"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Queen of Scots, in our National Portrait Gallery, is loaded with chains, brooches, and pendants, enough to stock the show-case of a modern manufacturer. This love of elaborate jewellery was a positive mania with many nobles in the olden time. James I. was childishly fond of such trinkets, and most portraits represent the king with hat-bands of jewels, or sprays of jewellery at their sides. His letters to his favourite, Buckingham, are often full of ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... During the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the land increased largely in value, and its acreage was considerably added to by the father of the present owner, a man of frugal mind, but with the family mania for the collection of all sorts of plate strongly developed. But it was Philip's father, "Devil Caresfoot," who had, during his fifty years' tenure of the property, raised the family to its present opulent condition, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... make them pioneers. It is note-worthy, however, that insanity is as frequent in the Pacific States as in New England, the explanation being that vice and indulgence prevail to an exceptional extent among the population drawn to the Pacific by the mania for gold. The average in Massachusetts, for instance, is 1 to 348; in California 1 to 345. It is also remarkable that the ratio of insanity decreases as we go west and south of New England, as these averages will show: New ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Lucretian treatment of love there is nothing really Greek. We do not hear of Eros, either as the mystic mania of Plato, or as the winged boy of Meleager. Love in Lucretius is something deeper, larger, and more elemental than the Greeks conceived; a fierce and overmastering force, a natural impulse which men share in common with the world ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fashion to read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends assembled to applaud them. The taste for eloquence ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... in. I saw, at once, that he was frightfully changed even from what you remember him. I should have said there was no danger at all to be feared from his attempts to trace you, if I had not perceived that it had become a kind of mania with him, and that his senses, which seem to be completely dulled on other subjects, are still alive on that. He asked me many questions; and although I told him plainly that I would answer none whatever ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... with much earnestness and no little pleasure his transformed brother-in-law. Hope for the future now filled his heart. If this crack-brained sugar-planter had really recovered from his mania for piracy and had a fancy for legitimate business, his new station might be better for him than any he had yet known. Sugar-planting was all well enough and suitable to any gentleman, provided Madam Bonnet were not taken ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... things—very proud of the fact that he owns a flute which once belonged to Charles Pease; a purse that was found on Frank Muller; a reputed riding-whip of Dick Turpin's and the like. How do you know that one or other of the various men who sat round the table you're talking of hasn't some such mania and appropriated the tobacco-box as a memento of the ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... time has come for me to tell you so. A wanderer like myself comes across many unexpected things in the course of his peregrinations. Shall I tell you how, while looking for some records of my family in an old New York church, secretly indulging the genealogical mania I am wont to deride, I lighted upon a record I did not think to find—the record of the marriage of one who is very ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... He ever longed for the day when he should be able to fulfil his promise to his poor stricken father, who, albeit somewhat relieved of his incubus, since the night when father and son watched together, was not yet quite free from his ghostly visitant; moderns would say "from his mania." ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... day of carnival, which is the most noisy festival of the year, when a fever of joy, a mania of amusement, unparalleled in any other country, seized the Roman people. Everybody is disguised; hardly does there remain at the windows, an unmasked spectator: the scene of gaiety commences at a given hour on a certain day, and scarcely ever does any ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... M'Fadden exults over the happy times his boys have at home. He shakes himself all over, like a polar bear just out of the water, and laughs heartily. He has delivered himself of something that makes everybody else laugh; the mania has caught upon his own subtle self. The negroes laugh in expressive cadences, and shrug their shoulders as Mr. M'Fadden continues to address them so sportively, so familiarly. Less initiated persons might have formed very satisfactory opinions of his character. He takes a peep ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... considered to be divinely ordained," said Aubrey, "And the wretched and ignorant populace flung themselves under it in the fit of hysterical mania to which they were excited by the priests of the god, and so perished in their thousands. Not THEY were to blame; but the men who invented the imposture and encouraged the slaughter. THEY had an ideal;—the priests had none! But Juggernaut had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... 1881 reads "epileptic," but that is a comment, not a translation. So again (Matt. xvii. 15) we read of a boy who was "lunatick"—seleniaxetai. On which Archbishop Trench remarks, "Of course the word originally, like mania (from mene) and lunaticus, arose from the widespread belief of the evil influence of the moon on the human frame." [373] Jerome attributes all this superstition to daemons, of which men were the dupes. "The ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... being it answered the purposes of money—was thrown upon the country, an overissue which was attended, as a necessary consequence, by an extravagant increase of the prices of all articles of property, the spread of a speculative mania all over the country, and has finally ended in a general indebtedness on the part of States and individuals, the prostration of public and private credit, a depreciation in the market value of real and personal estate, and has left large districts of country almost entirely without any circulating ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... "Persecutional mania is a dangerous hallucination," stated the sallow man. "Mr. Craig has accomplished certain definite results in the north country. We have used the word Consolidated in our corporation name with full knowledge ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... among the ancient Romans rose to a real mania. Apicius offered a prize to any one who could invent a new brine compounded of the liver of red mullets; and Lucullus had a canal cut through a mountain, in the neighbourhood of Naples, that fish might be the more easily transported to the gardens of his villa. Hortensius, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... do to him if he did not hold back, did not persist any longer in his mania for refusal? There was a new world spread out before him. He stood upon its border. He wanted to step into it. But something within him, something that seemed obscure, hesitated, was perhaps afraid. In his restless mood, in his strong excitement, he wanted to crush that thing down, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... inquiries as to Mr. Reade's private life, with which, whether they have the right or not, the public will concern itself. So at home is he on every subject that each appears to be his specialty. One asserts that he follows Galen: witness his mania on medicine. Certainly not, another replies; are not his principles erroneous, and second-hand at that? Does he not dredge the science with ridicule? No practitioner would gravely assert the feasibility of transfusion, an operation never yet performed with success, since ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the British Government on behalf of the mining industry of the Transvaal, were founded solely upon the statement of the Volksraad Commission itself. This mania of the Government for a monopoly by which the shareholders profit greatly and the State hardly at all, proves that there are other interests at stake than ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... now the property of the Stamford family,—having been won, it is said, in a raffle, by Sir—Stamford, during the stock-gambling mania of the South-Sea Scheme. The history of this gentleman may be found in an interesting series of questions (unfortunately not yet answered) contained in the 'Notes and Queries.' This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean, which here contains ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... state, I no longer know what I wish. If she came to-morrow, should I be glad or not? I cannot tell. I can no longer tell. Those who do not suffer from this absurd mania for action escape those painful moments when we are at the mercy of a distracted will that no longer knows exactly what it ought to want. In absence, our feelings pass through so many contradictory phases! When the hour of return comes, finding it impossible to collect ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... we may consider it pretty certain that our young tragedian will not regale us a second time with his little play. Where courage is required, it is good to have an opportunity of seeing to the bottom of one's sack; nothing is more likely to cure a boaster of the foolish mania ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... change whereby the beings of the old naive folklore are transformed into the devil or his agents is significant of that darker side of the new theology, which was destined to issue in those horrors of the witchcraft-mania that reached their height at the beginning ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... "I have come to the conclusion that I have gone quite mad. I beg you if I should show signs of homicidal mania, which I feel developing in me where Bastin is concerned, or of other abnormal violence, that you will take whatever steps you consider necessary, even to putting me out of the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... their existence. It engendered a sense of importance, gave life fulness and variety; and this far outweighed the trifling inconveniences such welldoing implied. Indeed, he throve on them. For, in his mild way, Dove had a touch of Caesarean mania—of a lust ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Festival of the Thesmophoriae, and of Lysistrata, is to throw ridicule on the relations and the manners of the female sex. In the Clouds he laughs at the metaphysics of the Sophists, in the Wasps at the mania of the Athenians for hearing and determining law-suits; the subject of the Frogs is the decline of the tragic art, and Plutus is an allegory on the unjust distribution of wealth. The Birds are, of all his pieces, the one of which the aim is the least apparent, and it is on that ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... a handful of small stones, and threw them up toward the apes. The stones did not go near them, but influenced by their instinctive mania for imitation, they instantly seized all the cocoanuts within their reach, and sent a perfect hail of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and as one was opposed to the other, Vargrave's exposition of views and motives had in them so much of the self-seeking of the professional placeman, that they might well have offended any man tinged by the lofty mania of political Quixotism. It was with a strange mixture of feelings that Maltravers listened: at one moment he proudly congratulated himself on having quitted a career where such opinions seemed so well to prosper: at another, his better and juster sentiments awoke the long-dormant combative ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it is an all-pervading mania, and as man is "a bundle of habits," the most moral persons in this country (always excepting one or two ladies who express their opinions strongly against it) see nothing in it to condemn, and are surprised at the effect it produces on a stranger; and, indeed, after a few years' residence here, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... is not to be praised on all occasions—it cannot be denied that The Times is the first journal in the world, a position which it has reached by its enterprise, vigor, and ability. It has frequently proved its disinterestedness, and during the great railway mania of 1845, while it was receiving no less a sum than L6,000 weekly for advertisements, constantly cautioned its readers against the prevailing madness, and persistently predicted the crash that was certain to follow. The Times, while it appears to lead, in reality waits ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... posted on the 23rd. He evidently did not anticipate an immediate decease. His communications usually took a week to reach me, for they were sent under cover to Spain and then to Newcastle. He had a mania, you know, for concealing ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... idealist, Clerambault rarely looked where he was going, but that did not prevent him from meddling in politics in a fumbling sort of way, as was the mania of men of letters in his day. He had his word to say, right or wrong, and was often entreated to speak by journalists in need of copy, and fell into their trap, taking himself seriously in his innocent way. On the whole he was a fair ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... tearing through crowded streets at forty miles an hour, I'd have her examined for homicidal mania. That Pierce girl will kill some one yet. Even then, I suppose we won't ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... de Millers, whose husband held an office in the Treasury, being very irregular in conduct, and of a scheming turn of mind, had a mania for appearing in the eyes of her friends at Paris as a person in favour at Court, to which she was not entitled by either birth or office. During the latter years of the life of Louis XV. she had made many dupes, and picked up considerable sums by passing herself ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... I was at the time of life when enterprise was necessary for my existence, and so keenly did I join in the slave-hunting mania that I found it dangerous to land in the town of Rio for ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... perfect mania pervading the country on the subject of railroads. Hardly a paper comes to hand but contains accounts of meetings held for the purpose of projecting one ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... entirely, in condemning the mania of giving names to objects of any kind after persons still living. Death alone can seal the title of any man to this honor, by putting it out of his power to forfeit it. There is one other mode of recording merit, which I have often thought might be introduced, so ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of the Hells (see vol. iv. 143). Here it may be advisable to give the names of the Seven Heavens (which are evidently based upon Ptolemaic astronomy) and which correspond with the Seven Hells after the fashion of Arabian system-mania. (1) Dar al-Jall (House of Glory) made of pearls; (2) Dr al-Salm (of Rest), rubies and jacinths; (3) Jannat al-Maaw (Garden of Mansions, not "of mirrors," as Herklots has it, p. 98), made of yellow copper; (4) Jannat al-Khuld (of Eternity), yellow coral; ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... of the tone of public opinion naturally resulted, which did not improve till the stirring events of the summer of 1887 brought men to their senses again. The number of members sent to Parliament was something so enormous, that it seems as if the people must have had a perfect mania for being represented. Nowadays we get along splendidly with only fifteen members (one for each Province) and a speaker. Formerly several hundred was not thought too many, and before the constitution was revised in 1935, there were actually over seven hundred representatives ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... that it is impossible for us to be friends; and when you have thought it over you will think as I do. My father teaches fencing and boxing in London; I was educated at a school you never heard of; I am helped here by an old gentleman who discovered that I was more or less intelligent. He has a mania for experiments, and I am his latest hobby. Have I said enough to put you off, or must I ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... cake a second time without being asked, drank three cups of tea, and only refrained from a fourth because the pot was drained. After tea, conversation turned on hobbies, and it being discovered that one girl had a mania for miniature jugs, and the other for foreign post- cards, the Italian servant was summoned, and received instructions in his own tongue, which resulted in an addition being made to each collection: Kitty returned ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... give Peter a little start. As the mulatto stood looking about among the cedars for the person who had called his name, it amazed him that Jim Pink could be so utterly insane; that he performed some buffoonery instantly, by reflex action as it were, upon the slightest provocation. It was almost a mania with Jim Pink; it verged on ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... social epidemic, which is, like fashion, a form of social contagion, has a different origin and a different connotation. J. F. C. Hecker, whose study of the Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, published in 1832, was an incident of his investigation of the Black Death, was perhaps the first to give currency to the term.[295] Both the Black Death and the Dancing Mania assumed ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... formed of little panes of glass, and in the lower divisions the glass windows are made to lift up. The books are all arranged in double rows; but by the ingenious plan of placing small books in front of large ones, the letterings of all can be seen. Neatness was a mania with Pepys, and the volumes were evened on all the shelves; in one instance some short volumes have been raised to the required height by help of wooden stilts, gilt ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... added smilingly, with a challenging glance at Don Carlos. "I think he must have spent most of his time in Paris at the Grand Guignol, and it has turned his brain. I'm afraid he is suffering from some sort of homicidal mania, poor fellow." ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... have witnessed the origin of this Love-mania, and with what royal splendour it waxes, and rises. Let no one ask us to unfold the glories of its dominant state; much less the horrors of its almost instantaneous dissolution. How from such inorganic masses, henceforth madder than ever, as lie in these Bags, can even ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster—poor, silly, and unattractive—whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret's heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! "I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... farm sale is by far the most amusing and picturesque, the sale of pedigree stock is much more sensational. When the shorthorn mania was at its height, and the merits of Bates and Booth blood were hotly debated, when such phrases as "the sea-otter touch," referring to the mossy coat of the red, white, or roan shorthorn, were heard, and the Americans were competing with our ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... the bedclothes. It is not necessarily attended by fever or by muscular tremors. The patient may show hysterical symptoms. This condition is probably to be regarded as a form of insanity, as it is liable to merge into mania or melancholia. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... propensity for purloining things that belonged to others, just to add to his "collection." The thing that struck Hugh as bordering on the comical was that even a small colored boy might have the same mania for gathering "trophies" of his visits that possessed Madame Pangborn. He felt that the good lady would herself be amused at the coincidence, and be ready ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... long-suffering; age had blunted his passions, checked their headlong impetus, and curbed the lust of pleasure. His crimes, so it is said, were involuntary; resulting from no tyrannical disposition in himself, but from the instigations of his son. For in him paternal affection had too clearly become a mania; his son was all in all to him; he did his bidding, committed every crime at his pleasure, dealt out punishment at his command, was subservient to him in all things; the minister of a tyrant's caprice, and that tyrant his son. The young man left him in possession ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... progress. With the automobile we have suddenly doubled, quadrupled the size of our "neighborhood," the space which a man may cover alone at will for a ramble or a call. As for speed, we seem to have succumbed to an actual mania for ever-increasing motion. The automobile is at present the champion speed-maker, the fastest means of propelling himself man has yet invented. But the aeroplane and the hydroplane are not far behind, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... this religious mania were the Crusaders; that is to say, those persons who went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. These persons, on their return to their own country, finding all their substance exhausted, exerted their utmost cunning to regain it; pretending that they had found some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... become almost as popular among the boys as the pedagogue himself. His instructions are not limited to school hours; and having inherited the musical taste and talents of his father, he has bitten the whole school with the mania. He is a great hand at beating a drum, which is often heard rumbling from the rear of the school-house. He is teaching half the boys of the village, also, to play the fife, and the pandean pipes; and they weary the whole neighbourhood ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... of insanity must always be a matter of the degree of the primary structural weakness and the energy and persistence of the operative forces; on these must depend the mere gentle, persistent illusion, or that fury of mania which transforms man, the "image of the Creator," into a wild beast. That insanity, no matter what its form or degree, is an evolution from an ancestral structural legacy, not essentially different from the structural conditions evolved ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... who had lately increased her importance, in the eyes of the young gentlemen, by the announcement that various pyrotechnical wonders were to be obtained at her shop. There are few boys who have not at some time of their boyhood had a mania for pyrotechnics—in plain English, fire-works—and there are few parents, and parents' neighbours, who can say that they relish the smell ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... century there was no bad building. On the contrary, nothing is more common in the monastic annals than the notices of how this and that tower fell down, and how this and that choir was falling into ruins, and how this or that abbot got into debt by his mania for building. There was an everlasting tinkering going on at the church; and the surest token that a monastery was in a bad way was that its church was ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... physical conditions as nervousness, prostration, temporary insanity, nervous disorders, pains resembling rheumatism, hay fever, heart troubles, mental symptoms, nervous chills, morbid forebodings and mild mania, there lurks the abnormal activity of the psychic or "thought body" caused by thoughts and feelings acting abnormally upon the vital centers of the ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... century's absurd exaltation of rude untrammelled nature. It really amounts to anarchy, because it is always accompanied by a certain feeling of hostility towards law and culture. Hence the love of wild rugged moors and mountains which is a modern mania." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... regretted that he did not follow the excellent example set by his father, and let time do its work, without interruption, upon his instruments. Had he done so they would, in many instances, have been equal to those of his parent; but, unfortunately, he worked when the mania for obtaining supposed maturity by artificial means was at its height, and shared the general infatuation, and, in consequence, very frequently destroyed all the stamina of his instruments. Subsequently he became a ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Gilmer, "and the fact that the woman with the broom is neither sufficiently appreciated nor decently paid brings its own train of evils. It is at the bottom of the distaste girls have for domestic pursuits and the frantic mania of women for seeking some kind of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... said George, while reason fought with his mania. "Whose goin' to save 'em? He needs killin'. I'm ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... of good crops, combining with the time of the crest between two eras of financial depression, and with Eastern capital easy to reach, a mania of speculation known as "the boom" burst forth; a mania that swept men's minds as prairie fires sweep along the wide lengths of the plains, changing both the face of the land and the fortunes of ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... B, that of the small tortoiseshell; C, that of the waved umber moth; D, that of the thorn moth; E, that of the shark moth; at F we have the delicate egg of the small emerald butterfly, and at G an American skipper; and finally, at H, the egg of a moth known as mania maura. In all this you see a delicacy of symmetry, structure, and carving, not accessible to the eye, but clearly unfolded. We may, from our general knowledge, form a correct notion of the average relation in size existing between butterflies and their eggs; so that we can compare. Now ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... the room; his wound had been so slight that he did not carry his arm in a sling. He was one of those men whose countenances are always cheerful and contemptuous, movements always restless, and mania to make a bustle insurmountable. Yet, notwithstanding his caprices, his pleasantries in very bad taste, and his enormous nose, he was not a vulgar man, thanks to a kind of natural dignity and courageous impertinence ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... He tried, too the effect of work upon the nervous depression from which he suffered. He was a man of a very methodical temperament, and sometimes carried out his plans for the allotment of his time with a strictness that bordered on mania. He shut himself up two evenings a week in order to write an exhaustive work on Cayenne. His modest bedroom was excellently adapted, he thought, to calm his mind and incline him to work. He lighted his fire, saw that the pomegranate at the foot of the bed was looking all right, and then ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... was only another of many tragic events demonstrating both the utter inefficiency of capitalist management, and the consistent capitalist program of subordinating every consideration of human life to the mania for profits. Vanderbilt was only a type of his class; although he was found out he deserved condemnation no more than thousands of other capitalists, great and small, whose methods at bottom did not vary from his. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... soon and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be rude—especially to Nancy's family—but the impulse to get everyone but Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months—and there is still her "grand news" to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more and more dubious the longer she looked at ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... afterwards Sir William Rawson, which name he took in consequence of some property he succeeded to by right of his wife, was one of the victims of the South American mining mania. He plunged deeply into speculation, and wrote pamphlets to prove that so much gold and silver must ultimately find its way into Europe from Mexico, that all the existing relations of value would be utterly destroyed. He believed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... to be kept open, after the building mania, to which it owed its origin, had ceased. It had extended the sphere of the export trade of the Delta; and it continued to serve as the means of transporting the blocks of porphyry—for which there was a constant demand at Rome and Constantinople, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... crupper bone (os coccygis) and knock till he opens." A well known missionary to the East during the last generation was subjected to this gross insult by one of the Persian Prince- governors, whom he had infuriated by his conversion-mania: in his memoirs he alludes to it by mentioning his "dishonoured person;" but English readers cannot comprehend the full significance of the confession. About the same time Shaykh Nasr, Governor of Bushire, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the right weapon with which to combat his wife's inclinations toward the Woman's Rights mania. A love of flattery was her weak point. It is with half her sex. We too often say, by way of expressing our disapproval of a certain man, "O, he is a gross flatterer!" thus very frequently condemning the quality we most admire in him;—or, if ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... contrast between the commencement and the close of the present year: it began in visions of prosperity, it closed with a certainty of adversity. The derangement of commercial affairs doubtless arose from the dangerous mania of speculation, aided by a vicious system of making paper money, which increased the currency, drove gold out of the country, and then caused a demand for it in exchange for paper, which it was impossible to meet. The natural consequence was an almost general breaking up of those who depended ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... devoted himself as much as possible to his body, almost, indeed, with the ardor of one possessed by a sort of mania. The Artists' Corps took up part of his time; Jenkins another part; he practised rifle shooting as diligently almost as if he expected to have to take his place almost immediately in the field; he began to learn fencing. Rosamund saw very little ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of conscience. To him, the current of his time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as though they were rabbits. One had no time to paint and putty ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... was a mania, an obsession with her. Even her death was a supreme gesture—of power, ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... over a new leaf in the province, and seems to have been a model wife and parent, she yet retained a sore heart against the mother country. The feeling of these two was early inculcated into the minds of their children, and their eldest son, in whom it amounted almost to a mania, transmitted it on to his own successor, our ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... tolerant and courteous language, and the liking he displayed for not a few priests, lurked a real anti-religious mania. The idea that his sister might, some day, draw near to the priests, to faith, to acts of piety, nearly drove ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... This was, however, not the case. There is no reason to suppose that Mr Kay did not mean well. But there is no doubt that he was extremely fussy. And fussiness—with the possible exceptions of homicidal mania and a taste for arson—is quite the worst characteristic it is possible for a ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... mania had left its mark over the divan in the shape of a gigantic fan constructed of little fans and opening out towards the ceiling. A few pen-and-ink and pencil sketches and studies, apparently the cast-off of many studios, were ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... know, to admit that the Bradford progeny is as numerous as the stars for multitude, and as the sands upon the seashore. It is advisable to restrict the genuine Bradfords to those of wealth and position. Now, this genealogical mania is a kind of midsummer madness that lasts in Warwick the year through, a lineal descendant, so to speak, of the witchcraft delusion; but it offers a certain kind of mental pemmican to impoverished minds. Those much vaunted ancestors ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... excited in the mind with all its connections. In some constitutions this is connected with pleasurable ideas without the exertion of much muscular action, in others it produces violent muscular action to gain or avoid the object of it, in others it is attended with despair and inaction. Mania is the general word for the two former of these, and melancholia for the latter; but the species of them are as numerous as the desires and aversions ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... distressing pains in the back and loins succeed; the patients become exceedingly nervous, as it is termed, and are unusually susceptible of ordinary impressions; pain in the head, often of great violence, follows, which, in some cases, is succeeded by delirium, in others, by absolute mania. Nor is this the whole catalogue of ills to which in such cases the unfortunate mother is subjected: the appetite fails, distressing languor is experienced by day, while copious perspirations deluge her by night, ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... his bird family became a mild mania. He carried food to the top rail of the line fence every day, rain or shine, with the same regularity that he curried and fed Nancy in the barn. From caring for and so loving the Cardinal, there grew in ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... naturally animates the minds of men under such circumstances. And there is another difficulty in the way of justice in the fact that this form of insanity is rarely accompanied by such evidences of mania as the uninstructed would demand as necessary to constitute insanity. The perverted state of the affections and the judgment are not necessarily accompanied by the wild ravings and glassy eyes of the lunatic. Emotional insanity of this type is only temporary. It may, also, only affect ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... model in this week's Queen which will be just the thing, and I have a piece of flowered pink silk upstairs which will do for you as well as for me. It is a remnant which I bought in Paris. I have a mania for remnants. I always think they will come in usefully, but somehow they don't. This will be the exception, however, and it will ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... cause of the vanishing of old houses, but it is not the only cause. The craze for new fashions at the beginning of the last century doomed to death many a noble mansion. There seems to have been a positive mania for pulling down houses at that period. As I go over in my mind the existing great houses in this country, I find that by far the greater number of the old houses were wantonly destroyed about the ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... themselves: and this brings them upon a lower plane, where the prophetic light glimmers and dies. The Pythia at Delphi, and the priestess in Dodona, have been the cause of very trifling benefits, when in a cautious, prudent state; but when agitated by a divine mania, they have produced many advantages, both public and private, ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... the people for one minute pulled themselves up and conquered their mania for money and machine excitement, the whole thing would be solved.—Would you like me to find Winnie and tell her to say ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... the parrot again." Precisely what happened. The lady soon found her husband, raised her hands tragically and broke out into excited French that was liberally sprinkled with oaths both English and French. The mania was asserting itself, the propensity overcoming her. It was a sad and at the same time an amusing scene, for one could not help smiling at Giuseppe's fat unconcern as he kept his wife off at arms' length, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... was the dowry of jewels which Lucretia was to receive. During the Renaissance the passion for jewels amounted to a mania. Ercole sent word to his daughter-in-law that she must not dispose of her jewels, but must bring them with her; he also said that he would send her a handsome ornament by the bridal escort, gallantly adding that, as she herself was a precious jewel, she deserved the most beautiful gems—even more ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... army in Egypt was sealed about a fortnight before the battle of Copenhagen. The British troops destined against Egypt in the preceding year were sent to Marmorica, on the coast of Cara-mania, under an expectation of receiving assistance from the Turks. This expectation was not realized; but Sir Ralph Abercrombie resolved at all hazards to attempt the dislodgement of the French from Egypt. He landed in Aboutir Bay on the 8th of March, in the very face of the French, and under a heavy ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Griswold had been fully alive to his peril. He had seen the swift hand-passing, and he knew what it was that Broffin was concealing in the hand which had made the quick pocket-dive. He knew that the crucial moment had come; and, as many times before, the savage fear-mania was gripping him. In the cold vise-nip of it he had become once ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... cheapened cost of construction; upon the growing disposition to employ redundant capital in making railways, instead of running the risks that had made foreign investment so disastrous. It was not long, indeed, before this very disposition led to a mania that was even more widely disastrous than any foreign investment had been since the days of the South Sea bubble. Meanwhile, Mr. Gladstone's Railway Act of 1844, besides a number of working regulations ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... he was intolerant of the sects around him; habitually pious, he was not without superstition; he was not an unbeliever in ghostly apparitions, and had a great fear of death; he also had the touching mania—touching every post as he walked along the street, thereby to avoid some ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... mania" which reached its climax on that notable Sunday, November 30th, 1845, to be followed by the catastrophic bursting of the bubble, had left men rather sobered in their outlook upon the future possibilities ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... with syphilis, and Giuliano had suffered from epilepsy from the age of seven. At this age he began to indulge in alcohol and self-abuse, and stole from his parents in order to buy sweets. He appears to have been subject to an ambulatory mania, which caused him to wander aimlessly about the country, and if kept within doors he would let himself down from the windows, climb up the chimney, or, failing in these attempts to escape, would break the furniture and attract the attention of the neighbours ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... of the interest that papa takes in all matters relating to bears. As people say, it is almost a mania with him." ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... should be in its place. In the morning I am always awakened at the same hour by the striking of the cuckoo-clock in the workroom; and whether it is scarcely daylight or not, I dress myself as quickly as possible; my shoes and stockings are here, my soap and all articles of toilette there—a true mania for order. Yet you may well believe that I was not born so! Oh no! On the contrary, I was the most careless person possible. Mother was obliged to repeat to me the same words over and over again, that I might not leave my ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici; there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on Alexander, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... of a new little spot, double leaf, streak or dash extraordinary in a tulip, anemony, carnation, auricula, or amaranth! cherishing and calling it by their own names, raising the price of a single bulb, to an enormous sum; till a law in Holland was made to check that tulipa-mania: The florist in the mean time priding himself as if he had found the elixir, or perform'd some notable atchievement, and discover'd ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... — N. disordered reason, disordered intellect; diseased mind, unsound mind, abnormal mind; derangement, unsoundness; psychosis; neurosis; cognitive disorder; affective disorder[obs3]. insanity, lunacy; madness &c. adj.; mania, rabies, furor, mental alienation, aberration; paranoia, schizophrenia; dementation[obs3], dementia, demency[obs3]; phrenitis[obs3], phrensy[obs3], frenzy, raving, incoherence, wandering, delirium, calenture of the brain[obs3]; delusion, hallucination; lycanthropy[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... I had finished the Pantheon we drove to the Conciergerie; for I wanted to see the prison of the hapless Marie Antoinette. That restless architectural mania, which never lets any thing alone here, is rapidly modernizing it; the scaffoldings are up, and workmen busy in making it as little historical as possible. Nevertheless, the old, gloomy arched gateway, and the characteristic peaked Norman towers, still remain; and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... be there. Gwendolen's imagination dwelt on this course and created agreeable consequences, but not with unbroken confidence and rising certainty as it would have done if she had been touched with the gambler's mania. She had gone to the roulette-table not because of passion, but in search of it: her mind was still sanely capable of picturing balanced probabilities, and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing thrust itself on her with alternate strength and made a vision from ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... bank was not only subscribed at once, but soon sold at a premium which invited the wildest sort of speculation in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Stock-jobbing became a mania. "The coffee house is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers," Madison wrote from the seat of government. Sinister aspects of this speculative craze soon began to appear. "Of all the shameful circumstances of this business," said Madison, "it is among the greatest ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... about German spies, he laughed in their faces, he told them they were a bunch of fools, they belonged in the nursery; for Jimmie classed German spies with goblins, witches and sea-serpents. And here suddenly the bewildered little man found himself in the midst of a German spy mania, the like of which ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... that he never speculated in his life and that he would immediately dissociate himself from any partner who would do so. This Wall Street coterie, in the years from 1898 to 1900, had made several large combinations in the steel trade. That was the era when the trust mania had gained possession of the American mind and when its worst features displayed themselves. The Federal Steel Company, the American Bridge Company, the American Steel and Wire, the National Tube Company, all representing ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... eyes fixed themselves instantly on his wife. By a privilege seldom granted even to men of genius, he awoke with his mind as clear, his ideas as lucid as though he had not slept at all. The man had the mania of jealousy. The lover, with one eye on his mistress, had watched the husband with the other, and he now rose quickly, effacing himself behind a column at the moment when the hand of the old man fell; after which he disappeared, swiftly as a bird. The lady lowered her eyes to her book and ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... the light of an historical character. Her collection of teapots promises to render her famous. She boasts already of more than two hundred, no two alike in form, and the record grows day by day; and the melancholy feature is that there is no end for the passion save in death, a mania for "a bit of the blue" ranking first in the list of diseases for which materia medico, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Willesden with travelling without a ticket a Walworth girl was stated to have a mania for travelling on the Tube. The Court missionary thought that a position could probably be obtained for her as scrum-half at a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various |
