"Monomaniac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In normal times the monomaniac's designs would never have reached fruition. Now the vast public discontents converted the cringing ex-tenant or shrieking beggar into a gaunt, long-haired, ferocious agitator—one of the outstanding crazy figures of ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... of the world holds most of such men as Magus, strange beings with a strange religion in their heart of hearts. The London "eccentric" always finds that worship, like life, brings weariness and satiety in the end; the Parisian monomaniac lives cheerfully in concubinage with his crotchet to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the most objectless, futile, idiotic business that ever I heard of. It can only be the work of a monomaniac." ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the sentiment or the folly which gave such a warning to the victim. For be it remembered that Bernhardi's words are to be taken very seriously, for they are not the ravings of some Pan-German monomaniac, but the considered views of the foremost military writer of Germany, one who is in touch with those inner circles whose opinions are the springs of national policy. "Our last and greatest reckoning is to be with Great Britain," said the bitter Treitschke. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... bearing on his manias, to obtain his assent to principles in various branches of art, and apply them subsequently to music. All was well so long as the patient's brain was heated with the fumes of wine; but as soon as he had recovered—or, rather, lost—his reason, he was a monomaniac ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... furiously to every indignation of the age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore. The year in which this story opens found him wearying; his campaign had grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a great deal on the Civil War, somewhat on his dead wife ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... could get no one about this place to believe you! They have taken my brother-in-law's false story, indorsed as it is by the doctor-proprietor, for granted. And just so long as I persist in telling my true story, they will consider me a monomaniac, and so often as the thought of my many wrongs and sorrows combines with the nervous irritability to which every woman is occasionally subject, and makes me rave with impatience and excitement, they will report me a dangerous lunatic, subject to periodical ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... burning, and, glancing down, he noticed that one piece—the last—had slipped to the floor and was lying under the table. He saw the pencil still in Charley's hand. Forthwith his natural suspicion leaped up, and the cunning of the monomaniac was upon him. With all his belief in le bon Dieu and the Church, Louis Trudel trusted no one. One eye was ever open to distrust man, while the other was ever closed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... were not as the rest of men, if only they let out their check-reins a hole or so. It was horrible,—the cruelties men practised to gratify appetite, and that women were guilty of for vanity. I suppose I am a monomaniac on the subject, but we never seemed far removed from barbarians, when we went clothed in the skins of wild animals, and decorated with their heads and tails and feathers, like so many Sioux chiefs. The varnish of civilization isn't dry on us ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... profound—have laid aside their nationality in the most generous spirit for the express purpose of investigating the great English models of intellectual power, locally so near to their own native models, and virtually in such polar remoteness. Chateaubriand's intense enthusiasm for Milton, almost monomaniac in the opinion of some people, is notorious. This, however, was less astonishing: the pure marble grandeur of Milton, and his classical severity, naturally recommended themselves to the French taste, which can always understand the beauty of proportion and regular or teleologic tendencies. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... The Goncourts perceived this descent of Poe from Voltaire when they recorded in their 'Journal' that the strange tales of the American poet seemed to them to belong to "a new literature, the literature of the twentieth century, scientifically miraculous story-telling by A B, a literature at once monomaniac and mathematical, Zadig as district-attorney, Cyrano de Bergerac ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... madman, lunatic, maniac, bedlamite^, candidate for Bedlam, raver^, madcap, crazy; energumen^; automaniac^, monomaniac, dipsomaniac, kleptomaniac; hypochondriac &c (low spirits);; crank, Tom o'Bedlam. dreamer &c 515; rhapsodist, seer, highflier^, enthusiast, fanatic, fanatico [Sp.]; exalte [Fr.]; knight errant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Mary! Forgive me, but you're in danger of becoming a monomaniac. The Medlands are ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... was able to put forth as active and invincible forces all that extraordinary obstinacy, that morose doggedness, that indifference to comfort and pleasure, that brutal violence which had more than once, in their negative condition, made him seem more like some wild animal or half-savage monomaniac than an ordinary young man under five-and-twenty. He had, moreover, at this moment, when all the energies of his nature suddenly burst out, a power of deliberate, complacent, and pitiless moral self-vivisection, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... but it was also startling. Harry knew now that the old man was crazy, or at least a monomaniac, and, though he seemed harmless enough, it was of course possible that he might be dangerous. He was almost sorry that he had sought shelter here. Better have encountered the storm in its full fury than place himself in the power of a maniac. The rain was now falling in thick drops, and he decided ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... his green and boastful youth, aspired to rule the world and whose theatrical obsession had been the sly jest of unwary nations, too carelessly sure of the advance of civilization and too indifferently self-indulgent to realize that a monomaniac, even if treated as a source of humour, is a perilous thing to leave unwatched. She had known France in all the glitter of its showy Empire, and had seen its imperial glories dispersed as mist. Russia she had ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
