"Lunacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feather in one's cap, is worth nothing to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since they ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... insisting that all books admitted should be models of style; even a purist must admit that one of the greatest charms of literature is its infinite variety. But when book after book is filled with such specimens of literary lunacy as this, one is tempted to believe that Homer and Shakespeare, to say nothing of Thackeray and Hawthorne, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... a toy, an absurd and pitiful toy. Real genius and lunacy had many an over-lapping line, Jerry reflected as he approached to look inside. But he found Winslow in a room surrounded by a network of curving, latticed struts. The machine was no makeshift of a demented builder: it was a beautiful ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... wrote to the Lunacy Commissioners (without explaining the source of his information) and in due time heard that the man had been visited by the Commissioners, and that he was certainly insane. Sometime afterwards the patient was ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the burgomaster, was forced to make police regulations concerning the domestic animals, as, seized with lunacy, they rendered the streets of ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... more hours and days and weeks, even months have to elapse before he can make up his mind what to do. Our haste, and what we consider smartness in business, are looked upon by the Persian as quite an acute form of lunacy,—and really, when one is thrown much in contact with such delightful placidity, almost torpor, and looks back upon one's hard race for a living and one's struggle and competition in every department, one almost begins to fancy that we ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... carry it away an action was brought which resulted in the affirmation of the mother's right to its custody. The circumstance in which a fourth sister who joined the community was abducted by her brothers led to an inquiry in lunacy and to her final settlement at Spaxton. A few years after the establishment of the "Abode of Love,'' a peculiarly gross scandal, in which Prince and one of his female followers were involved, led to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to you to-morrow. He was afraid to give it to me. Savva dear, don't look at me like that. I know it's unpleasant for you, but you have a lot of common sense. You can't help seeing that what you wanted to do was an absurdity, a piece of lunacy, a vagary that can come to one only in one's dreams at night. Don't I understand that life is hard? Am I not suffering from it myself? I understand even your comrades, the anarchists. It's not right to kill anybody; ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... up his hands. He had never heard of such lunacy and it angered him, as such purposes are wont to anger worldly-hearted men. That a lady of Luxemburg should have such vulgar tastes as to wish to be a Beguine was bad enough; but that Netherlandish wealth should be devoted to support the factious poor ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shadowy people living in the dim past and inaccessible to our cross-examination, but are our own contemporaries, men of character and intellect whom all must respect. The situation may, as it seems to me, be summed up in a simple alternative. The one supposition is that there has been an outbreak of lunacy extending over two generations of mankind, and two great continents—a lunacy which assails men or women who are otherwise eminently sane. The alternative supposition is that in recent years there ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... madmen, that ye have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence?" Thus it was that David was rescued. Thereupon he composed the Psalm beginning with the words, "I will bless the Lord at all times," which includes even the time of lunacy. (46) ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... nothing; and simply because she positively would not quarrel. And the jealousy fell through, because there was no decent subject for such a passion, unless it had settled upon an old music-master whom lunacy itself could not adopt as a rival. The quarrel meantime, which never prospered with the daughter, silently kindled on my part towards the father. His offence was this. At dinner, I naturally placed myself by the side of M., and it gave me great pleasure to touch ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... sending her to him then, in that moment of his utter anguish, of the utter annihilation of the fantastic faith whereby he had lived for years? From the first he had been right, though with a magnificent lunacy. It was she, in very truth, who had been destined to slay his dragon. It was dead now, a vulgar, slimy monster, incapable of hurt, slain by the lightning flash of love, when his eyes met hers, a moment or two ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... think, clearly, how inseparable are the problems of the districts, the tribal area, and of Afghanistan; and any attempt to place the districts under a separate control could only mean friction, inefficiency, and disaster. The proposal is, indeed, little short of administrative lunacy. There is, however, an underlying method in the madness that has formulated it, namely, the self-interest of a clever minority, which I need not now dissect. I trust that if this proposal should go further it will ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... Religieuse chez les Grecs: 6 tomes: Groningue—1840), alleges a case (which, however, we do not remember to have met) where the client ventured to object:—"Mon roi Apollon, je crois que tu es fou." But cases are obvious which look this way, though not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord of prophetic vision. Battus, who was destined to be the eldest father of Cyrene, so memorable as the first ground of Greek intercourse with the African shore of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic Oracle in reference to his eyes, which happened ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... detached scenes of the 'Broken Heart.'" This referred to Charles Lamb, who likened the "transcendent scene [of the Spartan boy and Calantha] in imagination to Calvary and the Cross." Now Gifford had never heard of the personal history of Lamb, nor of the occasional fits of lunacy to which his sister Mary was subject; and when the paragraph was brought to his notice by Southey, through Murray, it caused him unspeakable distress. He at once wrote to Southey [Footnote: When the subject of a memoir of Charles Lamb by Serjeant Talfourd was under consideration, Southey wrote ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Rugg. Let me introduce him.' With those words he presented another man without a hat, and also with a cigar, and also surrounded with a halo of ale and tobacco smoke, which man, though not so excited as himself, was in a state which would have been akin to lunacy but for its fading into sober method when compared with the rampancy of Mr Pancks. 'Mr Clennam, Mr Rugg,' said Pancks. 'Stop a moment. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... snatched up a pitch-fork, drove it at me, and, I luckily avoiding it, struck the prongs into the barn-door; with the exclamation, 'Damn your soul! I'll make you feel me!' The moment after he was seized with a sense of his own lunacy, turned as pale as death, and stood aghast with horror! My supposed crime was that I had eaten some milk, the last of which I myself had seen the dog lap. Perceiving the terror of his mind, I took courage and told him, 'Jowler eat the milk: I saw him, just as he had done. I would not tell you, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Marquise d' The Commission in Lunacy A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Letters of Two Brides Another Study of Woman The Gondreville Mystery The Secrets of a Princess A ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... that only some fifty years before the times of Columbus Christian Europe had no lunatic asylum,—not that there was a lack of lunatics or that the existence of lunacy was entirely ignored, but that the then state of medicine and the general intelligence was not emancipated from the idea of demoniacs,—and we are told that the lunatics were in many instances hung, quartered and burned, hooted and ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... equality, alike for men and women, excited widespread disgust and astonishment, as though it were a proposition to repeal the laws of nature, and literally to "turn the world upside down"; and it was ridiculed and caricatured as little short of lunacy. Now, it is a subject of increasing interest and grave consideration, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and what at first appeared to be so foolish in pretension is admitted by all reflecting and candid minds ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... tea. Presently he took from the cupboard a baker's roll and some cold meat, and when the tea was ready, invited Harry to be seated at the table. Our hero did so willingly. He had lost his apprehensions, perceiving that his companion's lunacy was of a ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... elect his successor, was a practice quite unknown to the constitution, and had a tendency to render kingly power entirely dependent and precarious: that where the sovereign, from his tender years, from lunacy, or from other natural infirmity, was incapacitated to hold the reins of government, both the laws and former practice agreed in appointing a regent, who, during the interval, was invested with the whole power of the administration: that the inveterate ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... sheet of foolscap with a bare—he called it a detached—statement of the facts about Irish lunacy. He had just begun to recount his own experience when there was a knock at the door. The housekeeper, a legacy from Dr. Farelly, came in to tell him that Constable Malone wished to speak to him. Dr. Lovaway left his ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... elegance, of taste, of refinement, of wit, of intelligence. Weakly marked eyebrows indicate a feeble constitution and a tendency to melancholia, Deep sunken eyes are selfish, while eyes in which the whole iris shows indicate erraticism, if not lunacy. Round eyes are indicative of innocence; strongly protuberant eyes of weakness of both mind and body. Eyes small and close together typify cunning, while those far apart and open indicate frankness. The normal distance between the ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... pantry, &c. If rather less, then rather cheaper; and as to making the slightest difference in style on account of our late pursuits, as whether, for instance, we were a retired candlestick-maker, or a Lord Chancellor, or a physician, the very idea would savour of lunacy. Not so Jacques Coeur. This man wished, in dying, to leave a beautiful shell behind him, so that the passers-by might say: 'Here lived a great merchant; he had a wife, sons, and a daughter, and numerous domestics. He liked his money, but loved art more. He kept a negro; he was pious, ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... thinking of itself, because such work, not being of a religious character, partook of the nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... cross of suffering to the throne of Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and within ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... justice, telling him that the abbess had refused to deliver up her lunatic husband to her care. While she was speaking, her real husband and his servant Dromio, who had got loose, came before the duke to demand justice, complaining that his wife had confined him on a false charge of lunacy; and telling in what manner he had broken his bands, and eluded the vigilance of his keepers. Adriana was strangely surprised to see her husband, when she thought he ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was, indeed, already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and bred to the bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the active thirty years of his life in the discharge of that function which seems often sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of lunacy. He sent my father a small volume containing the Songs, and some fragments; they fully deserved their reputation. The fragments were mostly scraps of dramatic dialogue, of which one at least ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... enough for you to try to prevent your ruining your life by a single piece of lunacy," he told her as he sought to steady her with the directness of his gaze. "You don't have to go on with Holbury if you choose to leave him, but this is the one place of all others for you to avoid." He cast ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... had not been taken, the weeks passed by and Lucia was as far from me as ever. And it could not continue. The perpetual excitation and reaction was slowly injuring and confusing the brain like a noxious drug administered to procure lunacy. And the temptation swept over me now to let go my hold on work, on this bitter effort to succeed, on this vain, useless striving for recognition, and sink into some humble position which would supply the necessities for a quiet obscure existence—shared with this woman. The weeks, months, years, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... But this will neither recall him to life, nor will it obliterate the days and months of mental agony that harassed the soul of this intuitional, far-seeing, modest genius, made even after his death to receive the donkey's kick of misrepresentation and to be publicly charged with lunacy. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed, and at last their own errands being ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... their swellings, which was, indeed, intolerable, running out of their own government, raving and distracted, oftentimes laid violent hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out at their windows, shooting themselves, &c.; mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy; some dying of mere grief, as a passion; some of mere fright and surprise, without any infection at all; others frighted into idiotism and foolish distractions, some into despair and lunacy, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... enchanter as well as a beautifier, and the old fancy of partial madness when the moon was at the full (from which the word "lunacy") was not altogether unwarranted by reality. At sea, in the tropics, a night on deck under the broad full moon stiffens and entirely maddens, if it does not kill; here the madness is only partial and it has a general reference to mischief ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the transfer of all real or share properties to trustees. Vigorous confiscation is a particularly logical punishment for the proven corruption of public officers by any property owner or group of property owners. Rich men who bribe are a danger to any state. Beyond the limits of lunacy it might be possible to define a condition of malignancy or ruthlessness that would justify confiscation, attempts to form corners in the necessities of life, for example, could be taken as evidence of such a condition. All such measures as this would be far more beneficial ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... to say that is a mild stage of lunacy, with which I have as yet never been threatened. Idolatry is a phase of human weakness I have ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... desires power for the sake of power alone than to any transcendental type. Thus it included the power to render the magician invisible, to change his bodily shape, to produce an enchanted sleep, to induce lunacy, and ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... RAMSDEN. [beside himself] Stuff! lunacy! There is a rascal in our midst, a libertine, a villain worse than a murderer; and we are not to learn who he is! In our ignorance we are to shake him by the hand; to introduce him into our homes; to trust ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... who is afflicted over much with himself because he has been crazed by others and made mad by his escape from them. I suppose I am mad, for to believe myself perfectly sane in a greatly mad world is surely a subtle species of lunacy. And yet I am compelled to act towards others as if they were more sane than I. To feel as if one were eternally in a court-room trial, with lean lunatics for lawyers and fat philistines for ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Marty became dazed and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... doctor in London so universally sought by the sane lunatics of society as Dr. Levillier. He was no mad-doctor. He had no private asylum. He had never definitely aimed at becoming a famous specialist in lunacy. But the pretty lunatics came to him, nevertheless; the lunatics who live at afternoon parties, till the grave yawns at their feet, and they must go down the strange ways of another world, teacup in hand, scandal still fluttering upon their ashy ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... was a monstrous one; the accused had ample means to indulge every wish, and nothing short of lunacy (of which she never showed the slightest sign) could have induced her to commit so petty a theft. Her high character and the absence of motive combined to render it incredible, and, had she been capable of such a deed, she would not have courted ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... such a very wild improbable circumstance were to occur, I should be heartily sorry for poor Adelais! Only imagine me with such a wife as she would make! Why I wouldn't have so transparent, white- skinned a beauty about my house all day for a mine of gold! I should be seized with lunacy before long, through mere contemplation of her very unearthliness, and be goaded into fancying her a picture, and hanging her up framed and glazed over my drawing-room mantelpiece! No, no, I'll leave Miss Cameron for you, you're just her style, I take it; but as for me, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... bought a dog—a queen! Ah Tiny, dear departing pug! She lives, but she is past sixteen And scarce can crawl across the rug. I loved her beautiful and kind; Delighted in her pert Bow-wow: But now she snaps if you don't mind; 'Twere lunacy to ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... murder they were not tried in September. Sir Christopher Turner would not proceed 'because the body of Harrison was not found.' There was no corpus delicti, no evidence that Harrison was really dead. Meanwhile John Perry, as if to demonstrate his lunacy, declared that his mother and brother had tried to poison him in prison! At the Spring Assizes in 1661, Sir B. Hyde, less legal than Sir Christopher Turner, did try the Perrys on the charge of murder. How he could do this does not appear, for the account ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... somewhat peculiar. On October 13, 1843, he petitioned the Presbytery asking it to annul its judgment with regard to him, and submitted a medical certificate to the effect that at the time of his secession he was "in a state of lunacy." The Presbytery, having consulted the Synod, reponed him, on the ground that at the time he separated himself from the Church he had been in a state ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... rarer, are visitations yet wider in their desolation. Sickness and commercial ill-luck, if narrower, are more frequent scourges. And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the sickness of the brain—lunacy—which, visiting nearly one thousand in every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' But there ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... no doubt, still be met with who think it a serious matter to buy a book if it cost more than 3s. 9d. It was recently alleged in an affidavit made by a doctor in lunacy that for a well-to-do bachelor to go into the Strand, and in the course of the same morning spend L5 in the purchase of 'old books,' was a ground for belief in his insanity and for locking him up. These, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... has been much weakened by the War, and those who still repeat the old catch-words are very near to lunacy. There is a deeper and more dangerous illusion which has not been killed—the class illusion. We are all very much alike; but we live in water-tight compartments called classes, and the inhabitants of each compartment tend to believe that ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... their owners. I engaged two wild young Arabs of eighteen and twenty years of age, named Bacheet and Wat Gamma: the latter being interpreted signifies "Son of the Moon." This in no way suggests lunacy, but the young Arab had happened to enter this world on the day of the new moon, which was considered to be a particularly fortunate and brilliant omen at his birth. Whether the climax of his good fortune had arrived ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... gloomy failure, to his contemporaries a popular pamphleteer, but to posterity he is the creator of public conscience in Ireland. He was the father of patriotic journalism, and the first to defend Ireland's rights through literature. Though his popularity was quenched in lunacy, his impress upon Irish politics remains as powerful and lasting as upon ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... whom we have any full knowledge is Otto Lilienthal of Berlin. He devoted his whole life to the study of aviation at a time when in Germany people looked upon such a pursuit as little better than lunacy. The principal professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gewerbe Academie, on hearing that Lilienthal was experimenting with aeronautics, advised him to spend no money on such things—a piece of advice which, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... she was the victim of mania; but she had been beaten into hopeless idiocy. Indeed this state of incurable imbecility seemed the end toward which all traveled. Shut in these bare rooms, with no treatment, no exercise, no variety, and meager food, cases of slight derangement soon grew into chronic lunacy. ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... on in such a surprising manner with your narrations, imprecations, admirations, and interrogations, that, upon my education, sir, I believe you are approaching to insanity, frenzy, lunacy, madness, ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... most portentous pauses (which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences. "Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!" one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth's was a pleasant lunacy. . . . ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... under a stone porch flung out from the front of the house. A wide porch, almost a verandah; to the delighted eyes of the Australians, who considered verandah-less houses a curious English custom, verging on lunacy. Near the house it was shut in with glass, and furnished with a few lounge chairs and ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... trait of Sir Sidney's constitutional temperament, and the little service through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and particularly in a man that might be said to live in the street, such was ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... handed down to me by my father, and I do not know any better practice." If in all this we are disposed to blame Bethlem, let us still more condemn the lamentable ignorance and miserable medical red-tapism which marked the practice of lunacy in ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... some of Mills' friends, on charges of lunacy, caused Mills to be sent to Bloomingdale Asylum, and Matthias to be thrust into the insane poor's ward at Bellevue, where his beard was forcibly cut off, to his extreme disgust. His brother, however, got him out by a habeas corpus, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... complex than the melodramatist's answer. It may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all the normal laws of cause and effect. It may be an answer made up largely, or even wholly, of the fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of lunacy. That is the chief, if not the only difference between melodrama and reality. The events of the two may be, and often are identical. It is only in their underlying network of causes that they ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... justified themselves. Never been to a school before, except that wretched little dame's school, and he goes practically straight to the top of the third form—at nine years of age!" They discussed his future. There could be no sign of lunacy in discussing his future up to a certain point, but each felt that to discuss the ultimate career of a child nine years old would not be the act of a sensible parent; only foolish parents would be so fond. Yet each was dying to discuss his ultimate career. Constance yielded ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... you by no drift of circumstance Get from him why he puts on this Confusion: Grating so harshly all his dayes of quiet With turbulent and dangerous Lunacy ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... celebrated remark which he made on the characteristic distinction of Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, that Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation, (unum accessisse ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the governess of Flora de Barral, was, as you may have noticed, severely practical—terribly practical. No! Hers was not a rare temperament, except in its fierce resentment of repression; a feeling which like genius or lunacy is apt to drive people into sudden irrelevancy. Hers was feminine irrelevancy. A male genius, a male ruffian, or even a male lunatic, would not have behaved exactly as she did behave. There is a softness in masculine nature, even the most brutal, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... plants have been credited at most periods with hurtful and injurious properties. Thus, there is a popular idea that during the flowering of the bean more cases of lunacy occur than at any other season. [17] It is curious to find the apple—such a widespread curative—regarded as a bane, an illustration of which is given by Mr. Conway. [18] In Swabia it is said that an apple plucked from a graft on the whitethorn will, if eaten by a pregnant ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... him to perceive that this unhappy man's mind had been so long agitated by desperate schemes and sudden disappointments that it had lost its equipoise, and that there was now in his conduct a shade of lunacy, not the less striking, from the vigour and craft with which he pursued his wild designs. Morton soon joined his guide, who had been terrified by the fall of the oak. This he represented as accidental; and she assured ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... inevitable, and brought our batteries and battalions to their very doors. But now they were fugitives every one from the city of their pride, which they had surrendered without striking a solitary blow for its defence; while the actual building in which their lunacy took final shape, and launched itself on an astonished Christendom, I beheld full to overflowing with the deadly fruit of their doing. In the very presence of the president's chair of state, here a Boer, there ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... all last year, How honestly and well— Alas! would weary you to hear, And torture me to tell; I raved beneath the midnight sky, I sang beneath the limes— Orlando in my lunacy, And Petrarch in my rhymes. But all is over! When the sun Dries up the boundless main, When black is white, false-hearted one, I ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... private mad-houses were more rigid than the public hospital laws. For himself, he added, he had, some years since, made the acquaintance of Maillard, and would so far assist me as to ride up to the door and introduce me; although his feelings on the subject of lunacy would not permit ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a heavenly week of silliness, and by dint of concealing our real relations from the general public, I fancy we escaped harsh criticism. There is a very large percentage of lunacy anyway in Ireland, as well as great leniency of public opinion, and I fancy there is scarcely a country on the map in which one could be more foolish without being found out. Visit each other we did constantly, and ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Bodies, though not Flesh and Bone, or any other grosse body, to bee discerned by the eye. But when our Saviour speaketh to the Devill, and commandeth him to go out of a man, if by the Devill, be meant a Disease, as Phrenesy, or Lunacy, or a corporeal Spirit, is not the speech improper? can Diseases heare? or can there be a corporeall Spirit in a Body of Flesh and Bone, full already of vitall and animall Spirits? Are there not therefore Spirits, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... conviction of your lunacy would prevent my taking offence, though I might wish you ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... families were unable to support them at the State or private asylums were huddled together in the poorhouses of the various counties. Their condition was heartrending. They were constantly exposed to neglect, frequently to extremes of cold and hunger, and sometimes to brutality: thus mild lunacy often became raving madness. For some years before my election to the Senate the need of a reform had been urged upon the legislative committees by a physician —Dr. Willard of Albany. He had taken this evil condition of things much to heart, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... wires. "What lunacy are you talking? You might as well ask me whether I'm going to ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... nose in the air, her mouth wide open, her other features registering the most complete lunacy. Joseph, her brother, at whom they fairly shrieked in order to make him smile, produced the most singular contortion of the mouth that I have ever seen, which denoted an extreme gift for mimicry, rare in ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... will be first. Who can stop him?" On the eve of the battle of Copenhagen he wrote to her, "Before you receive this, all will be over with Denmark. Either your Nelson will be safe, and Sir Hyde Parker victor, or your own Nelson will be laid low." What deep and genuine love-lunacy to be found in a terrific warrior, whose very name terrified those who had the honour to fight against him! The incongruity of it baffles one's belief, and seems to reverse the very order of human construction. In matters concerning his profession and highly technical State affairs ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Diane in serious disapproval. "I did. I get seizures of confidential lunacy once in a while. Are you going ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... "Yes, I've noticed that when a man in an asylum begins to suspect his keepers of madness he's mighty near lunacy himself." ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... imagined I was listening to Dr Cumming; and I endeavoured to repeat a distich of Martin Tupper: but the force of conscience and the congo carried the day, and I addressed myself vigorously to the question. I thought of making them missionaries, lighthouse-keepers, lunacy commissioners, Garter Kings-at-Arms, and suchlike, when a brilliant thought flashed across my brain, and, with the instinct of a great success, I saw I had triumphed. "Yes," cried I aloud, "there is one grand career for women—a career which shall engage ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Doctor, but you will be responsible for many cases of lunacy among our people," said the mayor. "I never saw them so utterly carried away as they were with your company and the globe. All you have to do is to take to the stage and ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... has heard of the lunacy of the Marchioness de Strozzi," was the reply. "It is for that reason that she never goes out. The marquis perhaps thought she might be trusted to see the regatta; but he was mistaken. You must have remarked how closely he watched her ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... horrible confusion of mind in which the faces of his dead friend and the pale woman were strangely blended, nor of the fancy that he was followed. Once, as he passed the hospital where Feval died, a faint hint seemed to flash and vanish from the clouds of his lunacy, and almost identify the dogging goblin with the figure of his dream; but the conception instantly mixed with a disconnected remembrance that this was Christmas eve, and then slipped from him, and was lost. He did not pause there, but strode on. But just there, what had been frightful ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... to grumble. It seemed just as if Long Tom Lane was making game of an old man in trouble. 'Twas either that or lunacy. And there was no time for nonsense off the Gingerbread coast in a ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... this respect I resemble Gontcharov, whom I don't like, who is ten heads taller than I am in talent. I have not enough passion; add to that this sort of lunacy: for the last two years I have for no reason at all ceased to care about seeing my work in print, have become indifferent to reviews, to literary conversations, to gossip, to success and failure, to good pay—in short, I have gone downright silly. There ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... of scientific men, as Lelut and Lombroso, seem to think that a hallucination stamps a man as mad. Napoleon, Socrates, Pascal, Jeanne d'Arc, Luther were all lunatics. They had lucid intervals of considerable duration, and the belief in their lunacy is peculiar to a small ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... Deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I think have been to some extent averted had his appearance been different. London is a home of madmen and casually permits any lunacy so that public peace is not endangered; had poor Wilbraham looked a fanatic with pale face, long hair, ragged clothes, much would have been forgiven him, but for a stout, middle-aged gentleman, well dressed, well groomed.... What could ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... indications of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... something wrong about St. John's mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged—a fate which is partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives so plainly or so practically put before us, but when ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... thought of destroying that beautiful stuff can have entered the mind of man I cannot fathom. I think I have got him persuaded to leave well alone. It must be nothing short of stark lunacy." ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... chamber belonged to Sam Cleghorn or to Dick Webb, their presence and actions there were not surreptitious. Stanton Mayhew, who ignorantly owned the well, had given them plenary permission to pump and dig, mildly pitying their apparent lunacy. The palace above was his in virtue of his sensible preference for living twice as well on the Arno for half the cost on the Hudson. This rule of two, like so many foreign residents of Florence, he ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead in me. A moment later came habiliments of a gentleman, borne in the arms ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... an unhealthy hold upon his imagination, that he was half-way to insanity. If Gramarye is permitted again to take the helm.... Well, the ship is half-way across—half-way across those narrow straits which divide reason from lunacy. We've got to take the helm and put it over just as hard as ever we can. You understand? In a word, if, for instance, Major Lyveden were to revisit Gramarye, I think the game would be up. That, of course, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... stringency of the filial tie needs relaxation. Already it is recognised that in cases of cruelty the child may be divorced from the parent. But there is a hopeless incompatibility of temper and temperament which is not necessarily attended with cruelty. Drunkenness, lunacy, and criminality should also be regarded as valid grounds for divorce, the parent being no longer allowed to bear the name of the child ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... nothing of this—would have thought him tinged with mild lunacy if they had known. To them, he was just the shy, simple farmer he appeared. They never knew or guessed at ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Charles F. Folsom, of Boston, in a book entitled "Diseases of the Mind," said of her: "Her frequent visits to our institutions of the insane now, and her searching criticisms, constitute of themselves a better lunacy commission than would be likely to be appointed in ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... power of insistence remained to me. But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia to flaming lunacy. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... my fellow men is severed. I sit up here, and write, and read Renan's ORIGINES, which is certainly devilish interesting; I read his Nero yesterday, it is very good, O, very good! But he is quite a Michelet; the general views, and such a piece of character painting, excellent; but his method sheer lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the names of the horses, that had brightened our journey. In spite of Juliet, whose disdain of the virtue or the charm that lies in a name is no more worthy of respect than is any lover's opinion when in the full-orbed foolishness of his lunacy, I believe names to be a very effective adjunct to life's scenic setting. Most of the horses we had had along these Normandy high-roads, had answered to names that had helped to italicize the features ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... have entangled them in some new embarrassment, would have required a new purging of their vocabulary. 'To charm,' 'to bewitch,' 'to fascinate,' 'to enchant,' would have been no longer lawful words for those who had outlived the belief in magic, and in the power of the evil eye; nor 'lunacy,' nor 'lunatic,' for such as did not count the moon to have anything to do with mental unsoundness; nor 'panic' fear, for those who believed that the great god Pan was indeed dead; nor 'auguries,' nor 'auspices,' for those to whom divination was nothing; ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... every one who has mastered the peculiarities of the Otto speaks of it would be considered as evidence in its favor, if we were not all considered by other cyclists to be in various stages of lunacy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... some chance escaped from the guardians which the good Earl of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia's train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked up in the corn-fields. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... them stare till they stare their eyes out. But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes. You remember the gentleman in The Spectator, who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap. Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys run ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Timor. I often found this deafness a very serious drawback, especially when hunting. I was sometimes at a loss to hear the "coo-ee" or call of my natives. Fortunate men! they did not even understand what deafness meant. Lunacy also was unknown among them, and such a thing as suicide no native can possibly grasp or understand. In all my wanderings I only met one idiot or demented person. He had been struck by a falling tree, and ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... its laugh over these romances. When unable to refute their theories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to the satisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a general charge of lunacy. Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as those of the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for five years possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret of making to the different nations an equal ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... he had been unable to prepare a suitable address, Mr. Oldfield had kindly consented to read some precious records recently discovered by him. A little rustling breath went over the audience. So this amiable lunacy had its bearing on the economy of life! They were amazed, as may befall us at any judgment day, when grays are strangely alchemized ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... A Bachelor's Establishment Colonel Chabert A Start in Life A Woman of Thirty The Commission in Lunacy The Government Clerks A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life A Man of Business ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... desperado's egotistical ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature. When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns to the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Forest took to her bed early in the day on the verge of a nervous collapse, or that Colonel Van Ashton, contrary to his habit, retired early in the evening firmly convinced that his nephew was suffering from an acute attack of lunacy which took the form of a mania for everything that was wild and bizarre; everything in fact that was contrary to ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... the colonial authorities to legislate away any rights enjoyed by the subjects of the British Empire. He dwelt strongly upon the insanity question, and said the jury were convinced of the prisoner's lunacy, hence their recommendation ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... imprisonment, whose laugh had in it a harsh hollow-sounding jangle, and whose brows had fixed themselves into the puckers of a sullen, hopeless, apathetic submission to fate. Their lack of intelligence was a blessing. Had they been more sensitive they would have been goaded into raging lunacy. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... the most criminal act of this generation. Germany has nothing but friendship for England. I ask you, what British interests are threatened by this inevitable clash between the Slav and the Teuton? It is miserable enough for France to be dragged in. It would be lunacy for England. Therefore, though it is true that serious matters are pending, though, alas! I must return at once to see what help I can afford my country, never for a moment believe, any of you, that there exists the slightest chance of ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... myself to get personally interested in this case; or to imagine that I'm personally interested. Folly. The girl is nothing to me. I'll never see her again. I care about her as I would about anybody in trouble. And—that's all. This lunacy of restlessness over the situation has got—to—stop." He was firm with himself. He sat down at his table and wrote a business note before he touched the letter again; but he saw the letter out of ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... as a vicious institution, that was but another phase of the partial lunacy which affected him: for to no man were purity and fidelity more essential elements in the idea of real love. Again, De Quincey speaks of Shelley's "fearlessness, his gracious nature, his truth, his purity from all flesh-liness of appetite, his freedom ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... this clear issue was to be blurred in the blinding glare of the King's lunacy. The causes of the malady of February 1801 were partly physical, partly mental. While still agitated by the dismissal of his trusted Minister, the King, two days later, went to church on the day appointed for the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... made laughing stocks for the whole business world to jeer at?" he asked as he paced the office furiously, "or to be bankrupted through methods that border strongly on insanity? For it is nothing else, Mr. Denton, but raving lunacy! No man in his sober senses would entertain such a plan for the space of a second! Why, your orders about those sweat-shops were simply ridiculous! Are we to pay more for our goods than they are really worth, and then make a charity ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... on a further search. "First" has no other intelligible sense or meaning than this. "First" in relation to a given cluster of phenomenon we may grant; "First" in the sense of calling for no further explanation is downright theological lunacy. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... in Paris no one has been completely free from lunacy while the spring-time is happening. There is something in the sun and the banks of the Seine. The Parisians drink sweet and fruity champagne because the good wines are already in their veins. These Parisians are born intoxicated and remain so; it is not fair play to require ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... nonsense; it was as real as anything could be.—What? It must be fancy, or you would have run to his side and spoken? It would have been fancy if you had. Madness! Folly! Bedlam-ish lunacy. Why, you would have spoiled everything. Poor old Hal—poor old Hal! ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... at her feet, pointed an uncannily long forefinger at them. "The crossings and sidewalks are slush—and you, a singer, without overshoes! Lunacy! Lunacy!" ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... she wants us to believe she knows what we're after. She's vindictive. She imagines she owes me a grudge on my brother's account. It might soothe her to think she had made me nervous. And by gad—it sounds like lunacy, and mind you I'm not propounding it for fact!—there's just one chance that she really does know where ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... was your doing," she observed; "it's a harmless piece of lunacy, but people would think you dreadfully silly ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... after they had become lost in the prairies, to wander about for days without exercising the least judgment, and finally exhibiting a state of mental aberration almost upon the verge of lunacy. Instead of reasoning upon their situation, they exhaust themselves running a-head at their utmost speed without any regard to direction. When a person is satisfied that he has lost his way, he should stop and reflect upon the course he has been traveling, the time that has elapsed ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... was to be her home, that all her fortitude forsook her. She sank upon the bed, as soon as she was left alone—she had been searched by the matron—and tried to think. But her brain was in a whirl. She recalled Braham's speech, she recalled the testimony regarding her lunacy. She wondered if she were not mad; she felt that she soon should be among these loathsome creatures. Better almost to have died, than to slowly go mad in ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... time what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... whole breed! There,—I see his marines and small—arm men handling their firelocks, as thick as sparrows under the lee of a hedge in a snow—storm, and the people are training the bull—dogs fore and aft. Why, this is downright, stark staring lunacy, Obed; we shall be smashed like an eggshell, and all hands of us whipped off to Davy, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... conductor of the band without the juggler being jealous, the Variety Profession was coming to a pretty pass. She also remarked that for a girl to entrust her life's happiness to a jealous man would be an act of lunacy. And then "Little Flouflou, the Juggling Genius," who was dying to marry her, would suffer tortures. He tried hard to conquer his failing, but it must be owned that Clairette's glances were very expressive, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... They were a little pale, but quite collected. "Excellency," they said, "forgive him; it is not his fault. He has been frightened into semi-insanity." "Hsia hu-tu-lo," they said. Yes, that is the phrase, frightened into semi-lunacy. They are employing this for everyone. The tragedy has been so immense, the strain has been endured for so many months, there has been so much of it, that all minds excepting those of the common people have become a little unhinged. Half the time you speak to men you are not understood; ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... own private purse; that he had, indeed at the solicitation of a nobleman deceased, made him a present of three hundred pounds, in consideration of some loss that he pretended to have sustained in an election; but, since that time, had perceived in him such indisputable marks of lunacy, both by his distracted letters and personal behaviour, as obliged him to give order that he should not be admitted into the house. To corroborate this assertion, the minister actually called in the evidence of his own porter, and one of the gentlemen of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... present work is a study in conjugal tedium. Parthenope (name of ill-omen) was one of those unhappy and devastating beings who go through life fated to bore their nearest and dearest to the verge of lunacy. So that her marriage to poor well-meaning Willy Steele had not endured for more than a matter of weeks before the wretched man fled from his newly-made nest, with the heart-cry (uttered to Parthenope's female relatives, themselves too sympathetic to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... mists of the unknown future, like some black cliff from the clouds that wreath around it. Is it not strange that the surest thing is the thing that we forget most of all? It sometimes seems to me as if the sky rained down opiates upon people, as if all mankind were in a conspiracy of lunacy, because they, with one accord, ignore the most prominent and forget the only certain fact about their future; and in all their calculations do not' so number their days' as to 'apply' their 'hearts unto wisdom.' 'Go thou thy way ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the firing now became incessant. The veteran in Yates was aroused. He was like an old war horse who again feels the intoxicating smell of battle smoke. The lunacy of gunpower shone ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... abdicated in favour of his son Shoko (101st sovereign), then twelve years old. This sovereign abandoned himself to the profligacy of the era. It is doubtful whether his reason was not unhinged. Some accounts say that he fell into a state of lunacy; others, that he practised magic arts. At all events he died childless in 1428, and was succeeded by a grandson of the Emperor Suko, Go-Hanazono, then in his tenth year. Thus, the claims of the Southern dynasty ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... be said of some others. Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness that contrasts touchingly with the self-restraint of a particular admirer. Her 'impassioned Caledonian' was one of a host, to speak of whom and their fits of lunacy even to her friend Emma, was repulsive. She bore with them, foiled them, passed them, and recovered her equanimity; but the contrast called to her to dwell on it, the self-restraint whispered of a depth of passion . . ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... door to freedom. And, after all, if we have to choose our masters, it is less disgrace to put up with Roman emperors than with German priestesses.' Thus the common people: the chieftains used more violent language. 'It was Civilis' lunacy that had driven them to war. He wanted to remedy his private troubles[555] by ruining his country. The Batavians had incurred the wrath of heaven by blockading Roman legions, murdering Roman officers, and plunging ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... capricious blood; and the great soul, with all its capacities, its solemn attributes, and sounding claims, is, while on earth, but a jest to this mountebank,—the body,—from the dream which toys with it for an hour, to the lunacy which shivers it into a driveller, laughing as it plays with its own fragments, and reeling benighted and blinded ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 1860 assumed proportions which twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams. Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy. $30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home Letters ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... Colonel Chabert A Bachelor's Establishment A Start in Life The Commission in Lunacy ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the poles of a large battery, as he proceeded: "Every day the medical detective plays a more and more important part in the detection of crime, and I might say that, except in the case of crime complicated by a lunacy plea, his work has earned the respect of the courts and of detectives, while in the case of insanity the discredit is the fault rather of the law itself. The ways in which the doctor can be of use in untangling the facts in many forms of crime have become so numerous that ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... asylums is the same for both sexes among married people (i.e., 8.5), but for the single it is larger among the men (4.8 to 4.5), as also it is among the widowed (17.9 to 13.9) (Fifty-sixth Annual Report of the Commissioners in Lunacy, England and Wales, 1902, p. 141). This would seem to indicate that when living apart from men the tendency to insanity is less in women, but is raised to the male level when the sexes live together ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the unfortunate wretch who hatches criminal thoughts behind the slanting brows of a criminal head? A doctor has but to glance at the cranium to predicate the crime. In its worst forms all crime, from Nero to Jack the Ripper, is the product of absolute lunacy, and those gross national sins to which allusion has been made seem to point to collective national insanity. Surely, then, there is hope that no very terrible inferno is needed to further punish those who have been so afflicted upon earth. Some of our dead have remarked that nothing ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with the trees of that name, and other resinous plants, curing ulcerated lungs, &c. Sardinia, melancholy and madness, replanted with true Anticyran hellebore, was famous; whilst Thusus (especially in Summer) brought almost all the inhabitants to lunacy and distraction for want of it. And what the effects and benefit of such plantations have produc'd, is conspicuous in one of the most celebrated cities of the East, the famous Ispahan, clear'd of the pestilence, since the surrounding it with that beautiful platan, as I have already noted. ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... wards in that part of the building collapsed. Twelve attendants were killed and Dr. Kelly, second assistant physician, was crushed to death. There were 1,100 patients in the hospital. C. L. Seardee, secretary of the state commission in lunacy, who was in Agnews and attending to official business, declared that it was a marvel that many more were not killed. Dr. T. W. Hatch, superintendent of the state hospitals for insane, was in charge ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... them—when he was bringing desolation on my hearth, and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feeling must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... now," the good old soul went on to say, "if Simon's wentured out without his hat to cool a head-ache: his grand-father—peace be with him! died, poor man, in a Lunacy 'Sylum: alack, Si, I wish you mayn't be going the same road. No, no, I hope not—he's always so prudent-like, and wise, and good; so kind, too, to a poor old fool like me:" and the poor old ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... worse; but as ill-used as ever—mewed up, kept in solitary confinement. They mean to make either an idiot or a maniac of him, and take out a commission of lunacy. Horsfall starves him; you ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... bless my soul!' Lord John's transparent skin flushed up to his white hair. 'Don't tell me any responsible person is going even to consider the lunacy of tampering with the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... he became the mere shadow of his former self, the wreck of what he was, and a picture of fallen and shattered genius. To drive away the hideous phantasmagorias that tortured him, as with the stings of demons, he had recourse to gin, and soon became a confirmed drunkard: the next stage was lunacy; and he was confined for fourteen months in Saint Luke's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, said he, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation (unum accessisse sobrium ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... remarked, judicially, "that savors of the rankest lunacy. And yet, why not? The lady certainly made the advances; it is an equivalent to an invitation to call. Pity she doesn't put ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac |
