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Sanity   /sˈænəti/   Listen
Sanity

noun
1.
Normal or sound powers of mind.  Synonym: saneness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sanity" Quotes from Famous Books



... self-contempt, made her feel the need he had of her, the place she had taken in his life. But for her, what ear would have been open to his cries? And what hand but hers could drag him up again to a footing of sanity and self-respect? All through the stress of the struggle with him, she had been conscious of something faintly maternal in her efforts to guide and uplift him. But for the present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged up, but to feel some one floundering in the depths with ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... on LULU Who Greater Britain sways From distant Woolloomooloo To Nova Scotia's bays; Whose sumptuous urbanity, Combined with well-groomed sanity And freedom from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... the speaker with growing concern. But he still assumed sanity on the part of the reverend gentleman, and still felt considerable irritation ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... the medium of personalities like these that Horace's message was delivered to the world of his time and to later generations. How far the finished elegance of his expression is due to their discriminating taste, and how much of the breadth and sanity of his content is due to their vigor of character and cosmopolitan culture, we may only conjecture. Literature is not the product of a single individual. The responsive and stimulating audience is hardly less needful ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman

... ago, monsieur, you appeared to cast a doubt upon my sanity. Is it a case of the drunkard who thinks all the world ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... attributing success to oneself; and his restoration might have been an object-lesson to teach that devout recognition of the Most High as sovereign was the beginning of a king's prosperity and sanity. But Belshazzar knew all this, and ignored it all. Was he singular in that? Is not the world full of instances of the ruin that attends godlessness, which yet do not check one godless man in his career? The wrecks lie thick on the shore, but their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life of the Old Cumberland Beggar, at one remove from nothingness, has yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the liberality of nature and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... having their minds made up. The trouble was that these latter classes, though delightful company to one of Andrew's sympathetic disposition, were considerably less remunerative than the irritating inquirers; and so long as there seemed any possibility of his father's return to sanity and his office, he felt that he could never regard his position as wholly satisfactory; on the other hand, though a sick lion may possibly be compared with a live dog, a defunct lion is ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... be elected. He came home modestly and made a splendid speech. We need a man of great administrative ability and of supreme sanity who can lead us into quiet ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... believed, that the confessor, upon leaving the tower, would immediately communicate to the civil and spiritual authorities, the particulars of the extraordinary interview that had taken place; and that although doubts might at first be entertained of the sanity of the narrator, yet, that his positive asseverations would at length so far weigh with the alcalde, and the bishop of Ronda, who then chanced to be making his yearly visitation to Tarifa, as to induce them ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various

... madder, if he'd been more set on it, he would have gone off with her that minute; he would have persuaded her to give up church; he himself would have broken his promise to old Wauchope. But he did none of these things, and his abstention was the sign and measure of his coolness, of his sanity. He only said, as any cool and sane young man might say: How about after church? And if he called when he got back from Clapham? He wouldn't be a minute ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... Russian frontier. The Great Death darkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited the plague spots where men's lives were being mown down at the devastating stride of 5000 deaths a week, and where men's hearts, the nerve, courage, sanity, and humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched and consumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people under the black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, living in the dark clouds of inquietude ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine

... his principles and his ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of vices. Those curious people ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... the great revolutionary religious and moral reformers has not been sufficiently recognised. It is remarkable that, unlike other reformers, he has not contradicted error by an exaggeration, which itself very soon stands in need of contradiction, but by simple sanity which requires no correction. One reason for this peculiarity is that the Ethic was the result of long meditation. It was published posthumously and was discussed in draft for many years before his death. Usually what we call our convictions are propositions which ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford

... imperious the tone of command with which he addressed her, the more easily could she pass over the error. There was a degree of pleasure in giving momentary case to him, while he could not recognise the hand that bestowed it. She dreaded, however, for the sake of both, an hour of sanity. If he slept for a short interval, she feared to hear him speak coherently on his waking; and the more because little or no chance of his recovery remained. The thought of his carrying forward into the hour of death the insolent temper of his life was terrible. She almost hoped that, if he were to ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau

... granted that Frank had some well-concocted scheme for gaining admittance to the Rose; and as the wiles of love were altogether out of his province, he had followed in full faith such a sans-appel as he held Frank to be. But now he almost doubted of his brother's sanity, though Frank's manner was perfectly collected and his voice firm. Amyas, honest fellow, had no understanding of that intense devotion, which so many in those days (not content with looking on it as a lofty virtue, and yet one to be duly kept ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... There surely is no engine-driver who does not feel the beauty of the business, but the emotion lies deep, and mainly inarticulate, as it does in the mind of a man who has experienced a good and beautiful wife for many years. This driver's face displayed nothing but the cool sanity of a man whose thought was buried intelligently in his business. If there was any fierce drama in it, there was no sign upon him. He was so lost in dreams of speed and signals and steam, that one speculated if the wonder of his tempestuous charge and its career over England ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... is gone indeed, and it seems as though a part, and that a very happy part, of my life has gone with him. When sanity returns to the earth, there will arise other deities of the cricket field, but not for me. Never again shall I recapture the careless rapture that came with the vision of the yellow cap flaming above the black beard, of the Herculean frame and the mighty bared arms, and all the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... observes purity and sanity of life. Hysteric dreams, the childishness of the mysterious, the insanity of the miraculous, are ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... the day on mental disease, Prometesky going with him as having been his only attendant during his illness, to give an account of the symptoms, and Dermot, who so comported himself in his excitement as to seem far more like the lover whose hopes might have depended on the verdict on his doubtful sanity, than did the grave, quiet, self-contained man, who answered all ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... hiding-place on Fire Mountain—and subsequent events have not shaken that belief. I reasoned that Winters had been picked up some time after he had made his last entry in the log, that he was out of his head when rescued, and that he never regained sanity. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... to add that a full explanation ensued when the party became calmer; that Mrs Twitter could not doubt the veracity of Hetty Frog, but suspected her sanity; that Mrs Frog was sent for, and was recognised at once by Mr Twitter as the poor woman who had asked him such wild and unmeaning questions the night on which he had found the baby; and that Mr and Mrs Twitter, Mrs Loper, Mrs Larrabel, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... passing there came again into his eyes the light of sanity. He gazed at the hair, breathless, still in wonder; and then very slowly there grew over his face the look of an unearthly peace, so that they who were by him deferred the putting aside of the Indian. With eyes wide open, full of a calm they could not understand, he looked and smiled, ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson

... always exist as the first barrier of American defense. I ask you, gentlemen, to ignore this request as you would ignore the statements of any person ... er, slightly demented. I should like to offer a recommendation that the general's sanity be investigated, and an inquiry be made as to the mental health of anyone else connected ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison

... him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... subtle—more subtle, even, than were our capitalistic friends. We shall not send our sub to them. We shall send it to a small island, and we shall see whether they wish to taste the death, the strangulation and crippling and suffering, the destruction of sanity that shall be the lot ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond

... American schools controlled by people of good sense; but sex-instruction from the larger viewpoint is taught in some of the best of Dr. Maxwell's high schools. (7) All advocates of sex-instruction who have a national reputation for educational sanity agree that legislation is most undesirable. (8) It is obvious that like so many others who have become confused regarding the sex-education movement, Dr. Maxwell has been impressed chiefly by the pioneer work that emphasized ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... dead straight." He stopped short and faced her. "You would be afraid, yes," he told her, "but you would try hard to discipline yourself. You would never go rushing blindly into a worse tangle, spending your strength and breaking your sanity down. Big Louie is a child; discipline is wasted on him. And—and I have always been able to ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... with me, and finally with his servant. Such an alienation distressed me more than any other instance of his decay: though I knew that he had not really withdrawn his affection from me, yet his air and mode of addressing me gave me constantly that feeling. So much the more affecting was it, when the sanity of his perceptions and his remembrances returned; but these intervals were of slower and slower occurrence. In this condition, silent or babbling childishly, self- involved and torpidly abstracted, or else busy with self-created phantoms and delusions, what a contrast ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... distinctly why I wept. The key that locked the muff unlocked in imagination the door of the home in New Haven which I believed I had disgraced—and seemed for a time to unlock my heart. Anguish beat my mind into a momentary sanity, and with a wholly sane emotion I keenly felt my imagined disgrace. My thoughts centred on my mother. Her (and other members of the family) I could plainly see at home in a state of dejection and despair over her imprisoned and heartless son. ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... his life to be so uncompromisingly and frankly judged. She was by no means the first to account him a fool, but she was certainly the first to call him one to his face; and whilst to the general it might have proved her extreme sanity, to him it was no more than the culminating proof ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... the Old Man of the Sea, riding on the latter's neck. The laugh tittered and rippled through clubs and social circles, was restrainedly merry in the editorial columns, and broke out in loud guffaws in the comic weeklies. There was a serious side as well, and Bassett's sanity was gravely questioned by many, and especially by ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... said, still smiling: "Yes, you are certainly a poet, you who have borrowed the apparel of my cousin. For you come out of my glen, and from my candor, as sane as when you entered. That is not saying much, to be sure, in praise of a poet's sanity at any time. But Merlin would have died, and Merlin would have died without regret, if Merlin had seen what you have seen, because Merlin ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... at last to find the True Self which was (and still remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever. Indeed there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul's return to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of life which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious long time about it; and when all this ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... forces daily diminishing, the difficulty of the country, and the possibility of the enemy's being reinforced from Martinique, wisely took the advantage of the present panic, and settled terms of capitulation without delay. The sanity of this resolution soon appeared. The inhabitants had just signed the agreement, when a messenger arrived in their camp with information that M. de Beauharnois, the general of the French islands, had landed at St. Anne's, to the windward, with a reinforcement from Martinique, consisting ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... Bologna, found no small amusement, as did the whole city. Some people, however, believe that there was some method mixed with this madness of his, because, having sold some property for a small price while he was mad and in very great straits, he asked for it back again when he regained his sanity, and recovered it under certain conditions, since he had sold it, so he said, when he was mad. I do not swear, indeed, that this is true, for it may have been otherwise; but I do say that I have often ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari

... night, devising means of telling Ian about this strange blank in her life. But she shrank from saying things that might make him suspect her of an unsound mind. She had plainly been sane enough in her abnormal state, and there was no doubt of her sanity now. She told him she had had since the autumn, and still had, strange collapses of memory; and he said that quite explained some peculiarities of her work. She tried to talk to him about French ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... Meanwhile he observed himself curiously ; the result in his poems is an impression of peculiarly wilful depravity. They reflect his physical and mental experience, are always without sobriety, often lacking in sanity. The title, les Fleurs du mal, is both appropriate and suggestive; they invite no epithets so much as "unhealthy" ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... rewarded with a vote out of the nation's gratitude," were some of the appeals made to our women by government officials high and low and by the rank and file of men and women. Never in history did a band of women stand together with more sanity and greater solidarity than did these 1000 delegates representing thousands more ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... that what I had seen might have been a dream. But, was I not there, wide awake? Had not his mother heard him speak as well as me? though her half-waking state had rendered the matter less distinct than it had been to me? I was not going to be reasoned out of my sanity in that way, because he did not choose to wait until I came down to open the door—which I thought rather unkind, when he must be well aware, that my anxiety for his safety must quite equal ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... they regarded him with no more respect than they did each other, he was at times carelessly admitted to their confidence. It was especially Rupert Filgee who extended a kind of patronizing protectorate over him—not unmixed with doubts of his sanity, in spite of the promised confidential clerkship he was to receive ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... touching meeting between Edith and the others that evening. She was naturally pale and weak, but her buoyant spirit triumphed over physical defects, and she made light of her injuries. Even Fairholme was restored to a state of sanity by his brief visit, a fact that was evidenced by his quiet enjoyment of a cigar when he walked down to the quay to witness the departure ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy

... extinction of the species on this planet. Somewhere in the universe he expected to meet his own, all whom he had loved, and to see this friend. Meantime, he accepted the fact of death in the world with that uncomplaining submission to nature which is in the strength and sanity of genius. As acquaintances left him, one after another, memory but kindled another lamp; hope but disclosed another white flower on ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... letter into Vannelle's hand, and say that I must abandon him forever. Let me forget the bitter temptation. Of course my friend begged to provide for my sister from his own ample means, and even offered her an asylum at his house. I still retained sufficient sanity to perceive the wrong of bringing a young child to that dismal place to wither removed from all human companionship and sympathy. A spirit not in a condition to be sustained and elevated by the society of Herbert would be confused, and finally petrified. Had this refined probing and questioning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... decorum. Stuart, tried before twelve regularly impaneled talesmen and defended by an advocate, cut matters short by a voluntary confession of his crimes. In fact, he boasted of them with a curious pride. Arson, murder, robbery, he admitted with a lavishness which first aroused a doubt as to his sanity and truth, but when in many of the cases he recited details which were later verified, all doubt as to ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... Rembrandt in his sombre imaginative pieces, but he boldly annexed all Spain for his sinister and turbulent art. He was more truly Spanish in the range and variety of his performances than any Spanish-born painter since Velasquez. Without the sanity, solidity, nobility of Velasquez, whose vision and voice he never possessed; without the luscious sweetness of Murillo, whose sweetness he lacked, he had something of El Greco's fierceness, and much of the vigour of Ribera. He added to these influences a temperament that was exuberant, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... and elevated his eyebrows, and finally answered—"I should have liked a little more sanity between you. Remember there is insanity on her side and insanity on yours, and you both of you seem half-cracky already, to my mind. Then you are cousins. The relationship is near, unpleasantly near. You are both very much alike, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... creed now offered us, and there can be little doubt both of the difficulty and the necessity of finding guiding principles for the practical life and to preserve sanity of mind. The monarchical idea still lingers; there is a variety of conceptions of democracy, differing widely; there are socialists—state socialists, Marxian socialists of the old line, Bolshevists, regionalists, syndicalists, and others—and anarchists of pure ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole situation. Yet ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James

... We are quite willing to judge of poetry as poetry and to leave it its ancient privilege of passionate overstatement. Of this privilege Schiller availed himself in the fullest measure, going quite beyond the bounds of sanity in his idealization of the Greeks, Well might the indignant Stolberg ask him if he really believed that the 'eternal bonds of the heart were gentler and holier when Hymen tied them'. Whatever else may be said of them, the amours of the Greeks ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... her sanity produced in Rebecca's mind a teasing compound of wrath and uneasiness. These people seemed to find something fundamentally irregular in her behavior. What could it be? The situation was intolerable, ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... to me as a heavenly melody freighted full of beautiful sentiment and holy rapture comes to them as an intolerable agony, a-maddenin' discord, that threatens their sanity, that rouses 'em up from their fitful sleep, that murders sleep—the bells to them seem murderus, strikin' noisily with brazen hands, ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... with idiots, lunatics, and negroes; and though we do not feel honored by the place assigned us, yet, in fact, our legal position is lower than that of either; for the negro can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of $250; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool; but we, who have guided great movements of charity, established missions, edited journals, published works on history, economy, and statistics; who have governed nations, led armies, filled ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the experience of others ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... division—old army, new army, Territorials—and you couldn't pick and choose between them. They fought like Trojans, and, dirty, weary, and hungry, found still some salt of humour in their sufferings. It was a proof of the rock-bottom sanity of human nature. But we had one man with us who was ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... sake of supporting a woman and children whom he rarely sees! Unhappily, there are such combinations; they are not homes! They are deplorable failures of people who have tried to make homes. To insist that they are anything else is to overlook the facts of life, to doubt the sanity of mankind which hopefully and courageously goes on building, building, building, sacrificing, binding itself forever and ever to what?—a shell? No, to the institution which its observation and experience tell it, is the one out of which men and ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... the old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I have represented the native common sense of the French mind and of the English mind—for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be 'God's Englishman'—leading mankind towards a bold and resolute ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... to her, had in me, latent and undeveloped, an artist's soul. I had felt the thing fluttering when I lost my self-control and talked flamboyantly about the head of Tim Gorman. It was necessary that I should keep a firm grip on myself. I belong to a class which has lost everything except its sanity. I think it is true of the Irish aristocracy that even its period of greatest glory, even when Grattan was waving his arms and shouting "Esto Perpetua!" it remained sane. I have nothing else left of what my forefathers bequeathed to me, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... you what," said the senior surgeon, rising abruptly with the others, "since you will neither listen to me, to reason, nor to my book, though I will not answer for the sanity of your mind, I will for that of your body. My duty, sir, my duty, will not permit me ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... advances, instead of expressing the helplessness and improvidence of an impecunious and invertebrate Government. In this manner the new departure might be a convenient halfway-house on the way from chaos back to sanity. But probably it is too revolutionary and goes too straight in the teeth of the Bank of England's privilege to receive much practical consideration; and there is the question whether the public would take the new paper readily and whether it could be ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... fact, as old as the oldest races. In Egypt and India, as well as in Rome and Athens, the gods were always regarded as in some especial way manifesting their will, and revealing their secrets, to those thus stricken. The view that wisdom is attained along the path of normal health and rational sanity has always been a "philosophical" and never a "religious" view. Dostoievsky's dominant idea has, indeed, many affinities with the Pauline one, and is certainly a quite justifiable derivation from the Evangelical doctrine. It is, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... Aix-les-Bains from Geneva on the lamentable determination of a commission agency in the matter of some patent fuel, with a couple of louis in his pocket forlornly jingling the tale of his entire fortune. As this was before the days when you had to exhibit certificates of baptism, marriage, sanity and bank-balance before being allowed to enter the baccarat rooms, Aristide paid his two francs and made a bee line for the tables. I am afraid Aristide was a gambler. He was never so happy as when taking chances; his whole life was a gamble, with Providence ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... all found out Darwinism before Mr. Darwin. They spied the idea, but they left it floating; they did not trap it, and break it into scientific harness. Solomon De Caus, as all the world has heard, was put into a lunatic asylum for inventing the steam-engine, though no one would have doubted his sanity if he had offered to raise the devil, or to produce the philosopher's stone, or the elixir vitae. Now, these precious possessions have not been more in men's minds than a system of conveniently suspended animation. There is scarcely a peasantry in Europe ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... days in the workshop at Ithaca flooded his memory with all the gruesome details he had tried for so many months to forget. The haunting ghosts of the mental anguish that had left him an altered man—so altered that there were times when he had feared for his sanity! ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... stared at his well-wisher dumbly for a moment. The thought crossed his mind that, if ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, this was it. His opinion of Jno. Peters' sanity went down ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... he could not hope to last through the next day. Then he slept, only to waken cold, shaking, and afraid. Shoulder deep in a pool, he was aware that in his sleep he must have opened the belt buckle and freed himself, and only the mishap of falling into the water had brought him around to sanity. ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... is madness and folly is perfect sanity with me. After all, Alf, is there not an amount of unreason ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... his own risk. Without his money and his enterprise they would have amounted to nothing. If Benedict had not lost his reason, the document would have been legally signed. The cause of Benedict's lapse from sanity did not occur to him. He only knew that if the inventor had not become insane, he should have secured his signature at some wretched price, and out of this conviction ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... the mind, and may be made more and more liable to recur, and greatly exaggerated by frequent repetition. But making the fullest allowance for all these conditions, it is still surprising that persons, otherwise appearing to be within the bounds of sanity, should entertain a confirmed belief in the possibility of phenomena, which, while they are at variance with the best established physical laws, have never been brought under proof by the evidences of the ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans

... work we meet with no unnecessary lifting of veils or treatment of themes merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. Everywhere there is the evidence of sound judgment, unimpeachable taste, and a wholesome sanity. This is especially the case in the frank revelation of the poet's views on religion and his attitude towards scientific and theological thought, to which we have ourselves referred. In this respect, a large debt is due to the biographer for setting before the reader, not only the high ethical ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... madness," was the retort. "So have I assured myself when wandering in hasheesh dreams. But beware. These bourgeois cities will kill you. Look at that den of traitors where I met you. Dry rot is no name for it. One can't keep his sanity in such an atmosphere. It's degrading. There's not one of them who is not degrading, man and woman, all of them animated stomachs guided by the high intellectual and artistic ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... to be a keenly acute conscience about evil, and about compromise with evil; and yet with it a sanity of judgment on particular questions arising, and a gentle consideration for others who see otherwise, or think they do. Evil grows in subtlety and in aggressiveness in our day, and probably will yet more. It seeks especially to make inroads ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon

... doubtful of the sanity; I always told you that you were too independent and strong-minded for a girl; but what is the use of preaching to deaf ears?" continued Aunt Agatha, in a decidedly cross voice, as ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various

... mind for years. Not in heaven—for he has no right there; Protestants would say that as well as I. . . . Where, then?—Lancelot! not in that other place. I cannot, I will not believe it. For the sake of God's honour, as well as of my own sanity, I will not believe it! There must be some third place—some intermediate chance, some door of hope—some purifying and redeeming process beyond the grave. . . . Why not a purifying fire? Ages of that are surely punishment enough—and if there be a fire of hell, why not a fire of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... would have had no rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to see that croquet or poker were in any way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... about an appointment and went out into the street. His inborn sanity could not defend him from a misty creeping jealousy. He thought that obviously no man of that sort could be worthy of such a woman's devoted fidelity. Renouard, however, had lived long enough to reflect that a man's activities, his views, and even ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... suffer himself to be robbed of his mind? For if he had the power of using his reason aright, he could not be deceived; for as far as in him lay, he necessarily sought to conserve his own being, and the sanity of his mind. But it is supposed he had this in his power, therefore he necessarily conserved his sane mind, neither could he be deceived. Which is evidently false from his history; and, consequently, it must be granted that ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... extinguish her passion for him, and the collapse of the inflated imaginations which had surrounded her supposed pregnancy, it can hardly be doubted, affected her sanity. Those forlorn hours when she would sit on the ground with her knees drawn to her face; those restless days and nights when, like a ghost, she would wander about the palace galleries, rousing herself only to write tear-blotted letters to her ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... an increasing tendency on the part of modern critics to cast a doubt on Byron's sanity. It is true that he inherited bad blood on both sides of his family, that he was of a neurotic temperament, that at one time he maddened himself with drink, but there is no evidence that his brain was actually diseased. Speaking figuratively, he may ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... The counter-irritant to grief is sanity, not emotion. When a woman is a little frightened the presence of the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... laws of evidence and of statistics can hardly be exaggerated. There may be a doctor here and there who in dealing with the statistics of disease has taken at least the first step towards sanity by grasping the fact that as an attack of even the commonest disease is an exceptional event, apparently over-whelming statistical evidence in favor of any prophylactic can be produced by persuading the ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw

... and epochs it is the rule." And whilst, on the one hand mental specialists have been extending the boundaries of insanity to the point of justifying the popular adage that everyone is a bit mad, they have, on the other hand, tended to narrow down the difference between sanity and its reverse until it has become almost entirely a question ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... the best and purest of her sex—a great love for one from whom she asked nothing, nothing at all, save to be permitted to think of him and to sacrifice everything, everything for him—even life. So strange had been the course of this love, that people would have doubted her sanity or her truthfulness had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... little that was definite. Here was a phial of some tincture, a paper of some salt, and a record of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll's investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another? And even granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more I reflected, the more convinced I grew that I was dealing with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... some of us how torturing they sometimes are!—concerning that future life. The more we keep ourselves within the broad limits of these promises that are intertwined and folded up together in that one saying, 'They shall walk with Me in white,' the better, I think, for the sanity and the spirituality of our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... coldly but with extreme firmness, "nothing but that lifeless child and the picture of desolation which rose in my own mind. Do not, I pray, make me speak again of that. It would sound like delirium, and it is my wish to impress you with my sanity, so that you will allow me ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green

... are strange and terrible words; but they are meaningless; they must be. Her misery has turned her brain; she is mad; heed her not; be silent all of ye! See how she glares upon the prisoner! Is that the look of sanity? By St. Francis, we have done wrong to call her hither! Stand back, good fathers. Remove the prisoner; and let Donna Marie be conducted from the hall. Our Consort should have warned us ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... tendency of love is to exaggerate the forms of its expression. It is, however, we feel on reflection, an error to judge by the exaggeration rather than by the love. It is perhaps well to ask ourselves whether we are saved from exaggeration by greater sanity or by lesser love. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... he was secure in his room, the blind drawn down and the gas flaring, he made vigorous efforts toward sanity. It was not of his free will that he allowed terror to overmaster him, and he desired nothing better than a placid and harmless life, full of work and clear thinking. He knew that he deluded himself with imagination, that he had ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... deliverance would be to me one of the greatest blessings my thoughts can conceive." Dr. Cotton was at last called in, and under his treatment, evidently directed against a bodily disease, Cowper was at length restored to sanity. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... him by his desire to save Carlyle, whose recent loss and shaken nerves made such business especially trying to him. Letters of this period remain, in which Carlyle begs Ruskin to "be diligent, I bid you!"—and so on, adding, "I must absolutely shut up in that direction, to save my sanity." And so it fell to the younger man to work through piles of pamphlets and newspaper correspondence, to interview politicians and men of business, and—what was so very foreign to his habits—to take a leading share ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... no great social question so imperfectly understood among us at the present day as that which refers to the line which divides sanity from insanity. That this man is sane and that other unfortunately mad we do know well enough; and we know also that one man may be subject to various hallucinations,—may fancy himself to be a teapot, or what not,—and yet be in such a condition of mind as to call for no intervention ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... night, and, in company with his fellow-conspirators, of trying those beautiful clothes upon her, passed through his mind, but he dismissed it. And then occurred a strange incident, which startled even his cool, American sanity. ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte

... it is necessary to exercise reserve is in the degree to which any story can be acted. In the justifiable desire to bring a large number of children into the action one must not lose sight of the sanity and propriety of the presentation. For example, one must not make a ridiculous caricature, where a picture, however crude, is the intention. Personally represent only such things as are definitely and dramatically personified in the story. If ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant

... this period he had heard nothing of the mournful consequences which his perfidy had produced upon the intellect of our unhappy Jane. His father, who in fact still entertained hopes of her ultimate sanity, now that his son was married, deemed it unnecessary to embitter his peace by a detail of the evils he had occasioned her. But when, like her brother William, he despaired of her recovery, he considered it only an act ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... means a frantic effort on the part of its rivals to pull down this advantage. In some fashion, therefore, we have to substitute for endless competition the principle of co-operation, national welfare being construed at the same time not in terms of overwhelming wealth, but of thorough sanity and ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney

... at this amazing creditor, worked his jaws a few moments wordlessly, found no speech adequate, and stamped out of the store. He no longer dreaded to meet Polly Candage. He felt that he needed to see her. He was seeking the comfort of sanity in that shore world of incomprehensible lunacy; he had had experience with Polly ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... refuse to believe that the great waste of human life and energy now going on in Europe is a waste pure and simple. We refuse to believe that some purification is not to result from the fire through which mankind is passing, and that some sanity in handling human affairs is not to follow the evident insanity with which we are now confronted. Something a little more stable because a little more reasonable must appear at the end to replace the inconstancy and unrest which have up to now characterized ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... Devotion, Faith, Politeness, Friendship, Love, Hope, Kindness or Philanthropy, Religion, Patience or Serenity, Integrity or Conscientiousness, Patriotism or Love of Country, Cheerfulness, Energy, Fortitude, Heroism, Health, Sanity, Caution, Sublimity, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... his horses. He didn't know what peremptory signal would be given him to move on, or what inquiry as to his sanity would scorchingly be made, but Suzanna's eager voice impelled him to stop. Mr. Massey leaned over the ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake

... Dostoevski's Raskolnikov, but whose states of mind are even more subtly analysed. No one should read this story unless his nerves are firm, for the outcome of the tale is such as to make almost any reader for a time doubt his own sanity. It is a curious study of the border-line between reason and madness. The physician, who rejoices in his splendid health, bodily vigour, and absolute equilibrium of mind, quietly determines to murder his best friend—to murder him openly and violently, and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... water was grateful to her senses. It was a plunge back into sanity and normal life again, drowning those ghosts of vague foreboding and anxieties which had kept such unpleasant vigil with her, and when the Turkish girl returned with a tray, Arlee was able to sit and eat breakfast with a trace of ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself. It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that I ask that the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... Aloysia had done. This letter was sent on New Year's Day, 1831. After a few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the incident is closed. It may best be summed up in the words of James Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes

... Lawton felt as though all sanity had been squeezed from his brain. Twice he started to ask a question and thought better ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long

... yet played, felt in it something sinister and bewildering. Gropingly, he divined in front of him a future of tyranny on her side, of expected submission on his. The Northern character in him, with its reserve, its phlegm, its general sanity, began to shrink from the Southern elements in her. He became aware of the depths in her nature, of things volcanic and primitive, and the English stuff ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... remember that intellectual over-indulgence is one of the most insidious and disgraceful forms that excess can take. Granted that every one should exceed more or less, inasmuch as absolutely perfect sanity would drive any man mad the moment he reached it, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... was a man with a taste for nonsense, as they call it—artistic fooling, and all that kind of thing. And I seriously believe that he has talked nonsense so much that he has half bewildered his own mind and doesn't know the difference between sanity and insanity. He has gone round the mental world, so to speak, and found the place where the East and the West are one, and extreme idiocy is as good as sense. But I ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... sanity," Mrs. Hauksbee announced, after tiffin was over and the two were comfortably settled in the little writing-room that opened out ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... humanity cannot progress as a whole while one half of it is semi-educated and only half free. There can be little doubt that if the later advocates of woman's suffrage could have preserved more of Mary Wollstonecraft's sanity, moderation, and breadth of outlook, they would have diminished the difficulties that beset the task of convincing the community generally. Mary Wollstonecraft was, however, the inspired pioneer of a great movement which slowly gained ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... crisis had arrived, that Winston's life probably hung upon her next decision. Twice she endeavored bravely to speak, and when she finally succeeded, the strange calmness other voice made her doubt her own sanity. ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... wax-candle, and perseveringly followed the lady to every place of public resort she visited. To the inquiries of his friends respecting this extraordinary device, he merely replied, that it signified Candela bianca (A white candle), and, consequently, doubts were entertained of the eccentric gallant's sanity. At last, though love is proverbially blind, the lady—probably she had a prompter—discovered that the true meaning was Can de la Bianca (The dog of Bianca), and with her hand rewarded the ingenuity and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various

... The last showed a high spirit and proud value for her character. She was advised by some, who pitied her youth, to gain at least a respite by pleading pregnancy; to which she answered disdainfully, "No, I will not be both held witch and strumpet!" The mother, to show her sanity of mind and the real value of her confession, caught at the advice recommended to her daughter. As her years put such a plea out of the question, there was a laugh among the unfeeling audience, in which the poor old victim joined ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... sluggard who had made his name a thing of reproach in all lands. With the overstrong bitterness of youth he had meant to die sword in hand, fighting for Ireland. The few burning words of Owen Ruadh had stripped all this false heroism from him, however, and had sent a flame of sanity into ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones

... Herrick was insane. Sir Thomas Browne always preferred to think that he was; whereas Philip Borsdale perversely considered the answer to be optional. Perversely, Sir Thomas protested, because he said that to believe in Herrick's sanity was not conducive to ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... consternation. Mr. Levinski (absolutely furious) had a hasty consultation with the author (also furious), in the course of which they both saw that the Fourth Act as written was now an impossibility. Poor Prosper, who had almost immediately recovered his sanity, tremblingly suggested that Mr. Levinski should announce that, owing to the sudden illness of Mr. Vane, the Fourth Act could not be given. Mr. Levinski was kind enough to consider this suggestion not entirely stupid; his own idea having ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne

... by his serious and sorrowful reflexions on his former career of iniquity. His death, however, was that of a good man, and a sincere christian. He expressed a very considerable degree of displeasure, when he was in a state of sanity, at his name being affixed to a narrative, which he knew only by report, as being about to be published, and which subsequently did ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann

... restraint, as used formerly under male superintendents, and, I may say, as still used in other hospitals than that of Norristown. Her skill in providing amusement, instruction and employment of various kinds, for the comfort and restoration of her patients to sanity and physical health, I feel sure has never been equaled in any hospital for the treatment of insane women. It is exceedingly interesting to see the school which she has established, and in which a large number of the insane are daily instructed, amused and interested. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... central! Talk out in church! Don't make a goddess of a woman. The men who want to marry her, and can't, will do that! The nincompoop can always be counted on to deify the commonplace. And she is commonplace. If she isn't, she's no good! Commend me to sanity and the commonplace. I take off my hat to it! I honour it. God ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... the utmost possible vividness the image of the object: and every artifice is exhausted to render the image as life-like, as close to the reality, as near an approach to actual hallucination, as is consistent with sanity. This degree of intensity having been, as far as practicable, attained, the effusion follows. Every person should compose his own form of prayer, which should be repeated not mentally only, but orally, and may be added to or varied for sufficient cause, but never arbitrarily. It ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... Face and body were beaten hard with the endless struggle of it all. His rough clothing, which had no relation to the smart Inspector's uniform he was entitled to wear, bore witness to the life that claimed him. His only claim to distinction was the sanity and strength that looked out of his steady grey eyes, the firmness and decision of his clean-shaven lips, and his broad, sturdy body with ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... old philosophical pinax of the life of man: whether thou art yet in the road of uncertainties; whether thou hast yet entered the narrow gate, got up the hill and asperous way which leadeth unto the house of sanity; or taken that purifying potion from the hand of sincere erudition, which may send thee clear and pure away unto a virtuous and happy life.' And having taken his reader up through a virtuous life, Sir Thomas thus parts with him at its close: 'Lastly, if length of days ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte

... and that the nation is going down hill, it behoves all thinking people to gather their forces together and seriously apply themselves to consider how they can better this condition of things. In their daily life they can do so by setting up a high standard of sanity and right behaviour, by the encouragement of fine aims and high ends, by the firm avoidance of hypocrisy and hysterical altruism, and by intelligent explanation to those under their care of the reason why individual ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn

... is an "intimate divinity" which is the source of all true wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it, that "the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force," that the rule is "Do what you know, and perception is converted into character,"—all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in this Oration. Just how easily ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... for a moment doubted the sanity of his companion. He had spoken in figure—a mode of speech, which it is a mistake in rhetoricians to ascribe only to an artificial origin, during a state of mental quiet. Deep passion and strong excitements, we are bold to say, employ metaphor largely; and, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... was accomplished without noise or outcry? To this hour only a few inhabitants locate the treacherous spot. He could not hide, even at Madame Clementine's, from all the talk of a community. This unreasonable tryst of thirty-five years raised for the first time doubts of his sanity. A woman might have kept such a tryst; but a ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... he had cooled down a good deal, and he resolved to treat her with the respect due to her age and former condition of sanity; but to take care that she should not again be alone with him, and to arrange that she should return to her home ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton

... and other battles; two have been mercifully treated and have lost it completely—the padded cell must mean a certain unconsciousness; but the greatest, deepest pity of which the human heart is capable is called forth by those who are maimed in mind. Long lucid intervals of perfect sanity give them time to learn the meaning of the locks and bars. "Yes, I know; I went off my head after Magersfontein," one poor fellow tells you; another repeatedly asks, "Will they put me into an asylum when I go home?" What a home-coming! Sure enough it ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... mighty power that lies in propinquity—the propinquity of an inspiring ideal. Miss Farnham was never enthusiastic; that, perhaps, would be asking too much of an ideal; but what she lacked in warmth was made up in cool sanity, backed by a moral sense that seemed never to waver. Unerringly she placed her finger upon the human weaknesses in his book-people, and unfalteringly she bade him ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... when he went to the asylum. His sanity was blinding in its brilliancy; he voluntarily renounced the world of foolish faces and had himself locked away where he would not hear its foolish clacking. O Silence! gift of the gods, deified by Carlyle in many volumes and praised by me in many ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... disfavor into which poetry has fallen, or rather which it has brought upon itself. In the remoteness of its themes and sentiments, in its over-anxiety for a faultless or striking technique, it has erected a barrier between itself and the sanity of a practical, truth-loving people. Let us hope that this aberration is not permanent. When poetry returns to simplicity, sincerity, and truth; when it shall voice, as in the great English singers, Tennyson and Browning, ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... perfect organic wholes;—carrying with it the gift to clothe each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical form, giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation, and rounding off without effort;—the power, in a word, to leave simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering on our minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of classicalism, and the reason why (until modern effort equals them) the study of that Hellenic and Latin poetry in which these gifts are eminent above ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick

... altogether too presumptuous claim. The whole is greater than the part, the will than the instrument. There can be no official nor pontifical Socialism; the theory lives and grows. It springs out of the common sanity of mankind. Constructive Socialism shapes into a great system of developments to be forwarded, points to a great number of systems of activity amidst which its adherents may choose their field for work. Parties and societies may come or go, parties and organizations and names may be used and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... capable care and sympathy carried Nelly through the worst days of her trouble. There were times when Mary had to hold the girl's hands, to fight with all her might against the acute suffering which menaced for a time her sanity and her health. The horrors into which Nelly fell when she thought upon the things which happened in such wars as this with cruel and cunning savages, were the worst things to fight. There were hours in which all the fears of the world seemed to be let loose on the unhappy child, when it seemed ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... was given. And what lady can be married, now-a-days, without having a few pounds of silver given to her? For Christmas presents, of course, silver-ware is always among the objects dangerous to the sanity of those who go forth, just before the holidays, with a limited purse ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... that you doubt my sanity, madam. My nerves are a little out of line; I have just left the hospital and must be quiet. Do you see? If you must have references, I work for the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... "dreaming over your impossible plan for regenerating the world! Beloved child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Madness—madness on the face of it!" But, madness or sanity, he could ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... call for—whom? Somebody—anybody—to speak—to tell her she was awake—alive. Marion? but Marion was not here. Marion had gone with the big soldier husband whose mere presence in the house would, the girl felt, have been an assurance of security, of sanity. Violets! What had Marion said? "There is a sad story attached to violets at Bessacre." But she had not told her what it was. Why had she left her? And then she remembered the earlier events of the ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... strain of her emotion. It is his entrance, perhaps, which prevents Orestes from being swept away and revealing himself. The peasant's courage towards two armed men is striking, as well as his courtesy and his sanity. He is the one character in the play not somehow tainted ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides

... assuring him that Eschylus is an out-of-date old fogy, while on the other hand we may acknowledge the greatness of Homer and Milton without trying to force them upon unwilling and incompetent readers. After all it is not so much a question of Milton versus George Ade, as it is of sanity and wholesomeness against vulgarity and morbidity. And if I were to walk through one city and behold collections of this latter sort predominating and then through another, where my eyes were gladdened with evidences of good taste, of love for humor that is wholesome, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that I should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion return to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peasants and priests ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... on the fact of Richard's brutality. He at least had ventured to insult her. He had loved her enough to forget himself. He had dared to make himself odious in her eyes, because he had cast away his sanity. What cared he for the impression he made? He cared only for the impression he received. The violence of this reaction, however, was the measure of its duration. It was impossible that she should walk backward so fast without stumbling. Brought to her senses by this accident, she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... making a musical tour through France, Germany, and Italy. Nourrit, who was subject to alternate fits of excitement and depression, was maddened to such a degree by a series of articles praising Duprez at his expense, that his friends feared for his sanity, a dread which was ominously realized in Italy two years afterward, where Nourrit was then singing. Though he was very warmly welcomed by the Italians, his morbid sensibility took offense at Naples at what ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris

... live together any longer would be an obscene joke. Let's end it while we still have some sanity and decency left. ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell

... manner, true work of mind or technical skill brings peace, composure, sanity, to one to whom the proper outlet of his energy has been denied. To youth, possessed by an almost riotous vitality, with great but unused powers of endurance and of positive action, the finding of its task means concentration of energy instead of ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie



Words linked to "Sanity" :   saneness, reason, insanity, reasonableness, rationality, mental health, sane, lucidity



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