"Lunacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lunacy is always distressing, but sometimes it is dangerous, and when you get it manifested in the head of the State, and it has become the policy of a great Empire, it is about time when that should be ruthlessly put away. I do not believe he meant ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... Silence significantly, "and if all the people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they are. It is little wonder," he added, "that your sense of humour was clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your brain for their dissemination. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... mechanical powers of the human body, that puts that determination into practice.(1) If the former decides, and the latter does not perform, it is a state of imbecility; and if the latter acts without the predetermination of the former, it is a state of lunacy. The executive department therefore is official, and is subordinate to the legislative, as the body is to the mind, in a state of health; for it is impossible to conceive the idea of two sovereignties, a sovereignty to will, and a sovereignty to act. The executive ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... into his confidence,' returned the lawyer. 'But I may say one thing: if he's your advertiser (and he may be, for he seems to have been seized with criminal lunacy) you can go ahead with a clear conscience, for I hold him in the hollow of ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... back, remembering the tales that Mrs. Jobson had told, and not being by any means sure but that the Colonel was in a dangerous condition of lunacy. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... boys among these men who, in spite of their lunacy, had an eye to business, and begged pathetically for coppers, though of what use they could be to them in that place I cannot imagine. I saw no girls under twelve years of age. There were several boys who appeared scarcely in ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... taste, of refinement, of wit, of intelligence. Weakly marked eyebrows indicate a feeble constitution and a tendency to melancholia, Deep sunken eyes are selfish, while eyes in which the whole iris shows indicate erraticism, if not lunacy. Round eyes are indicative of innocence; strongly protuberant eyes of weakness of both mind and body. Eyes small and close together typify cunning, while those far apart and open indicate frankness. The normal distance between the eyes is the width of ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... Philander, the more he rends her heart, and sets her on the rack; and concluding him false, she could no longer contain her rage, but broke out into all the fury that madness can inspire, and from one degree to another wrought her passion to the height of lunacy: she tore her hair, and bit his hands that endeavoured to restrain hers from violence; she rent the ornaments from her fair body, and discovered a thousand charms and beauties; and finding now that both his strength and reason were ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... trait of Sir Sidney's constitutional temperament, and the little service through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and particularly in a man that might be said to live in the street, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... the mental torture experienced by these unfortunate victims may, however, be conjectured from the fact that their senses at such junctures become so completely absorbed and overpowered by the cheerless prospect before them, that they oftentimes wander about in a state of temporary lunacy, without the power of exercising the slightest volition ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... should he excuse himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she forgave him—for she knew not what!—became his champion. There was a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming ill in all he said which wrung her heart. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... veneration kept in the churches and monasteries were held to be capable of curing disease. The Latin Church had either a saint or a relic of a saint to cure nearly every ill that flesh is heir to. St. Apollonia was invoked against toothache; St. Avertin against lunacy; St. Benedict against stone; St. Clara against sore eyes; St. Herbert in hydrophobia; St. John in epilepsy; St. Maur in gout; St. Pernel in ague; St. Genevieve in fever; St. Sebastian in plague; St. Ottila for diseases of the head; St. Blazius for the neck; St. Laurence and St. Erasmus for the body; ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... this morning, Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, once more ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... time what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... shaking his head, "I fear your charge of lunacy will not stand upon such ground as that. ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Thursday; and on the following day an inquest was held on the mother's body, and a verdict of Mary's lunacy was immediately found by the jury. The Lambs had a few friends. Mr. Norris—the friend of Charles's father and of his own childhood—"was very kind to us;" and Sam. Le Grice "then in town" (Charles writes) "was as a brother to me, and gave up every hour of ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... lifted from the cross of suffering to the throne of Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and within ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... million a day! And so does every doctor. And so does everybody—including you —for that matter. And THAT was the important thing that authorized you to venture to disobey my orders and imperil that woman's life! Look here, Hester Gray, this is pure lunacy; that girl COULDN'T tell a lie that was intended to injure a person. The thing is impossible —absolutely impossible. You know it yourselves—both of you; you know ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that she wants us to believe she knows what we're after. She's vindictive. She imagines she owes me a grudge on my brother's account. It might soothe her to think she had made me nervous. And by gad—it sounds like lunacy, and mind you I'm not propounding it for fact!—there's just one chance that she really does know where the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... IV., spent the last few years of his life under restraint, hopelessly insane, his brother and ultimate successor administering the government as regent. The late Princess Frederick of Prussia was afflicted like her brother, the last Duke of Anhalt-Bernburg, with a peculiar kind of lunacy which took the form of an invincible objection to clothing of any kind whatsoever; while one of her two sons, Prince Alexander, who died only a few months ago, suffered from a species of good-natured imbecility, which led him to offer his heart ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... thinks and does. She and I came to an understanding two years ago [the coxcomb!], and now she has only to write me a line and say, 'My dear des Lupeaulx, you will oblige me by doing such and such a thing,' and it is done at once. We are engaged at this very moment in getting a commission of lunacy on her husband. Ah! you women, you can get what you want by the bestowal of a few favors. Well, then, my dear child, bewitch the minister. I'll help you; it is my interest to do so. Yes, I wish ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... loved her. He was voiceless—he could not control his speech. He did not dare to show such presumption as talk of love must seem to be to her. He knew he must not speak of love; such proffer to her would be lunacy. But this greater presumption, this blind capture of her in his arms—this was something which he had not intended any more than a sane man considers flight ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... eye inwards and owned up to more than a little excitement as to what was going to happen when Gilbert realized that Mrs. Jekyll had brought his wife over to rescue him. Conceive Gilbert being rescued! "All of us as near the primeval as most of us are to lunacy," he told himself. "Education, wealth, leisure and all the shibboleths of caste and culture,—how easily they crack and gape before a touch of nature. Brooks Brothers and Lucile do their derndest to disguise us, but we're ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... so it was lucky for Mrs. Potvin that she had an uncle at the Admiralty who generally managed to send, "dear Peter" to a foreign station. He was rarely at home, or his wife would have been wrought to the verge of lunacy. ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... once again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... terms in which every one who has mastered the peculiarities of the Otto speaks of it would be considered as evidence in its favor, if we were not all considered by other cyclists to be in various stages of lunacy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... some chance escaped from the guardians which the good earl of Kent had put over him to' take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia's train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of Bradford was brought before the Lord Chancellor, to be examined upon application for a statute of lunacy against him, the chancellor asked him, "How many legs has a sheep?"—"Does your lordship mean," answered Lord Bradford, "a live sheep or a dead sheep?"—"Is it not the same thing?" said the chancellor. "No, my lord," said Lord Bradford, "there is much difference; a live sheep may ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, 'over a lunatic asylum! Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy Commissioner of himself—for nothing!' ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... torpor, unaware of what was day-dream and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness. And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten history, unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or impossible adventures of lunacy, he encountered the monsters created of man's first morality that ever since have vexed him into the spinning of fantasies to elude them or do battle ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... Baronne Delphine de Father Goriot The Thirteen Eugenie Grandet Cesar Birotteau Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon The Firm of Nucingen Another Study of Woman A Daughter of ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... faultless kings run down by common cry, For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790 If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead's images, But government itself at length must fall ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... professional acquirements. Behind him was the entire medical profession and all its literature: behind me were only Nature, many-voiced—and the patient. With us there was no lack of mutual respect, except in matters of faith and practice; but he no more tolerated my "crankiness," lunacy—perhaps imbecility—in withholding food from the sick than I his paganism in enforcing it. For the sake of the agony of friends my noble patient accepted one severe dose of medicine and one ration of predigested food. The instant response of the digestive ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... Yet it was in the United States of America where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England, with the guns in France making themselves felt ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... dissolved; and it was declared illegal for them to take cognizance of any matter of property, belonging to the subjects of this kingdom. But, in plantation or admiralty causes, which arise out of the jurisdiction of this kingdom, and in matters of lunacy and ideocy (being a special flower of the prerogative) with regard to these, although they may eventually involve questions of extensive property, the privy council continues to have cognizance, being the court of appeal in such causes: or, rather, the appeal lies to the king's ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... certain plants have been credited at most periods with hurtful and injurious properties. Thus, there is a popular idea that during the flowering of the bean more cases of lunacy occur than at any other season. [17] It is curious to find the apple—such a widespread curative—regarded as a bane, an illustration of which is given by Mr. Conway. [18] In Swabia it is said that ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... resinous plants, curing ulcerated lungs, &c. Sardinia, melancholy and madness, replanted with true Anticyran hellebore, was famous; whilst Thusus (especially in Summer) brought almost all the inhabitants to lunacy and distraction for want of it. And what the effects and benefit of such plantations have produc'd, is conspicuous in one of the most celebrated cities of the East, the famous Ispahan, clear'd of the pestilence, since the surrounding it with that beautiful platan, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... to establish its preeminence in Lancashire as a ridiculous waste of money, and plainly intimated that they would never attempt to enter into a competition which, in their opinion, savoured of stark lunacy. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... with such people? I was inclined to let them work out their salvation in their own eccentric fashion; but Barbara decided otherwise. When one's friends reached such a degree of lunacy as warranted confinement in an asylum, it was one's plain duty to look after them. So we continued to look after our genius and his worshipper, and we did it so successfully that before he left us he recovered his ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... an hour ago, after lowering a stick of wood into the water, "to season it". All about Duke were these usual and reassuring environs of his daily life, and yet it was his fate to behold, right in the midst of them, and in ghastly juxtaposition to his face, a thing of nightmare and lunacy. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... but he rebelled in ways either murderous or panicky at being a slave to anybody else. Love's sweet servitude was a thing of which he had no comprehension. Men he had seen in love impressed him as lunatics, and lunacy was a thing he had never considered worth analyzing. But comradeship with men was different from love with women. There was no servitude in comradeship. It was a business proposition, a square deal between men who did not pursue each other, but who shared the risks of trail ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... though as private citizen he criticised profanely the state of mind that allowed him to go on such an errand. He gnawed his beard, and a flush of something like shame settled on his cheek. It seemed to him that he was allowing himself to be cajoled into a mild spree of lunacy. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... scientific pugilist, and once took a journey to have a sparring encounter with the Game-Chicken. Certainly, no one would have looked for a pugilist in this subdued old gentleman. He is now Commissioner of Lunacy, and makes periodical circuits through the country, attending to the business of his office. He is slightly deaf, and this may be the cause of his unaccented utterance,—owing to his not being able to regulate his voice exactly by his own ear. He is a good man, and much better ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... There were several disastrous speculations. Presently the money was all gone. Then we came up here, where we can live on next to nothing. We shall have to stay here another eighteen months. Looking back, the way we spent money seems sheer lunacy. The fool and his money—you know. And it wasn't our money. That hurts me now. I've begun to realize what money means to me, to you, to every one. That's why when Jim calmly told me that he had borrowed a hundred dollars from you I felt that was a little more than I could ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... place one's happiness on the continuance of any man's affection? Would it not be painful to owe his appearance of regard more to his honour than his love? and is not my person, already faded, likelier to fade sooner, than his? On the other hand, is his life a good one? and would it not be lunacy even to risque the wretchedness of losing all situation in the world for the sake of living with a man one loves, and then to lose both companion and consolation? When I lost Mr. Thrale, every one was officious to comfort and to soothe me; but which of my ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... only some fifty years before the times of Columbus Christian Europe had no lunatic asylum,—not that there was a lack of lunatics or that the existence of lunacy was entirely ignored, but that the then state of medicine and the general intelligence was not emancipated from the idea of demoniacs,—and we are told that the lunatics were in many instances hung, quartered and burned, hooted and chased about ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... much as dreamed of by his judges, they would have formed the most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace. They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... swellings, which was, indeed, intolerable, running out of their own government, raving and distracted, oftentimes laid violent hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out at their windows, shooting themselves, &c.; mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy; some dying of mere grief, as a passion; some of mere fright and surprise, without any infection at all; others frighted into idiotism and foolish distractions, some into despair and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Religieuse chez les Grecs: 6 tomes: Groningue—1840), alleges a case (which, however, we do not remember to have met) where the client ventured to object:—"Mon roi Apollon, je crois que tu es fou." But cases are obvious which look this way, though not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord of prophetic vision. Battus, who was destined to be the eldest father of Cyrene, so memorable as the first ground of Greek intercourse with the African shore of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents, or from any ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in their blood, but they do receive from their progenitors certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould, fix and shape their subsequent destinies. Hysteria in the mother may develop insanity in the child, while ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement—these could at worst suspect, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered waistcoat and olive-green knee-breeches. He danced with her, then took her to a scarlet nook, apparently devised to hold only one person, but into which they gently squeezed, not ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... world; that ye are one with time, And in the great primordium sublime Were nursed together, as an infant-twain,— A glory and a wonder! I would fain Hold truce, thou elder brother! for we are, In feature, as the sun is to a star, So are we like, and we are touch'd in tune With lunacy as music; and the moon, That setteth the tides sentinel before Thy camp of waters, on the pebbled shore, And measures their great footsteps to and fro, Hath lifted up into my brain the flow Of this mad tide of blood.—Ay! we are like In foam and frenzy; ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... more like the Tara he knew. "Very well. Why accuse me of incipient lunacy? I care, too. Always have done. Think how topping it would be, you and I together, exploring all the wonderland of our Game and Mummy's tales—Udaipur, Amber, Chitor, perhaps the shrine ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the burgomaster, was forced to make police regulations concerning the domestic animals, as, seized with lunacy, they rendered ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... stringency of the filial tie needs relaxation. Already it is recognised that in cases of cruelty the child may be divorced from the parent. But there is a hopeless incompatibility of temper and temperament which is not necessarily attended with cruelty. Drunkenness, lunacy, and criminality should also be regarded as valid grounds for divorce, the parent being no longer allowed to bear the name of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with them. When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to interpret and discuss them,—for surely to pass from mystical to scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on the other hand if there is {302} anything which human history demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present themselves as wild ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... possible, with another doctor. Man—Innocent Smith—gone mad on premises, and doing dreadful things. Do you know anything of him?' I went round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is also a private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you calmly tell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing, with accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of sanity. I ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the child's death! Cyriax raved as if he had really been seized with the lunacy whose pretence helped him to beg his bread. Besides, he gave himself up to unbridled indulgence in brandy, and, when drunk, he was capable of the most brutal acts. The dead Juli's mother, who, spite of an ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Angela realized how wisely Jim had traded in Vancouver. At the time she had wondered why he had been so prodigal in the matter of food. It seemed to her sheer lunacy to travel over icy mountains with what appeared to be enough food for a traveling circus. Now she saw that but for his foresight they might have felt the fine edge of starvation as others ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... communication was the reverse of tranquillizing upon the patient. The wild, terrified look in her eye resembled the unreasoning fear of lunacy as she ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... all-merciful, as every creed proclaims, could punish the unfortunate wretch who hatches criminal thoughts behind the slanting brows of a criminal head? A doctor has but to glance at the 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 ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and barbarous Platonism." The divinities of Plato are the divinities to be adored, and we are to be taught to call God, Jupiter; the Virgin, Venus; and Christ, Cupid! The Iliad of Homer allegorised, is converted into a Greek bible of the arcana of nature! Extraordinary as this literary lunacy may appear, we must observe, that it stands not singular in the annals of the history of the human mind. The Florentine Academy, which Cosmo founded, had, no doubt, some classical enthusiasts; but who, perhaps, according to the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to set the Church, our cathedrals and bishops' palaces in order—and augured well; but this old woman journeyed not alone, in her hand she carried a broom (Brougham). It may have been a case of ultra-lunacy this journey of ninety-nine times as high as the moon, and "one cannot help thinking," said a writer of that period, "of the song, 'Long life to the Moon'; but this saying became common, 'If that time goes the coach, pray what time goes ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... after receiving Henrietta's letter of information, descended on them and thought them each and all a crazed set. Love, as a motive of action for a woman, she considered the female's lunacy and suicide. Men are born subject to it, happily, and thus the balance between the lordly half of creation and the frail is rectified. We women dress, and smile, sigh, if you like, to excite the malady. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences. "Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!" one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth's was a pleasant lunacy. . . . ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... delicate and peculiar case," continued Doctor Platt. "You can not place him in an idiot asylum, because he is not now an idiot—yet his lunacy is not developed enough to commit him for lunacy. At the same time, he may become violent at any time and—do murder! It is not right to keep him at Ellsworth with such terrible risks attached to his staying. I have a plan, if you choose ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... even a liven soul, gentle or simple, can stand on level ground. As to getten up hill to the church, 'tis perfect lunacy. And I speak of foot-passengers. As to horses and carriage, 'tis murder to think of 'em. I am going to send straight as a line into the breakfast-room, and say 'tis a closer.... Hullo—here's Clerk Crickett and John Day a-comen! Now just look at 'em and picture ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... I don't think much of this affair at all. Of course there'll be a row, but it seems to me a case of temporary lunacy that we can't be ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead in me. A moment later came habiliments of a gentleman, borne in the arms of a wretch ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... about the lunacy of a one-cent journalist who's willing to risk even his own funds for the sake of an afternoon beat! I tell you, Pyott, the whole story's got to ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... dignify such tactics and antics by the title of "political propaganda." The proper name for them is sheer organized lunacy. The militants have erected militancy into a principle. I am beginning to think that a good many of them are more concerned with the success of their method than with the success of their cause. They would rather not have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... bear the moon,' said Ada; 'do not you know, Maurice says that the moon makes the people go mad, and that is the reason it is called lunacy, ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that not only was insanity caused by diabolical influences, but that "Satan produces all the maladies which afflict mankind." Even much later, however, when other diseases were assigned a physical origin, insanity was still thought to be demoniacal possession. As late as Bossuet's time, lunacy was thought to be the work of demons. The cultured and progressive Bishop of Meaux, while trying to throw off the shackles of superstition, delivered and published two great sermons in which demoniacal possession ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... assumed proportions which twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams. Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy. $30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of philanthropy. ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a student of medicine who dwelt in 1828 at number 22, rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve—the residence of the Marquis d'Espard. [The Commission in Lunacy.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... to hear. "But why in the world? . . . Ah, there he goes!—and Brother Bonaday with him. They are off to the river, for Brother Copas carries his rod. What a strange fascination has that dry-fly fishing! And I can remember old anglers discussing it as a craze, a lunacy." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature. When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Loveyet, you run on in such a surprising manner with your narrations, imprecations, admirations, and interrogations, that, upon my education, sir, I believe you are approaching to insanity, frenzy, lunacy, madness, distraction,—a man of ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... low speech, crowded with gestures: and suddenly the Captain's face, till now haggard, reddened; out went his shaken fist; with eyes blazing like lunacy, up he flew to the bridge; and now he is bending down with howling throat: ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... so. You've fought for years for your tests and your atmosphere with plain business men not able to understand such lunacy. Quite right ... atmosphere's all that matters. If one and one don't make ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... yourself; Mr. Baker told me the order was signed by a relation, and the certificates by first-rate lunacy doctors." ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... less than in the second case, where there was less escape for the vapour. The result seems to indicate that it was so, since in the first case only the woman, who had presumably the more sensitive organism, was killed, the others exhibiting that temporary or permanent lunacy which is evidently the first effect of the drug. In the second case the result was complete. The facts, therefore, seem to bear out the theory of a ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... adultery, desertion for two years, cruelty or intolerable indignities, marriage within prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity, fraud, conviction for felony for more than two years, lunacy ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... can do nothing with Mr. Dartrey. He has just decided that our whole scheme of life is absurd, that politics and power are shadows, and that work for others is lunacy. All that he wants is your cottage, a fishing rod ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an unhealthy hold upon his imagination, that he was half-way to insanity. If Gramarye is permitted again to take the helm.... Well, the ship is half-way across—half-way across those narrow straits which divide reason from lunacy. We've got to take the helm and put it over just as hard as ever we can. You understand? In a word, if, for instance, Major Lyveden were to revisit Gramarye, I think the game would be up. That, of course, can't happen. But it is, in my opinion, of the highest importance, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... this clear issue was to be blurred in the blinding glare of the King's lunacy. The causes of the malady of February 1801 were partly physical, partly mental. While still agitated by the dismissal of his trusted Minister, the King, two days later, went to church on the day appointed for the National ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... mild form of lunacy, and have no disposition to debate with men who indulge in such delusions, which have prevailed to some extent, at different times, in all countries, but whose life has been brief, and which have ever shared the fate of other popular delusions. Congress will never entertain such a proposition, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the ripe age of forty-five, I succeeded in achieving the most sublime folly of my life. I should have taken a degree in madness and been raised to a professor's chair in some college of lunacy! Herbert, at the age of forty-five I fell in love with and married a girl of sixteen out of a log cabin! merely, forsooth, because she had a pearly skin like the leaf of the white japonica, soft gray eyes like ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... omission of the item for his nephew's pay.' [Footnote: Mr. Ralph Charlton Palmer was Lord Selborne's second cousin, and secretary to Lord Selborne in the Lord Chancellor's Office. He was afterwards a Commissioner in Lunacy.] ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with the general health of the mind,—a sane type of madness, one might say. Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the same ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... Ronan is said to have been Abbot of Kingarth, Bute, where he died in 737. Holy wells bear his name at Strowan (Perthshire), Chapelton in Strathdon (Aberdeenshire), and the Butt of Lewis; the latter is famed for the cure of lunacy. ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... was a toy, an absurd and pitiful toy. Real genius and lunacy had many an over-lapping line, Jerry reflected as he approached to look inside. But he found Winslow in a room surrounded by a network of curving, latticed struts. The machine was no makeshift of a demented builder: ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... also exercises some superintendence over the district attorneys, and acts as legal adviser to the governors and the legislature. There is also in many states a superintendent of education; and in some there are boards of education, of health, of lunacy and charity, bureau of agriculture, commissioners of prisons, of railroads, of mines, of harbours, of immigration, and so on. Sometimes such boards are appointed by the governor, but such officers as the secretary of state, the treasurer, auditor, and ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... well as a beautifier, and the old fancy of partial madness when the moon was at the full (from which the word "lunacy") was not altogether unwarranted by reality. At sea, in the tropics, a night on deck under the broad full moon stiffens and entirely maddens, if it does not kill; here the madness is only partial and it has a general reference to mischief ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... regard to your daughter-in-law. I shall be waiting to see you at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. The matter is so utterly vital to the happiness of all your family, that I cannot imagine you will fail to come." Now, what's the meaning of it? Is it sheer impudence, or lunacy, or what? ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed, and at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... difference of opinion, but let him tell it me without getting himself up as a lunatic. At this stage of the world, if a man wants to be taken seriously, he must keep clear of melodrama. Don't misunderstand me. I am not suspecting you of setting up any lunacy on your own account. I only think you might easily be led arm in arm with a lunatic, especially if he wanted defending. You have a passion for people who are pelted, Dan. I'm sorry for them too; but so far as company goes, it's a bad ground of selection. However, I don't ask you ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... bringing desolation on my hearth, and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feeling must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad in ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... of Brains, which otherwise the young Gentleman might have enjoy'd, to the great support of his Family and Posterity. Thus the famous Waller, Denham, Dryden, and sundry Others, were oblig'd to condemn their Race to Lunacy and Blockheadism, only to prevent the fatal Destruction of their Families, and entailing the Plague of Wit and Weathercocks ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... week of silliness, and by dint of concealing our real relations from the general public, I fancy we escaped harsh criticism. There is a very large percentage of lunacy anyway in Ireland, as well as great leniency of public opinion, and I fancy there is scarcely a country on the map in which one could be more foolish without being found out. Visit each other we did constantly, and candour obliges me to state ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... from the clouds that wreath around it. Is it not strange that the surest thing is the thing that we forget most of all? It sometimes seems to me as if the sky rained down opiates upon people, as if all mankind were in a conspiracy of lunacy, because they, with one accord, ignore the most prominent and forget the only certain fact about their future; and in all their calculations do not' so number their days' as to 'apply' their 'hearts unto wisdom.' 'Go thou thy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... word upon the substantial improvements effected in the administration of justice during the late session, and of which the last volume of the statute-book affords abundant evidence, principally under the heads of bankruptcy, insolvency, and lunacy. Great and salutary alterations have been effected in these departments, as well as various others; the leading statutory changes being most ably carried into effect by the Lord Chancellor, who continues to preside over his court, and to discharge his high and multifarious duties ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... illustrated by the words of one whose powers of observation have added some interesting discoveries to Natural History, but whose speculations on the origin of Nature resemble the distempered ravings of lunacy, rather than the mature results of philosophic thought "Physio-philosophy has to show," says Dr. Oken, "how, and in accordance indeed with what laws, the Material took its origin, and, therefore, how something took its existence from nothing. It has to ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... visitations yet wider in their desolation. Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are more frequent scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the sickness of the brain—lunacy—which, visiting nearly one thousand in every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad a sight as a human soul overthrown ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... a tear and as if disdaining complaint, he franticly snatched up a pitch-fork, drove it at me, and, I luckily avoiding it, struck the prongs into the barn-door; with the exclamation, 'Damn your soul! I'll make you feel me!' The moment after he was seized with a sense of his own lunacy, turned as pale as death, and stood aghast with horror! My supposed crime was that I had eaten some milk, the last of which I myself had seen the dog lap. Perceiving the terror of his mind, I took courage and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... am neither shocked nor disposed to issue a Commission of Lunacy against you. It may be all true, for anything I know to the contrary, but really I cannot get up any interest in the subject. I never cared for gossip in my life, and disembodied gossip, such as these worthy ghosts supply ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... fair proposition, considering the circumstances, and I wish I could make Roxanne be as sensible in spirit. But I can't. Family pride is a terrible thing, like lunacy or hysterics when a ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... thousand people in this town, and there'll be seventy-five thousand bankrupts if this lunacy goes on. And there's seventy-five thousand maggots in your brain, and seventy-five thousand in John Pintard's; and if you two live to see nineteen hundred, you'll have twice five million two hundred and fifty-seven thousand ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... was a most wonderful sight. Now, as Bigot explained it to me, this was to signify that she was not of the nature of other women; for they have all the moon at their heads, and consequently their brains are always troubled with a lunacy. This makes me willing to believe what you said, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... published some detached scenes of the 'Broken Heart.'" This referred to Charles Lamb, who likened the "transcendent scene [of the Spartan boy and Calantha] in imagination to Calvary and the Cross." Now Gifford had never heard of the personal history of Lamb, nor of the occasional fits of lunacy to which his sister Mary was subject; and when the paragraph was brought to his notice by Southey, through Murray, it caused him unspeakable distress. He at once wrote to Southey [Footnote: When the subject of a memoir of Charles Lamb by Serjeant Talfourd was under ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... thought of destroying that beautiful stuff can have entered the mind of man I cannot fathom. I think I have got him persuaded to leave well alone. It must be nothing short of stark lunacy." ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... sheet of foolscap with a bare—he called it a detached—statement of the facts about Irish lunacy. He had just begun to recount his own experience when there was a knock at the door. The housekeeper, a legacy from Dr. Farelly, came in to tell him that Constable Malone wished to speak to him. Dr. Lovaway left his MS. with a sigh. He found Constable Malone, ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... "the parlour" (though he guessed that the Madison family called it "the reception room," now) this was the place where his aunt received callers who, she justifiably hoped, would not linger. Altogether, it struck him that it might be a good test-room for an alienist: no incipient lunacy would remain incipient here. ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... germ of truth in things erroneous in the child's definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be able to forget means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I desired ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... up in sheer wonder at the lunacy of our dispute and the side he was forcing me to take. Here was I haranguing a grey-headed veteran on his own quarter-deck and exhorting him to valour! In a flash I saw myself befooled, tricked into playing the patronising amateur, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... partook of the nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. I believe," he continues, "my name is up about the county ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... man of sense, the lunatic and the man of genius, there are degrees—streaks—of idiocy and lunacy. How many expectant politicians elected to Congress have entered Washington all hope, eager to dare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and fortune, happy to get back home—sometimes unable to get away, to linger on ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... will it obliterate the days and months of mental agony that harassed the soul of this intuitional, far-seeing, modest genius, made even after his death to receive the donkey's kick of misrepresentation and to be publicly charged with lunacy. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... fits his lunacy: Whate'er I forge to feed his brain-sick fiits, Do you uphold and maintain in your speeches, For now he firmly takes me for Revenge; And, being credulous in this mad thought, I'll make him send for Lucius his son; And whilst I at ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the community had been shocked to learn from some one who happened in just in time to prevent the tragedy that Mrs. Martin had gone suddenly insane and had tried to murder both of her children. She must go to the asylum, of course; but pending the preliminary trial for lunacy she lay silent on her bed with staring, horrified eyes, surrounded by watchful neighbors. Suddenly toward night she had grown restless and had implored them to send for the Methodist preacher. To quiet her the messenger had come, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Catholic Hierarchy, September 29th, 1850, brought on what appeared to us one of John Bull's periodical fits of lunacy. I witnessed many scenes of mob violence at the time, when, in deference to the prevailing bigotry in opposing what they termed "Papal Aggression" a part of the Penal Laws were revived in Lord John Russell's Ecclesiastical Titles Act. ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... sanctuary!) if we do not like their answers. This is a strange kind of irresponsibility. What we ought to say is that we can afford to be satisfied with a less satisfactory answer from a lunatic than from one who is not mad, because lunacy is less ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... themselves from their saddles, at last bowed to me. They were a little pale, but quite collected. "Excellency," they said, "forgive him; it is not his fault. He has been frightened into semi-insanity." "Hsia hu-tu-lo," they said. Yes, that is the phrase, frightened into semi-lunacy. They are employing this for everyone. The tragedy has been so immense, the strain has been endured for so many months, there has been so much of it, that all minds excepting those of the common people have become a little unhinged. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... dog—a queen! Ah Tiny, dear departing pug! She lives, but she is past sixteen And scarce can crawl across the rug. I loved her beautiful and kind; Delighted in her pert Bow-wow: But now she snaps if you don't mind; 'Twere lunacy to ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... divided among themselves as to whether she had or had not. Some said she was charming, and like any one else, but others shook their heads, and, like experts in brain disease, professed to see traces of the old lunacy, and to be doubtful as to her cure. At the worst, however, here she was—one of themselves whom they must receive; and common sense dictated that they should make the best of her, and hope all things ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... coach, in such a night, was rather remarkable; but that the person so doing should be totally unprovided with a box-coat, or other similar protection, argued something so strange, that I doubt not, if he were to decide upon the applicability of the statute of lunacy to a traveller in the mail, the palm would certainly have been awarded to me, and not to my late companion. Well, on we rolled, and heavily as the rain poured down, so relieved did I feel at my change of position, that I soon fell fast asleep, and never awoke till the coach was driving up Patrick ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... as we are permitted to know what took place—for the House of Commons had another Secret Session—in both Houses it was Ireland, Ireland all the way. The Commons began by granting a return relating to Irish Lunacy accounts, and then by an easy transition passed to the report of the Sinn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... had refused to deliver up her lunatic husband to her care. While she was speaking, her real husband and his servant Dromio, who had got loose, came before the duke to demand justice, complaining that his wife had confined him on a false charge of lunacy, and telling in what manner he had broken his bands, and eluded the vigilance of his keepers. Adriana was strangely surprised to see her husband, when she thought he had been within ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... deliberate orders in German for murder, murdering for their lives; and they, too, were like himself, and ate and drank and either laced their boots or had them laced daily. And the staggering apprehension of the miraculous lunacy of ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... sooner gathered who these people were, than he burst open the coach-door somehow or other, and came tumbling out among them; and as if the lunacy of Mr Tapley were contagious, he immediately began to shake hands too, and exhibit every demonstration of ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... horseback a few paces off, had a mind to ride forward and protest. To his mind the order spelt sheer lunacy. The barrier, to begin with, stood close on twenty feet high, built of rough timbers staked in the ground and densely packed with furze. Nothing could be seen behind it but the top of the second barrier, which at fifty yards distance guarded the approach from Helleston. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... modesty, even if they have it not. To rail at 'fact mongers' is, doubtless, far easier than to overturn facts themselves. The 'Shepherd' calls Atheists 'Chaotics' and Materialism 'the philosophy of lunacy,' which is a very free and very easy way of 'Universalising.' But arguments grounded on observation and experience are not to be borne down by hard names. Man, like the magnet, is something—he acts. Dust and ashes he was; dust and ashes he will be.—He may be touched, and tasted, and seen, ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavored to soothe his three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy (or delirium tremens) rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes it expressed itself in extravagant shapes. The course taken with the infatuated ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... (BETTY prepares to go.) Oh, what am I thinking of! (Waving to the table.) I want that review; I think it's the blue one. (As BETTY begins to look.) It has an article by Mr. Baxter on the "Rise of Lunacy in the Eastern Counties"—yes, that's the one. I'd better have that too; I'm just at the most exciting place. You shall have ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... the consequence of long voyages, and exhibits itself in such dreadful symptoms as are scarcely credible, viz. asthma, pains in the limbs and joints, blotches all over the body, ulcers, idiotism, lunacy, convulsions, and sudden death. Nor can the physicians, with all their materia medica, find a remedy for it equal to the smell of turf, grass, or a dish of greens. It is not my province to account for what is a matter of much doubt and perplexity even to the most ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... was brought before the Lord Chancellor to be examined upon application for a statute of lunacy against him, the Chancellor asked him, "How many legs has a sheep?"—"Does your lordship mean," answered Lord Bradford, "a live sheep or a dead sheep?"—"Is it not the same thing?" said the Chancellor.—"No, my lord," said Lord Bradford, "there is much difference: ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... thought and to all learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since they were dependent upon you; but their innermost thought was this, that, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being "out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... guards looked askance at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the minister's camel, so as to prevent him from falling. The friendly negro sidled his beast up ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... Anything in the wide world. He could have gone to the world's end. I would have helped him. I made him, didn't I, Polly? Didn't I create that man? Doesn't he owe everything to me? And to reward me, just when everything was nicely arranged, by this lunacy that spoilt everything!' ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... body and animal spirits that circulated in the nerves. One spoke, as did still Prof. Pomme at the end of the eighteenth century, "of the shrivelling up of the nerves."[14] But above all, one preserved the conviction that these queer disorders were very different to the mental disorders of lunacy. These peculiar individuals had, it was said, all their reason; they remained capable of understanding their fellow creatures and of being understood by them; they were not to be expelled from society like ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... looked at her rather wildly. "Let's go home," he said. He was astounded and alarmed by the discovery that his infatuation had whirled him to the lunacy of longing to confide—and he feared lest, if he should stay on, he would blurt out his ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... can you by no drift of circumstance Get from him why he puts on this Confusion: Grating so harshly all his dayes of quiet With turbulent and dangerous Lunacy ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... "that savors of the rankest lunacy. And yet, why not? The lady certainly made the advances; it is an equivalent to an invitation to call. Pity she doesn't put ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... It was sheer lunacy on the part of Richard to peep through his fingers to judge the effect of his words. For it is an established truth that the nerves of a man's back ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... Nor has "the judgment of their peers" been pronounced against women exercising their right to vote. No disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror—and none but disfranchised persons can be women's peers; nor has the Legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... becomes habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridge discount his own notes of this kind with less and less specie as the figures lengthened on the paper! As with Hamlet, so it is with Ophelia and Laertes. The father's feebleness comes up again in the wasting heartbreak and gentle lunacy of the daughter, while the son shows it in a rashness of impulse and act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential feebleness we are all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature so steady on its keel, and drawing ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... and almonds and divers ingredients, tending to make a sort of "compote" of it. Taken as it is taken here, it must have a tremendous effect on the nerves. Mr. Olphert thinks it has had much to do with the increase of lunacy in Ireland of late years. From his official connection with the asylum at Letterkenny, he knows that while it used to accommodate the lunatics of three counties, it is now hardly adequate to ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... to chronicle, fewer still to read, the sad history of a sick-bed. Of mine, I know but little. The throbbing pulses of the erring brain, the wild fancies of lunacy, take no note of time. There is no past nor future; a dreadful present, full of its hurried and confused impressions, is all that the mind beholds; and even when some gleams of returning reason flash upon the mad confusion of the brain, they come like sunbeams through ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... with William was not a form of romantic idealism bordering on lunacy; it was instead a token of his blundering stupidity; also in a sense his four-square frankness in owning that Prussia was playing second fiddle to Austria, at this interesting moment. And, in truth, all that William thought was logical; the stream was tending that ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... description of Menou see the Memoirs of Marmont:— "Clever and gay, he was an agreeable talker, but a great liar. He was not destitute of some education. His character, one of the oddest in the world, came very near to lunacy: Constantly writing, always in motion in his room, riding for exercise every day, he was never able to start on any necessary of useful journey. . . . When, later, Bonaparte, then First Consul, gave him by special favour the administration ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... d'enfles). We proceeded sedately, my companion muttered with rage, and I was able to resume my thinking. It was based on the deep persuasion that the man at my side was insane with quite another than Carnivalesque lunacy which comes on at one stated time of the year. He was fundamentally mad, though not perhaps completely; which of course made him all the greater, I won't say danger ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... East" Railroad, he could not have been more astonished than he had been at the unaccountable change of heart of Jethro Bass. He did not know what to make of it, and told his colleagues so; and at first they feared one of two things,—treachery or lunacy. But a little later a rumor reached Mr. Balch's ears that Jethro's hatred of Isaac D. Worthington was at the bottom of his reappearance in public life, although Jethro himself never mentioned Mr. Worthington's name. Jethro sat in the Throne Room, consulting, directing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... old fellow's lunacy became less harmless as he grew older. It developed into a kind of kleptomania. Should a housewife have a family wash hanging on her clothes-lines, it was not infrequently the case that many of the articles would mysteriously disappear. The most ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett |
