatible with moral sanity; in our day, when science is so prone to find the explanation of crime in insanity, he would undoubtedly have been adjudged to the nearest asylum. In his early years, he had been stupid and illiberal, but nothing worse; in his old age, he seemed to seek out opportunities of wickedness and outrage, and at last he gave way to ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... many,—so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man,—a problem in human character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence, was the copying of music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Viceroyalty, the visible symbol of separatism and dependence, were all essential portions of Pitt's scheme. But Pitt was destined to sink into an early grave without seeing any of them materially furthered. Treacherous colleagues and the threatened insanity of the King blocked the way of some of them: England's prolonged struggle for existence against the power of Napoleon, involving as it did financial embarrassment and a generation of political reaction, ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... first rough wind: so at the last, with much excitement and breath and valuable time quite wasted, we find that the end of all is death. Then would it have been more shrewd, dear ladies, to have avoided love? To the contrary, we were unspeakably wise to indulge the high-hearted insanity that love induced; since love alone can lend young people rapture, however transiently, in a world wherein the result of every human endeavor is transient, and the end ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... my consternation when I realized this. I began to fear the day when his insanity would take some violent form and he would endeavor to do me a personal injury. I determined to have a bodyguard. I wanted a man inured to danger; one capable of meeting violence with violence, if the need arose. It struck me that if ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... otherwise it would consist of conflicting personalities, in which case we have not yet reached the ONE all-originating cause. Or to put it in another way, an Infinite Personality divided against itself would be an Infinite Insanity, a creator of a cosmic Bedlam which, as a scientific fact, would be impossible of existence. Therefore the conception of an Infinite of Personality necessarily implies a perpetual Unity of Purpose; and for the same reason this Purpose can only be the ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... speed through the bitter cold to be in such a sweat. There was a mysterious, controlled disorder in his look and there arose from him the odor of strong drink. But he was steady and sure in all his movements and his eyes were deadly cool and reasonable—only it was the reasonableness of insanity, reasonableness based on the ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Wave neared each other, he threw a shot at us from the boat gun on his topgallant forecastle, as if to ascertain beyond all doubt the extent of our insanity, and whether we were serious in our attempt ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... instantly took possession of such minds amounted to scarcely less than insanity, and for a prolonged period it paralyzed energy and made worse the ruin that war had wrought ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... probably, whom he really loved, d. Though he had a circle of friends in Dublin, and was, owing to his championing the people in their grievances, a popular idol, the shadows were darkening around him. The fears of insanity by which he had been all his life haunted, and which may account for and perhaps partly excuse some of the least justifiable portions of his conduct, pressed more and more upon him. He became increasingly morose ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... to exorcise evil spirits, or influences; whence it was also formerly called Fuga doemoniorum, "the Devil's Scourge," "the Grace of God," "the Lord God's Wonder Plant." and some other names of a like import, probably too, because found to be of curative use against insanity. Again, it used to be entitled Hexenkraut, and "Witch's Herb," on account of its reputed magical powers. Matthiolus said, Scripsere quidam Hypericum adeo odisse doemones, ut ejus suffitu statim avolent, "Certain writers have ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... in church architecture of the fourteenth century, sometimes pleased and flattered the Rector by subscribing to his fund for the restoration of the tower, and the removal of the accumulated rubbish of hundreds of years from the crypt. Small speculators, not otherwise in a state of insanity, settled themselves in the town, and tried the desperate experiment of opening a shop; spent their little capital, put up the shutters, and disappeared. The old market-place still showed its list of market-law's, issued by the ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... Tenbruggen's bosom-friend is a creature not fit to be seen or heard when she loses her temper. I only told her to leave the room. To my great amusement, she shook her bony fist at me, and expressed a frantic wish: "Oh, if I was rich enough to leave this wicked house!" I wonder whether there is insanity (as well as poverty) in Miss ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... providential thievishness; and not content with stripping me of health and strength,—not satisfied with pilfering inventiveness and any strong hunger to create—why, that insatiable fever even robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a broken instrument flung by because the god had wearied of playing. I would give forth no more heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed. And I still lived—I, the stout little tradesman whom you loathed. Yes, that tradesman ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... not fail me, I find. As to insanity in the sense intended by Gulielmus, namely, as 'mania',—I should as little think of charging Swedenborg with it, as of calling a friend mad ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... more reasonable and charitable verdict is that the 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... after the morning meal. Paula was moistening the bandage on the Masdakite's head, and Pulcheria was busy in the adjoining room with Mandane, who obeyed the physician's instructions with intelligent submission and showed no signs of insanity. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... go further," he said. "Have you never heard of—of insanity in connection with all this? We will call it ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... diseases. Six specific cures of such possession are recorded in the story of the Galilean ministry, besides general references to the cure of many that were possessed. Of these specific cases the Gadarene demoniac shows symptoms of violent insanity; the boy cured near Caesarea Philippi, those of epilepsy; in other cases the disease was more local, showing itself in deafness, or blindness, or both. In the cures recorded Jesus addressed the possessed with a command ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... schools, to say nothing about sex relations, normal or abnormal; and in society at large to do nothing about the ancient evil of prostitution, to provide neither isolation nor treatment for the worst of contagious diseases, and to regard the blindness, feeble-mindedness, sterility, paralysis, and insanity which result from those diseases as afflictions which could not be prevented. The progress of medicine within twenty years, both preventive and curative, has greatly changed the ethical as well as the physical situation. The policy of silence and concealment concerning evils ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... degree shapely; but in the winter—the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter, when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten our spirits and lift them up—we all conform to the prevailing insanity, and go about in dreary black, each man doing it because the others do it, and not because he wants to. They are really no sincerer than Sackcloth and Ashes. At bottom the Sackcloths do not care to exhibit ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... said I, 'to the singing clerk, who stood near me, 'that Fate has so ordered matters, that this young creature should depart the world in so very extravagant a condition of mind. Though too many pass their whole lives in a state of insanity, it were to be wished, that, towards the evening, the clouds of phrensy might be dissipated, and the sun ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... midst of American society, you meet with men, full of a fanatical and almost wild enthusiasm, which hardly exists in Europe. From time to time strange sects arise, which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... grinning, "but insanity's worse. Had the maddest ride of my life, Dad—my poor old Garryowen's absolutely cowed, and has no tail left to speak of!" He ducked to avoid a cushion from his sister. "It's a most disastrous experiment to keep Norah off a ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... united in death; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the ambitious criminals; Hamlet, the young man with a great mind and a great heart but with a feeble will which collapses under too heavy a task and comes to the verge of insanity; Cordelia, the English Antigone, the devoted daughter of the proscribed King Lear; Falstaff, glutton, coward, diverting and gay, a kind of Anglo-Saxon Panurge. A whole dramatic literature has come from Shakespeare. To France he was introduced by Voltaire and ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... In both these instances the cow was sacrificed by being buried alive. The sacrifice of other living animals,[223] as of the cat, cock, mole, etc., for the cure of disease, and especially of fits, epilepsy, and insanity, continues to be occasionally practised in some parts of the Highlands up to the present day. And in the city of Edinburgh itself, every physician knows the fact that, in the chamber of death, usually the face of the mirror is ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... to say that you hesitate?" said Lady Desmond, looking as though she were thunderstruck at the existence of such hesitation. "You do not wish me to suppose that you intend to persevere in such insanity? Clara, I must have ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... if I were deeply in love with a man who I thought was going to kill me, especially in that way, I would make no effort to save myself beforehand, though, of course, in the final moments nature would assert herself without my volition. What makes the horror of such cases in insanity is the fact of the love being left out. But I think I find no greater difficulty in picturing the mental attitude of a sadistic lunatic than that of a normal man who gets pleasure out of women for whom he ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... needs no paint," which he 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 keeping all day, were ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the Queen, implored her pardon, and disturbed the Temple for many days with the sight and the noise of her madness. The Princesses, forgetting the denunciations of this unfortunate being, in consideration of her repentance and insanity, watched over her by turns, and deprived themselves of their own food to relieve her.—LAMARTINE, "History of ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... friendly face, not a kind look nor an understanding eye! Crime, passion, foulness, insanity. The sheer horror of her situation mercifully blotted out consciousness. She sank, a crumpled ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... his wish to establish me there before his departure; and now it is the gray of the evening before his setting off, and we are strolling through the still park. Vick is racing, with idiotic ardor, through the tall green bracken, after the mottled deer, yelping with shrill insanity, and vainly imagining that she is going to overtake them. The gray rabbits are scuttling across the grass rides in the pale light: as I see them popping in and out of their holes, I cannot help thinking of Bobby. Apparently, Sir Roger ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... brown, combed perfectly straight and smooth about his ears and slightly powdered, but without the faintest vestige of a curl." It is a living portrait of that solemn gentleman in the suit of soberest black, with those bright large eyes in which insanity burned, "eyes which betrayed a restlessness of thought and purpose, singularly at variance with the studied composure and sobriety of his mien, and with his quaint and sad apparel." It fits well with all that we ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... had thirteen matters attended to this winter," I pursued. "The one that can't be done—Really, Mr. Roebuck, the whole state knows that the trustees of the Waukeegan Christian University are your dummies. It would be insanity for the party to turn over a hundred thousand acres of valuable public land gratis to them, so that they can presently sell it to you ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... high repute as the eccentric author of Logan and Seventy-six, but the repute, like the Seventy-six, is quite in the preterite tense now; and to review him and his works at this time of day would be suspiciously like a post-mortem examination, resulting possibly in a verdict of temporary insanity—if not, indeed, of felo de se—so wilful and wrongheaded were the vagaries of this 'rough, egotistical Yankee,' as he has been called: Herman Melville is replete with graphic power, and riots in the exuberance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... before the great outbreak took place. I could not remain and witness the ruin of mankind. But neither could I leave Estella behind me. Maximilian might be killed. I knew his bold and desperate nature; he seemed to me to have been driven almost, if not quite, to insanity, by the wrongs of his father. Revenge had become a mania with him. If he perished in the battle what would become of Estella, in a world torn to pieces? She had neither father, nor mother, nor home. But she loved me and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... reason; and it is immaterial that the one reaches the age of puberty, and the other recovers his faculties, before his decease. If, however, a lunatic makes a will during a lucid interval, the will is deemed valid, and one is certainly valid which he made before he lost his reason: for subsequent insanity never avoids a duly executed testament or ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... young woman say: "I believe we'll get married" and forthwith they do. The state sanctions it, and the church blesses it. They may be consumptive, epileptic, shiftless, immoral, or with a tendency to insanity. No matter. They may go on and reproduce their kind. They are perfectly free to bring children into the world, who are a burden and a menace to society. Society has to bear it—that is all! "Be fruitful and multiply!" declares the church, as it deplores the evils of race suicide. Many male ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... dreary monotony that was scarcely enlivened by its discomforts, never amounting to actual accident or incident, but utterly destructive to all nervous tissue. Insanity often supervened. "On the third day out," said Hank Monk, driver, speaking casually but charitably of a "fare,"—"on the third day out, after axing no end of questions and getting no answers, he took to chewing straws that he picked outer the cushion, and kussin' ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... me several documents, and, on reading them, I was astounded to find one was an order for my removal to a private lunatic asylum, the papers being signed by Josias Googery, J.P., and Dr. Loonem; and others contained statements of the evidences of my insanity, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... such an impulse could have become deep-seated in a 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 ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... lay for a long time listening to the storm, thinking disconnectedly on the past and the morrow. The strain upon her was twisting her toward insanity. The never-resting wind appalled her. It was like the iron resolution of the two men. She saw no end to this elemental strife. It was the cyclone of July frozen into snow, only more relentless, more persistent—a tornado of frost. It filled her with such ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... not in any way an unusual or abnormal thing; to brood over the rupture, to blame himself, to feel that he had been dishonorable, was to be expected, after such an act, from one of his temperament. Nothing, however, but temporary insanity or constitutional cowardice could explain such conduct as here described. Mr. Herndon does not pretend to found his story on any personal knowledge of the affair. He was in Springfield at the time, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... that the power of self-mastery is passing from him is only a degree less appalling than the consciousness of insanity itself; and Blondel cowered, trembling under the thought. If aught could strengthen his purpose it was the suspicion that the insidious disease from which he suffered was already sapping the outworks of that mind on whose clever combinations ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... I fed upon locusts and roots, that I too have blessed freedom with which thou hast blessed men, and that I too have once prepared to join the ranks of Thy elect, the proud and the mighty. But I awoke from my delusion and refused since then to serve insanity. I returned to join the legion of those who corrected Thy mistakes. I left the proud and returned to the really humble, and for their own happiness. What I now tell thee will come to pass, and our kingdom shall be built, ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... 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 hearing ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... she be compared with one who replaced her husband, whilst he was yet alive, with a youth of unknown extraction and condition, and especially when this was in lewd carriage and not by way of lawful marriage? So he who deemeth all women alike,[FN475] there is no remedy for the disease of his insanity. And glory be to Him to whom belongeth the empire of the Seen and the Unseen and He is the Living, who dieth not! And among the tales they tell, O auspicious King, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Marquis of Lothian (1737-1815) belonged to the "fast set." He commanded the first regiment of Life Guards, and was a favourite of George III., whom he deserted at the division caused by his first attack of insanity; at the King's recovery he was transferred to ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... decided to prosecute? He committed suicide! Is there no proof of guilt in that act?"—"You are going a little too fast, sir. The coroner's jury declared that the second mate killed himself in a state of temporary insanity."—"Gently! gently! we have nothing to do with what the coroner's jury said. What did the judge say when he summed up?"—"Bother the judge! He said what they all say: 'Find the prisoner guilty, if you think he did it; and find him not guilty, if you think ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... cannot fail to trace in Norna—the victim of remorse and insanity, and the dupe of her own imposture, her mind too flooded with all the wild literature and extravagant superstitions of the north—something distinct from the Dumfriesshire gypsy, whose pretensions to supernatural powers are not beyond those of a Norwood prophetess.—The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... 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 what a pitiable ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and either of them sufficient to establish it. One is deducible from the law of hereditary transmission as considered in its wider consequences. For if it be true that men exhibit likeness to ancestry, both in aspect and character—if it be true that certain mental manifestations, as insanity, occur in successive members of the same family at the same age—if, passing from individual cases in which the traits of many dead ancestors mixing with those of a few living ones greatly obscure the law, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... others," she begged. "If you knew how weary one gets of this place—a man, too, like my uncle! How can he be content? The monotony here is enough to drive even a dull person like myself mad. To choose such a life, actually to choose it, is insanity!" ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... standards, customs and traditions. The fact that Vespucci spent most of his leisure and all of his spare ducats in the collection and study of maps and globes and works on geography, was regarded as a proof of mild insanity. When he paid one hundred and thirty gold pieces for a particularly fine map made by Valsequa in 1439, even his intimate friend Soderini called him a fool. Vespucci was himself an expert mapmaker. This may have been a reason ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... continual contact with an intellect like Basil's, I had always the feeling that that splendour and excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived perpetually near the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose their reason. And I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of friends with heart disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a hansom cab, looking at a sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now. At the very moment of delivering a judgement for ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... meant the opposite to genteel. But "insanitary" was a discovery. She tried to store it in her mind, not daring to move her tightly folded hands towards her slate. Perhaps it was something like insanity, and Miss Hillary meant that anyone who didn't use a slate-rag and ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... a thing for mid-day, and not for midnight. She was therefore not particularly anxious to spend an evening—which began at an aggravatingly late hour instead of at a reasonable time, thanks to a social custom which has its foundation in nothing short of absolute insanity—in the pursuit of nothing of greater value than dancing, stair talks, and conservatory confidences; but Mrs. Willard soon persuaded her that she ought to go, and ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... when the vapours were dispelled, they were convinced of the delusion. To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension[200]; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgement. That his own ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... said slowly, "what is insanity? Medical insanity's one job, legal insanity's another.... Suppose your butler was convinced of the fact that he was Napoleon: would you care a continental, provided he buttlered as per contract? So long as he didn't shout, 'Tete d'armee!' as he passed ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Bedlam. If he were here, he might draw a companion picture of the Tombs. The one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, irrational, futile place, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civic attitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. There is nothing intelligent, purposeful, trenchant or radical about it; it is planted in ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Drury Lane, was a favourite resort of the Elder KEAN, and in 1841 had a club-room divided into four wards: Gin Ward, Poverty Ward, Insanity Ward, and Suicide Ward, the walls of which were appropriately illustrated, and by no mean hand. The others named (with the exception of PADDY ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... prevalent and one of the hardest fears to meet, is that of insanity,—especially when it is known to be a probable or possible inheritance. When such fear is oppressing a man,—to tell him that he not only can get free from the fear, but free from any possibility of insanity, through a perfect willingness to be insane, must seem to him at first a monstrous ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... bank of the Rhine. Louis II (856-875) ascended the throne as Roman Emperor, but died without any male issue, while Charles the Fat, who succeeded him, was removed from the throne by order of the Church on account of his insanity. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... forks in the roads. One road leads to incurable insanity, the other to curable melancholia. Right here is where heroic action is ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... coming only in my dreams; filling now, with a real presence, the eyes that had longed for it, as if in them dwelt an appetite of sight. It calmed my heart at once, which had been almost choking me with the violence of its palpitation. "That is not the face of insanity," I said to myself. "It is clear as the morning light." As I stood gazing, I made no comparisons between the past and the present, although I was aware of some difference—of some measure of the unknown fronting me; I was filled with the delight of beholding the face I loved—full, as it seemed ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... like Wilford Cameron could not fail even in New York to cause some excitement, especially in his own immediate circle of acquaintances, and for several days the matter was discussed in all its phases, and every possible opinion and conjecture offered as to the cause of his strange conduct. Insanity! how many sins it is made to cover, and how often is it pleaded for an excuse when no other can be found. This is especially true in the higher walks of life, and so in Wilford's case it was put forward, cautiously at first by Mrs. Cameron herself, who wondered at the avidity with ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... the West remained in the family of Charlemagne until the deposition of Charles the Fat in 884. His insanity dissolved the empire into factions, and it was not until Otho, King of Germany, laid claim to the title, with fire and sword, that the western empire was restored (962). His conquest of Italy and delivery of the pope for ever fixed the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... river. She was pregnant. The medical man stated that there were signs on the body of very great privation, so the jury returned a verdict that the deceased had committed suicide whilst in a state of temporary insanity! ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... seldom any society, and when I have, I run out of it. At this present writing, there are in the next room three ladies, and I have stolen away to write this grumbling letter. I don't know that I sha'n't end with insanity, for I find a want of method in arranging my thoughts that perplexes me strangely; but this looks more like silliness than madness, as Scroope Davies would facetiously remark in his consoling manner. I must try the hartshorn of your company; and a session of Parliament would ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... discuss my daughter's insanity with me?" He noticed that the sailors were preparing to hoist the tender to the davits. "Drop that boat back into the water!" he shouted. There was an ugly rasp in his voice, and for a moment it seemed as if he were about to lose control of himself. Then he set a check on his temper and tongue, ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... of insanity had gone by, and I was once more myself. Instead of regarding the act which I had meditated as the dictate of compassion or of justice, it only added to the sum of my ingratitude, and gave wings to the whirlwind that was sent ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... was the case—Josiah Wedgwood was in love, madly, insanely, tragically in love! And he was liberating that love in his work. Hence, among other forms that his "insanity" took, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... repels the fiend that had been making a waste of life, or the same passion drives its possessor to become a busy body and zealot in the current excitement of the times; or absolute despair, ennui in its intensity, leads to insanity. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... knocked and thudded, urging me to do something. It was not until the Friday or the Saturday that I could think consecutively. My first thought was driven in on me by the old curmudgeon of a doctor, as his deliberate opinion that it was simply insanity to stay on in those damp rooms when I suffered from my complaint, that I was only asking for what I got, and that he, on his part, had no sympathy for me. I told him that I entirely agreed with him, that I had determined several weeks ago to leave these ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... of this, in his state, was, that partial insanity supervened, and at a moment when frenzy rose far above reflection, he must have committed the dreadful act which hurried him instantaneously ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... "lil' Ann" and, since the strange reticence and misunderstood joyousness remained, Lois Ann, at her wit's end, believing that death or insanity threatened, went secretly to the Greyson house to confess and ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... falling when we reached the appointed place. We found Captain Stanwick angry and suspicious; it was not easy to pacify him on the subject of our delay. His insanity seemed to me to be now more marked than ever. He had seen, or dreamed of seeing, the ghost during the past night. For the first time (he said) the apparition of the dead man had spoken to him. In solemn words it had condemned him to expiate his ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... and six sons, and one son-in-law, and several more men besides,—as many at least as twelve disciples,—all struck with insanity at once; while the same tyrant holds with a firmer gripe than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving their country and their bacon! Just as insane were his efforts in Kansas. ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... might be cited as another proof. Yet I have been told that the women are apt to suffer in health, particularly at the critical period of life. I must add, however, that I could hear of no cases of insanity or idiocy traceable to the celibate condition. Of course there is no force used to keep members in a commune; and those who are uncomfortable leave and go out into the world. The celibate communes keep very few of the young people whom ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... natives that they ran a great risk of being attacked by lions when wandering on either side of the line of march in search of honey. One of the doctor's head men, indeed, Monahin, having been suddenly seized with a fit of insanity during the night, left the camp, and, as he never returned, it was too probable that he had been ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... have concentrated by beautiful imagination the cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes, colors have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline of the Roman ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of association during imprisonment. Studies of Auburn prison in New York, of Mountjoy in England, and penal institutions on the continent show the effects of solitary incarceration in the increase of cases of suicides, insanity, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Infinite and finite stand in strange relations in the mind of man; with his finite powers he would grasp the infinite of God. He fails to find the equation of his terms, and, baffled in his search, in the insanity of intellectual pride, denies his Maker. He puts the infinite mysteries of revelation into the narrow crucible of the finite, the residuum is—nothing; he calls it immutable laws, as if laws could exist without a lawgiver, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the feverish pulse of war, and already the still half-frozen clods of the common highway were beaten into frosty dust by the tread of marshaled men; and the shrill shriek of the fife, and the hoarse boom and jar and rattling patter of the drums stirred every breast with something of that rapturous insanity of which true patriots and heroes can ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... one's self is so often a premonitory symptom of either insanity or crime, that a policeman standing on the corner eyed him closely and ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... with Mr. Dam, the pastor, and his wife, to some of the Eskimoes' houses have been singularly sad. Titus' wife, Katharina, formerly a good and able woman, has fallen into a pitiable state of insanity, which is not only a sore sorrow to the good man, but also a great hindrance to his earning a livelihood. Then we were suddenly summoned to the next house, where we found Hermine dying. In the morning she went out fishing with her husband, Wilhadus. Both were taken very ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... wild desire to offer to kiss the finger and make it well. This, however, was not habit. It was insanity. He recognised this himself, and felt more than a trifle worried about it, because he had been in love quite a number of times before, but he had never had this ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... took the name of Whithed for his uncle's estate and, as heir to him, recovered Mr. Norton's estate, which he had left to the Parliament for the use of the poor, etc,; but the will was set aside for insanity. [See ant'e.) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... have before me a letter written by Judge Edmonds, which is a more painful exemplification of the insanity superinduced by giving way to these absurdities; in that document you will find him deliberately stating, that he saw heavy tables flying about without touch, like the leaves in autumn; bells walking off shelves and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... 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 lent her ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... and did not sustain him in the opposite one—all combined to make him profoundly and passionately miserable. To his friends and acquaintances, who were unused to such finely wrought and even fantastic sorrows, his trouble seemed so exaggerated that they could only account for it on the ground of insanity. But there is no necessity of accepting this crude hypothesis; the coolest and most judicious of his friends deny that his depression ever went to such an extremity. Orville H. Browning, who was constantly in his company, says that his worst attack lasted only about a week; that ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... French general with a brilliant record behind him should have been guilty of such treachery, sacrificing his men and his honour. His friends (they were not many) say he lost his head, was nearly crazy with the utterly unforeseen defeat of the French, but even a moment of insanity would hardly account for such extraordinary weakness. W. and some of his friends were discussing it in the train coming home. They were all convinced of his guilt, had no doubt as to what the sentence ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... but his memory and his tomb. She is then driven to dishonesty to supply the cravings of her child—is tried and acquitted. During her imprisonment, the child dies; distress brings on her temporary insanity; but she at length flies to a secluded part of the country, and there seeks a solace for her miseries in making peace with her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... 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 ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... to the music of the simple ballads in which he delighted, taking part in the performances of the local theatre, making excursions, and writing verses. This otherwise quiet time was disturbed by exhibitions of violence on the part of Mrs. Byron, which suggest the idea of insanity. After one more outrageous than usual, both mother and son are said to have gone to the neighbouring apothecary, each to request him not to supply the other with poison. On a later occasion, when he had been meeting her bursts of rage with stubborn mockery, she flung a poker at his head, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... over their instruments, sending into the middle of this turmoil the passionate, mad, Spanish music. The proprietor of the place came in agitation and plunged headlong into the argument, where he thereafter appeared as a frantic creature harried to the point of insanity, for they buried him at once in long, vociferous threats, explanations, charges, every form of declamation known to their voices. The music, the noise of the galloping horses, the voices of the brawlers, gave the whole thing ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... terribly beaten by the vicious Pernambucan; hence one could scarcely blame him for drawing a pistol and shooting the launchman—fatally, according to Mr. Schultz. Of course, after that, to have lingered longer inside the three-mile limit would have been sheer insanity, so Mr. Schultz, taking matters into his own hands, had uphooked and skipped with doused lights from the jurisdiction of ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... as he acts according to his understanding. Any apparent wisdom, therefore, which does not make one with the love of wisdom, sinks back into the love which does make one with it; and this may be a love of unwisdom, yea, of insanity. Thus a man may know from wisdom that he ought to do this or that, and yet he does not do it, because he does not love it. But so far as a man does from love what wisdom teaches, he is ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... renewing the act for suspending the Habeas Corpus bill, there was a stormy debate; but the measure was carried with the usual majorities. An attempt made by a maniac named Hadfield to shoot the king in Drury-lane theatre, led to the insertion of two additional clauses in the insanity bill, by which the privilege of bail to alleged lunatics was abridged, and the personal safety of the sovereign thereby consulted. Subsequently a committee of each house was appointed to consider of the most effectual means for remedying the distress which prevailed at this time, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... taking an outside estimate, the Doctor's opinion is that there may have been half a dozen, who, with Malvina's assistance, succeeded in hypnotising themselves into temporary insanity. When Malvina, a little disappointed, but yielding quite sweetly her own judgment to that of the wise and learned Christopher, consented to "restore" them, the explanation was that, having spent their burst of ill-acquired energy, they fell back at the ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... sanity. But in The Innocence of Father Brown these principles, almost the fundamental ones of literary decency, were put on the shelf. Chesterton's criminals are lunatics, perhaps it is his belief that crime and insanity are inseparable. But even if this last supposition is correct, its approval would not necessarily license the introduction of some of the characters. There is Israel Gow, who suffers from a peculiar mania which drives him to collect gold ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... deeper, until in the end the king, completely disheartened and despairing, goes into an adjoining room, and dies by his own hand, to the consternation of the men from whom he has just parted. They give utterance to a few polite phrases, charitably accounting for the deed by the easy attribution of insanity to the king, and ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... At least it appears to differ from that of the Anglo-Saxon. A Japanese seems to lose all self-control when the supreme moment comes; he throws himself into the fray with a frenzied passion and a fearless madness allied to insanity. Such is the impression I have gathered from the descriptions I have heard and the pictures I have seen. Even the pictures of the late war with China give ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... cranium to predicate the crime. In its worst forms all crime, from Nero to Jack the Ripper, is the product of absolute lunacy, and those gross national sins to which allusion has been made seem to point to collective national insanity. Surely, then, there is hope that no very terrible inferno is needed to further punish those who have been so afflicted upon earth. Some of our dead have remarked that nothing has surprised them so much as to find who have been chosen for honour, and certainly, without in any way condoning sin, ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bought six beds at his own expense, and had set to work in a thankful spirit to heal God's people. Besides him, the staff consisted of two persons; an engraver, Pavel, liable to attacks of insanity, and a one-armed peasant woman, Melikitrisa, who performed the duties of cook. Both of them mixed the medicines and dried and infused herbs; they, too, controlled the patients when they were delirious. The insane engraver ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... hurt because he is a fellow of delicate nerves, but because of his very strength, and the power with which he resisted until overcome by numbers, and subjected to treatment which left him insane. His insanity takes the form of harmless delusion, and the absurdity of his ways and talk enables the author to lighten the sombreness without weakening the moral, in a way that ought to win all boys ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... consider the profound wisdom of the Upanishads, and then look at the mad idolatry in the India of to-day, with its pilgrimages, processions and festivities, or at the insane and ridiculous goings-on of the Saniassi. Still one can't deny that in all this insanity and nonsense there lies some obscure purpose which accords with, or is a reflection of the profound wisdom I mentioned. But for the brute multitude, it had to be dressed up in this form. In such a contrast as ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... folly?—this rooted incapacity of acting as every motive, generous and selfish, combine to recommend? Constitution; habit; insanity; the dominion of some evil spirit, who insinuates his baneful power between the ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... so that public peace is not endangered; had poor Wilbraham looked a fanatic with pale face, long hair, ragged clothes, much would have been forgiven him, but for a stout, middle-aged gentleman, well dressed, well groomed.... What could be supposed but insanity and insanity of ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... in the first week, all but six in the second. These six, with the shadow of insanity upon them, made out to launch a boat, returned to the island and died there, after leaving a record of what ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... the loss of a four thousand dollar Airdale who had stopped traffic in Fifth Avenue for twenty minutes while a sympathetic crowd viewed his gory remains, and an unhappy but garrulous taxi-cab driver tried to account for his crime. He never even thought of the insanity dodge. The Airdale was given a most impressive funeral and was buried in pomp with all his medals, ribbons, tags, collars and platinum leashes, but minus a few of the uncollected parts of his anatomy. While ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... from the Duc de Rhetore; but one day, five years after her marriage, she played with her cat to such purpose that the coverlet—furbelows, flounces, and all—was torn to shreds, and replaced by a sensible quilt, a quilt that was a quilt, and not a symptom of the peculiar form of insanity which drives these women to make up by an insensate luxury for the childish days when they lived on raw apples, to quote the expression of a journalist. The day when the bed-spread was torn to tatters marked a new epoch ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... misanthropy which will present themselves. But when I am alone, and under the influence of opium, I lose for a season my chief source of misery, myself; my mind takes a new and unnatural channel; and I have often thought that any one, even that of insanity, would be preferable to its natural one. It is drawn, as it were, out of itself; and I realize in my own experience the fable of Pythagoras, of two distinct existences, enjoyed by the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... formidable. No half-holiday next Wednesday, and for the seniors a hundred lines of Greek to write out; for the Limpets a hundred lines of Latin, and for the juniors fifty lines of Latin. The doctor had evidently taken a lenient view of the case, regarding the escapade more as a case of temporary insanity than of determined disobedience. However, he relieved his mind by a good round lecture, to which the school ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... known, at first, as an event in their mission life, then, as the years went by, as history and tradition. Meek and gentle she was. It was only when thwarted in her desires that she became aroused to a pitch of angry insanity which made her dangerous. This chanced very seldom, for she was allowed to do as she pleased in all things. And so she lived, unnoting the many and great changes that took place from year to year in Nueva California—San ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... man's record, his speeches, and his acts before any impartial jury you can get together, and I'll make them pronounce him either a knave or a fool, without the least trouble." He continued: "My own impression is that we had better put it on the ground of insanity or whisky or something of that kind. I don't want to hurt the man's feelings by telling him that he is a rascal. I'd rather put it mildly, and say he hasn't got off that inauguration drunk yet, and just let him ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... was for some years in this state, it is now [in 1845] two years and more since he has been quite restored. 4. On June 15 I also began to ask the Lord daily in his mercy to keep a sister in the Lord from insanity, who was then apparently on the very border of it; and I have now [in 1845] to record to his praise, after nearly four years have passed away, that the Lord has kept her from it. 5. During this year I was informed ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... say, and that is, that in spite of false messages, I have never in all these years known a blasphemous, an unkind, or an obscene message. Such incidents must be of very exceptional nature. I think also that, so far as allegations concerning insanity, obsession, and so forth go, they are entirely imaginary. Asylum statistics do not bear out such assertions, and mediums live to as good an average age as anyone else. I think, however, that the cult of the seance may be very much overdone. When once you have convinced yourself of the ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... daughter—so far, mind, I don't blame you: I've spent time very pleasantly among the ladies of the counter myself. But in the second place, I'm told that you actually married the girl! I don't wish to be hard upon you, my good fellow, but there was an unparalleled insanity about that act, worthier of a patient in Bedlam than of my brother. I am not quite sure whether I understand exactly what virtuous behaviour is; but if that was virtuous behaviour—there! there! don't look shocked. Let's have ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... in the presence of a super natural being, yet, among all the strange half-frantic disguises of chivalry this was assuredly the most uncouth which she had ever seen; and, considering how often the knights of the period pushed their dreamy fancies to the borders of insanity, it seemed at best no very safe adventure to meet? one accoutred in the emblems of the King of Terrors himself, alone, and in the midst of a wild forest. Be the knight's character and purposes what they might, she resolved, however, to accost him ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... is he who observes purity and sanity of life. Hysteric dreams, the childishness of the mysterious, the insanity of the miraculous, are no ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... in denouncing the sluggish and the time-serving. But to accept military command without experience of war except as an observer, and to lead an untrained and unprepared mob from Western Europe to Palestine through difficulties of which, as a pilgrim, he had had experience, connotes insanity, or, at ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... attended an efficiency congress and came home with a collection of newfangled ideas that eliminated from the office all the joy and contentment old Cappy Ricks had been a life-time installing. He inaugurated card systems and short cuts in bookkeeping that drove Cappy to the verge of insanity, because he could never go to the books himself and find out anything about his own business. He had to ask Mr. Skinner—which ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... life. I may name him, for he is beyond the reach of the law now,—it was Claperon, the jailer, who loved Claudine, and had himself killed Alphonse de Bellefonds from jealousy. An unfortunate wretch had been several years in the jail for a murder committed during the frenzy of a fit of insanity. Long confinement had reduced him to idiocy. To save my life Claperon substituted the senseless being for me, on the scaffold, and he was executed in my stead. He has quitted the country, and I have been a vagabond on the face of the earth ever since that time. At length ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... fight me," Judge Custis remarked. "I have tried to be a peaceable man and Christian magistrate, albeit a poor hypocrite in some, things, but I am pushed too far. My wife's smallness is worse than insanity and wickedness put together. Between her and this money-broking fiend, and my neglected child entrapped into such a marriage, by God! I will clean my old duelling arms, and appeal to injustice itself to ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... without resistance to some dominant appetite, desire, or affection, under whose imperious reign reason is silenced, considerations of expediency and of right suppressed, and exterior counteracting motives neutralized. It resembles insanity in the degree in which the actions induced by it are the results of unreasoning impulse, and in the unreal and distorted views which it presents of persons, objects, and events. It differs from insanity, mainly in its being a self-induced madness, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... 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 ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... personal phantasy of the founder; but it is the finger of God to those who see the result. The fool stands side by side here with the inspired man, only the fool never succeeds. It has not yet been given to insanity to influence seriously ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... "Tubalcain"—in other words a set of bells played from a keyboard—which he intended to use in the scene in which the Israelites welcome David after his victory over the Philistines. It is curious that Handel should have dramatised the insanity of Saul just after he had ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... would 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 ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... Prohibition milk- sickness is being treated with vermifuge. A Kansas M.D. has succeeded in hiving the old-age microbe, and is now treating the ballet girls whom Weis & Greenwall and Rigsby & Walker will bring South next winter, while a New York empiric has discovered the insanity insect and is fumigating the brain of the Rev. Mr. Parkhurst. Thus does medical science go marching from conquest to conquest, reforming and rejuvenating this wicked and suffering world. Clearly the Rescue ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in her clothes, on the bed; and was thankful for the intense weary physical pain which took off something of the anguish of thought—anguish that she fancied from time to time was leading to insanity. ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... about the room and up to the violins hanging on the walls. Indeed, I could not repress a loud cry that rose to my lips when, on the Councillor making an abrupt turn, the crape came all over me; I fancied he wanted to envelop me in it and drag me down into the horrible dark depths of insanity. Suddenly he stood still and addressed me in his singing way, "My son! my son! why do you call out? Have you espied the angel of death? That always precedes the ceremony." Stepping into the middle of the room, he took ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... constitute a government with two heads, and to give to one of those heads regal power without regal dignity, and to the other regal dignity without regal power? It was notorious that such an arrangement, even when made necessary by the infancy or insanity of a prince, had serious disadvantages. That times of Regency were times of weakness, of trouble and of disaster, was a truth proved by the whole history of England, of France, and of Scotland, and had almost become a proverb. Yet, in a case of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 he wondered how ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common sense exterior and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; .. but straightway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... But there are further curious particulars in connection with this claim. You must know, they are a family of singular characteristics, humorists, sometimes developing their queer traits into something like insanity; though oftener, I must say, spending stupid hereditary lives here on their estates, rusting out and dying without leaving any biography whatever about them. And yet there has always been one very queer thing about this generally very commonplace family. ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... daughter's mind was deranged. His interview with Gouache had convinced him that Faustina meant what she said, though he affected to laugh at it, but he was wholly unable to account for her conduct on any theory but that of insanity. Being at his wits' end he had sent for his wife, and while waiting for her he did not ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... semi-insanity by sight of the sudden brief battle, had caught up a stick from the rubbish at his feet. With this, not at all knowing what he did, he smote the struggling Lad with every atom of his feeble ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... happened? Whose was the fault? How came it that sixty girls were imprisoned in the skies, as it were, and could only fling themselves down to the stone pavement in an insanity of terror? What war was more horrible than this Peace of Industry? Such things must be prevented in future, said New York, rising like a wrathful god—and for a while the busy ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot. Out of this experience of hard life and harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas—perhaps the greatest this story of the skipper's wife who insisted on making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of insanity by months of ice-bound solitude. The motive of Captain Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay. Against his iron determination his wife's piteous pleading and evident ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... used to be intensely amused at the piteous attitudes of Nemorino Brignoli, contrasting, as they did, with the ardent pantomime of Adina R., who looked by his side like a wounded lioness. Poor woman! What has been your fate? The glossy tresses of which you were so proud in your scenes of insanity, those tresses that brought down the house when your talent might have failed to do so, are now frosted with the snow of years. Your husband has forsaken you. After a long career of success, he has buried his fame under the orange-groves of the Alhambra. There he directs, according ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... one sees the entire satisfaction there is here with so ugly and revolting a state of things, and the inability people have to conceive the inconvenience of it... I am driven to speculate.... Is insanity excessively rare here, so that outrages, if they do occur, are naturally very few? or is the insanity... always of the imbecile kind? Or is insanity, at its worst, mollified by the respectful treatment which it meets, as ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... think of his case—what you can do for him? I shall not mind the cost—I wish to spare nothing, and I do not wish any one, at least of our friends and acquaintances, to know that he is under treatment for insanity until you pronounce your verdict. He seems sane enough upon all other topics, except now and then he persists in calling himself by some other name, and I know he would be very sensitive, should he recover, to have his condition known. He does not even suspect that I am contemplating any such ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... in his mind—a vein, in short, of madness, which breaks out in the usual manner, rendering the poor young man a dupe to vain imaginations of his own dignity and grandeur, which is perhaps the most ordinary effect of insanity, and inspiring the deepest aversion against his nearest relatives, and against myself in particular. He is a man extremely plausible, both in speech and manners; so much so, that many of my friends think there is more vice than insanity in the irregularities which he ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... miracle that the escaped convict's son should know something of the matter, too. The boy knew that even if Mr. Wagner fully recovered from his injury the police would object to his testimony on the ground of previous insanity. If the boy could corroborate the statements made by his father, that would ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... terrors there was, of course, a distinct token of possible insanity. The man needed a friendly, guiding hand to steer him back to the world of reason and common-sense. But to whom could he go, since he had taken up this violent prejudice against the doctors? He felt drawn to none of the nurses, although some of them had been very kind to him. The only ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... during which Colonel de Sucy struggled against mortal agony; tears no longer came to his eyes. His soul, often lacerated, could not harden itself to the sight of Stephanie's insanity; but he covenanted, so to speak, with his cruel situation, and found some assuaging of his sorrow. He had the courage to slowly tame the countess by bringing her sweetmeats; he took such pains in choosing them, and he learned so well how to keep the little conquests he sought to make ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... of the way, so that I can leave her," he called to the girl. He tried with a frantic gesture to frighten them into getting out of the mother's reach. He continued to shout for aid as he held down the woman, who with the strength of insanity was struggling to get hold of ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the unthinking, from the pursuits of regular industry, into the vortex of wild adventure and exasperated passions. Like gambling, they ultimately create a necessity for constant vicious excitement. Like gambling, they often lead to poverty and despair, to insanity and to suicide. Like gambling, they furnish strong temptations to fraud, and theft, and drunkenness. Like gambling, they work, in but too many cases, a permanent depravation of all moral principle and all moral habits. This ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... such a repugnance from a woman who had been given in marriage "by advice of friends," was treated by an eminent physician as sufficient proof of insanity. If he had said sufficient cause for it, he would have been ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... warrant you, had faced full many a cannon, and stormed many a rampart, with courage and success. But he could not resist the raging influence of the Book-Mania: nor could all his embrasures and entrenchments screen him from the attacks of this insanity. His collection was both ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... hour Grantley Mellen was a madman. The fever and the insanity passed at length; he lay upon the ground, staring up at the cold sky, the telegram still clutched in one hand, the other dug deeply into the earth, in a wild conflict of passion that shook him to ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... 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 is ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... of humanity, This flesh worn out to rags and tatters, This soul at struggle with insanity, Who thence take comfort, can I doubt, Which an empire ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... personal resemblance to Lady Glyde, escaped from the Asylum; it is known that the person received there last July was received as Anne Catherick brought back; it is known that the gentleman who brought her back warned Mr. Fairlie that it was part of her insanity to be bent on personating his dead niece; and it is known that she did repeatedly declare herself in the Asylum (where no one believed her) to be Lady Glyde. These are all facts. What have you to set against them? Miss Halcombe's recognition ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... instrument," said Stella, her eyes shining, "you don't know what you have brought upon yourself. Playing the violin is my pet insanity, and once or twice since I have been here, when I wanted it, I have cried over the loss of mine, especially as I can't afford to buy another. Oh! what a lovely night it is; look at the full moon shining on the sea and snow. I never remember her so bright; and ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... Conrad, but I can't tell. He appears to have gone crazy. He's got that wild look on his face which betokens insanity. We'll have to be careful in our parleyings with ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... forms, and wonderful shades or combinations of colors, full of contrasts, caprices, and surprises. Prices rose in a marvelous way; a new variegation, a new form, obtained in those blest leaves was an event, a fortune. Thousands of persons gave themselves up to the study with the fury of insanity; all over the country nothing was talked of but ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... heaven looks into hell he sees only thick darkness, and when a spirit of hell looks into heaven he sees only thick darkness there. For heavenly wisdom is like thick darkness to those in hell; in turn, infernal insanity is like thick darkness to those in heaven. It is plain from all this that such as a man's understanding is, such is the light he has, and that after death everyone comes into his own light, for he sees in no other. In the spiritual ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... that if physicians and people would all adopt the views of the advocates of non-alcoholic medication the temperance problem would be solved, and the greatest source of disease, crime, pauperism, insanity and misery would be driven from ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... though she had suddenly been shown the real Silas—or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that inhabited his mind. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Assistant-Surgeon Judson B. Andrews graduated at Yale in 1855. He was captain in a New York regiment in the early part of the war, and became afterward superintendent of the Buffalo State Hospital, and a recognized authority on insanity before his ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... don't marry to be happy, we marry out of curiosity. It's funny when you think of it. Two people with nothing in common have a period of insanity during which they tie themselves together in a hard knot which they can't undo and then they must feed on each other for the rest ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... father to the gate and stood looking as he went slowly along the short street and around a corner. The mood induced in her by her talk with Melville Stoner had returned. Was it possible that her father also felt as Melville Stoner sometimes did? Did loneliness drive him to the door of insanity and did he also run through the night seeking some lost, some hidden ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... "but you surprise me by saying that Thomas has a tendency to insanity. I thought his one of the justest and most brilliant minds in college. Idle, yes, very idle, and procrastinating; but still he is no ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... 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
... shadows of insanity began to creep athwart his life. Even in 1884 he seemed to feel a premonition of his coming catastrophe when he wrote: "I am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of the familiar objects which seem to me to assume ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... century each Italian city was a little world in itself, with its own standards, customs and traditions. The fact that Vespucci spent most of his leisure and all of his spare ducats in the collection and study of maps and globes and works on geography, was regarded as a proof of mild insanity. When he paid one hundred and thirty gold pieces for a particularly fine map made by Valsequa in 1439, even his intimate friend Soderini called him a fool. Vespucci was himself an expert mapmaker. This may have been a reason ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... CAREER OF GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS.—Gustavus Vasa made the mistake of undertaking to divide power among his four sons. There was a vein of eccentricity, amounting sometimes to insanity, in the family. Eric XIV. was hasty and jealous, imprisoned his brother John, and committed reckless crimes. In 1569 he was himself confined, and nine years after was secretly put to death. John ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... microscope, and watch the world of animalculae it reveals. Very curious that little world; but we take no part in any of its proceedings, violent as they evidently are. And here lies the reason, we apprehend, why dramatic representations of insanity are so generally unsuccessful. We cannot participate in the capricious delusions of the maniac, who becomes, therefore, a mere object of wonder or curiosity. The moment when the lunatic affects us most deeply is, when he approaches nearest to the ordinary current ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... subduing the enemies of the Hebrews, and consolidated the tribes and settled the affairs of the new state. But towards the close of his reign, his reason became disturbed: fits of gloom and despondency passed into actual insanity, which clouded the closing years of his life. At last he and his three sons fell in battle with the Philistines upon ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... his present mental state would have seemed to him little short of insanity twenty-four hours before; that it might pass again as it had done before; and a kind of mental frenzy seized him lest it would. He did not want to lose this assurance of One guiding through a world that was ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... 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
... phantasmagoria of life that wearies and stultifies the mental and moral nature. It induces a sort of intellectual fatigue through which we see the ranks of the victims of insomnia, melancholia, and insanity constantly recruited. Our modern brain-pan does not seem capable as yet of receiving, sorting, and storing the vast army of facts and impressions which present themselves daily. The white light of publicity is too white. We are weighed upon by ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... 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 rose to ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... anxiously questioned about his pallor, could only escape for a minute. He was just able to whisper in his wife's ear that he had found Pascal and that Macquart would leave that night. Then lowering his voice still more he told her of his mother's insanity, and placed his finger on his lips, as if to say: "Not a word; that would spoil the whole evening." Felicite bit her lips. They exchanged a look in which they read their common thoughts: so now the old woman would not trouble them any more: the poacher's hovel would be razed ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... itself she knew. She sought to relieve the people of gloom, to stop introspection and self-analyzation. They quarreled, strife was imminent; and when, with the dread of Winter, came the added fear of a Pequot uprising, the whole place was treading the border-land of insanity. It is doubtful whether Anne Hutchinson knew that insanity was infectious, and that whole families, communities, can become possessed of hallucinations—that towns can go mad, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... a new emotion which I did not in the least comprehend, I yet fully realized the utter helplessness of my position in point of resistance. They were twenty to one. However much I longed to grapple with him who mocked me, the very thought was insanity; my only possible chance of escape lay in flight. To realize this was to act. I leaped backward, trusting for a clear field in my rear, and an opportunity to run for it, but the door by which I had just entered was now closed and barred—Bungay had ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... Philadelphia, U.S.A., 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 ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the Post's general position was sound; had not the editor himself dictated it? If the expression of that position in cold type had been gradually carried by a subordinate to a more and more violent extreme, to an intemperance of utterance which closely approached insanity, what was it the editor's duty to do? Obviously to take charge himself and swing the position back to a safe and sane mean, exactly where he had placed it to begin with. That was all that was asked of him—to shift back the paper's position to where he had placed it in the beginning, and by so ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... with an equal population, we find that three thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine of her white children have been crushed by sufferings of some sort, to the condition of insanity, while in these five old slave States there are only two thousand three hundred and twenty-six of her white children who have been called to suffer, in their earthly pilgrimage, a degree of anguish beyond mental endurance. Here is a difference of more than sixty per cent. in favor of these ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
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