"Insanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... paint," Elfrida answered quickly. "I have put away the insanity of thinking I ever could. I told you that, I think, in a letter. But there are—other things. You may remember that you ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... went on all about us in the sunshine, the pressure of the encircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not in the mud and jokes and every-day activities of the trenches that one most feels the damnable insanity of war; it is where it lurks like a mythical monster in scenes to which the mind has always turned ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... threw herself at the feet of the Queen, implored her pardon, and disturbed the Temple for many days with the sight and the noise of her madness. The Princesses, forgetting the denunciations of this unfortunate being, in consideration of her repentance and insanity, watched over her by turns, and deprived themselves of their own food to relieve her.—LAMARTINE, "History of the ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... beaming man observed zestfully. "Of the Interstellar Medical Service, to which all problems of public health may be referred! But here we have a real problem for you! A contagious madness! A transmissible delusion! An epidemic of insanity! A plague of ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... To her, loss of memory smacked of insanity of which she was terribly in awe—like all her race. However, under Stonor's stern eye she kept her face ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... and emulation of French splendor. In Potsdam the grandeur, was not a historical growth as at Versailles, but was the effect of family genius, in which there was often the curious fascination of insanity. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the story of his life, we can discern striking features of resemblance between him and the wayward, sorrowful Rousseau. Hercules, according to the old fable, "was afflicted with madness as a punishment for his being so near the gods;" and the imaginativeness of a brain which had in it a fibre of insanity, near which genius often perilously lies, may be supposed to account for much that is strange and sad in his career. The place of his birth was a fit cradle for a poet. On the edge of a bold cliff, overlooking the sea at Sorrento, is the Hotel Tasso, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... that the battle was lost. Dropping the child from her arms, she rushed straight at us, a very picture of horrible insanity. I lifted my gun, but could not bear to shoot. After all she was but a mad thing, half ape, half woman. So I sprang to one side, and she landed full on Indaba-zimbi, knocking him down. But she did not stay to do any more. Wailing ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... surrounded. Notwithstanding this unfortunate disposition, the First Consul felt very kindly to him. When the Emperor went to camp at Boulogne, Hambard refused to accompany him; and the Emperor gave him, as a place of retreat, the charge of the palace of Meudon. There he showed unmistakable symptoms of insanity, and his end was lamentable. During the Hundred Days, after a conversation with the Emperor, he threw himself against a carving-knife with such violence that the blade came out two inches behind his back. As it was believed ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... strange half-frantic disguises of chivalry this was assuredly the most uncouth which she had ever seen; and, considering how often the knights of the period pushed their dreamy fancies to the borders of insanity, it seemed at best no very safe adventure to meet? one accoutred in the emblems of the King of Terrors himself, alone, and in the midst of a wild forest. Be the knight's character and purposes what they might, she resolved, however, to accost him in the language and manner observed ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... bewildered, they put forth earlier and earlier in the spring, until they got back to January; the leaves at last fell so early that the worms died before spinning cocoons, and the whole enterprise was in a few years abandoned because of this vegetable insanity. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... useless for him to make any effort either in the one direction or in the other. The doctrine of man's natural depravity and the divine foreordination of all things, it is held, must drive man either to despair, insanity, and suicide, or land him hopelessly in fatalism: he will simply continue his physical life in a mechanical way, like a brute or a plant; he ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... dreariness would at length master the healthiest in whom the true life has not begun to shine. But so satisfying is the mere earthly existence to some at present, that this remark must sound to them bare insanity. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Tasso! Else, O Cornelia, it had indeed been much. I thought, in the simplicity of my heart, that God was as great as an emperor, and could bestow and had bestowed on me as much as the German had conferred or could confer on his vassal. No part of my insanity was ever held in such ridicule as this. And yet the idea cleaves to me strangely, and is liable ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... complete; too barbarous," answered the kindly hearted Frenchman. "What harm have all the poor men done to you? And what insanity to provoke enemies of the people all around who would bring us things to eat! And worse—if the houses are consumed with fire, where will be the revenue that is designed for me, as the fair son of the Admiral? No, no; I will ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... died on the 7th of December, 1807, having spent twelve years in a state of constant melancholy and often raving insanity. Poor woman! she was from the first a victim to her husband's aspirations, which she never understood. There is something piteous in the cobbler's daughter marrying the apprentice to keep on the business, and finding him a genius and a hero on her ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... prudent to dwell upon topics which are injurious to a person's vanity, and a word dropped upon so tender a part produces as much effect as the strongest argument. He seemed not a little struck by it, and when I said that I thought there was a taint of insanity in the Chancellor, he said that he thought a great change in him was manifest in the course of the last year, and admitted that he did not think him of sound mind certainly. This he rather implied than expressed, however. He talked of his conduct in Parliament, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... of sheer insanity, Daphne, of mental excitement that passes reason." Mr. Withers spoke in a carefully controlled but quivering voice—as a man who has been struck an unexpected and staggering blow, but considering ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... uncertainty and obscurity. Does the same man always agree with himself in the notions he forms of his God? No. His idea varies with the changes, which he experiences;—another sign of uncertainty. Men always agree in demonstrative truths. In any situation, except that of insanity, every one knows that two and two make four, that the sun shines, that the whole is greater than its part; that benevolence is necessary to merit the affection of men; that injustice and cruelty are incompatible with goodness. Are ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... all came the appalling admission that an officer suffering from insanity had taken out three prisoners and caused them to be shot without trial on his own responsibility, none of these men having any complicity with the rebellion. This incident would have inflamed public opinion in any community; in ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... is still alive, and has been removed by his friends into Yorkshire. It appears, insanity is in his family, his father being at this time in an asylum. It is evident that he had the pistols in his pockets, but of this no one knew until after the occurrence took place. I do not know what ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... vigorous and of long life. He also took notice of the lunar influence in epilepsy [375] of which fearful malady a modern physician writes, "This disease has been known from the earliest antiquity, and is remarkable as being that malady which, even beyond insanity, was made the foundation of the doctrine of possession by evil spirits, alike in the Jewish, Grecian, and Roman philosophy." [376] The terrible disorder was a fact; and evil spirits or the moon had to ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... known arts. An attempt to fix the boundary between the regions of ability and inability, would much oftener give scope to personal and party attachments and enmities than advance the interests of justice or the public good. The result, except in the case of insanity, must for the most part be arbitrary; and insanity, without any formal or express provision, may be safely pronounced to ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... hideous deformity. His head was of uncommon size, covered with a fell of shaggy hair, partly grizzled with age; his eyebrows, shaggy and prominent, overhung a pair of small dark, piercing eyes, set far back in their sockets, that rolled with a portentous wildness, indicative of a partial insanity. The rest of his features were of the coarse, rough-hewn stamp, with which a painter would equip a giant in romance; to which was added the wild, irregular, and peculiar expression, so often seen in the countenances of those whose persons are deformed. His body, thick and square, like that of a ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... on high medical authority, that motoring is a cure for insanity. We would therefore recommend several motorists ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... of this misfortune, the insanity of vengeance and grief into which I was hurried, my fruitless searches for the author of this guilt, my midnight wanderings and reveries beneath the shade of that fatal elm, were revived and reacted. I heard the discharge of the pistol, I witnessed ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... your brother out of the way, so that I can leave her," he called to the girl. He tried with a frantic gesture to frighten them into getting out of the mother's reach. He continued to shout for aid as he held down the woman, who with the strength of insanity was struggling to ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... illustrious descent, allied to the noblest families, witty, well-informed, and beautiful; there is a power of social domination. To enter into any struggle whatever with a woman in whom so much influence centers is—I tell you this in confidence—an act of insanity. Let there be neither servility, nor sullen pride, nor susceptibility, nor too much compliance; nothing but good natural affection. This is the line of conduct prescribed by good sense ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... tremens at Katleean. Silvertip, when in liquor, was fond of detailing the last, violent days of the old bookkeeper. . . . Sometimes, Harlan fancied, he too was beginning to see those fearful shadowy images that dance on the borderland of insanity. How else could he account for that spectre of the tundra which he saw, sometimes, as he went home in the dusk—that dark, almost imperceptible figure far off toward the south cliffs where the lone tree of Kon Klayu stood on the brow of the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... Chancellor knows our great corporations, and gives us the Almighty's views about them; they mean that "the forces with which God built the universe have been put into the hands of man." Likewise by divine authority we learn that "the sympathy given to Socialism is appalling. It is insanity." We learn that the income tax is "a doctrine suited to the dark ages, only no age ever has been dark enough." Somebody raises the issue of "tainted money", and the Chancellor disposes of this matter also. As a Deputy of Divinity, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... the day of her death, continued to receive her pension, which, in the year 1786, was augmented by a special grant to a shilling a day. In the latter part of her life she discovered symptoms of insanity, and was admitted a patient into Bethlehem-hospital, where she died, Feb. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... the roof of the wireless building, he kept a nightly and a daily watch with his eyes fixed upon the drawbridge. A week went by. Food was carried up to him, and he scarcely touched it. The rims of his eyes became scarlet from sleeplessness, and he muttered constantly, like a man on the verge of insanity, as his eyes wandered back and forth over the red filth, from the shadowy bridge to the shining white ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the Lake Shore Drive, with all her father's wealth, with no want money can gratify, she takes things. In her circumstances it is out of the question to call it stealing. It is a mania, a form of insanity. When she is doing it, she seems to be in the grasp of some other mind, to be another person, and her actions are involuntary, unconscious. Then she seems to come to herself, when her ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... guileless of men. Amongst his orthodox brethren he was reputed a "Methodist;" and not without reason; for some of his Low- Church views he pushed into practical extravagances that looked like fanaticism, or even like insanity. Lady Carbery wished naturally to testify her gratitude for his services by various splendid presents: but nothing would the good doctor accept, unless it assumed a shape that might be available for the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a lawyer, and, as I said before, even he declined to believe my story, and suggested the insanity dodge. Of course I wouldn't agree to that. I tried to get him to subpoena Ferdinand and Isabella and Euripides and Hawley Hicks in my behalf, and all he'd do was to sit there and shake his head at me. Then I suggested going up to the Metropolitan Opera-house some fearful night ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... lesson for all ages and for all classes of society—a lesson continually enforced by Scripture, and illustrated by history. It deals with the insanity of pride and the senselessness of egotism. It reminds us, by repeated examples, of the temptations to self-inflation, and of the perils which assail its indulgence. "Ye shall be as gods," was the smiling, sarcastic ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... married. His successor, Wenzel, whose ghastly dissipations can only be regarded as the terrible proofs of insanity, was the child of his third wife. His fourth wife, the beautiful daughter of the Duke of Pomerania and Stettin, had four children, of whom Sigismund, the eldest, afterwards succeeded Wenzel as emperor, and Anne, the third, came to England ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... certain number of hours' sleep a day—I cannot recall for the moment how many—made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I've given you the main idea of the thing; and a German doctor says that early rising causes insanity. Still, if you're bent on it——" After which he ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... who, when all debate had subsided—who, when the bill was given up, had risen to make an inflammatory speech against my country, I should be obliged to any friend who would excuse my conduct by attributing it to insanity. Were I the man who could commit a murder on the reputation of my country, I should thank the friend who would excuse my conduct by attributing it to insanity. Were I a man possessed of so much arrogance as to set up my own little ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... written story of still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had pronounced a masterpiece of style. Markheim was a graphic, but very unpleasant, story of a murder; Olalla, a horrible, but powerfully written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of Italian scenery to relieve the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... hospital strapped fast to the stretcher, because his sobbing wrenched and tore his body so that the bearers could not control him otherwise. Something inexpressibly hideous—so it was said—had half robbed the poor devil of his reason, and the Frau Major suddenly dreaded a fit of insanity. She pinched the cavalryman's arm and exclaimed with a ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... the requisite sum of "demerits," after having repeatedly and in vain sought permission to withdraw from the control of a system of discipline so unsuited to his temperament; that, so far from being intemperate, a single glass of wine sufficed to bring on something like insanity; that, instead of neglecting his family, he devoted himself to them with a very rare exclusiveness, and wore down his health by watching at the bedside of his sick wife; that he was as faithful to his business as to his domestic obligations; and that, wholly disqualified ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... "Tasso" and "Iphigenia" who delivers Orestes from unrest and insanity, are modelled on Charlotte. Tasso is unmistakably a fantastic woman-worshipper, a fact of ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... was. You know she had been in such an unusual state of exhilaration all that summer; and as soon as she left New Hampshire and began the old city-life, she became oppressed with a speechless melancholy, I believe, so that the doctors foreboded insanity. She expressed great disinclination to follow their advice, and her husband finally banished them all. It was a great care to him; he altered much. McLean surmised that she didn't like to see him, while she was in this state; for, though he used to surround her with every luxury, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... restore what they had appropriated from the treasury, to bring a plot against the Count Fortunatianus, who was especially obnoxious as being represented to be the principal demander of this restitution. He, being a man of naturally harsh temper, was thereupon inflamed almost to insanity, and exercising the authority of the office which he filled, he delivered up to trial before the tribunal of the prefect a person of the lowest birth, named Palladius, for being a poisoner in the train of Anatolius and ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... which the telegraphic column of the newspapers has been daily crowded, since the vagaries of South Carolina finally settled down into unmistakable insanity, would give us but a poor opinion of the general intelligence of the country, did we not know that they were due to the necessities of "Our Own Correspondent." At one time, it is Fort Sumter that is to be bombarded with floating batteries mounted on rafts behind a rampart of cotton-bales; at ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... "catholicity of faith," or, it may be, "a divine hope." The less fortunate brethren bewail the laws of Nature, and doubt a future readjustment, because of stomachs chronically out of order. An eminent author with a weak digestion wrote to me recently animadverting on what he calls Browning's insanity of optimism: it required no personal acquaintanceship to discern the dyspeptic well-spring of this utterance. All this may be admitted lightly without carrying the physiological argument to extremes. A man may have a liberal hope for ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... are going well notwithstanding the President's illness. No one is satisfied that we know the truth, and every dinner table is filled with speculation. Some say paralysis, and some say insanity. Grayson tells me it is nervous breakdown, whatever that means. He is however getting better, and meantime the ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... not go away. At a glance she had seen that this was sickness and delirium, not insanity. She sent Teddy off in hot haste for Mrs. Spencer and when Mrs. Spencer came they induced the Old Lady to go to bed, and sent for the doctor. By night everybody in Spencervale knew that Old Lady Lloyd ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a distinguished priest, well known in London, also suddenly waved an umbrella and behaved as if he were angry. But he showed hardly any sign of insanity, and on applying to the proper court for release from supervision, was declared ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris
... of the most powerful, if not the most powerful story that Tchekoff has written. It is an analysis of moral degeneration, leading progressively to insanity, in a doctor who is seized by the pervasive banality of the village in which he practises. Tchekoff, like many other Russian writers, has shown himself a master in the study of certain psychological anomalies. Certain conversations between the doctor, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... his disorder, entered, and forcing him from Miss Aubrey, desired her to leave him. He fell upon his knees to them, he implored, he begged of them to delay but for one day. They, attributing this to the insanity they imagined had taken possession of his mind, endeavoured to ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... imperative necessity. Had Say been permitted to fall a prey to her momentary excitement, everything would have been lost for Shotaye. Had Say's mind given way permanently, the cause of that calamity would have been attributed to her, and she would have been charged with her friend's insanity in addition to the charge ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... others," she begged. "If you knew how weary one gets of this place—a man, too, like my uncle! How can he be content? The monotony here is enough to drive even a dull person like myself mad. To choose such a life, actually to choose it, is insanity!" ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of Colonel Armstrong's own daughters? To their father it is a period of dread suspense—an agony indescribable. Much longer continued it would drive him mad. Perhaps he is saved from insanity by anger—by thoughts of vengeance, and the hope of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Alfred as a barely sane person," said his Lordship, "since he turned his back on his prospects to become a horse dealer. If we decline altogether to sanction this new act—I won't say, of insanity, I will say, of absurdity—on his part, it is impossible to predict to what discreditable extremities he may not proceed. We must temporise with Alfred. In the meantime I shall endeavor to obtain ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... day, and his convalescence seemed to be advancing rapidly. But he was then, unfortunately, allowed to come frequently in contact with a furious maniac, by meeting him in the gardens. The musician's mind was unhinged; his Violin was destroyed; and he fell back into a state of insanity which was considered as confirmed ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... his insanity, and he did not follow the girl out on the veranda, but when Mr. Ross came down a few minutes later to get a cigar Clement plucked the proprietor of the hotel by ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... book: the Restoration of Property, while perhaps a better name still was The Outline of Sanity. This Chesterton had chosen for a series of articles that became a book. He was asking for a return to the sanity of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and starvation. "We are destroying food because we do not need it. We are starving men because we do ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... violent in her attachments. In Mirra, the character of Ciniro is perfect as a father and king, and Cecri is a model of a wife and mother. In the representation of that species of mental alienation where the judgment has perished but traces of character still remain, he is peculiarly happy. The insanity of Saul is skilfully managed; and the horrid joy of Orestes in killing Aegisthus rises finely and naturally to madness in finding that, at the same time, he had inadvertently ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... you have come to the right house," said she. "For Fanny Jordan is a little, slight woman without strength, and her insanity is from religion." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... anchor on a lee shore in a gale of wind would be an act of madness that I could never excuse to the underwriters, under any circumstances, so long as a rag can be set; but to anchor close to breakers would be insanity." ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... residence upon Johnson's mind was characteristic. The lad already suffered from the attacks of melancholy, which sometimes drove him to the borders of insanity. At Oxford, Law's Serious Call gave him the strong religious impressions which remained through life. But he does not seem to have been regarded as a gloomy or a religious youth by his contemporaries. When told in ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Mexico. A week later he sent Dick Rover a telegram stating that he had found his father and was taking him home. It may be added here that, cleared of the suspicion that had hung over his name, Mr. Bird speedily recovered from his insanity, and became the prosperous planter he had been in ...
— The Rover Boys in Southern Waters - or The Deserted Steam Yacht • Arthur M. Winfield
... days, he felt this desire growing stronger within him, asking himself whether, every time one was cracking, so as to be on the point of falling, he could pass beneath it without being touched. It was a piece of stupidity he confessed; but everyone has these moments of insanity, and ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... Germany with the provinces on the left bank of the Rhine. Louis II (856-875) ascended the throne as Roman Emperor, but died without any male issue, while Charles the Fat, who succeeded him, was removed from the throne by order of the Church on account of his insanity. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... scarcely trust his senses. A swift suspicion of his mother's insanity crossed his mind; but when he looked around the room and beheld Alfred Barton gazing upon her with a face more livid than that of the dead man, this suspicion was followed by another, no less overwhelming. ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... in practice were just what I could not—and if I could, dared not, give? that all that I could do was to leave them as seed, to grow by itself in many forms, in many minds, instead of embodying them in some action which would have been both as narrow as my own idiosyncrasy, gain the reproach of insanity, and be simply answered by—'If such things have been done, where are they?' and lastly, how do you know that I had not a special meaning in choosing a civilized fine lady as my missionary, one of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... that these are more to be feared than the white men, for they are terribly cruel, and when they get a victim he is tortured with all the horrible rites of the true savage. They know that the moment they are caught that is the end for them, so that they are reckless to the verge of insanity. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... government, and as the Old Whigs had been growing unpopular, it seemed quite possible, with the aid of the Tories, to accomplish this. George was quite decorous in behaviour, and, although subject to fits of insanity which became more troublesome in his later years, he had a fairly good head for business. Industrious as a beaver and obstinate as a mule, he was an adept in political trickery. In the corrupt use of patronage he showed ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... that day, and he now felt worse than before. The pain in his head had given place to a strange sense of dilation, and there was a silent, confused riot in his fevered brain, which seemed to him like the incipience of insanity. Striving to divert his mind from what had passed, by reflection on other themes, he could not hold his thoughts; they came teeming but dim, and slipped and fell away; and only the one circumstance of his recent cruelty, mixed with remembrance of George Feval, recurred ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color to her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate. She remembered Gow the pirate, who had been a native of these islands, in which he ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... unfrequently the objects of his frantic fury. In a word, he exhibits, to the life, all the detestable passions that rankle in the bosom of a savage; and such is the spell in which his senses are locked, that no sooner has the unhappy patient recovered from the paroxysm of insanity occasioned by the bite, than he seeks out the destroyer for the sole purpose ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... morning. At the coroner's inquest which ensued, Spencer Cowper gave his evidence with extreme caution, withholding every fact that could be injurious to Sarah's reputation; and the jury returned a verdict that the deceased gentlewoman had killed herself whilst in a state of insanity. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... all other best helps will be given thee. There is no clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness, that poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems like an invention of well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity; and indeed it has proved a door of escape out of worse imaginations. It is apparently an old 'doctrine;' for St. John seems to point at it where he says, 'Little children, let no man lead you astray; he that doeth righteousness ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... moments, then a strange sound took place in his throat. She started, came to herself, and, horrified, saw him. His head made a queer motion, the chin jerked back against the throat, the curious, crowing, hiccupping sound came again, his face twisted like insanity, and he was crying, crying blind and twisted as if something were broken which kept him ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... a common mortal. He has some paltry appointment, or is mad after some ridiculous idea of his own, and everything must be sacrificed to it! That's what Austin calls concentration of the faculties. I think it's more likely to lead to downright insanity than to greatness of any kind. And so I shall tell Austin. It's time he should be spoken ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... one sees the entire satisfaction there is here with so ugly and revolting a state of things, and the inability people have to conceive the inconvenience of it... I am driven to speculate.... Is insanity excessively rare here, so that outrages, if they do occur, are naturally very few? or is the insanity... always of the imbecile kind? Or is insanity, at its worst, mollified by the respectful treatment which it meets, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... an outside estimate, the Doctor's opinion is that there may have been half a dozen, who, with Malvina's assistance, succeeded in hypnotising themselves into temporary insanity. When Malvina, a little disappointed, but yielding quite sweetly her own judgment to that of the wise and learned Christopher, consented to "restore" them, the explanation was that, having spent their burst of ill-acquired ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... pitch, when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremely difficult to fix. Up to this hour we have never fully satisfied ourselves whether it is a tone and hum of real Humor, which we reckon among the very highest qualities of genius, or some echo of mere Insanity and Inanity, which doubtless ranks ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... I was frequently called to see him, and prescribe for his enemy, the gout, by which he was sorely afflicted. Mrs. Allen also required treatment. Her nervous system was disordered; and, on closer observation, I detected signs of a vagrant imagination, leading her away into states verging upon insanity. She was fretful and ill-tempered; and rarely spoke to the Captain except complainingly, or in anger. The visits I made to the Allen house, during the lifetime of Captain Allen, were among the most unsatisfactory of all my professional calls. I think, from signs which met my eyes, that something ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... original, epistle of this famous lunatic to the matron of Bedlam; No other proof is necessary of her insanity:— ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... self-justifications, nearly as many,—so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man,—a problem in human character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence, was the copying of music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish work, to earn its ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... development of human energies, but it contains also an infectious virus of tremendous power. Beside the splendor of its artistic, scientific and industrial achievements, it accumulates gangrenous products, idleness, poverty, misery, insanity, crime and physical suicide and moral ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Dinah with awful determination, wrought up to a pitch of fury by her resistance that almost bordered upon insanity. ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... have suffered no positive rule of evidence to counteract those principles. They have even suffered subscribing witnesses to a will which recites the soundness of mind in the testator to be examined to prove his insanity, and then the court received evidence to overturn that testimony and to destroy the credit of those witnesses. They were five in number, who attested to a will and codicil. They were admitted to annul the will they had themselves attested. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... system. It will sometimes show itself by severe pains in the arm, when in reality there is nothing whatever to cause pain; or it will raise a swelling on the head quite without cause. It is a tendency to nervous disease which in severe cases may lead to insanity. The word neurotic is a general term covering affection of the nervous system. It includes hysteria ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... anything in the world. Good Heavens, Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm miserable. I hate her for half an hour; then I'd give my whole life to be with her for ten minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or why I feel it; it's insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable. Can you make any sense of it? Can you see what's happened? I'm raving, I know; don't listen, Mary; go on ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... remains but his memory and his tomb. She is then driven to dishonesty to supply the cravings of her child—is tried and acquitted. During her imprisonment, the child dies; distress brings on her temporary insanity; but she at length flies to a secluded part of the country, and there seeks a solace for her miseries in making ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... years, to amass wealth for the purpose of introducing his daughter to society in England, and elevating her to a high station in that land. She married contrary to his wishes, and in his fiend-like disappointment, wrought up to insanity, he actually murdered the victim of his rage, his own child. Why will parents thus attempt to coerce the chainless affections? Why should so many females consent to marry the objects of their aversion, nay, sometimes, of their disgust, for the ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... conviction, apparently, grew the John Brown raid into Virginia in 1858. John Brown was an enthusiast, whom sufferings from the Border Ruffians in Kansas, where one of his sons had been atrociously murdered and another driven to insanity by cruel treatment as a prisoner, had frenzied in his opposition to slavery. He had dedicated himself to its extirpation. The intrepid old man formed the purpose of invading Virginia, and of placing himself with a few white allies at the head ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... strangled by a rope tightly drawn around her neck. If they would then speak, the strangulation would cease. In the mean time two females of adult age, and two male youths, were seized in the same manner. Unless confined, they would elope, and appear to all intents the victims of insanity. One of the young women eloped, fled to a lake which was covered with ice, was pursued by some of the ox teamsters, and carried back to the infirmary. Two men could with difficulty hold a woman or a child when thus influenced. To prevent mischief and elopement, we were ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... unmarried, at Windsor, in 1810. A few days before her death she gave her poor blind, old father, a ring containing a scrap of her hair ; saying only, as she pressed it into his hand, "Remember me!" The poor king's anguish brought on a fresh attack of insanity, from which ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... only got knocked over and his nose scratched for his pains. There was a curious instance, once, of a Fingo going mad in consequence of being bitten by a leopard. The madness took the form of his feigning to be a leopard, and there was no doubt as to his insanity, for he continually growled and scratched and snapped with his teeth, and finished off by jumping through a glass door.—Now then, the ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... that he noticed there was murder in the woman's eye when he saw her. A person who had met the woman on the stairs felt a creeping sensation. Some thought Brierly was an accomplice, and that he had set the woman on to kill his rival. Some said the woman showed the calmness and indifference of insanity. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... or Shaffer's Farm, the present terminus of the Oil Creek Railway, Miselle was relieved from much anxiety by seeing upon the platform Friend Williams, to whom she had, in a fit of temporary insanity, written that she should leave home on Tuesday instead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... Wood's room, when the latter was alone, and begged him to bring about a reconciliation. They WERE reconciled, as much as ever they could be. The woman looked at him, thought what she might be but for him, and scorned and loathed him with a feeling that almost amounted to insanity. What nights she lay awake, weeping, and cursing herself and him! His humility and beseeching looks only made him more despicable ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from his business at Glasgow to meet his friend Flambeau, the amateur detective, who was at Glengyle Castle with another more formal officer investigating the life and death of the late Earl of Glengyle. That mysterious person was the last representative of a race whose valour, insanity, and violent cunning had made them terrible even among the sinister nobility of their nation in the sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine ambition, in chamber within chamber of that palace ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... about? Mother has lost her wits. Please do not be angry, your Excellency. She has a touch of insanity. Her mother was ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... be continually occupied with the extreme of active, living suffering! let there be no cessation till the end! He could accept it and exult in it; but to live on as he was living now was to walk open-eyed into insanity. Rather than that, he would commit some capital crime, and subject himself to the penalty. Let God take at least so much pity upon him, and ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... to me! The pendulum was swinging, you see, up as high as Madness. Explain to me, if you can, how it happens that a being perfectly rational in ordinary life should at certain seasons, and, so to speak, voluntarily, be bereft of reason. To excuse and explain my temporary insanity, I am ready to admit that the excitement to which I gave way may have been a symptom of the nervous malady which laid hold of me a few days later, and stretched me for weeks upon a bed ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... This was so like insanity, that it perplexed me more and more; but, on second thoughts, it appeared to offer some clue to his pursuit.—He had gone to die in presence of the royal family. If they were to be found by him at all, they must be found in the Assembly. I immediately went to the garden ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... sufficient explanation can be offered. There was throughout the colonies an inborn and a carefully cultivated dread of standing armies and military power. But this very natural feeling was turned most unreasonably against our own army, and carried in that direction to the verge of insanity. This jealousy of military power indeed pursued Washington from the beginning to the end of the Revolution. It cropped out as soon as he was appointed, and came up in one form or another whenever he was obliged ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... eye of faith, as we all have to do. The familiar, undeniable good of the present has to be waived in favour of what 'common sense' calls a misty possibility in the future. To part with solid acres and get nothing but hopes of an inheritance in the skies looks like insanity, and is the only true wisdom. 'Get thee out' is plain; 'the land that I will shew thee' looks like the doubtful outlines seen from afar at sea, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an improvement of the species ought to follow such a change. In certain specific respects we know, indeed, that the improvement has taken place. Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... angry that such a repulsive and offensive thing as his marriage to Maria Port should be mentioned, or even thought of, but he was enraged when he heard that his niece had believed him capable of such disgusting insanity. With a jerk he rose ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... Agnes—"his end's dreadfully near. He has been a sort of providence to us—he was Sir Nicholas's second self. But he won't put up with such insanity, such wickedness, and that ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... by the younger generation! What madness is it in them that makes them sigh for the monsters we had vanquished, submit to the yoke that we had broken, call back with great shouts the reign of Force, and kindle Hatred and the insanity of war in the heart ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... started to her eyes. She kept murmuring the words abstractedly to herself, and for a few moments seemed quite unconscious of the General's presence. He still watched her, on his part, and gradually the thought arose within him that the easiest solution for all this was possible insanity. Insanity, he saw, would account for every thing, and would also give some reason for his own strange feelings at the sight of her. It was, he thought, because he had seen this dread sign of insanity in her face—that sign only less terrible than that dread mark which is made by the hand ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Not only was he one of the best-read amateur Egyptologists in Europe, but he was also an ex-President of the Royal Society, a Member of the Psychical Research Society, and, moreover, Chairman of a recently appointed Commission on Comparative Insanity, the object of whose labours was to determine, if possible, what proportion of people outside asylums were mad or sane according to a standard which, somehow, no one had thought of inventing ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... "Nobody but a maniac could have gone up and down that mountain as he did! He hasn't any muscles, and one need only look at him to know that he couldn't do any climbing in a natural way. It is only the excitement of insanity that ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... cenobite, with no companion but a poor lunatic whom I had met on a small island, and who had attached himself to me. He followed me everywhere, and loved me with that absurd and touching constancy of which dogs and madmen alone are capable. My friend, whose insanity was of a mild and harmless character, fancied himself the greatest genius in the world. He was, moreover, under the impression that he suffered from a gigantic, monstrous tooth. Of the two idiosyncrasies, the latter alone made his lunacy discernible, too many ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... further," he said. "Have you never heard of—of insanity in connection with all this? We will call it insanity, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... sternly tapping the note with his forefinger. "I see the cunning of insanity, the suspicion of insanity, the feline treachery of insanity in every line of this deplorable document. There is a far more alarming reason, sir, than I had supposed for Mrs. Lecount's behavior to my ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... E'en o'er the grave, l. 87. Many theatric preachers among the Methodists successfully inculcate the fear of death and of Hell, and live luxuriously on the folly of their hearers: those who suffer under this insanity, are generally most innocent and harmless people, who are then liable to accuse themselves of the greatest imaginary crimes; and have so much intellectual cowardice, that they dare not reason about ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... leaving school my sex life continued for some years on the same lines: a struggle for chastity, morbid fears and regrets about the past, efforts to cope with the neurasthenia, and a haunting dread of coming insanity. These troubles were increased by my sedentary life. However I obtained medical aid, and put as good a face on ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... children, watching one another die, not prettily but with all the torture that the laboratories of the world could dream and put together. A family that watched each other go insane, knowing what was happening. A family that watched each other die, writhing and unknowing in insanity. ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... friend, Lucy will drive with you, and talk to you, and sing your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,—you must bring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the Irish Parliament on the Regency question, when the insanity of George III. required the appointment of his heir as governor of England. The Marquis of Buckingham, who was then Lord Lieutenant, refused to forward their address; but the members sent a deputation of their own. This nobleman was open and shameless in his acts of bribery, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... person's experience, except through the discovery of discrepancies with the experiences of others. Dreams might conceivably belong to this class, if they were jointed sufficiently neatly into waking life; but the chief instances are recurrent sensory hallucinations of the kind that lead to insanity. What makes the patient, in such cases, become what others call insane is the fact that, within his own experience, there is nothing to show that the hallucinatory sense-data do not have the usual ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... so that he should return to his senses and undertake to aid you in this stress." To this the lady made reply: "Take care now! For surely, if he does not escape, with God's help I think we can clear his head of all the madness and insanity. But we must be on our way at once! For I recall a certain ointment with which Morgan the Wise presented me, saying there was no delirium of the head which it would not cure." Thereupon, they go off at once toward the town, which was hard by, for it was not any ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... parties, the essence of every rational contract, the Roman marriage required the previous approbation of the parents. A father might be forced by some recent laws to supply the wants of a mature daughter; but even his insanity was not gradually allowed to supersede the necessity of his consent. The causes of the dissolution of matrimony have varied among the Romans; [123] but the most solemn sacrament, the confarreation itself, might always be done away by rites of a contrary tendency. In the first ages, the father ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... carried devastation wherever he went. He was the greatest fighter in the whole county. I had to get my whip and my fastest horse to try and catch him. I can hardly be blamed if I did not catch him till the evening. For in that way I got a wild kind of holiday on horseback and was saved from insanity. Certainly, when El Toro got away on the loose and was looking for other bulls to have a row with I could think of nothing else. Sometimes he got free by the rope rotting close up to his ring. In that case he went headlong. If he took the rope with him he sometimes trod on it and gave ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... condition in which the will yields without resistance to some dominant appetite, desire, or affection, under whose imperious reign reason is silenced, considerations of expediency and of right suppressed, and exterior counteracting motives neutralized. It resembles insanity in the degree in which the actions induced by it are the results of unreasoning impulse, and in the unreal and distorted views which it presents of persons, objects, and events. It differs from insanity, mainly in its being a self-induced ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... namely, the weakness of women. The slave who dances, unconscious of degradation on the auction-block, is at once the greatest stimulus and the bitterest discouragement of the antislavery reformer: so women, contented in ignominious dependence, restless even to insanity from the need of healthy employment and the perversion of their instincts, and confessedly looking to marriage for salvation, are at once a stimulus to exertion, and an obstacle in our way. But no kind, wise heart will heed this obstacle. Having spoken ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... is 3-1/5 diameters. This volume is of 981 good folio pages, and treats of all things, mental and material. The author is not at all mad, only wrong on {136} many points. It is the weakness of the orthodox follower of any received system to impute insanity to the solitary dissentient: which is voted (in due time) a very wrong opinion about Copernicus, Columbus, or Galileo, but quite right about Robert Greene. If misconceptions, acted on by too much self-opinion, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the readers of NOTES AND QUERIES, who suffer from depression of spirits, confusion, headache, blushing, groundless fears, unfitness for business or society, blood to the head, failure of memory, delusions, suicidal thoughts, fear of insanity, &c., will call on, or correspond with, REV. DR. WILLIS MOSELEY, who, out of above 22,000 applicants, knows not fifty uncured who have followed his advice, he will instruct them how to get well, without a fee, and will render the same service to the friends of the insane.—At ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... their country involved in the European slaughter merely for the sake of gratifying Wilson's vainglorious ambition, there is hope that the common sense of the American people will assert itself and that they will not permit the appalling insanity to spread to the new world that holds the old world ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... was seized with a temporary attack of that species of insanity which originates in a sense of injury, or animated by this display of Mr. Weller's valour, is uncertain; but certain it is, that he no sooner saw Mr. Grummer fall, than he made a terrific onslaught on a small boy who stood next to him; whereupon ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... will only say that if you do not like your life, it is your own fault. How can a man of your age talk of being melancholy, or of the hollowness of existence? Are you consumptive? Are you subject to hereditary insanity? Are you deaf, like Aunt Bluebell? Are you poor, like—lots of people? Have you been crossed in love? Have you lost the world for a woman, or any particular woman for the sake of the world? Are you feeble-minded, a cripple, an outcast? Are you—repulsively ugly?" She laughed again. "Is ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the gamekeeper and a couple of villagers to the spot. The boy had watched the recapture of the lifeless body in solemn silence, a red flush of color in either cheek. He had been rather fond of Aunt Jane after her insanity became confirmed, and he was the only human being whom the poor woman had seemed to recognize, and in whose company she felt some dull gleams of pleasure. He now shed no tears, seeming more angry than grieved, ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... insanity in his preference of a windowless bedroom;—it was that airs and odours, birds and sunlight—the sound of flapping wing, of breaking wave, and quivering throat, might be free to enter. Cool clean air he must breathe, or die; with that, the partial confinement ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... foregoing incident—I mean the unhappy storekeeper's notion of establishing his claim to an English estate—was common to a great many other applications, personal or by letter, with which I was favored by my countrymen. The cause of this peculiar insanity lies deep in the Anglo-American heart. After all these bloody wars and vindictive animosities, we have still an unspeakable yearning towards England. When our forefathers left the old home, they pulled ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whether the unfortunate one who has found his life too hard for endurance, and has rushed away to see whether he could not find an improved condition of things elsewhere, has or has not been mad at the moment. Surviving friends are of course anxious for a verdict of insanity, as in that case no further punishment is exacted. The body can be buried like any other body, and it can always be said afterwards that the poor man was mad. Perhaps it would be well that all suicides should be said to have ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... cortege was re-formed; to enter in state the yashiki of Honda Sama. It was said that he got but a cold bride—one on whom only "the bed quilt lay light." Time, the ascertained fact of Hideyori's death, worked a change in the insanity simulated by the princess. Then she was so taken with her lord that she proved fatal to him. He died at the age of thirty-one years, was buried in his castle town of Himeji, leaving but one daughter as issue by the princess. The lady returned to residence at the Takebashi Goten, to be ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... have mastered himself, perhaps, had she not responded, had he not seen the laughless eyes laugh alone for him, had she not once when a momentary insanity possessed them both confessed in words her love for him as he had done to her. But now? Well, now only this horrible tale of theft and untruth hung between them like a veil; now even with his arms locked about her, his ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... note, as I was then leaving London for Paris, and had not yet had time fully to consider the subject. On reviewing my note I can recall that then the whole history appeared to me like one of those singular cases where unnatural impulses to vice are the result of a taint of constitutional insanity. This has always seemed to me the only way of accounting for instances of utterly motiveless and abnormal wickedness and cruelty. These, my first impressions, were expressed in the hasty note ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... themselves, her advice be worth a following. Endow the San Reve with a personal interest, the more if that interest were one mixed of love and jealousy, and her reason, if that be its name, would go blind and deaf and lapse into the merest frenzy of insanity. She would hasten to believe the worst and disbelieve the best. Under spell of jealousy, the San Reve would accept nothing that told in her own favor; and just now, despite an outward serenity—for, though sullen, she ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... mountains would have maddened them and made them push on until the horses would have died within five miles of the labor; otherwise the pain in their slowly swelling throats would have taken their reason. For thirst in the desert carries the pangs of several deaths—death from fire, suffocation, and insanity. ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... termed the Family of Love, but more commonly Ranters, had made some progress in times when such variety of religious opinions were prevalent, that men pushed the jarring heresies to the verge of absolute and most impious insanity. Secrecy had been enjoined on these frantic believers in a most blasphemous doctrine, by the fear of consequences, should they come to be generally announced; and it was the care of Master Tomkins to conceal the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... see it," replied Gerald. "No one will ever see it. It wouldn't be my way to make a display of the insanity, supposing, that is, that ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... that through the cloudiness of his insanity he saw some antagonism in me, for he at once fell back on the last refuge of such as he, a dogged silence. After a short time I saw that for the present it was useless to speak to him. He was sulky, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... attack of insanity, since you ask." La Signorina's face sobered. She stepped over to the wall, rested upon it, and searched the deepening eastern horizon. Yes, her father had been insane, and all her present wretchedness was due to this insanity of a rational mind. For a moment she forgot those about her, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... or demons, to whose malignant agency they ascribed various diseases, both functional and organic, and in particular those unhappy cases of obsession, fixed idea, and multiple personality, which we should now class under the general head of insanity, and treat in asylums for the mentally deranged. The New Testament writings are full of this point of view, which is of course largely foreign to our minds to-day. The ordinary Englishman is not a great believer in devils or spirits ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... of both sexes, however amiable and pure their minds may be, should conscientiously abstain from marriage. This applies to all who have a tendency to consumption, scrofula, insanity, or any other of those diseases which are so frequently transmitted to offspring. This very important matter is not sufficiently known, and therefore is not attended to as it ought to be; hence the great amount of sickness and early death ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... the air; a red cloud of insanity was hovering over Nepenthe. Although the volcano continued to behave in exemplary fashion, although the clergy had done their utmost to allay popular apprehensions, the native mind had not calmed down since the news concerning the Saint Elias fountain and those other portents had been disseminated. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Lord Halifax's, in Great George-street, burst out into such violence on some observation made by De Vergy, that it became necessary to call in the guard. His whole behaviour in this affair looks like insanity.-C. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of our own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... forget. Memory is earth's retribution for man's sins. I have bought at a terrible price my conviction of the melancholy truth, that he who touches the weapons of Nemesis effectually slaughters his own peace of mind, and challenges her maledictions, from which there is no escape. In my insanity I said, 'Vengeance is mine! I will repay!' and in the hour when I daringly grasped the prerogative of God, His curse smote me! Mr. Hammond, friend of my happy youth, guide of my innocent boyhood! if you could know all the depths of my abasement, you would pity me indeed! My miserable heart ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... formed no part of the pirate's plan. The guilty man had reached that state of depravity which, especially among the natives of that region, borders close on insanity. While the inhabitants of the village were hunting far a-field for him, Baderoon lay concealed among some lumber in rear of a hut awaiting his opportunity. It was ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... who said that A.'s spirit would not be clear for some time yet. This A. had suffered from violent headaches and nervous exhaustion for some years before his death, though the troubles had not amounted to insanity. Now, just at the time when A. was incapable of manifesting clearly, other spirits were manifesting with all desirable lucidity in identical circumstances. Another case quoted by Dr Hodgson is that of a Mr B. who had committed ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... reach of the law now—it was Claperon, the jailor, who loved Claudine, and had himself killed Alphonse de Bellefonds from jealousy. An unfortunate wretch had been several years in the jail for a murder committed during the frenzy of a fit of insanity. Long confinement had reduced him to idiocy. To save my life Claperon substituted the senseless being for me, on the scaffold, and he was executed in my stead. He has quitted the country, and I have been a vagabond on the face of the earth ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... words, and looking askew, as he walked back and forth, at the stranger who went slowly through the room over to the window in the corner. "What can human fancy find reasonable or possible after all that has happened? Nothing! Merely pine away; pine away in insanity." ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... proper aim of personality, therefore, is not permanence and stability, but unification. The inability of a personality to adjust to or integrate a new situation, the resistance of the personality to unification, and its efforts to preserve its integrity are known popularly as insanity. ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... cracked to a certain extent," said Sewell, "as every wrong-doer is. You know the Swedenborgians believe that insanity is the last ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... stairs alone. Out of the clangor and confusion, the yells and oaths, there came a memory of Billie. My God! I had forgotten! and she was there, crouching in the blackness, not five feet away. The thought gave me the reckless strength of insanity. My feet were upon a rubbish heap of plaster, where a shell had shaken the ceiling to the floor. It gave me vantage, a height from which to strike. Never again will I fight as I did then. Twice they came, and I beat them back, the iron club sweeping a death circle. ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... to act. Think how the dog, fond and faithful creature as he is, from being the most docile and obedient of all animals, is made the most dangerous, if he becomes mad; so men acquire a frightful and not less monstrous power when they are in a state of moral insanity, and break loose from their social and religious obligations. Remember too how rapidly the plague of diseased opinions is communicated, and that if it once gain head, it is as difficult to be stopped as a conflagration ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... brought out at Naples in 1844. This work also was a failure. It was evident that his capacity for work was over. He grew sad and melancholy, and during the last three years of his life was attacked by fits of abstraction which gradually intensified and ended in insanity and physical paralysis. He died at ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... every day in painful ways, still we have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, and for want of a fuller realization of these most grievous mistakes, we are in danger of plunging more and more deeply into the snarls to which they bring us. From nervous prostration to melancholia, or other forms of insanity, is ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... reverently keeping the Church clean and watching over it in every way. He also continued in the post of schoolmaster, which at first he had only taken temporarily, giving up part of his business to his nephew. But he still sat up at night baking, and he also had other troubles: there was insanity in his family, and ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... considered, not in any way an unusual or abnormal thing; to brood over the rupture, to blame himself, to feel that he had been dishonorable, was to be expected, after such an act, from one of his temperament. Nothing, however, but temporary insanity or constitutional cowardice could explain such conduct as here described. Mr. Herndon does not pretend to found his story on any personal knowledge of the affair. He was in Springfield at the time, a clerk in Speed's store, but ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... indignant at such high-handed proceedings. Arnold remained behind to transact some unfinished business, but was arrested and thrown into prison, where he remained several weeks. Seeing no prospect of being released, he feigned insanity, and acted the madman to the life; insomuch that the authorities were glad to discharge him on condition that his friends would send him ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... In insanity, does the kind Lord remove all from this world in order to fit up the new life more gloriously? and are those whom most we pity clasped the closest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... course it could not go on. Death or insanity would surely follow. He was warned of it, and for a while he went into a home. Then he got better, and he determined to go abroad ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason |
