"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fairs which he frequented, were of a kind which he had never before observed among the pacific people of North Italy. These faction-fights were the result, partly of dram-drinking, and partly of the fighting mania which then prevailed in Ireland. There were also numbers of crippled and deformed beggars in every town,—quarrelling and fighting in the streets,—rows and drinkings at wakes,—gambling, duelling, and riotous living amongst all classes ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Australian wool-growers, Members of the French Royal Academy, Canadian timber- merchants, Dutch Mynheers, Brazilian coffee-planters, Belgian lace- makers, and the representatives of all other countries and professions in Christendom. An autograph-monger, with the mania strong upon him, of unscrupulous curiosity, armed furtively with a keen pair of scissors would be a dangerous person to admit to the presence of that big book without ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... to the surface, from time to time, of hidden waves—groundswells of some deep ocean. The temper, the temperament, the character, the policy of a whole nation will change, and it is difficult to see why. Sometimes a passion, a fury, a veritable mania, quite unlike its ordinary self, will seize it. There is a madness of peoples, which causes them for a while to hate each other with bitter hatred, to fight furiously and wound and injure each other; and then lo! a little while more and they are shaking hands and embracing and swearing eternal ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... she had lived at the South, and there acquired a taste for lottery gambling. During her husband's lifetime she wasted considerable money in lottery tickets, once or twice drawing small prizes, but like all lottery dupes spending a hundred dollars for one gained. The thing had become a sort of mania with her. She thought so much of prizes and drawn numbers through the day that she dreamed of them all night. She had a memorandum-book in which were all the combinations she had ever heard of as taking prizes. It contained page after ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... that there should be no bond left even of that kind; and yet it was a long time before I gave up visiting and revisiting all the corners of all possible receptacles for something that she might have left behind on purpose. It was like the mania of those disordered minds who spend their days hunting for a treasure. I hoped for a forgotten hairpin, for some tiny piece of ribbon. Sometimes at night I reflected that such hopes were altogether insensate; ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... that a confession that servants are good, useful creatures, with all their faults? Then as to the mania for dress, why, that is not confined to them. It is the mania of the sex. Are you free ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... to show the abyss that separated Serbia from West Europe. Politics in the Near East are an obsession—a nervous disease which may end in acute dementia and homicidal mania. ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... publication was effected with comparative rapidity and cheapness; bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's shop a usual meeting-place of men of culture. Reading had become a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library. The superior officer was seen ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the future, when Madelinette should return and see him as he was and cease to love him—to build up his Seigneurial honour to an undue importance, to give his position a fictitious splendour, became a mania with him. No ruler of a Grand Duchy ever cherished his honour dearer or exacted homage more persistently than did Louis Racine in the Seigneury of Pontiac. Coincident with the increase of these futile extravagances was the increase of his fanatical patriotism, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sensation) { as found in neurasthenia, or in mania. { Anesthesia (absence of sensation) { as in the numbness of hysteria; in sensory { paralysis. Disorders / Retardation of < as in dementia and melancholia. Sensation "Clouding" or dulness { as in simple depression. { Perversion { as in dementia and melancholia. ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... features of the shah-mania that British journalism was overrun and surfeited with Persian topics, Persian allusions and fragments of the Persian language and literature. Every pedant of the press displayed an unexpected and astonishing acquaintance with Persian history, Persian geography, Persian manners and customs. Desperate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... roofless castle, when the grey hue of age is wiped away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the venerable fortress is made to look as spick and span as the last built range of shops at Paris. Among the endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... suicidal mania, and had to be watched closely all the time to keep her from taking her ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... her Bible, and it was her only food between meals; packages arrived daily with the regularity of the Vancouver Province. She had a standing order there for hats, dresses and kimonas, to be rushed out the moment the fashions changed. While before Hance had taken a pleasure in saving, he now had a mania for spending money; and their merry marriage bells continued to ring for a few sweet years ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... Baldy, who gained recognition in an unexpected manner; for the Woman, whose experiences nearly quenched her ardor for exploration; and for Jemima, who learned that masculine human nature respects feminine ambition up to a certain point only, and then considers it a form of mania ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... second-class coaches was longer than usual, filled with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... seen such a suspicious and distrustful person as he was. Not in reference to money—no, indeed—for he left that lying about everywhere; but about his papers. He locked them up with the greatest care, as if he feared that some terrible secret might evaporate from them. It was a mania with him. If he had a letter to write, he barricaded his door, as if he were about to commit some horrible crime. More than once have I seen him——" The words died away on her lips, and she remained motionless and abashed, like a person who has just escaped ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... has ever lived with more contempt for mere sedentary theories or a fiercer mania for the jagged and multifarious edges of life's pluralistic eccentricity. For any reader teased and worried by idealistic perversion this obstinate materialistic sage will have untold value. And yet he knows, none better, the place of sentiment ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... metaphorical. It did not merely mean that the Glengyles sought for wealth; it was also true that they literally gathered gold; they had a huge collection of ornaments and utensils in that metal. They were, in fact, misers whose mania took that turn. In the light of that fact, run through all the things we found in the castle. Diamonds without their gold rings; candles without their gold candlesticks; snuff without the gold snuff-boxes; ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... a trick to get over that; we apply a sharpened tent peg to the crupper bone (os coccygis) and knock till he opens." A well known missionary to the East during the last generation was subjected to this gross insult by one of the Persian Prince- governors, whom he had infuriated by his conversion-mania: in his memoirs he alludes to it by mentioning his "dishonoured person;" but English readers cannot comprehend the full significance of the confession. About the same time Shaykh Nasr, Governor of Bushire, a man famed for facetious blackguardism, used to invite European ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... "Persecutional mania is a dangerous hallucination," stated the sallow man. "Mr. Craig has accomplished certain definite results in the north country. We have used the word Consolidated in our corporation name with full knowledge ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... mathematicks, or logick, without long and close application to the subject."—Ib., p. 152. "Caspar's sense of feeling, and susceptibility of metallick and magnetick excitement were also very extraordinary."—Ib., p. 238. "Authorship has become a mania, or, perhaps I should say, an epidemick."—Ib., p. 6. "What can prevent this republick from soon raising a literary standard?"—Ib., p. 10. "Courteous reader, you may think me garrulous upon topicks quite foreign to the subject before me."—Ib., p. 11. "Of the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... care, adding larger sticks as the smaller ones took fire. I had dropped on my knees and could reach the sticks from where I knelt, for there was plenty of dead wood lying about. As the blaze grew I rose to my feet and, dragging larger wood, piled it on. A sort of joyful mania took possession of me as I watched the great tongues of flames shooting skyward and listened to the crackling of the burning wood, and I stood back and laughed. I had triumphed over fate and the elements. Our arms, ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... a Damara give two fine oxen for a dog which struck his fancy. The Damaras take great delight in having whole droves of cattle of the same colour, and they prize their oxen in proportion to the size of their horns. "The Namaquas have a perfect mania for a uniform team; and almost all the people of Southern Africa value their cattle next to their women, and take a pride in possessing animals that look high-bred." "They rarely or never make use of a handsome animal as a beast ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... of approval the (by many esteemed) sinful pastime of dancing, and I own myself to be so far of that mind, that I could not but set my face against this Mexican Polka, though danced to the Presidential piping with a Gubernatorial second. If ever the country should be seized with another such mania de propaganda fide, I think it would be wise to fill our bombshells with alternate copies of the Cambridge Platform and the Thirty-nine Articles, which would produce a mixture of the highest explosive power, and to wrap every one of our cannon-balls in a leaf of the New Testament, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... know a little about Africa, and I know something about Durnovo. That man has got a mania, and it is called Simiacine. He is quite straight upon that point, whatever he may be upon others. He knows this country, and he is not making any mistake about ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... latter basis. If Montesquieu's principles as to no nation ever arriving at durable greatness but by institutions in harmony with its spirit and origin, had been generally adopted, the French Revolution, which originated in the Anglo and American mania, and the desire to transplant English institutions into the soil of France, would never have taken place. Had the same views prevailed in the British Cabinet, the iniquitous support of the revolt of the South American colonies in 1821 and 1822, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... by natural, gradual, almost imperceptible diffusion, partly by violent crises, we see the mania for luxury and the appetite for pleasure beginning, growing, becoming aggravated from generation to generation in all Roman society, for two centuries, changing the mentality and morality of the people; we see the institutions and public policy being altered; all Roman history a-making ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... and repair the fountain. He will place this arm-chair in an arbor near the fountain; the guest who seats himself in it will be caught, and the salamanders may throw the water upon him as long as they please. It is a mania of ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... the party asked the meaning of certain tall buildings, he was told that they were pawnbrokers' offices; for the Chinese have a mania for pawning their clothes, or whatever they have, even if not in need of the money, to save the trouble of taking care of the articles. Before the third day of the stay in Canton was over, some of the party had seen enough, ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... this youth's father, a much finer and handsomer young man. Sir Guy is certainly gentlemanlike, and has that sort of agreeability which depends on high animal spirits. I should think him clever, but superficial; and with his mania for music, he can hardly fail to be merely an accomplished man. In spite of all you said of the Redclyffe temper, I was hardly prepared to find it so ready to flash forth on the most inexplicable provocations. ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of mania, by which I desire to understand enthusiasm and the inspiration of the gods: Firstly, the musical; secondly, the telestic or mystic; thirdly, the prophetic; and fourthly, that ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... answer to the question what prompted Melanchthon to make his alterations will embrace also the following points: 1. Melanchthon's mania for changing and remodeling in general. 2. His desire, especially after the breach between the Lutherans and the Papists seemed incurable, to meet and satisfy the criticism that the Augustana was too mild, and to reenforce the Lutheran position over against the Papists. 3. Melanchthon's doctrinal ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... other class of facts, in which real ghosts have appeared;—I mean, where figures have been dressed up for the purpose of passing for apparitions:—in every instance I have known or heard of (and I have collected very many) the consequence has been either sudden death, or fits, or idiocy, or mania, or a brain fever. Whence comes the difference? evidently from this,—that in the one case the whole of the nervous system has been by slight internal causes gradually and all together brought into a certain state, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... regarded with much earnestness and no little pleasure his transformed brother-in-law. Hope for the future now filled his heart. If this crack-brained sugar-planter had really recovered from his mania for piracy and had a fancy for legitimate business, his new station might be better for him than any he had yet known. Sugar-planting was all well enough and suitable to any gentleman, provided Madam Bonnet were not ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... ordinary farm sale is by far the most amusing and picturesque, the sale of pedigree stock is much more sensational. When the shorthorn mania was at its height, and the merits of Bates and Booth blood were hotly debated, when such phrases as "the sea-otter touch," referring to the mossy coat of the red, white, or roan shorthorn, were heard, and the Americans were competing with our own breeders ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... has almost every requisite for an orator. He is an army officer; so his manners are good and his self-possession complete. His voice is commanding, for it has been long his duty to give the word of command. Above all, he has a mania to become a member. Yet, alas! one trifling deficiency ruins his prospects; he has an impediment in his speech, which debars him from the use of the W's. Like the French alphabet, that letter is denied to him. When he comes to a syllable it begins, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... to Morse he says: "Which of my friends was it who lately observed to you that I had a picture mania? You made, I understand, a most excellent reply, 'You wished I would come to town, then, and bite a dozen.' Indeed, my very good sir, was it in my power to excite in them a just admiration of your talents, I would readily come to town and bite the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... bad, for he wants to give up his profession and take a job. You know, Davy's liking for his work amounted almost to a mania." ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... houses of 'notorious rebels' burned down by the orders of Sir James Macdonell, Colborne's second-in-command. Colborne himself acquired the nickname of 'the old Firebrand'; and, while he cannot be charged with such a mania for incendiarism as some writers have imputed to him, it does not appear that he took any effective measures to stop the arson or to punish ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... twinkled, for Mademoiselle Therese had a mania for speaking English whenever possible, and at first always used that language when with her pupil, until Barbara had asked her if she had got so accustomed to speaking English that it was more familiar to her than French! Since then, she only used English in public ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... people for one minute pulled themselves up and conquered their mania for money and machine excitement, the whole thing would be solved.—Would you like me to find Winnie and tell her to say ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... Spain's chivalry away," sang Byron; and if Gay did not extinguish the failing flame of our night errantry—unlike the "Robbers" of Schiller, which is said to have inflamed the Saxon youth with an irrepressible mania for brigandage—, the "Beggar's Opera" helped not to fan the dying fire. That laugh was fatal, as laughs generally are. Macheath gave the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... she helped herself to cake a second time without being asked, drank three cups of tea, and only refrained from a fourth because the pot was drained. After tea, conversation turned on hobbies, and it being discovered that one girl had a mania for miniature jugs, and the other for foreign post- cards, the Italian servant was summoned, and received instructions in his own tongue, which resulted in an addition being made to each collection: Kitty returned home hugging "a little d-arling" jug of Italian ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... for the worm itself is occasionally seized with the mania for foreign travel, and finds its way into the throat or nostrils, causing the dog to become perfectly furious, and inducing such pain and agony that it may seem charity to end its life. The worms may also crawl into the stomach, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... devotion to his bird family became a mild mania. He carried food to the top rail of the line fence every day, rain or shine, with the same regularity that he curried and fed Nancy in the barn. From caring for and so loving the Cardinal, there grew in his tender old heart a welling flood of sympathy for every bird that homed ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... they would have pealed for James's. Men were loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the storm. As in the South Sea Bubble, almost everybody gambled; as in the Railway mania—not many centuries ago—almost every one took his unlucky share: a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at his opportunity. His bitterness, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the Albigensian heresy, Innocent III, founder of the papal power, had his attention directed to the Jews, whom he considered the dangerous protagonists of rationalism. The "heresy" was stifled, Provence in all her magnificence fell a prey to the Roman mania for destruction, and, on the ruins of a noble civilization, the Dominican Inquisition raged with all its ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... The Tractarian mania has now (October 1866) settled down into a chronic vestment disease, complicated with fits of transubstantiation, which has taken the name of {64} Ritualism. The common sense of our national character ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... appeared to love me. It was at that period you told me all that nonsense about your fondness for your creations. You held such shadows in pity when you were with me; but it didn't last. You returned to them, oh! like a maniac returns to his mania. I, though living, no longer existed for you; it was they, the visions, who again became the only realities of your life. What I then endured you never knew, for you are wonderfully ignorant of women. I have lived by your side without your ever understanding me. Yes, I was jealous of those painted ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... twenty-five or thirty years old, dressed with extreme elegance, members of the association of Avengers, who seemed possessed with the mania of assassination, the lust of slaughter, the frenzy of blood, which no blood could quench—men who, when the order came to kill, killed all, friends or enemies; men who carried their business methods into the business of murder, giving their ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... certain that but for the fact of a mania for boating, and punting, and skating indulged in by several of his younger sons, Mr. Miller, in his energy for sweeping away all things old, and setting up all things new, would not have spared the Bath any more than he had spared the bowling-green. He had gone so far, indeed, as ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... successive days, and used various methods of excitement. He had a singing-girl, he drank spirits, smelled, penetrating odors, sprinkled Cologne-water round the room, etc., etc. Eight days thus passed, when he was seized with a fit of frenzy which terminated in mania. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... however, always controlled by a certain instinctive tact, began to affect Kate nearly as it had the others. She found herself laughing over the work she had undertaken in a pure sense of duty; she joined in the hilarity produced by Lee's affected terror of her surgical mania, and offered to undo the bandages in search of the thimble he declared she had left in the wound with a view to ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... the consequent result that they are more successful in its requirements. The distractions of more numerous social interests may actually accompany the later years of school age. In reference to the social distractions of girls, Margaret Slattery says,[23] "This mania for 'going' seizes many of our girls just when they need rest and natural pleasures, the great out-of-doors, and early hours of retiring." But surely such distractions are not peculiar to the girls alone. The economic needs that arise at the age of sixteen and ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... his column began to reflect the effects of his mania for and about collecting. For a short time he showed little preference between both "the newe and old" books; but ere 1889 was three months gone, "newe" books, however, "jollie goode" were almost banished from ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... was herself a prey to emotion and agitation, when unawares sorrowful accents also struck her ear, from the direction of the mound. "Every one," she cogitated, "laughs at me for labouring under a foolish mania, but is there likely another fool besides myself?" She then raised her head, and, casting a glance about her, she discovered that it was Pao-yue. "Ts'ui!" eagerly cried Tai-yue, "I was wondering who it was; but is it truly this ruthless-hearted ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... lost their senses. The most sensible people appeared as phrenzied as the others; it was a veritable brain fever, as dangerous as any mania or madness. Whole families were seen to forsake their houses, and coming from the ends of the town, bring their flock beds to the market-place to pass the night there. Every one complained of some new insult; you heard nothing but lamentations at night-fall; and the most ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... assurance in which the Prince uttered these words; and on reaching his apartment he sat down by the blazing fire, lighted a cigarette, and began considering in all its bearings what he felt convinced was a most remarkable case of mania and mental derangement. In the first place, was the Prince deceived himself, or merely endeavoring to deceive another? The latter theory he at once rejected; not only the character and breeding of the man, but his nervous earnestness about this matter, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... big, prosperous Westchester farm where she lived—had always lived with her grandfather since her parents' death. It was turning out to be very valuable because of the mania of the wealthy for Westchester acreage and a revival in a hundred villages of the ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... informer exhaled from the pages. The vital feature, however, lay in the revelation of Sister Claire's character, between the lines. Beneath the vulgarity and obscenity, poorly veiled in a mock-modest verbiage, pulsated a burning sensuality reaching the horror of mania. A well-set trap would have easy work in catching the feet of a woman related to the nymphs. Small wonder that the Livingstone party kept her afar off from their perfumed and reputable society while she did her nasty work. ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... her. Only his terror of the hours of night grew on him, obsessed him like a mania. He slept fitfully, with constant wakings of anguish. The fear wore ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... would take one or the other of them, because it was more than she could bear. This young woman had been confined in the State Hospital for the Insane, and had been treated by specialists for many years, without any benefit at all. There was some homicidal mania, much depression, and attempts at suicide. She could not be left alone in her room for a moment. But the day after the transplantation of the glands this young woman embraced her mother, and talked so ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... fulfil his promise to his poor stricken father, who, albeit somewhat relieved of his incubus, since the night when father and son watched together, was not yet quite free from his ghostly visitant; moderns would say "from his mania." ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... no hard epithet that Evelyn did not apply to Mr. Basil Bainrothe during her hysterical mania, and before the doctor's arrival; but, on her recovery, she begged me to repeat nothing of the sort, if she had been indiscreet enough to let out her true opinion of him and his measures, in a moment of irrepressible emotion. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... egomaniacs in Paris styling themselves worshippers of Satan, the God of Ugliness." Some of these men were suffering from the "visual derangement" of the insane, whilst "many of the pictures exhibited another form of mania. The system of this is an incontrollable desire to mutilate the human body." Sadism, as we know, played a prominent part in both the French and Russian revolutions. The most important point in all this is not that degenerates should be found to perpetrate these abominations, but what ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Mania for Greek and Latin quotations: this is peculiarly to be avoided. It is like pulling up the stones from a tomb wherewith to kill the living. Nothing is more ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... fair, frail mistress, who, mad to make herself his wife, saw in these a means to remove every obstacle out of the way. She poisoned her husband, her father, her brother, and at last, carried away by a mania for murder, administered on all sides the fatal poudre de succession, which brought death to house, palace, and hospital, and filled the capital, nay, the whole kingdom, with ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... latter years he developed an exaggerated love for solitude, a predilection for self-preservation and still worse, a constant fear of death and mania of persecution, which ran like a black thread through all his writings and brought on gradually the final tragic catastrophe.—He became insane in 1891 and died in 1893 without ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... constrained him to regard with toleration, and even reverence, every apparent approach, every pretension, even, to a divine inspiration and guidance in the age in which he lived. "'The greatest blessings which men receive come through the operation of phrensy ([Greek: mania]—inspired exaltation), when phrensy is the gift of God. The prophetess of Delphi, and the priestess of Dodona, many are the benefits which in their phrensies (moments of inspiration) they have bestowed ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... forming an integral part of the plan. But the basilica does not quite align with the temple, and the road back of the basilica precludes any such idea, not to mention the fact that no building the size of a temple was in front of the west cave. It is the mania for making the temple cover too large a space, and the desire to show that all its parts were exactly balanced on either side, and that this triangular shaped sanctuary culminated in a round temple, this it is that has caused ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... New York, and Pennsylvania passed laws suppressing lotteries, but the gambling mania seemed to transform itself into a craze for banks. In many parts this was such that actual riots took place when subscriptions to the stock of banks were opened, the earliest comers subscribing the whole with the purpose of selling to others at ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... doubtless think that the evident neglect in which the poor wife lives ought to be, for her husband, a motive of security. Not at all! His ingenious mania manages to discover in that fact a ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... from him, when he was marched off to jail. Many persons who were attracted to the spot where this bloody work had just taken place, looked bewildered and seemed to be asking themselves what was to happen next, appearing in doubt as to whether the killing mania had reached its climax, or whether we were to turn in and have a grand killing spell, shooting whoever might have given us offence. It was whispered around that it was not all over yet —five or six more were to be killed before night. Reeder was taken to the Virginia City Hotel, and doctors called ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... without hesitation. Yet this navigation passed through a difficult country, necessarily involving very costly works; and as the district was but thinly inhabited, it did not present a very inviting prospect of dividends.*[1] But the mania had fairly set in, and it was determined that the canal should be made. And whether the investment repaid the immediate proprietors or not, it unquestionably proved of immense advantage to the population of the districts through which it passed, and contributed to enhance the value of ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... my passion for gambling grew into a veritable mania, and I no longer felt any inclination for those things which at one time had lured me to student life. I became absolutely indifferent to the opinion of my former companions and avoided them entirely; I now lost myself in the smaller gambling dens of Leipzig, where only ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... him what he was, I am sure. He went nowhere; he always fancied people were laughing at him. His feeling about his—his mother's lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life. He exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania. If you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human being—one of the million crawling units on the earth—could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance. It was pitiful. He went nowhere, and saw no ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... some constitutions this is connected with pleasurable ideas without the exertion of much muscular action, in others it produces violent muscular action to gain or avoid the object of it, in others it is attended with despair and inaction. Mania is the general word for the two former of these, and melancholia for the latter; but the species of them are as numerous as the desires ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... furnishes the popular standard of poetry. The old heroic stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for the bleached, the double- refined,—white houses, white china, white marble, and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out of the flour in order to have white bread, and are bolting our ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... William Rawson, which name he took in consequence of some property he succeeded to by right of his wife, was one of the victims of the South American mining mania. He plunged deeply into speculation, and wrote pamphlets to prove that so much gold and silver must ultimately find its way into Europe from Mexico, that all the existing relations of value would be utterly destroyed. He believed what he wrote, though he failed to demonstrate what he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... strip off the husks and get at the kernel of things! There is more chance for high thinking when one is big enough to have plain living. How we surround ourselves with non-essentials, how we are dominated with the "mania of owning things"—one feels all this afresh in looking around at this simple, well-built cabin with its few needful things close at hand, and with life reduced to the simplest terms. One sees here exemplified the creed Mr. Burroughs outlined several years ago ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... in Venice. Lord Evelyn Urquhart is financing it. You know he has taken up his residence in Venice? A pleasant crank. Venice is his latest craze. He buys glass. And, indeed, most other things. He shops all day. It's a mania. When he was young I believe he had a very fine taste. It's dulled now—a fearful life, as they say. Well, his last fancy is to run a magazine, and I'm to edit it. It's to be called 'The Gem.' 'Gemm' Adriatica,' you know, and all that; besides, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... chess-playing, the delight of having the upper hand of a better player. Then to more complicated positions, and at last back to the formal beginning. You begin to see now to what end the array is made, and understand why one Gambit differeth from another in glory and virtue. And the chess mania of your teacher cleaveth to ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... who had lately increased her importance, in the eyes of the young gentlemen, by the announcement that various pyrotechnical wonders were to be obtained at her shop. There are few boys who have not at some time of their boyhood had a mania for pyrotechnics—in plain English, fire-works—and there are few parents, and parents' neighbours, who can say that they relish the smell of gunpowder on ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... psychology which usually goes by the name of "mob-psychology." Perhaps mob and mobbish are rather unfortunate terms. They are apt to make us think of the wilder explosions of collective feeling—panics, blood-mania, dancing-epidemics, and so on. But, though a savage society is by no means a mob in the sense of a weltering mass of humanity that has for the time being lost its head, the psychological considerations applying to the latter apply also to the former, when due allowance has been made ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... indulgence of his own tastes, and the humiliation of a former rival who lies modestly buried in the same church. In the delirium of his weakness, these motives, which we imagine always prominent, assume the strength of mania. His limbs are already stiff; he feels himself growing into his own monument; and his fancy revels in the sensations which will combine the calm of death with the consciousness of sepulchral magnificence. He pleads, as for dear life, with those ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... right weapon with which to combat his wife's inclinations toward the Woman's Rights mania. A love of flattery was her weak point. It is with half her sex. We too often say, by way of expressing our disapproval of a certain man, "O, he is a gross flatterer!" thus very frequently condemning the quality we ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... the suburbs of the city, and his knowledge of the science of finance was limited to his dealings with the needy students who ate his wares on credit, and paid for them accordingly. The Mississippi mania whirled him along with it also. In those days every man in Paris meant to be a millionaire. In the streets, alleys, and public squares every one was either buying or selling Mississippi shares. Monsieur Griffard left his pastry-shop in the charge of his eldest assistant while he himself went in ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... of his team or in his accouterments as a Scout, and a little later, with quieter taste, the persistent fraternity pin—all of these tell the same story of the love of insignia and the power of the emblem in the social control and development of youth. Think also of the collecting mania, which among primitives was less strong than is ordinarily supposed, but which in early boyhood reaches forth its hands, industriously, if not always wisely, after concrete, tactual knowledge and proprietorship. ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... still more frantic and desperate by the magic influence of their accustomed war-whoop. These formed the base barbarian race of Oxford truands,{1} including every vile thing that passes under the generic name of raff. From college to college the mania spread with the rapidity of an epidemic wind; and scholars, students, and fellows were every where in motion: here a stout bachelor of arts might be seen knocking down the ancient Cerberus who opposed his passage; there the iron-bound ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Puerperal mania resulted in one case cited, from the use of a moderate amount of wine at mealtimes; when the wine was abandoned the ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... of "Peter, the Hermit," and "The Crusades," the "Black Death," the "Great Plague" that swept over Europe in the Thirteenth century; or that of the "Flagellants," and the "Dancing Mania," where whole villages became "Dancing Dervishes," samples of which may occasionally be found to-day in the cities of America, the "Yogis" that are "Buddhas" or "Christs" in New York, and the Dowies that were "Elijahs" in Chicago, the Genius of Point Loma, Obispo, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Which doesn't figure in our maps. Of Ithacas we have a score, And Troys and Uticas galore; Chicago has a Punic sound, And pretty often, I'll be bound, Austere Bostonians heavenward send a Petition calling her delenda; While Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Betray the classicising mania. We have a Capitol, also, As fine as Rome's of long ago; Pompey and Romulus and Remus (I'm not so sure of Polyphemus) Are names with us more often worn Than in the lands where they were born. Then, as true classicists to stamp us, Each ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... of the house were the outcome of a naturally malignant disposition. This was, however, not the case. There is no reason to suppose that Mr Kay did not mean well. But there is no doubt that he was extremely fussy. And fussiness—with the possible exceptions of homicidal mania and a taste for arson—is quite the worst characteristic it is possible ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Heaven's blessings so lightly. But there, we are told that the love of money is the root of all evil, and how true it is! for they are now rooting arter it, like pigs arter ground-nuts. Why, it is a perfect money mania ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... drunkenness and its attendant sins, the upper classes, in general, either set them a bad example, or made a plunder of them by pandering to their favourite vice. The passion for liquor, it is stated by Collins,[104] operated like a mania, there being nothing which the people would not risk to obtain it: and while spirits were to be had, those who did any extra labour refused to be paid in money, or in any other article than spirits, which were then so scarce as to be sold at six shillings a bottle. So eagerly ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... priced in dealers' catalogues, and, if they want money, they carry their treasures to the dealers. But "advantage seldom comes of it." The dealer has a different price, very often, when he is a purchaser. This is intelligible, but, to many persons who are not amateurs, the mania for rare postage-stamps passes all understanding. Yet it is capable of being explained. Like many other oddities and puzzling features in the ways of collectors, the high price of certain stamps is the consequence of the passion for perfection. Any one can collect stamps—little boys ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... stared at Jimmy wondering whether he was seated with an insane man or not, and if so whether the latter might develop homicidal mania. ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... is of interest today primarily because it is a good story. Its broad satire about the autograph collecting mania of the mid-nineteenth century is deftly combined with the more serious irony of a poet's frantic appeal for help becoming an expensive plaything of the rich, while the poet himself has died of want. Susan ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... times out of ten, has a mania for collecting pipes or steins, or both. Dan and I had been affected this way. During the year I had studied at Heidelberg I had gathered together some fifty odd pipes and steins. I have them yet, and many a pleasant memory they beget me. As for the steins ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... letters could be. They are written by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called "sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take abnormal forms. They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of drugs, or in dreams and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... intimates that all cases of supposed demoniacal possession are identical with hysteria, delirium, and mania, and suchlike bodily and mental derangements.' Dr. Nevius, however, gave what he conceived to be the notes of possession, and, in his diagnosis, distinguished them from hysteria (whatever that may mean), delirium, and mania. Nor ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... chevalier should not have looked quite so well; but this was an irreparable misfortune. The passport was in the name of Signior Diego, steward of the noble house of Oropesa, who had a commission to bring back to Spain a sort of maniac, a bastard of the said house, whose mania was to believe himself regent of France. This was a precaution taken to meet anything that the Duc d'Orleans might call out from the bottom of the carriage; and, as the passport was according to rule, signed by the ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere) |
