"Unbalanced" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... approaching the group, Captain Bergen turned about, and without a word, walked slowly away in the direction of the cabin, his manner showing still more clearly than ever that his mind was unbalanced—a fact which caused Storms great discomfort. Aside from his love for the good, honest man, he saw that he had already imperiled, and was likely still further to imperil, their great possessions by his rambling, ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... yet a further degree, the cerebral or brain centres become influenced; they are reduced in power, and the controlling influences of will and of judgment are lost. As these centres are unbalanced and thrown into chaos, the rational part of the nature of the man gives way before the emotional, passional or organic part. The reason is now off duty, or is fooling with duty, and all the mere animal instincts and sentiments are laid ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... (see especially chapter 6) where an unbalanced right square bracket appears, often after either an italicized phrase or a Hebrew phrase. ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... murdered Rickwell was not discovered. But he had occupied a room with another man, a mining agent from New York named Mortimer Arbuckle, the father of this lad here, and some thought Arbuckle had done the foul deed, and he had to run away to escape the fury of a mob. The horror of this occurrence unbalanced the man's mind and to this day he sometimes thinks he may be guilty. ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... hell. If we leave scripture and human belief aside, science reveals to us that nature has her catastrophes—that there is just so much of the failed cycle, of the unrecovered, the unbalanced, the incompleted, the fallen-short, in her motions, that the result must be collision, shattering resumption, the rage of unspeakable fire. Our world and all the worlds of the system, are, I suppose, doomed to ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there lies a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue, but of eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present writer to come down to it on Sunday ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... something was wrong. She was certainly overwrought and almost hysterical—beyond anything the journey would bring about. Possibly that was the explanation of the mystery. Elsie had rarely spoken of her stepmother. Perhaps her husband's death had unbalanced her mind? ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... the thoracic cavity is enlarged in breathing, the unbalanced atmospheric pressure is exerted from all directions towards the thoracic space. This not only causes the air to flow into the lungs (Chapter VII), but also causes a movement of the blood and lymph in such of their tubes as enter this cavity. It will be noted that both ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... another such family is that of the "Zeros." Three centuries ago they were highly respectable people, living in a Swiss valley. But they intermarried with an insane stock, and subsequently married other women of an unbalanced nature. In recent times 310 members of this family have been studied, and it is found that vagrancy, feeble-mindedness, mental troubles, criminality, pauperism, immorality are, as it may be termed, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Adams woman,—you know she followed him to Washington.... Too bad! He was a brilliant fellow, but he tied himself all up, tied himself all up," he observed sententiously, thus explaining the catastrophe of an unbalanced character. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... here suggested should not, however, blind the reader to some of Lanier's better work. The history of criticism, especially of romantic criticism, is full of just such unbalanced judgments. It is often true in criticism that a man "should like what he does like; and his likings are facts in criticism for him." Without very great learning and with strong prejudices in some directions, Lanier yet had remarkable insight into literature. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... operating-room, and saw the surgeons in their togs, and the pails and basins all about, and was invited to step up to the table!" There is nothing so agreeable as the remembrance of fears through which we have passed; and we can only learn to despise them by finding out how unbalanced ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... perfectly. The Word of God taken alone will lead to superstitious regard for a book and to a cramped judgment and action. To say that we are guided by the Spirit, without due regard for the Book He has been the principal one in writing, leads to fanaticism, or at least to ill-advised, unbalanced, unnatural ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... positive of that side, and the excess of current would flow through the negative, N, back to the source of energy. Thus it will be seen that a three-wire system, considered as a whole, is elastic in that it may operate as one when in balance and as two when unbalanced, but in either event giving independent control of ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... to the bourgeoisies of the nations. You alone can be sure of an attentive hearing. None but you can act as mediator to-day (and will even you still be able to act as mediator to-morrow?). Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses, disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction. Class wars, racial wars, wars between the nations of yesterday, wars between the nations ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... felt certain that the old man's mind was really unbalanced. He attributed it to the excitement of his narrow escape that afternoon. A good sleep would refresh him, and he would be all right in the morning. He rose to his feet and ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... kingdom of Heaven by storm and reign supreme as enthroned king of all material forms. Man, in his blindness, has relegated intuition to obscurity; has neglected the cunning of the left hand and debauched the pure love of the divine state. Consequently, the executive forces within him are unbalanced, thus rendering him the slave of material forms, instead of being their lawful sovereign. Therefore, not until, with clean hands and pure heart, he restores intuition to her throne, united with reason, can he hope to COMPREHEND the reality of this arcane ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... school, whose minds had become unbalanced by overwork, worry or disease, George Howe was born a fool. Being a child of honorable and respectable parentage, the playmates with whom he associated in his early youth were of that class who regarded his imbecility as a terrible affliction, were ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... according to them, will be the bridge over which all human souls must walk, while Christ sits at one end, Mohammed at the other, watching and judging. The righteous, upheld by angels, will pass safely; the wicked, heavy with unbalanced sins, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... could not get over the feeling of having a number of deformed and grotesque figures lingering about me. The Bright Powers are always beautiful and desirable, and the Dim Powers are now beautiful, now quaintly grotesque, but the Dark Powers express their unbalanced natures in ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... companion. He stood gazing under the moon, like a gaunt statue of melancholy. Stanton spoke to him but got no answer, and presently took his own road home. He had no taste for histrionic scenes. And as he went his way he meditated. Mad, beyond doubt. Not without power in him, but unbalanced, hysterical, alternating between buffoonery and these schoolgirl emotions. He reflected that if the American nation contained much stuff of this kind it might prove a difficult team to drive. He was thankful that he was going home next ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... morning of July 2, President Garfield was shot by a poor, miserable, unbalanced, and abnormal growth whose name will not be discovered even in the appendix of this work. He was tried, convicted, and sent ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... beliefs filled the minds of all and colored the criminal or insane excesses of many of the unbalanced. A similar insanity was the efficient cause of the more or less hysterical "sanctity" of some of the saints. At the close of our century it is the politico-social questions which absorb (and with what overwhelming interest!) the universal consciousness—which ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Lenin, had been mad. The implications were, of course, that many of the purges, certainly the latter ones, were the result of the whims of a mental case, that the Soviet Complex had for long years been ruled by a man as unbalanced as Czar ...
— Freedom • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the circle and the discovery of the Beast are the two goals—and goals also—of many unbalanced intellects, and of a few instances of the better kind. {226} I might have said more of 666, but I am not deep in its bibliography. A work has come into my hands which contains a large number of noted cases: to some of my readers it will be a treat to see the collection; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... "If anything comes in the back way, I shall hear and have time to run out the front door; and I know there is nothing in the house." But she could not reassure herself, since what terrified her, and even temporarily unbalanced her, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... allowed a thing like this to assume the proportions it did. I must say that I seem to have gotten the story about this business in a very garbled form indeed." He laughed shortly. "I came here convinced that you were mentally unbalanced. I hope you won't take that the wrong way, Professor," he hastened to add. "In my profession, anything can be expected. A good psychiatrist can never afford to forget how sharp ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... to thee, Olympus' king, That suffering mortals at thy doom should know By omens dire the massacre to come? Or did the primal parent of the world When first the flames gave way and yielding left Matter unformed to his subduing hand, And realms unbalanced, fix by stern decree' Unalterable laws to bind the whole (Himself, too, bound by law), so that for aye All Nature moves within its fated bounds? Or, is Chance sovereign over all, and we The sport of Fortune and her turning ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... while Maya watched with fear-struck eyes, the tube flashed once more. Gunnar and Odin stood there for a second. They fell like unbalanced ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... Hundred had revelled in the luxury of a hot bath. "Casey," who had found and hurriedly slipped into his trouser pocket a full packet of "fags" inadvertently left behind by some individual with an unbalanced mind, portrayed his bare arm for general admiration of the ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... mention. He is always active when God is at work for the salvation of souls. When the sons of God come to present themselves before the Lord, Satan comes also among them. In every revival he is ready to bring in those who are unsanctified in heart and unbalanced in mind. When these have accepted some points of truth, and gained a place with believers, he works through them to introduce theories that will deceive the unwary. No man is proved to be a true Christian because he is found in company with the children ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... woman?—An unbalanced mind in a sensually inclined body. As with all who are greedy of pleasure, the foundation of her moral being was overweening egotism. Her dominant faculty, her intellectual axis, so to speak, was imagination—an imagination ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... rose stock had not reached their perfection as soon as others, to have pronounced them of no value, unworthy, and to have refused them the dews, the warm rains, the life-giving sunshine, the very agencies that hastened their perfected growth! Yet this puerile, unbalanced attitude is that taken by untold numbers in the world to-day toward many human souls on account of their less mature ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... there was no heroic taint in the bride's motives. In this he was consciously influenced by the thought that his side would suffer by his own action, so his own motives were tainted. A chivalric instinct, unbalanced by reasoning power, is so very apt to decide—on principle—against its owner's interests. Behind this there may have been a saving clause, to the effect that the young people might be relied on to pay no attention to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... mill. One day he was placed upon a horse with a sack of grain containing about two bushels, after the sack of grain was balanced upon the back of the horse he was started to the mill which was a distance of about five miles, when about half the distance of the journey the sack of grain became unbalanced and fell from the horse being too small to lift the sack of grain he could only cry over the misfortune. There he was, powerless to do any thing about it. After about two hours there was a white man riding by and seeing ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... these unities requires any element whatsoever that does not partake of its beauty. It is quite irrelevant to the drama that the hero should himself have his own view of events with no understanding of their dramatic value, as it is irrelevant to the picture that an unbalanced fragment of it should dwell apart, or to the symphony that the discord should be heard without the harmony. One may multiply without end the internal differences and antagonisms that contribute to the internal meaning, and be as far as ever from understanding the external ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... evil, and yet mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness—the perversity of the unbalanced mind." ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... her son anxiously. His words meant absolutely nothing to her, for Henry had not told any one of his letter to his captain. Suddenly she feared that perhaps something had fallen on Henry's head and momentarily unbalanced him. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... England talk a great deal about restoring Handel's orchestra in performances of his oratorios, utterly unmindful of the fact that to our ears, accustomed to the myriad-hued orchestra of to-day, the effect would seem opaque, heavy, unbalanced, and without charm were a band of oboes to play in unison with the violins, another of bassoons to double the 'cellos, and half a dozen trumpets to come flaring and crashing into the musical mass at intervals. Gluck in the opera, and Haydn and Mozart in the symphony, first disclosed the charm of ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... I do the culture, refinement and polished manners of the great journalist, I wondered what aggravating force could have so unbalanced his mental scales and led him to so bitterly denounce those, whose only offense is, trying to do what Lincoln did, abolish an evil. If this resourceful writer were only converted to the truth on this question, ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... history have their due; still I imagine the world would have been much the same had Alexander died of cholera-infantum or grown up a harmless dude. I don't think the earth unbalanced would from its orbit fly had Caesar been drowned in the Rubicon, or Cleveland never been born. I imagine that Greece would have humbled the Persian pride had there been no Thermopylae, that Rome would have ruled the world had ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... because a dependent and servile womanhood is an immovable obstacle to race development; second because the major defects of our civilization are clearly traceable to the degradation of the female and the unbalanced predominance of the male, which unnatural relation is responsible for the social evil, for the predatory and combative elements in our economic processes, and for that colossal mingling of folly, waste, and horror, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... knew the utter desperation of Hal Dozier. For the man had fired while Andrew's back was turned. The bullet had followed the warning cry as swiftly as the strike of a snake follows its rattle. Luck and his sudden leap forward had unbalanced the nice aim of Dozier, and perhaps his mental agitation had contributed to it. But, at any rate, Andrew was troubled as he cleared the edge of the trees and cantered Sally not too swiftly along the Little Silver River toward Las Casas mountains, ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... not yet returned. The silence and evident distress of Mrs. Carlisle struck down the heart of Esther, almost as much as her own fears. The too vivid recollection of one terrible event in her own life completely unbalanced the aunt's mind, and took away all power to sustain ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... sternly, staring at her. There was something surging up inside of him, unknown, unreasonable; heart's blood was rushing about his system inconveniently; his pulse was hammering—why? He knew why; this sudden vision of a girl reminded him—took him back—he cut through that idea swiftly; he was ill, unbalanced, obsessed with one memory, but he would not allow himself ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... said. "They could not adjust psychologically to changed conditions. They usually became unbalanced. Some suicides and a number of cases of extreme schizophrenia resulted. It was decided that it was no kindness to the older space-struck cases ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... model of the reflective lyric, requires a peculiarly intimate union of thinking and singing. It may be, as it often was in the Elizabethan period, too full of thought to allow free-winged song, and it may also be too full of uncontrolled, unbalanced emotion to preserve fit unity of thought. Conversely, there may not be enough thought and emotion to fill the fourteen lines: the idea not being of "sonnet size." The difficult question as to whether there is such a thing as an "average-sized" thought and lyrical reflection upon ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the shock of sudden, unexpected attainment, and they realized that both the accumulated achievement of generations and the greater promise of the future might be lost irretrievably by failure at this critical moment. 'Surfeit (κορος {koros}) breeds sin ὑβρις {hubris} when prosperity visits unbalanced minds.' In slightly different words, the proverb recurs in the collections of verses attributed to Theognis and to Solon. Its maker refrained from adding what was in his and his hearers' thoughts, that ὑβρις {hubris}, once engendered, breeds αιη ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of the twentieth century there were in the civilized world, millions of people in whose lives Christianity had ceased to play any part. Yet, psychically—remember, "psyche" means "soul"—they were just as sick and unbalanced, just as much in need of some compensation as were the subjects of the early Roman empire, or the Arabs in the Middle Ages. They were forced to work at the strained and monotonous pace of machines; they were the slaves, body and soul, of machines; they lived with machines ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... said to have wept because he found no more worlds to conquer. The man who bemoans the loss of a world and the man who bemoans the loss of coffee are to my mind equally unbalanced and equally in need of forgiveness. The desire for a cup of coffee and the desire for a crown, the hankering after the flavor or even the fragrance of the drink and the hankering after fame, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... that family was living in fear and trembling until several years had passed after that critical age, and only then would they begin to breathe freely. Indeed, many people became insane from the very fear of becoming insane. It cannot be subject to any doubt that many people do become mentally unbalanced from the fear that they will become unbalanced. Fear has a tremendous influence on the purely bodily functions, but its influence on the mental functions is incomparably greater, and a person will often get that which he fears he ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... depths of grief and humiliation. Then your wonderful physical resemblance to your mother caused me to dread that you would also inherit her character, and that you would grow up deceitful and untrustworthy. Connect those two feelings with the unbalanced state of my mind and you will easily understand ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... Villa Firenze as her address. Very likely he would never think of doing anything; it is no business of his. But if he did, what could he prove? Why, nothing at all. There is no evidence whatever. If this thing ever got into court, I could suggest that the woman was mentally unbalanced, suffering from the delusions which cause intent to injure. I can prove that the nurse had access to the laboratory; it would be easy to make a jury believe that she put the toxin in the syringe herself, with the insane ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... precocious lad whose training had been grossly neglected, began to study theology under the orthodox mystic, Christian August Crusius (1715-1775), who in 1757 had become first professor in the theological faculty. The boy varied the monotony of his studies by pranks which revealed his unbalanced character, including an attempt to raise spirits with the aid of Dr Faust's Hoellenzwang. His orthodoxy was, however, unimpeachable, his talent conspicuous, and in 1761 he was appointed lecturer on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... at least as real as the material world. When his younger brother died he declared that he saw the released soul mount through the ceiling, clapping its hands in joy. The bulk of his writing consists of a series of 'prophetic books' in verse and prose, works, in part, of genius, but of unbalanced genius, and virtually unintelligible. His lyric poems, some of them composed when he was no more than thirteen years old, are unlike anything else anywhere, and some of them are of the highest quality. Their controlling trait is childlikeness; for Blake remained all his ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of her last. Two of his children had already shown the signs of unbalanced mentality. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... every sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then "the awakening" comes. Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic, as it came to "Emma Bovary," sometimes it is carbolic acid taken covertly in the police station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads. "Edna Pontellier," fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea on a summer night and went down with the sound of her first lover's spurs in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... entered her uncle's study—so called because of its dust-laden bookshelves, though the duke sometimes disturbed their contents to steady the leg of an unbalanced chair or table—he laid down his pipe and dismissed his ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... like a boy who'd keep out of sight, old warrior," he said. "Far more likely to thrust himself into the front with all the unbalanced rashness of a boy. A nice pair indeed! But I should like to have a thousand of you, all the same. No, I don't think I ought to take you, boy," he continued, slowly, with a very severe frown gathering on his forehead. "But ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as "modern civilization," "spirit of the age," "tone of thought," "intellectual type of the age," "bias of the imagination," "habits of religious thought," unbalanced by any precise definition; and the spirit of rationalism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the specific mental activities of which it is a generalized expression. Mr. Curdle's famous definition of the dramatic unities as "a sort of a general oneness," is not totally false; but such ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... letter was a flaming village. The Emperor read it and bent his weary steps towards Chalons; Bazaine read it and said, "There is time;" MacMahon, Canrobert, Leboeuf, Ladmirault read it and wondered idly what it meant, till Vinoy turned a retreat into a triumph, and Gambetta, flabby, pompous, unbalanced, bawled platitudes ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... important proof of the soul's immortality, that frequently, as physical power declines, the mind exhibits unusual activity. But the argument moves in the opposite direction. For of what sort is this unusual activity? That which results from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that not only are the physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause has impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself. Sometimes there is manifested, towards the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Indian is unfortunate enough to be unbalanced in mind, the others become more kind to him than before; he would have no need ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... produced a degree of sense gratification or pleasure. The reason why these sensations are pleasurable instead of painful is, in this state of moderate excitement the circulation is materially increased without being materially unbalanced. But as with every sense indulgence, when the craving for increased doses becomes satisfied, when larger doses are taken the circulation becomes unbalanced, vital resistance centers in one point, congestion occurs, then the sensation becomes one of pain instead of ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... escaped from a very clever trap was plain, but who was the traitor? Who, indeed, had fired that shot which, failing to kill Yvonne, had unbalanced her brain so that no attention could be ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... went to bed or sat in the garden, separated from the others as by an invisible wall, at which he stared and stared. Even the unexpected arrival of his pretty, fair wife had not resulted in dispelling for so much as a second the vision of the awful occurrence that had unbalanced his mind. With his chin on his chest he sat without a smile, while she murmured words of endearment; and whenever she tried to touch his poor twitching hands with the tips of her fingers, full of infinite love, he would jerk away as if seized by a convulsion, ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... to be his wife would have to be enough. He continued to draw out her story, not because he cared anything about hearing it, but in order to spring his question finally without making her think him more unbalanced ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... man shrank on his crutches, looking up, the aeroplane swept past overhead—a wounded, wavering, unsteady, unbalanced thing, its right aileron dangling, half stripped, and almost mangled to ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... my hiding place as he came close. I wanted to tackle him hard and ask some pointed questions. He saw me as I saw him skidding to an unbalanced stop, and there was the dull glint of metal in his right hand. His needle-ray came swinging up and I went for my armpit. I found time to curse my own stupidity for not having hardware in my own fist at the moment. But then I had my rod in my fist. I ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair Or grinning over a screen With seaweed in its hair. I heard the beat of centaur's hoofs over the hard turf As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon. "He is a charming man"—"But after all what did he mean?"— "His pointed ears... He must be unbalanced,"— "There was something he said that I might have challenged." Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah I remember a slice of ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... yielded to their rage, the more consummate was their art declared. Then a change took place. From laughing the educated town of Stockbridge turned to resentment, then to irritation, and finally to suspicion. Booverman and Pickings began to lose caste, to be regarded as unbalanced, if not positively dangerous. Unknown to them, a committee carefully examined the books of the club. At the next election another treasurer ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... Sancho Panza represents the type of person who does not have imagination or spiritual ideals. Not much less ridiculous, though much more deserving of sympathy, is Don Quixote, who represents the type of person who is controlled by imagination and fanciful ideals, unbalanced by practical judgment. The life of a person of either type must be ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... certainly gave substance to his brother's theory that his mind was unbalanced, the family having noticed his peculiarities from the time he was thrown from a horse, when a boy.* He soon returned to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, where his first step was to "resuscitate" the Messenger and Advocate, which had died at Kirtland. In a signed article ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... will not do your business better because you wear a long face all the time; you will do it worse. If you are talking about your high ideals all day you are not only a nuisance: you are either dishonest or unbalanced. We are not creatures with wings. We are creatures who walk. We have to "foot it" even to Mount Pisgah, and the more cheerful and jolly and ordinary we are on the way the sooner we shall get over the journey. The noblest Englishman that ever lived, and the most deeply ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... deep-hollowed and sorrowful, but they met his as squarely as they could, considering their cast. Schepstein was quite shocked to observe that there was no shame in them. I suppose the shock temporarily unbalanced his principles, for, having caught sight of one of her shoes, he offered to lend her three dollars, indefinitely and without interest, on her bare note-of-hand. (When he saw the other shoe, he made it five.) She looked at the money ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... this class of thumb should never be given any position of authority over others, for he could not curb his ungovernable temper. He would also be absolutely unbalanced in his jealousy, and no woman who has the ambition to live to the usual "threescore-years-and-ten" should risk marriage to a man with one of these thumbs. But as "love is blind" it is useless, I know, to give advice ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... ways; that's just it," Alice said eagerly. "He has always been singularly—well, unbalanced, in some ways. Don't you know there was always a sort of simplicity, a sort of bright innocence about Warren? He believed whatever anybody said until you laughed at him; he took every one of his friends on his own valuation. It's only where his work is ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... people best the voice of their leaders obey, When neither too slack is the rein, nor violence holdeth the sway; For indulgence breedeth a child, the presumption that spurns control, When riches too great are poured upon men of unbalanced soul. ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... but Mrs. Arbuthnot had met the unbalanced before—indeed she was always meeting them—and they had no effect on her own stability at all; whereas this one was making her feel quite wobbly, quite as though to be off and away, away from her compass points of God, Husband, Home and Duty—she didn't feel as if Mrs. Wilkins intended ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... mother's prayers. He came to America in 1891, and first settled at Jamestown, Long Island. Early in 1893 he moved to Denver, Colorado, and in the following July he felt impelled by inner promptings to start out, he knew not whither. Probably mentally unbalanced, he wandered through the wilderness of the great Southwest without shoes or hat. Fasts, temptations, visions, arrests and imprisonments, and healings combined to furnish his experience during these ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... that she had been drinking. Some people might say that it was the scorn of her husband's relatives, but that is all nonsense, and I have no doubt she and the young man might have done very well if this hadn't spoiled all their chances at the outset. She was quite unbalanced and a strange, wild creature, very handsome in her girlhood, but morally undeveloped. It was impossible not to have a liking for her. I remember her when she ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Cicero to elucidate their charms when displaying them to friends. For after all, the chief point of interest in such books is their cost price, and this you may be obliged to refrain from mentioning for fear you will be accused of being mentally unbalanced. ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... evidently pertaining to the class of human eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... same way she would have said he had not had luncheon. A strange responsibility, if he felt it, had this William, a man nearly forty years old, for this young creature not yet twenty-three, and with powers so undeveloped and a character so unbalanced! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... chances of existence, and the seriousness of the ailment depends upon the degree of this diminishing power. Seen from a strictly psychological point of view, we must expect thus a broad borderland region between the entirely normal well-balanced mental life and that unbalanced disorder of functions which really interferes with the chance for self-protection and effectiveness. That the melancholic who declines to take any nourishment, or the paranoiac who misjudges his surroundings, is unable to secure by his ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... for a once famous European ruler who had lost his throne in the war. A man always of unbalanced mentality, who, after living for years in exile, had been reported dead three years before. A madman who had vanished to make this last attempt upon the world, aided and abetted by the secret group of nobles who had surrounded him in the days of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... fleet was now in good order, and his signals were chiefly confined to keeping it closed. The French, on the other hand, were greatly scattered when their Commander-in-Chief, in an impulse of hasty, unbalanced judgment, abandoned his previous cautious policy and hurried them into action. Some of them were over ten miles to windward of the flagship. Though they crowded sail to rejoin her, there was not time enough for all to take their stations properly, between daylight ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... work we come in the splendidly composed Rape of the Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna in the Loggia itself. Spoiled a little by its too laboured detail, its chief fault lies in the fact that it is top-heavy, the sculptor having placed the mass of the group so high that the base seems unsubstantial and unbalanced. Bologna's other group here, Hercules and Nessus, which once stood at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, is dramatic and well composed, but the forms are feeble and even insignificant. The antique group of Ajax dragging the body of Patrocles, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the opposite clan, backed up by the Numidians, objected. At their head was a wealthy Spanish woman named Lucilla, an unbalanced devotee, who, it seemed, always carried about her person a bone of a martyr, and a doubtful one at that. She would ostentatiously kiss her relic before receiving the Eucharist. The Archdeacon Caecilianus forbade this devotion as superstitious, and thus made ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... follow a great shock. She is mentally unbalanced on one point. Unless anything occurs to excite her in connection with that, time will effect a cure. She must not be opposed in her wishes, and I would suggest that she be taken out of London and an effort made to distract her. Plenty of society, outdoor amusements—anything ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... made the mistake which many girls make. I came from school, young, inexperienced, unbalanced, and eager for admiration. Your father, a brilliant man of more than twice my age, easily appealed to my fancy. He was handsome, courteous, distinguished, wealthy, of fine character and unassailable position. I did not know, then, that a woman could love love, rather ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... a terrific, convulsive jerk on the rope and jerked it through Charley's hand. The sudden pull completely unbalanced him and he fell from the limb. But instantly he tightened his clutch on the slipping rope and in a second was dangling in air, frightened but safe. He slid to the ground, and drew the rope taut. Now he had the rope over a limb, ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... state of mental disease, resulting in disordered, unbalanced and chaotic thought, destitute ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... best pages of history made under their own eyes. Hence the woman suffrage movement has not yet been accepted as the legitimate outgrowth of American ideas—a component part of the history of our republic—but is falsely considered the willful outburst of a few unbalanced minds, whose ideas can never be realized under any form ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... type of mind could be really mentally unbalanced by such methods which we had heard outlined, where the mere fact of another trying to exert power over them became known to them. They would, as a matter of fact, unbalance themselves, thinking about ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... and to exert its predominance; to be restored to prestige, not by holding aloof in its privileges, but by asserting itself in act. The preponderance of political and family influence in determining promotion of officers, unbalanced by valid tests of fitness such as later days imposed, had not only lowered the competency of the official body as a whole, but impaired the respect which personal merit alone can in the long run maintain. On ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... driven sex under-ground, into secret channels, strengthened the conspiracy of silence, concentrated men's thoughts upon the "lusts of the body," have sown, cultivated and reaped a crop of bodily and mental diseases, and developed a society congenitally and almost hopelessly unbalanced. How is any progress to be made, how is any human expression or education possible when women and men are taught to combat and resist their natural impulses and to ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... fit takes him. There's no accounting for his whims, poor unbalanced fellow. In some respects he is clever and remarkably clean-handed. In fixing parts of the machinery, I would rather have his help than that of most professionals, he is so careful about the minutest details. Yet, of course, it would be out of the question to rely upon him. There's another ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... endure. Such a friendship is not a sane or a wise relation, for friendship is like scholarship: if it is worth anything at all it comes slowly. Impulsive, quickly forced friendships are not wise investments; the very fact that they come so quickly implies an unbalanced state of idealizing, or lack of self-control. This does not mean that one is not to form pleasant acquaintances from the very beginning of the school life. Acquaintanceship always holds something in reserve and is the safest prelude to a deeper ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... is where you might be of such assistance to us Lisbeth. A boy with only an aunt here and there is unbalanced, so to speak; he requires the stronger influence of an uncle. Not," I continued hastily, "that I would depreciate aunts—by the way, he has but one, I believe?" ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... could not be accomplished in less than five or ten years, if, indeed, in a lifetime, I then believed could be accomplished in a year or two, and by me single-handed. Had I had none but mentally unbalanced people to talk with, I might have continued to cherish a distorted perspective. It was the unanimity of sane opinions that helped me to correct my own views; and I am confident that each talk with relatives and friends hastened my ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... were threshing grain a few hundred yards away, the steam threshing machine attracting farmers from all the country about. One a peculiar man, more refined appearing than the others, had once been a college professor; overstudy had partially unbalanced his reason. He was versed in the classics. He took an especial ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... whom we do not notice something painfully wanting. We do not always understand what it is, but we know that, while we may accord to them good sense, and even genius, they fail to satisfy us. There is some good thing which they lack—something unbalanced and partial and one-sided about them. We presume that this is often the result of a constitutional defect, but in most instances it is attributable to insufficient nourishment in some department of their ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary—the Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... neither paid attention to the interruption. Nor did they take notice when another door opened and Andy and Randy came into view. Brassy managed to break away and land a blow on Jack's arm, and in return received a crack in the chin which sent his head backward and all but unbalanced him. ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... and Tara must have got tired of carrying it; but she would not tell it so, and for one whole morning she staggered about with the cumbersome beauty tilted over her shoulder, which gave her the appearance of an unbalanced but ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... same time, dissimilar units in the aggregate tend to separate, and those which are similar, to cluster together ("segregation"); and this subdivision and dissipation of forces, so long as there are any forces unbalanced by opposite forces, must end at last in rest; the penultimate stage of this process "in which the extremest multiformity and most complex moving equilibrium are established," being the highest conceivable state. The various derivative laws of phenomenal changes ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... in the Russian temperament a peculiar unbalanced hysterical element. This, joined to a distinct bent towards the mystic, and to a large amount of credulity, has made Russia for two hundred years the happy hunting-ground of charlatans and impostors ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... Kathleen's brain was in a whirl. Was Julie's mind unbalanced? She knew that the Frenchwoman's fiance and two brothers had been killed early in the war. Had grief for them and anxiety for her beloved country developed hallucinations? One thing was apparent—it would never do to disagree ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... had for three or four years kept himself within bounds, and been known only as one of the most eminent preachers of the ordinary Gospel of the Quakers and a prolific writer of Quaker tracts. But, having come to London in 1655, he had been unbalanced by the adulation of some Quaker women, with a Martha Simmons for their chief. "Fear and doubting then entered him," say the Quaker records, "so that he came to be clouded in his understanding, bewildered, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... common sense of his class; his wife had been like him in this respect, and her influence had intensified the trait. Queer people with abnormal manners excited his intense aversion. The most charitable view that he could take of Mrs. Mumpson was that her mind—such as she had—was unbalanced, that it was an impossibility for her to see any subject or duty in a sensible light ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... late, he stood upon contested ground. The former owner being now in the insane asylum, and having, before she became unbalanced, deeded the property to her husband (who had subsequently sold it to Steve), she was temporarily out of the way, but it seemed that by some oversight she had left outside a mother and a brother, whom she should ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... him alone—they all flirted with him. It would have been all right if he'd been used to it before, but getting good-looking so suddenly unbalanced him. From a kind of puzzled wonder that he should thus attract the opposite sex, he began to develop an interest in what he termed "their bewildering number of types." He said he used to think they were all exactly alike. It was when he declared ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... individuals, to be rude, harsh, and vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have been equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me, without resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt obscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were intolerable. My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an unreasonable proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed, ill housed, ill educated and ill trained, my will was ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... partakes of the horrible collapse of its polluted tenement, and can contemplate no motive, however weighty, nor entertain any other thought, be it ever so interesting, than how to relieve its present wretchedness. When, then, can the unhappy man find peace with God amid this tumult of his unbalanced faculties, this perturbation of his unholy passions? How utterly unfitted to perform those duties which are requisite to ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... deserted woman! She was an evil-doer, and the fatality of love and the unbalanced vigour of her mind, which might, had she been more happily placed, have led her to all things that are pure, and true, and of good report, combined to drag her into shame and wretchedness. But the evil that she did was paid back to her in full measure, ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... of strong nerves, but that sudden manifestation of light and a human hand from a sealed death chamber momentarily unbalanced his common sense, and caused it to swing like a pendulum towards the supernatural. He would not have been surprised if the light and the hand had been followed by the apparition of the murdered man on the threshold, demanding vengeance on his murderer. The feeling passed immediately, and ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... equal—is the child who is born into the world with an unbalanced or inefficiently controlled nervous system; and while it is all too true that the common nursery methods of "spoiling the child" are often equally to blame with heredity for the production of an erratic disposition and an uncontrolled temper, nevertheless, ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... a {washing machine} or, by extension, any hard disk is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... a serpentine band of tremulous pressure had encircled his body. The acts of that unbalanced creature ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... centre compartment for the crew and engines, which was the standard practice at that time for ships designed by the Astra Company. A 35 horse-power Green engine drove two wooden two-bladed propellers by chains. The ship was fitted with an unbalanced rudder, while the elevators were in the front of the frame. This ship was successful, and in June flew to London and back, and in September took part in the Army manoeuvres, on one occasion being in the air for 7 3/4 hours without landing, carrying ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... learned that a great part of the time the Emperor was either drunk or doped, that the Empress was hysterical and on the verge of a mental breakdown, and that they were assisted by senile Sturmer, mentally unbalanced Protopopov, and profligate Rasputin, none of whom could read a compass nor lay out a course and steered the ship as they willed. All the passengers, first, second, and third class, grand dukes, intelligentsia, and laborers saw ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... 'lost,' which is nonsense, as what losing a scale means, I know not; but leaving an unbalanced scale, or a scale unbalanced, is intelligible.[28] Correct this, I pray,—not for the public, or the poetry, but I do not choose to have blunders made in addressing any of the deities so seriously ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... uplifting, encouraging, inspiring atmosphere, and the most good in the world is found in the best books. I have known people who were suffering under the most painful mental anguish, from losses and shocks which almost unbalanced their minds, to be completely revolutionized in their mental state by the suggestive power which came from becoming absorbed ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... but sit round being very learned and getting seraphic hands. We were quite mad, as I don't mind admitting. It was in the course of those years that we acquired all the distorted ideas we've been burdened with since; we grew dull with school wisdom, anaemic, unbalanced: sometimes terribly unhappy about our sad lot, sometimes hysterically happy, and pluming ourselves on our examinations and our importance. We were the pride ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... its apparent location, fear is a psychic state, of course, reacting upon the individual in several ways: as, in the nerves, in mental moods, in a single impulse, in a chronic habit, in a totally unbalanced condition. The reaction has always a good intention, meaning, in each case, "Take care! Danger!" You will see that this is so if you will look for a moment at three comprehensive kinds of fear—fear ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... perfumed crush where purse-strings and morals were loosened with every heave and twist in the panting struggle around the raw gold altar—back of the sordid past, back of all the resentment, and the sinister memory of wrongs and grievances, still unbalanced, ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... promise to me, and as a necessary result of my repeated demand for the fulfillment of that promise; but I saw and felt, and was of course deeply moved to observe, the manifest belief that there was more or less of truth in the rumor that the cares, perplexities, and anxiety of the situation had unbalanced my judgment and mind. It was, doubtless, an incident common to all civil wars, to which I could only submit with the best grace possible, trusting to the future for an opportunity to redeem my fortune and good name. Of course I could not deny the fact, and had to ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman |
