"Idiocy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... laugh in forgetfulness and they laugh lest they die of sadness. A shrug of the shoulders, a widening of the lips, a heaving forth of sound, and the life is saved. The remedy is as drastic as are the drugs used for epilepsy, which in quelling the spasm bring idiocy to the patient. If we are made idiots by our laughter, we are paying dearly for the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... but the heart in the right place. Still very cordially interested in my Barrie and wishing him well through his sickness, which is of the body, and long defended from mine, which is of the head, and by the impolite might be described as idiocy. The whole head is useless, and the whole sitting part painful: ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... instrument of the soul. Deformity of the body is a limitation of the ego who functions through it. A withered arm, a club foot, a deformed back, in this incarnation are results of unfortunate causes which that soul has generated in past lives. In idiocy the malformation is in the brain. Of course this is not an accident. There is no element of chance which places the limitation in one body where it causes but little trouble and in another where it prevents mental activity and thus produces idiocy. In each case it is the exact working out of the ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... Mrs. Stanton on the Jubilee; Electricity; Progress of the Telegraph; The Mystery of the Ages; Progress of the Marvellous; A Grand Aerolite; The Boy Pianist; Centenarians; Educated Monkeys; Causes of Idiocy; A Powerful Temperance Argument; Slow Progress; Community Doctors; The Selfish System of Society; Educated Beetles; Rustless Iron; Weighing the Earth; Head and Heart; The Rectification of Cerebral Science Chapter IX.—Rectification of Cerebral ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... me the least word of advice about any of my errors. The same night, as this priest was passing the evening in company with the patriarch, bishop, and other individuals, as if they had been conversing on my idiocy in making the request of to-day, the patriarch sent for me to come and sit with them. I came. The patriarch then asked this priest and the others present, if two proper men could be found to go and preach the gospel. They then answered one to another, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... observed, that mediums 'take on' the conditions of certain spirits who are communicating, i.e. they suffer pro tem. from heart or bowel trouble, pains in the head, etc. Further, this seems to extend to the mental functions and conditions also. Idiocy and insanity, e.g., are supposed to gradually wear off in the next life, and a gradual return to normal conditions ensue. This is, at least, the statement made through several mediums, and it is only natural to suppose ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called "courage," ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... bathos of the failure. Wieland includes in the letter some "specimen passages from a novel in the style of Tristram Shandy," which he asserts were sent him by the author. The quotations are almost flat burlesque in their impossible idiocy, and one can easily appreciate Wieland's despairing cry with ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... bride. From the time of their incoming a marked improvement in the administration of the jail became apparent, which continued, when, after two years, Mr. Jones was stricken down with softening of the brain, which reduced him to a condition of idiocy for six months before his death. When at last this occurred, by unanimous vote of the board of freeholders the woman who had really performed the duties of jailor was appointed warden of Hudson county jail. All this has been a matter of report in the papers, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... which means forcing the minister's hand and ejecting a man of talent? Between ourselves, Rabourdin is the only man capable of taking charge of the division, and I might say of the ministry. Do you know that they talk of putting in over his head that solid lump of foolishness, that cube of idiocy, Baudoyer?" ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... intelligible character of the sanctimonious scoundrel, by the everyday experiences of the madhouse. No professor of metaphysics, psychology, or religion can claim to know the elements of what he teaches, unless he is acquainted with the ordinary phenomena of idiocy, madness, and epilepsy. He must study the manifestations of disease and congenital folly, as well as those of sanity and ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... to see—now that Violet Williamson has seen it and Constance, and God knows who of the rest of them, who were so tactful and sympathetic about my 'disgrace'—now that you've won your fight without any help from me ... Without any help! In spite of every hindrance that my idiocy could put in your way! Now, after all—I come and tell you that you've earned the thing ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... really did question it. She didn't care. She loathed their excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't care. It was she who had drawn them and led them on to this display of incomparable idiocy. Like her brother Nicholas she found that adversity was extremely ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... about court, obtaining a monopoly of such trade, left the business of production and circulation to their inferiors, while, as has already been sufficiently indicated, religious fanaticism and a pride of race, which nearly amounted to idiocy, had generated a scorn for labour even among the lowest orders. As a natural consequence, commerce and the mechanical arts fell almost exclusively into the hands of foreigners—Italians, English, and French—who resorted in yearly increasing numbers to Spain for the purpose of enriching. themselves ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inconspicuous, exercise a great influence over the methods rather than over the conduct of affairs. A devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue the possession of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy. Councillor Mikulin was not only a clever but also a faithful official. Privately he was a bachelor with a love of comfort, living alone in an apartment of five rooms luxuriously furnished; and was known by his intimates to be an enlightened patron of the art of female ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... George on his feet. 'What have you done with her, you—you villain?' Soane, with misgivings gnawing at his heart, was in no patient mood. In a blaze of passion he flung the attorney from him. 'You madman!' he said; 'what idiocy is this?' ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... rocking-chair, in some spot where the sun fell warm, and he would rock to and fro for hours, working his slender fingers and mumbling forth his satisfaction at the warmth in the plaintive and unvarying refrain of idiocy. The boy was thus situated when ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... awakened some time hours later by a deluge of rain that brought him out of his blankets with a yell to Bruce. They had not put up their tepee, and a moment later he heard Bruce anathematizing their idiocy. The night was as black as a cavern, except when it was broken by lurid flashes of lightning, and the mountains rolled and rumbled with deep thunder. Disentangling himself from his drenched blanket, Langdon stood up. A glare of lightning ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... generation was one of colossal exaggeration, both in talent and in idiocy, in virtue and in vice. Men sinned like giants and as giants atoned. Common sense, mediocrity—save upon the throne—were rare. Even the fools in their folly were great. The spectacle was recurrent of men who would smilingly stake a fortune as a ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... herself audibly. Without the slightest ear for music, she has been plunging round the room with her husband, who is still so far infatuated as to half believe she can dance. She is an extremely pretty woman, so one can condone his idiocy. ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... original. He was indifferent to literary fame, and never attempted any higher style of composition than that in which he could excel. His last days were miserable, and he lingered a long while in hopeless and melancholy idiocy. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... and looked at the bed; after which he began to undress. Unfastening his old black girdle, he slowly divested himself of his torn nankeen kaftan, and deposited it carefully on the back of a chair. His face had now lost its usual disquietude and idiocy. On the contrary, it had in it something restful, thoughtful, and even grand, while all his movements were ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... Theodore, hardened by his father's severity, and unable to bear the privations of a narrow income, absented himself more and more from their wretched lodgings, and tried to drown his cares by drinking himself into a state of semi-idiocy. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... the idiocy, or, as the novelists say, to complete the illusion, one goes to the refreshment-room and tosses off two or three glasses. And then something happens in your head and your heart, finer than you can read of in a fairy tale. I am a man of no importance, ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of time now to brood over her wrongs, and to concoct schemes of vengeance. Her father no longer required her care. He had passed from the frenzied ravings of insanity and delirium to the stupor of idiocy. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... that? No, she did not want him to be ridiculous; and as he spoke she recalled the staggering, impotent figure of last night, in its unmanly feebleness and senseless idiocy. A sense of the difficulty of her task and the vanity of her representations came over Dolly; it gave her new food for tears, but the present effect was to make her stop them. I suppose despair does not weep. ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... speak of the "idiocy of rural life" from which capitalism, through the concentration of agriculture and the abolition of small holdings, would rescue the peasant proprietors (Communist Manifesto). In Capital Marx ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... once. But Smith's sister taught me to take a higher view of girls. I admit that they have defects—they can't help 'em. There are times when I doubt if even boys are perfect. I freely admit that there is a certain amount of idiocy in the ways and manners of girls in general. Far be it from me to deny that they squeak and squeal when there is no occasion for squeaking and squealing. There is no use in denying that they are afraid of mice. Even Smith's sister visibly ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... salivate, to digest, to evacuate; that you are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity, constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy, eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and so on to the end of the alphabet and ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... idiocy, this unexpectedness and inconsequence, are perhaps the most characteristic qualities of his freest humour elsewhere. Take, for example, the flavour of this singular remark from The Four Men. Grizzlebeard is telling, according to his oath, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... had the slightest suspicion of the avocations of the proprietor. Besides, even the humblest agent of police would be expected to possess a degree of acuteness for which no one gave M. Tabaret credit. Indeed, they mistook for incipient idiocy ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... his whole stricken life. The twin shames of venereal disease, blinked by every health board in the country (Detroit possibly deserves a partial exception) are, in their effect upon the race, in blindness, deafness, idiocy, and death so dreadful a menace to-day, that consumption alone can march beside them in the leadership of the destroyers. Typhoid, so easily conquerable, claims its annual thousands of sacrificed victims. And the slaughter ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... "'Inspiration of idiocy. What do mystic men of the Orient know about warm-blooded Americans, dead in love? I might kiss the air until I was blue in the face,—nothing to it,—but let me kiss you, and we are ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... to earth in visible form, it is the result of some disquieting influence immediately before the death of the body, or, as I might say, previous to the new life. At the hour of physical birth, such influences cause idiocy or such imperfection of the bodily functions that death ensues, and the spirit returns to seek another entrance into the world of matter. When a man dies dominated by some intense earthly desire, his mind is barred against the higher powers and greater possibilities ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... respects and, as most people would say, much better mannered. He is neater and a better listener to conversation. He puts his shoes under the table, does not throw them. But he has brought back also some of the nurses' exclamations of surprise—"Oh, I say!" "Not I!" "You don't say so!" "What idiocy!" and the like. No doubt those expressions sounded quite proper among the nurses, but on Tommy's lips they seem curiously more vulgar than his natural and rougher expletives. It is, besides, as if one were eavesdropping outside ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... evil and good; that evil is as real as good and more powerful. This belief has not one qual- ity of Truth. It is either ignorant or malicious. The 103:24 malicious form of hypnotism ultimates in moral idiocy. The truths of immortal Mind sustain man, and they anni- hilate the fables of mortal mind, whose flimsy and gaudy 103:27 pretensions, like silly moths, singe their own ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of "Endymion." We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable. Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for many apparently hopeless invalids; and if Mr Keats should ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... degraded motley conspicuously forth amidst the fair colors of earth, and mix their incoherent cries with the melodies of eternity, break with their inane laugh upon the silence which Creation keeps where Omnipotence passes most visibly, and scrabble over with the characters of idiocy the pages that have been written by ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... "You looking for an inn?" she said. "An inn in this town?" The idea appeared to strike her as the very height of idiocy. She covered her face with her hands and shook. After a second Jonas discovered that she was laughing. He waited patiently until the fit ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... inextricable. Dame Gillian declared it unreasonable, that, since a woman was only allowed one husband, a man should, under any circumstances, be permitted to have two wives; while Raoul, glancing towards her a look of verjuice, pitied the deplorable idiocy of the man who could be fool enough to avail ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... me. With an incipient passion for nature and animal life, I read with delight all the books of natural history I could get, and I have heard in later years that in all the community of Sabbatarianism I was known as a prodigy. Fortunately I was saved from a probable idiocy in my later life by a severe attack of typhoid fever at seven, out of which attack I came a model of stupidity, and so remained until I was fourteen, my thinking powers being so completely suspended that at the dame's school to which I was ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... aloud, pushing the slip away. Go? Certainly not. He had never really meant to go. He would, of course, keep his engagement with Josephine. "And I'll not come down town until she has taken another job and has caught Tetlow. I'll stop this idiocy of trying to make an impression on a person not worth impressing. What weak vanity—to be piqued by ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... "If inspired idiocy can help the law," shouted Kerry, "the man who did this job is as good as dead!" He turned his fierce gaze in Gray's direction. "Thank you, sir. I need ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... cunning and fraudulent ingenuity, had she been known as an expert forger, you would not have convicted her on this indictment, having had before you the malice and greed of Dockwrath, the stupidity—I may almost call it idiocy, of Kenneby, and the dogged resolution to conceal the truth evinced by the woman Bolster. With strong evidence you could not have believed such a charge against so excellent a lady. With such evidence as you have had before you, you could not have believed the charge against ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... but somehow her arm was stealing around the slight shoulders so far beneath her own, "that's the silly kind of a person you are. If any creature needs you, from a lame kitten to a lion with a toothache, you'll cling. Idiocy, that's what it is! Your brother warned me last summer to restrict your charities. And now to help her with her writing, and she your most ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... would have the most terrible after-effects upon their whole lives and upon their families—diseases which cause tens of thousands of surgical operations upon women, and a large percentage of blindness and idiocy in children—and you might hear them confidently express the opinion that these diseases were no worse than ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... which had struck him as rather silly; now he plainly saw that this sentimental soul could never, never have been the friend of his father, who was so matter-of-fact, so narrow, so heavy, to whom the word "Poetry" meant idiocy. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... now I'll tell you something funnier. Her playing WAS wonderful to me. The gates of heaven opened to me when she played. I can see myself now, worn out and dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats of the palace veranda and gazing upon her at the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss. Why, this idea she had of her fine playing was the one flaw in her deliciousness of perfection, and I loved her for it. It kind of brought her within my human reach. Why, when she played her one-two-three, tum-tum-tum, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... of her members. 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. ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sometimes reversed, and tendencies which have been in sane life dormant or repressed become suddenly supreme. In such cases we all acknowledge that there is no moral responsibility, but madness, with its illusions and irresistible impulses, and idiocy with its complete suspension of the will and of the judgment, are neither of them, as lawyers would pretend, clearly defined states, marked out by sharp and well-cut boundaries, wholly distinct from sanity. There are incipient stages; there ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... attend to the order of our books so much as (to the order) of our thoughts.' So, in the midst of Homer he would skip to Longinus; a passage in Longinus would send him to Pliny, and so on. General reading upon this plan, with no idea of collection in view, would in time reduce most of us to idiocy. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... some form of honest labour. But I could not imagine that Crossan had started one of those ridiculous industries by means of which Government Boards and philanthropic ladies think they will add to the wealth of the Irish peasants. Besides, even if Crossan had suddenly developed symptoms of kindly idiocy, neither wood-carving or lace-making could possibly have made Rose's freckly faced young man rich enough to buy a gold brooch. The thing puzzled me nearly as much as ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... still asleep when I got back to the big room. I moved his boots back from the fire, and trimmed the candle. Then, with sleep gone from me, I lay back on my divan and reflected on many things: on my idiocy in coming; on Alison West, and the fact that only a week before she had been a guest in this very house; on Richey and the constraint that had come between us. From that I drifted back to Alison, and to the barrier my ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... thin film across the sky; he should have turned back with Gloria the first thing this morning; he should have done anything in the world save exactly what he had done. He should not have married her; he should not have brought her with him; it was even sheer idiocy to come after this blind fashion into the mountains in the late fall. Though the season was early the hour was ominous. The storm might pass before dawn. There remained the equal likelihood that it would not. Were he alone, or had he a man, or, yes, by heaven! ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... idiocy in the eyes of Mr. Atwater's daughter, as she watched them. They had brought to her mind the tricks of the Jongleur of Notre Dame, who had nothing to offer heaven itself, to mollify heaven's rulers, except his entertainment of juggling and nonsense; ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... Devonshire,' 'Lord Alvanley, 'Mr. Sheridan,' or whom not. The poor old idiot received the imaginary visitors with the old bow, and talked to them in the old strain, till his servant announced their imaginary carriages, and he was put drivelling to bed. At last the idiocy became mania. He burnt his books, his relics, his tokens. He ate enormously, and the man who had looked upon beer as the ne plus ultra of vulgarity, was glad to imagine it champagne. Let us not follow the poor maniac through his wanderings. Rather let us throw a veil ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... which is highly important," agreed Garrick. "I suppose they'd consider a fingerprint, or the portrait parle the height of idiocy beside that." ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... feelings as to those of their families whom cretinism has reduced to idiocy. They are attended to, fed, dressed clean, and provided with a pleasant place for the day, before doing anything else, even by very busy ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... not affected by my ignorance of the facts, motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous, flitted through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these girl-friends' heads! Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent mother (of the strict governess type), ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... word in a cracked falsetto, with the evident intention of mocking her, and at the same time hideously contorted his face into a grotesque idiocy of expression, pursing his lips so extremely, and setting his brows so awry, that his other features were cartooned out of all familiar likeness, effecting an alteration as shocking to behold, in a man of his severe cast of countenance, ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... what I should like to marry. A thoroughly sensible wife would reduce me to a condition of absolute idiocy in less ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... connects the nerves in their passage from the brain and the spinal cord through the body with manifestations of life. She has a series of chapters with regard to psychology normal and morbid. She talks about frenzy, insanity, despair, dread, obsession, anger, idiocy, and innocency. She says very strongly in one place that "when headache and migraine and vertigo attack a patient simultaneously they render a man foolish and upset his reason. This makes many people ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... studied his arithmetic lesson the next morning. Equally inadequate is it to relate in full how he became so confused among the waxworks that he pinched the solemnest showman's legs to see if he was real, and perplexed the beautiful Circassian to the verge of idiocy by telling her he had read all about the way they sold girls like ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... tired of being blamed for Kit Raynham's idiocy," she said, a note of resentment in her voice. "No one seems to consider my side of the question! I was merely nice to him in an ordinary sort of way, and there wasn't the least need for him to have chucked up everything and rushed off ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... that, when we had met, our interviews had been brief and our conversation conventional; but it is the intervals between the meetings that do the real damage. Absence, as the poet neatly remarks, makes the heart grow fonder. And now, thanks to Ukridge's amazing idiocy, a barrier had been thrust between us. As if the business of fishing for a girl's heart were not sufficiently difficult and delicate without the addition of needless obstacles! It was terrible to have to reestablish myself in the good graces of the professor before I could so much as begin to dream ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... Skim had been flattered to the extent of destroying any stray sense he might ever have possessed. His utter ignorance of girls and their ways may have been partly responsible for his idiocy, or his mother's conviction that all that was necessary was for him to declare himself in order to be accepted had misled him and induced him to abandon any native diffidence he might have had. Anyway, the boy fell into the snare set by the mischievous young ladies without ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... suggestion was made by a bright Hawaiian, which was adopted with satisfaction, that it probably referred to that state of dreamy mental exaltation which comes with awa-intoxication. This condition, like that of frenzy, of madness, and of idiocy, the Hawaiian regarded as ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... and began at once to make preparations for turning himself into a large black dog, an accomplishment for which he was justly renowned, and to which the family doctor always attributed the permanent idiocy of Lord Canterville's uncle, the Hon. Thomas Horton. The sound of approaching footsteps, however, made him hesitate in his fell purpose, so he contented himself with becoming faintly phosphorescent, and vanished with a deep churchyard groan, just as the twins ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... "Of your idiocy, very likely," shouted the Caliph, bored by the eternal flatteries of the barber. "Tell me, what ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... opinions upon others, rarely becomes a learned man. A great many confused, dreamy ideas, no doubt, float through the brain of such a man; but he has little exact and reliable knowledge. The truth is, there is a sort of indolent, listless absorption of intellectual food, that tends to idiocy. I knew a person once, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... might sound like pure idiocy to some people; but funnily enough it came into the head of Vance that when he had been teasing those twelve models of propriety, his sisters, a few days before, and had made their blue bead-like eyes ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... Paris is preparing to stand siege if the Prussians double up Bazaine and the army of Chalons in the north. But you don't know what a pitiable fright the authorities are in. Why, Scarlett, they are scared almost to the verge of idiocy." ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the Wolf. "Of course! You just happened a round. Funny, as you Americans say. And the letter in your pocket—it happens that I lost that letter through the idiocy of one of my servants. You happened to find that also, of course. Where did ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... own. As the boy was under the impression that he had done a fine thing, which deserved praise, and not blame, he rebelled, and was impertinent. Melchior lost his temper, and said that he would box his ears, although he had played his music well enough, because with his idiocy he had spoiled the whole effect of the concert. Jean-Christophe had a profound sense of justice. He went and sulked in a corner; he visited his contempt upon his father, the Princess, and the whole world. He was hurt also because the neighbors came ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... snarled. "I may laugh at my idiocy, but you haven't any right to. I know I'm ridiculous. I've known it for months. But it's ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wonder," soliloquized the young man, "that he advised me to shave off this ridiculous crop of alfalfa. Hang election bets, anyway; if things had gone half right I shouldn't have had to wear this badge of idiocy. And to think that it's got to be for a whole month longer! A year's a mighty long while at best, but a year in company with a full set of red whiskers ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... one of the whole tribe is defrauded of a voice, and at least one is an exquisite singer; or accuse the nightingale of the superfluous idiocy of holding his (though they always say her) breast to a thorn as he sings, as if he were so foolish as to imitate some forms of human self-torture,—if they would only be a little more sure of their facts, what a comfort it would be to those who ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... know what. And treats—why, I spent over seventy-five dollars in bar money alone the day of the Pioneers' picnic, while the County Fair meant the price of a good horse. It's a good thing for me that the torchlight idiocy has gone out. Still, the 'Shelby Base-ball Club' is as big a nuisance. Three thousand legitimate dollars," he repeated. "We now ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... "It's sheer idiocy. Haven't you heard the things people are saying? They are calling him a fool, and in the clubs they are betting that he will be a pauper ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... relations, and nobody need have been wiser—and she'd have had all the blame—and it's only what she's accustomed to—you—you! you, James North!—you must nonsensically go, and, by this extravagant piece of idiocy and sentimental tomfoolery, let everybody see how serious the whole affair was, and how deep it hurt you! and here in this awful place, alone—where you're half drowned to get to it and are willing to be wholly drowned to get away! Oh, don't talk to me! I won't hear it—it's ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... said, fumbling nervously all over his clothes, "I've given it to the cabman. Of all the infernal idiocy! I knew I should. I had a presentiment that I should get it muddled up with my other ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... kind of history not often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common to the realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William, the perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from generation to generation in many things and like many families; some of them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, some of them merely boobies; but they have ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... ever stop in the street and talk for a few minutes to some old bachelor? If so, I dare say you have remarked a curious phenomenon. You have found that all of a sudden the mind of the old gentleman, usually reasonable enough, appeared stricken into a state approaching idiocy, and that the sentence which he had begun in a rational and intelligible way was ending in a maze of wandering words, signifying nothing in particular. You had been looking in another direction, but in sudden alarm you look straight at the old gentleman to see what on earth is the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... there filled with hostility to Cisy; but the young aristocrat's idiocy had disarmed him. However, as the other's gestures, face, and entire person brought back to his recollection the dinner at the Cafe Anglais, he got more and more irritated; and he lent his ears to the complimentary remarks made in a low tone by Joseph, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... toward evening, at town after town, one would think that whiskey and tobacco were the main articles they bought. Any number of men and boys, and at least four women, were drunk enough, and they brought bottles with them and added to their puling idiocy as they went on. Nothing short of a pig-sty could match the filth, but it is only in that class of cars that you see anything of the vast number of poor farmers and laborers. If they can not pay exorbitant rates, refined, educated men and women are thrust into pens ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... his industrious companions, Faust and Schoffer, ever have believed that, by the division of labor, their sublime invention would fall into the domain of ignorance—I had almost said idiocy? There are few men so weak-minded, so UNLETTERED, as the mass of workers who follow the various branches of the typographic industry,— compositors, pressmen, type-founders, book-binders, and paper-makers. The printer, as he existed even in the days ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... discouraged. Wise as this precaution certainly was, it has resulted in a very inconvenient state of things; for a remote ancestor—the fifth in line from the beginning—experienced such vicissitudes that he returned from his travels in a state of most abandoned idiocy, and when the time arrived that he should, in turn, communicate to his son, he was only able to repeat over and over again the name of the pious hermit to whom the family was so greatly indebted, coupling it each time with a new and markedly offensive ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... thoroughly illustrated than in this Burgundian race which for two centuries held the sceptre of Spain. The son Philip and the grandmother Isabella are both needful in order to comprehend the strange mixture of good and evil in Charles. But the descendants of Philip—two generations of idiocy, and a third of utter impotence—are a sufficient commentary upon the organization and ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... And there are signs that even in France syndicalism is losing its anti-political tendency. Herve, who demanded at the beginning of 1909 that the "directors of the Socialist Party cure themselves of 'Parliamentary idiocy'" (his New Year's wish), expressed at the beginning of 1910 the wish that "certain of the dignitaries of the Federation of Labor should cure themselves of a syndicalist and laborite idiocy, a form of idiocy not less dangerous or clownish ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... his native genius, constituted his entire capital, and he needed no more. He found the colonies clamoring for justice; whining about their grievances; upon their knees at the foot of the throne, imploring that mixture of idiocy and insanity, George III., by the grace of God, for a restoration of their ancient privileges. They were not endeavoring to become free men, but were trying to soften the heart of their master. They were perfectly willing to make brick if Pharaoh would furnish the straw. The colonists wished ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... big and angry that she felt like a wren or sparrow in his hold. But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy! She eyed him from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt unutterable—a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled with smaller, worn-out prejudices! The way of escape had been set before him, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... when it comes to the question, Will the applicant now before me probably become a public charge—that is, fall into the pauper or criminal class—or is he of the right stuff to make a respectable and desirable American citizen? In cases of plain insanity or idiocy or disease the decision is easy; but when it comes to the moral and economic sphere an expert opinion is required. Then, the inspectors have to be constantly on the lookout for deception and fraud. Immigrants who belong to the excluded classes have been carefully coached ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... himself. His hand seemed to make a fruitless effort to release his tomahawk, which was confined by its handle to his belt, while his eyes gradually became vacant. Richard at that instant thrusting a mug before him, his features changed to the grin of idiocy, and seizing the vessel with both hands, he sank backward on the bench and drank until satiated, when he made an effort to lay aside the mug with the helplessness of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... make a pilgrimage to one of the great temples of India, in the hope that change of scene might restore his health, and was even disposed, notwithstanding all that had passed, again to employ him in the public service. But from the moment of that sudden shock, the unhappy man sank gradually into idiocy. He who had formerly been distinguished by the strength of his understanding and the simplicity of his habits, now squandered the remains of his fortune on childish trinkets, and loved to exhibit himself dressed in rich garments, and hung with precious stones. In this abject state he languished ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and there issues from a cell about four feet six inches wide, and nine long, the hideous countenance of a poor, mulatto girl, whose shrunken body, skeleton-like arms, distended and glassy eyes, tell but too forcibly her tale of sorrow. How vivid the picture of wild idiocy is pictured in her sad, sorrowing face. No painter's touch could have added a line more perfect. Now she rushes forward, with a suddenness that makes Madame Montford shrink back, appalled-now she fixes her eyes, hangs down her head, and gives vent to her tears. "My soul is white-yes, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him. The schools are no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you. For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... bridegroom! but such a changed man. His eyes were fixed, and his face as white as silver—his mouth was wide open, and his great tongue went lolling about from side to side—and he shook his head, and mumbled and slavered—he was struck all of a sudden into idiocy, and knew nobody; not even his bride. She was sinking before him, but he never noticed her, but went moaning, and muttering, and shaking his head. Ho! ho! 'twas the comicalest thing I ever saw. And ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the temple of the Soul. Each shall have its due, each shall glory in the sacred purity and strength of life; each shall develop and expand, but never at the expense of the other. I will have neither the renunciation which ends in a kind of idiocy dignified with a philosophic or a theologic name, nor the worldliness which ends in bestiality. I am a citizen of two worlds—a citizen of the Universe; I owe allegiance to two kingdoms. In my heart are those stars and that sun, and the LIGHT of those stars ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... truth the shifty breed had an expression on his face as he tried to put his torn garments to rights that savoured not a little of idiocy. He had been for the last three hours working himself into a mood of unconcern and even defiance, so that he might be able to repel the attacks of the outspoken Pepin. But now, at the very first words this terrible manikin uttered, he felt his heart sinking down into his boots. Still, he bore news ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... CHILDREN.—(Incontinence of Urine).—This refers to an escape of urine from the bladder uncontrolled by the will. It naturally occurs in infants under thirty months, or thereabouts, and in the very old, and in connection with various diseases. It may be due to disease of the brain, as in idiocy or insanity, apoplexy, or unconscious states. Injuries or disorders of the spinal cord, which controls the action of the bladder (subject to the brain), also cause incontinence. Local disorders of the urinary organs are more frequent causes of the trouble, as inflammation of ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... "They have discovered that even incipient congenital idiocy can be cured by the removal of the adenoids. But I don't suppose such an operation will ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the world, they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational, 'cool', and imaginative as they consider themselves. This bias often contributes to weakness in communication skills. Hackers tend to be especially poor ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. Indeed, it lies so far from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting the reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent idiocy of my condition; when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees and church spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the rhythmical swish of boat and paddle in the water became a cradle-song to lull my thoughts ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Gothard were now removed from the courtroom. When Gothard was left alone the president adjured him to speak the truth for his own sake, pointing out that his pretended idiocy had come to an end; none of the jurors believed him imbecile; if he refused to answer the court he ran the risk of serious penalty; whereas by telling the truth at once he would probably be released. Gothard ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... "is it possible that you take me for a candidate for a lunatic asylum? Do you think that I am on the verge of lapsing into complete idiocy? Or are you simply trying to have a little sport ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... chestnut bur by instinct, as the possum plays dead, or whether that is a matter of slow learning is yet to be discovered. Whether his dense stupidity, Which disarms his enemies and brings him safe out of a hundred dangers where wits would fail, is, like the possum's blank idiocy, only a mask for the deepest wisdom; or whether he is quite as stupid as he acts and looks, is ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting the devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised stronger remedies; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence, was so great, that on one occasion he appears to have advised the killing of an idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet Luther was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range of literature there is hardly anything more touching ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... not affected by my ignorance of the facts, motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs. Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous, flitted through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these girl-friends' heads! Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent mother (of the strict governess type), she was as guileless ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... and that since that time he has never been of sound mind, his brain never recovering from that shock, a blow which actually broke in a portion of his skull. Since that time he has had recurrent times of violent insanity, with alternating spells of what seems a semi-idiocy. This man's mind never grew. In some ways his animal senses are keen to a remarkable degree, but of reason he has little or none. He can not tell you why he does a thing, or what will happen provided that he does thus or so. This I shall prove ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... heart, that I am an absolute blunderer. You ought to watch me when I am at it; now thinking "it must do after all," then going to the piano to puzzle out some wretched rubbish, and giving it up again in a state of idiocy. Oh, how I feel then! how thoroughly persuaded of my musical wretchedness! And then come you, whose pores are running over as with streams, fountains, cataracts, and tell me such words as those which you have said to me. I find it difficult to think that this is not the purest irony, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred would come nearer to the mark. I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth while to set up a school for instruction in the art. "Poetry taught in twelve lessons." Congenital idiocy is no disqualification. Anybody can write "poetry." It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and revels ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... going!" I declared firmly. "It's—it's dratted idiocy, that's all. Plain water would do well enough. There's a lot of people think whisky is poison with ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Mrs. Pedagog," rejoined the offender, meekly. "Nevertheless, as apart from the question in hand as to whether Mr. Pedagog inspires idiocy or not, I should like to get the views of this gathering on the point you make regarding the table. Is this your table? Is it not rather the table of those who sit about it to regale their inner man with the good things under which I remember once or twice in my life to have heard it ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... belief. Even the presents given by the Emir of Bokhara to the Tzar are splendid enough to dazzle one like a realization of the Arabian Nights. But to see the most valuable of all, which are kept in the Emperor's private vaults, is to be reduced to a state of bewilderment bordering on idiocy. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... the human is a condition in which the burning taper we call Life flickers and smoulders and smokes. Thirty years ago it was an example of the most hopeless idiocy. Whole populations were afflicted with it. But neither man of science, nor bigot-fanatic, assured by the Divine Confidence of its meaning as a visitation, believed it could be modified an iota. Today, that inept word ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... try whether Viscount Wenman, "aged 19, of L5000 per annum estate in Oxfordshire," were an idiot or not. On the 14th February the Commission was superseded. In June 1709, a new Commission passed the Great Seal for inquiring into the Viscount's idiocy, and on July 29 they found that he was no idiot. On July 12, Peter Wentworth wrote thus to Lord Raby: "The prosecution of Lord Wainman is now order'd again, upon wch the Tatler is to day; the accation I am ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... city, when we feel puzzled, by the almost total absence of reason in the countenance, to know whether the utter indifference to nakedness and the elements, be the consequence of drunken destitution, or pure idiocy. To this questionable appearance had the individual we speak of come. The day was now nearly past, and the crowd had considerably diminished, when this man, approaching Father Matthew, knelt down, and clasping ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... salvation that we'd lost our way and were driving towards Bergamo instead of out," said the conqueror triumphantly. "You see, they thought probably they'd got hold of the wrong car, as the accused one had been coming from Lecco. What with that impression, and their despair at my idiocy, they were ready to give us the benefit of the doubt and save their faces. Otherwise, though we were innocent and the driver of the cart merely 'trying it on,' we might have been hung up ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... moment to consider: "Well, I think is of the earth, earthy. There's a mixture of idiocy in it the Devil might fairly repudiate. Young gentleman, the English Statutes of Lunacy are famous monuments of legislatorial incapacity: and indeed, as a general rule, if you want justice and wisdom, don't you go ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... consequences." No; in reality the word is fitted to signify something psychical, a feeling, a state. Could I not apprehend it? and I reflect profoundly in order to find something psychical. Then it seems to me that some one is interposing, interrupting my confab. I answer angrily, "Beg pardon! Your match in idiocy is not to be found; no, sir! Knitting cotton? Ah! go to hell!" Well, really I had to laugh. Might I ask why should I be forced to let it signify knitting cotton, when I had a special dislike to its signifying knitting cotton? I had discovered the word myself, so, for that ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... and gauzy partition divides Clara Morse's brains from idiocy. In my day, all such feeble watery minds as hers were regarded as semi-imbecile, pitied as intellectual cripples, and wisely kept in the background of society; but, bless me! in this generation they skip and prance to the very edge of the front, pose in indecent garments ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... clustering firs of Hawkins Hill, as if it were part of the natural phenomena. At last it was completed. Then Mr. Hawkins proceeded to furnish it with an expensiveness and extravagance of outlay quite in keeping with his former idiocy. Carpets, sofas, mirrors, and finally a piano,—the only one known in the county, and brought at great expense from Sacramento,—kept curiosity at a fever-heat. More than that, there were articles and ornaments which a few married experts declared only ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte |
