"Insanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will be meted out to the owners of fowls. At present these fiends in human shape can keep their detestable pets, and defy the menaces, as they have rejected the prayers, of their neighbours. The amount of profanity, insanity, ill-health, and general misery which one rooster can cause is ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... passes from a race without leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are strong; the human organisms through which they play are but—as we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... artist as a more or less harmless lunatic. When he succeeds it is willing to exalt him into a kind of god and to worship his eccentricities as a part of his divinity. So we arrive at a belief in the insanity of genius. What would Raphael have thought of such a notion, or that consummate man of the world, Titian? What would the serene and mighty Veronese have thought of it, or the cool, clear-seeing Velazquez? How his Excellency the Ambassador of his Most Catholic Majesty, glorious ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... think of death? If I died, it would not be you: It would be simply the same Lack of you. The same want, life or death, Unfulfilment, The same insanity of space You not there ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... of medicine is indissolubly connected. The "Ayur Veda," written nine hundred years before Hippocrates was born, sums up the knowledge of previous periods relating to obstetric surgery, to general pathology, to the treatment of insanity, to infantile diseases, to toxicology, to personal hygiene, and to diseases of the generative functions. [Footnote: Wise, On the Hindu System of Medicine, p. 12.] The origin of Hindu medicine is ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... little mention of insanity in the domesticated animals in any of our modern authors, whether treating on agriculture, horsemanship, or veterinary medicine, and yet there are some singular and very interesting cases of aberration of intellect. The inferior animals are, to a certain extent, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... annoy the poor creature—soothsaying, by palmistry, had been her weakness in her brighter days, and now the strange propensity clung to her through the dark night of her sorrows, and received strength from her insanity. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... good—only good—and that too, not only in eternity, but in time also. We believe, that had the confidently anticipated deluge of blood followed the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, the calamity would have been the consequence, not of abolition, but of resistance to it. The insanity, which has been known to follow the exhibition of the claims of Christianity, is to be charged on the refusal to fall in with those claims, and not on our ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... These splendid images derive tenfold beauty from the rich antique coloring of the author's language, skilfully imitated from the old romances, but which necessarily escapes in the translation into a foreign tongue. Don Quixote's insanity operates both in mistaking the ideal for the real, and the real for the ideal. Whatever he has found in romances he believes to exist in the world; and he converts all he meets with in the world into the visions of his romances. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... James. "Murder's one thing. Such coldblooded deviltry is quite another. There may be insanity connected with it. But one thing is sure. I'll not rest till the villain's run ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... But with all this insanity of pretension he has a sort of cowardly shrewdness, acquired in his days of hiding "on the underground." On the witness stand in Washington he denied that he had had any direct communication with God by revelation; and then he returned to Utah ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... plunge and hide himself, built him a hut, and become lost to civilization, his name forgotten and his name forgetting. O fool in wine that he had been! To cut himself off from the joys and haunts of men in a moment of drunken insanity! He had driven the marquis with taunts and gibes; he had shouted his ignoble birth across a table; and he expected, by coming to this wilderness, to lose the Nemesis he himself had set upon his heels! What a fool! What a fool! He had cast out his heart for the rooks and the daws. Wherever he ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... wife were tried at London in the spring of 1857 for the murder of their two young children. It was sufficiently proved upon that occasion that Mrs. Bacon (who had already been in a madhouse) committed the crime in a fit of insanity. Bacon, however, had endeavoured to manufacture some evidence in order to give countenance to a theory that the murder had been committed by housebreakers during his absence. He thus incurred suspicion, and was placed upon trial with his wife. It also came out that he had been tried ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... some one thought, more or less weird. Short and slight, and a little bent, but more from habit —the habit of listening and watching—than from age, his face had a stern kind of earnestness and loneliness, and nothing at all of insanity. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... departure from Lourdes when she was two-and-twenty, her sudden disappearance and sequestration in the convent of Saint Gildard at Nevers, whence she never emerged. Didn't that give a semblance of truth to those spurious rumours of insanity which were circulated? Didn't it help people to suppose that she was being shut up, whisked away for fear of some indiscretion on her part, some naive remark or other which might have revealed the secret of a prolonged fraud? Indeed, to speak plainly, I will confess to ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... been observed that genius and madness are nearly allied; that very great talents are seldom found unaccompanied by a touch of insanity, and that there are few Bedlamites who will not, upon a close examination, display symptoms of a powerful, though ruined intellect. According to this hypothesis, the flowers of Parnassus must be blended with ...
— English Satires • Various
... selfish, worldly man. People never liked him much. His favoring, so strongly, the tavern of Slade, and his distillery operations, turned from him some of his best friends. The corruption and terrible fate of his son—and the insanity and death of his wife—all were charged upon him in people's minds, and every one seemed to turn from him instinctively after the fearful tragedy was completed. He never held tip his head afterward. Neighbors shunned him as they would a criminal. ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... which seemed to the multitude an incomprehensible speech, there were but few present who did not inwardly pronounce the king to be laboring under a sudden fit of insanity. ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... any lady of them all,—how often he said all these things, we need not enumerate; nor need we say with what unquestioning trust, and deafness to all the suggestions of probability, Jenny believed. Does not love, in fact, always believe what it hopes? Who would do away with the blessed insanity that clothes the marriage day with such enchantment? Who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... told—and the events which preceded render the tale not improbable—that when on his march to subdue one of his nephews who had rebelled in Sistan, he proposed to put to death every Persian in his army. There can be little doubt that his mind was at this moment in a state of frenzy which amounted to insanity. Some of the principal officers of his court, who learned that their names were in the list of proscribed victims, resolved to save themselves by the assassination of Nadir. The execution of the plot was committed to four chief men who took advantage of their stations, and, under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... and the duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He floundered—he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, that his ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... even tenderly, for her children. Alas, poor maniac! How could I tell her that the girl she had chastised so undeservedly had died in early womanhood, and her son, a fine young man of twenty, had committed suicide, and flung himself off the bridge into the Moira river only a few months before. Her insanity saved her from the knowledge of events, which might have distracted a firmer brain. She seemed hardly satisfied with my evasive answers, and looked doubtingly and cunningly at me, as if some demon had whispered ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... rather fruitless discussion respecting the reason or reasons why Swift did not marry Stella; for if there was any marriage, it was nothing more than a form. Some have supposed that Swift resolved to remain unmarried because the insanity of an uncle and the fits and giddiness to which he was always subject led him to fear insanity in his own case. Others, looking rather to physical causes, have dwelt upon his coldness of temperament and indisposition to love; upon the ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... her mind. How such an impulse could have become deep-seated in a nature like Hetty's will for ever remain a mystery. One would have said that she was the last woman in the world to commit a morbid or ill-regulated act. But the act she was meditating now was one which seemed like the act of insanity. Yet had Hetty never in her life seemed farther removed from any such tendency. She was calm, cheerful, self-contained. If any one saw any change in her, it seemed like nothing more than the natural increase of quiet and decorum coming with her increased age. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... overbearing. He had been commissioned by an imperious authority to sketch—a fever almost amounting to insanity fired his soul. His work was everywhere, for he had miles of forest and jungle country for his studio, and no hampering, sordid cares to distract him. The light of genius in such an obscure world was unrecognised. Being beyond comprehension, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... some great thing in this short life, must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as to the idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.—JOHN FOSTER. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... arms beat the imprisoned water to spume; fists and feet struck living flesh; and one poor, frantic fool clutched the unconscious cause of all this madness in his arms. Then the skipper, steadied from his first insanity of fear by the signs of disaster, lowered his head deliberately, plunged forward and downward, and swam under water for the companion. In his passage he wrenched floundering bodies aside and kicked and struck at floundering legs and arms. Coming ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... Restoration of Property, while perhaps a better name still was The Outline of Sanity. This Chesterton had chosen for a series of articles that became a book. He was asking for a return to the sanity of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and starvation. "We are destroying food because we do not need it. We are starving men because ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... for Edmund. To call or to fancy it a loss, a disappointment, would be a presumption for which she had not words strong enough to satisfy her own humility. To think of him as Miss Crawford might be justified in thinking, would in her be insanity. To her he could be nothing under any circumstances; nothing dearer than a friend. Why did such an idea occur to her even enough to be reprobated and forbidden? It ought not to have touched on the confines of her imagination. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... restored by Christian Science treatment. Her friends employed a homoeopathist, who had the skill and honor to state, as his opinion given to her friends, that "Mrs. Eddy's teach- ings had not produced insanity." This is the only case [10] that could be distorted into the claim of insanity ever having occurred in a class of Mrs. Eddy's; while ac- knowledged and notable cases of insanity have ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... know not: this much I do know, that I find in their writings nothing which has the air of a Divine secret, but only childish lucubrations. (66) I have read and known certain Kabbalistic triflers, whose insanity provokes my unceasing as astonishment. (67) That faults have crept in will, I think, be denied by no sensible person who reads the passage about Saul, above quoted (1 Sam. xiii:1) and also 2 Sam. vi:2: "And David arose and went with all the ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... double representation, "that no seaman would give such an opinion honestly. To anchor on a lee shore in a gale of wind would be an act of madness that I could never excuse to the underwriters, under any circumstances, so long as a rag can be set; but to anchor close to breakers would be insanity." ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... contrectation and of detumescence. But the fallacy of drawing general conclusions from this fact is shown by the additional fact that in idiots and imbeciles premature awakening of the sexual life is also of common occurrence. In cases such as were formerly described as moral insanity, but which in Germany to-day are classed with imbecility, sexual assaults on others are very common at an early age. This is true also of other forms of idiocy and imbecility. In asylums for such patients, feeble-minded children not infrequently make sexual attempts ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... of the insanity without realising its cause. He avoided her touch, and she wondered why. Her voice, heard in another room, drew his heart after her in longing. At the worst moments, to get away from her, he went out of the ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... her hand pressed to her quick-beating heart, real fear in her eyes. What was in his mind? Was this insanity? She had read of men driven mad by disappointment who brutally set upon and killed—But he was facing her now, and she stopped short. His jaw was set but there was no insane light in the eyes that regarded her so steadily. Somehow—and suddenly—her ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... light of the world of the laurelled dead; and the court-house is as completely forgotten as the dreams of a pre-adamite life. Well may he prize that endeared charm, so effectual and safe, without which the brain had long ago been chilled by paralysis, or set on fire of insanity! R. Choate. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... classes: understrappers innumerable; an endless swarm; a monstrous mass. Can it be conjured away by angry breath? No, no. It is no house of cards: for an individual to attempt to puff it down would be ridiculous insanity.' ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... years before, her mind had ceased to act; it had become suddenly weakened without the possibility of recovery. And now, at the age of 104 years, she lived here as if forgotten by the world, a quiet madwoman with an ossified brain, with whom insanity might remain stationary for an indefinite length of time without causing death. Old age had come, however, and had gradually atrophied her muscles. Her flesh was as if eaten away by age. The skin only remained ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Jewel's hair," she replied before she realized her own insanity. Then she hastened on, coloring under the odd look in his eyes, "But you mean Jewel, of course. She will be down at once, I'm sure. It's so kind of you to ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... real pleasures of a gentleman; which occasion neither sickness, shame, nor repentance. Whatever exceeds them, becomes low vice, brutal passion, debauchery, and insanity of, mind; all of which, far from giving satisfaction, bring on dishonor and ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off; and the Mannerings don't want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D, T. or epileptic fits? Sorry I can't offer you a better exchange unless you'd prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word and I'll tell 'em it's fits. All Simla knows about that scene on the Ladies' Mile. Come! I'll give you five ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Lord Melville he wished the Royal Academy to remain open till after the King's funeral, that he might see the exhibition, and said Peel should attend him when he went. This Peel thinks very foolish, and his disposition seems to be to turn the King into ridicule, and to throw the suspicion of insanity upon all his acts. This is the tactique of the Whigs. The King takes the Sacrament on Sunday, and has desired the two English and one Irish archbishop to attend. This ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... yet we approach this apparently new opportunity with the utmost seriousness. We must strive to break the calamitous cycle of frustrations and crises which, if unchecked, could spiral into nuclear disaster; the ultimate insanity. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of both sexes, however amiable and pure their minds may be, should conscientiously abstain from marriage. This applies to all who have a tendency to consumption, scrofula, insanity, or any other of those diseases which are so frequently transmitted to offspring. This very important matter is not sufficiently known, and therefore is not attended to as it ought to be; hence the great amount of sickness ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... not go on. Death or insanity would surely follow. He was warned of it, and for a while he went into a home. Then he got better, and he determined to ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... tangled locks of the man, who had scarcely passed his thirtieth year, were grey, his tall figure was bowed and emaciated, and his naked back was covered with scars and bleeding wales; the wife, who had shared his misery, was blind. She sat cowering on an ass, in the dull torpor of insanity, and though the passing of the convicts made a startling interruption to the silence of the wilderness, and her hearing had remained keen, she paid no heed, but continued to stare indifferently ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by a man who knew more than any one else, and he knew very well what the answer would be. We should suspect a man of insanity who looked for grapes on a thorn bush. And yet we see numbers of both men and women looking for happiness and comfort in the Public House, and judging from their appearance afterwards, we feel sure they went for grapes and found ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... most democratic views, and in a needlessly offensive way. When I did get on terms with him at last, I found that there was nothing on which he could be drawn on to talk so soon as on politics. In substance, I am bound to say that I think his new views are probably saner than his old ones, but the insanity lies in his sudden reasonless change and in his violent blurts ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... feel so badly, now that I know my idea was not incipient insanity," she said, smiling. "I've quite made up my mind to send back to Kentucky for my forgotten church-letter. I've seen all fashionable society in New York can offer and I am weary of its vacuity. I've ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... wrong." Had he got among the Alps on a bright day he might have lost his reason. And even to any one who has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of insanity. The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your eye; the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, which are black with pine-trees, bear it no relation, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... October, D'Eon, meeting M. de Guerchy and a M. de Vergy at Lord Halifax's, in Great George-street, burst out into such violence on some observation made by De Vergy, that it became necessary to call in the guard. His whole behaviour in this affair looks like insanity.-C. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... question, Will the applicant now before me probably become a public charge—that is, fall into the pauper or criminal class—or is he of the right stuff to make a respectable and desirable American citizen? In cases of plain insanity or idiocy or disease the decision is easy; but when it comes to the moral and economic sphere an expert opinion is required. Then, the inspectors have to be constantly on the lookout for deception and fraud. Immigrants who belong to the excluded classes have been carefully ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... the stranger's words had made upon him. Crazy or not, the man had hinted at the possibility of an insincerity on his part, which made him restless. He determined to question him and see if he really would develop a streak of insanity that would justify him in getting rid of him ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... Elizabethans. I love his fine humour and homely fantastic grandeur of style,' returned Dr. Ross warmly. 'The man's whole life, too, is so wonderfully pathetic. Few scenes in fiction are so touching as that sad scene where the unhappy Mary Lamb feels the dreaded attack of insanity coming on, and brother and sister, hand-in-hand, and weeping as they go, perform that sorrowful journey across the fields to the house where Mary is to be sheltered. I used to cry over that story ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... I, without the slightest idea of what I was doing or why I did it. Sometimes I wonder if there has ever been any insanity in our family. I know there have been fools, for I have my Uncle ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... the battle song and battle standard, they have concentrated by beautiful imagination the cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes, colors have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, in the decline of the Roman Empire; black against ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... and vitality in existing architecture all over the world. (Compare "Seven Lamps," chap. ii.) All the Gothics in existence, southern or northern, were corrupted at once: the German and French lost themselves in every species of extravagance; the English Gothic was confined, in its insanity, by a strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the mainland into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and the Cathedral of Como (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... don't you? Well, maybe it isn't, but insanity is. It's a very good reason for voiding a contract voidable on grounds of unfitness ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... who took the name of Whithed for his uncle's estate and, as heir to him, recovered Mr. Norton's estate, which he had left to the Parliament for the use of the poor, etc,; but the will was set aside for insanity. [See ant'e.) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... in the punishment of the guilty. Thus ended the procedure against Damien and his family, in a manner not very favourable to the avowed clemency of Louis, or the acknowledged humanity of the French nation. It appeared from undoubted evidence, that the attempt on the king's life was the result of insanity, and a disturbed imagination. Several instances of a disordered mind had before been observed in his conduct, and the detestation justly due to the enormity of his crime ought now to have been absorbed in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... origin, named Ul-Jabal. The baronet had consumed his vitality in the life-long attempt to sound the too fervid Maelstrom of Oriental research, and his mind had perhaps caught from his studies a tinge of their morbidness, their esotericism, their insanity. He had for some years past been engaged in the task of writing a stupendous work on Pre-Zoroastrian Theogonies, in which, it is to be supposed, Ul-Jabal acted somewhat in the capacity of secretary. But I will give verbatim the extracts from ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... comely burgess, is now emaciated with poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by an insane lightness about the eyes; a withered and blighted skin and complexion; features begrimed with snuff, charged with the self-importance peculiar to insanity; and a habit of perpetually speaking to himself. Such was my unfortunate client; and I must allow, Darsie, that my profession had need to do a great deal of good, if, as is much to be feared, it brings many individuals to ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... exactly suited to the age; neither behind it nor in advance of it; but acute enough to penetrate its mystery ere it was discovered by any other. Enthusiastic, chivalrous, bigoted, and, if not insane, not far removed from insanity, he was the very prototype of the time. True enthusiasm is always persevering and always eloquent, and these two qualities were united in no common degree in the person of this extraordinary preacher. He was a monk of Amiens, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... in English, Cauchemar in French, [Greek: Ephialtes] in Greek, meaning one which rides upon another. So with epilepsy, which signifies the act of being seized by any one; it was, like all nervous diseases, held to be a sacred evil, and those afflicted by it were supposed to be possessed. Insanity was regarded in the same way, as we see in the Bible where Saul's melancholy is said to be an evil spirit sent from God. A furious madman was supposed to have been carried off by a demon, and in Persia the insane were said to be ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... but evil is of the heart. I wouldn't have you condemn yourself too severely for harm that you didn't intend—that's remorse—that's insanity; and I wouldn't have you fall under the condemnation of another's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... except the profession of homemaking. A young man and a young woman say: "I believe we'll get married" and forthwith they do. The state sanctions it, and the church blesses it. They may be consumptive, epileptic, shiftless, immoral, or with a tendency to insanity. No matter. They may go on and reproduce their kind. They are perfectly free to bring children into the world, who are a burden and a menace to society. Society has to bear it—that is all! "Be fruitful and multiply!" declares ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... highly organic communal life of Quaker Hill. Connecticut people, some of them of the same original Quaker stock, have settled on small holdings of lands, and held them till isolation and poverty have driven them to suicide, insanity or other miseries. Quaker Hill was from the beginning differentiated into a healthier diversity, and it has been the ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... copy "A blind man's wife needs no paint," which he defended as "Proverbs, sir, Proverbs." Giving up part of his business to his nephew, he still sat up at night baking, for the nephew, he said, was only in the A B C book of baking, and he also had other troubles: there was insanity in his family, and he was much harassed. His kindness and simplicity were sometimes abused. He never had the heart to refuse to lend money, or to deny bread on credit to hopeless debtors; and altogether ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... not deny that he killed Richardson, yet he was acquitted on the plea of insanity, and was, at the same time, made the legal guardian of his child, a boy, then, twelve years of age, and walked out of the court with him, hand in hand. What a travesty on justice and common sense that, while a man is declared too insane to be ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... began in November and lasted more than two months. The defence was insanity. The assassin maintained that he was inspired to commit the deed, and that it was a political necessity. The "stalwart" Republicans, headed by Senator Conkling, had quarrelled with the President over certain appointments unacceptable to the New York senator; ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... with saliva. All who were found guilty were sent to the army in America, or the plantations. A sergeant had compassion on him, and said, 'Tell me, gudeman, if you are really out of your mind. I'll befriend you.' He confessed that he only feigned insanity, because he had a wife and three bairns at home who would starve if he were sent to the army. 'Dinna say onything mair to ony body,' said the kind-hearted sergeant. He then said to the commanding officer, 'They have given us a man clean out of his mind: I can do nothing with the like o' him,' The ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... permitted to fall a prey to her momentary excitement, everything would have been lost for Shotaye. Had Say's mind given way permanently, the cause of that calamity would have been attributed to her, and she would have been charged with her friend's insanity in addition to the charge of witchcraft ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... the grave, l. 87. Many theatric preachers among the Methodists successfully inculcate the fear of death and of Hell, and live luxuriously on the folly of their hearers: those who suffer under this insanity, are generally most innocent and harmless people, who are then liable to accuse themselves of the greatest imaginary crimes; and have so much intellectual cowardice, that they dare not reason about those things, which they are directed by their priests to believe. Where this intellectual ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... advice. Should all or any of the parties refuse to accept it, an appeal lies to the Central Court of Arbitration, composed of a judge of the Supreme Court sitting with two assessors representing capital and labour respectively. The trio are appointed for three years, and in default of crime or insanity can only be removed by statute. Their court may not be appealed from, and their procedure is not fettered by precedent. No disputant may employ counsel unless all agree to do so. The decisions of this Court are binding in law, and may be enforced by pains ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... either he or Mr. Lindsay must certainly be in the first stage of mild insanity, and he did not think that he himself could be out of his wits. He must try one more question. He had become so mystified that he forgot himself, and began putting his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... permanently impaired by the trip. He was threatened with absolute blindness, and was compelled to have all his notes read to him and to dictate his histories. For years he was forbidden literary work on account of insomnia and intense cerebral pain which threatened insanity, and on account of lameness he was long confined to a wheel chair. He rose above every obstacle, however, and with silent fortitude bore his sufferings, working whenever he could, if for only a bare half ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... mercy, is it given to read the mixed celestial cypher: not in mercy, save as a penance merciful in issue.' His mischievous influence over the popular mind is sealed by the partial and latent degree of his insanity, for 'madness that doth least declare itself endangers most, and ever most infects the unsound many.' His great natural powers are tainted by the one black spot; his youth has been devoted to books, to the study of chemistry and mechanics; ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... gently laying my hand on his arm, and speaking in a low voice, but with much earnestness; "this darkness is an emblem of our present life. You cannot see me, but you hear my voice and feel the touch of my hand. For any thing you know, I may be seized with a sudden fit of insanity. I may be about to stab you in this darkness; such things have been. You have lost, with the light, more than half the indications of affection which that would disclose. But you trust to the probable; ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... 'Battery' I wrote that same night. I am ashamed to have to confess the fact, but I had taken more champagne than, I hope, I ever shall again; and, irreverent as it must seem to mention the fact in such a connection, I was possessed almost to insanity with your beauty, and the graciousness of your behavior to me. Everything around me was pervaded with rose-color and rose-odor, when, my head and heart, my imagination and senses, my memory and hope full of yourself, I sat down to read your poem. I was like one in an opium-dream. I saw everything ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... was suffering from one of his terrible fits of insanity, but a great assembly was held, at which princes, councillors, lords, doctors of law, and prominent citizens were present. A monk of the Cordeliers, named John Petit, then spoke for five hours in justification ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... am ahead of my story. When the great exodus from the cities around San Francisco Bay began, and while the telephones were still working, I talked with my brother. I told him this flight from the cities was insanity, that there were no symptoms of the plague in me, and that the thing for us to do was to isolate ourselves and our relatives in some safe place. We decided on the Chemistry Building, at the university, and we planned to lay in a supply of provisions, and by force of arms to prevent ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... marriage is delayed too long in either sex, say from thirty to forty-five, the offspring will often be puny and more liable to insanity, idiocy, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... review before me. I thought of his toils among the poor and lowly, the vicious and depraved,—of his broken sleep,—the interruptions of his social ease,—and then of the many scenes so repugnant to delicate nerves which he has to pass through,—scenes of pain and insanity, of maimed and severed limbs, and all the eccentricities and fearful forms of disease. These considerations pressed with such weight on my mind that for a time my ancestral craft was in danger of being ignominiously rejected by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the cop were impossible, impassable. Corson found the thing too outrageously ridiculous to be handled by sane argument; his insanity in ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... derangement, and seems now just like all the other poor creatures who come to me for help and pity. I suppose her constant child-bearing and hard labour in the fields at the same time may have produced the temporary insanity. ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... . . Sah-luma listened with placid indifference. "'Tis a case of self-slaughter"—pursued Zibya chattily.. "or so say the wise writers who are supposed to know everything, . . self-slaughter committed during a state of temporary insanity! Well, well! I myself would ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... feebleness, which might forbid her to co-operate with us in any degree at the critical moment; and the main danger was—delay. We pushed forward, therefore, in our attempts with prodigious energy, and I for my part with an energy like that of insanity. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... They are degenerate Puritans. There are a great many like them, who have petered out on the stony farms, or in little clerkships, or in asylums of one sort or another. The stock was too finely bred in and in, over and over, for three hundred years nearly. Insanity and vice have been hoarded and repressed and passed on." He seemed to ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... recounted, quite frankly, his unjust suspicions of the hardware dealer, and told of the interview in which the full details of this transaction were disclosed by West, as well as the truth relating to the death of Captain Wegg and the sudden insanity and paralysis of ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... could remember. A thing the origin of which you cannot trace cannot be seriously considered. It is an illusion. Or perhaps mine was a physical state, some sort of disease akin to melancholia which is a form of insanity? The only moments of relief I could remember were when she and I would start squabbling like two passionate infants in a nursery, over anything under heaven, over a phrase, a word sometimes, in the great light of the glass rotunda, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... hardened Rowland alone dares unlock the door. Instantly, in her shroud, mad, starved, with the flesh gnawed from her own fair shoulders, rushes out the maniac Charlotte: in phrensied half-reason she has seized Rowland by the throat, with the strength of insanity has strangled him, and then falls dead upon the steps of the vault! Of Saville—who, as having swooned, is spared all this scene of horror, and who leaves the country for ever—little or nothing is more said: and Clopton ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... I will have to make a clean breast of it. Toglet is more or less insane. His folks do not care to place him in an asylum, and so I offered to take care of him for a while. It was his sudden fit of insanity that caused all ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield
... of insanity, Doctor?" observed the Idiot, with a look of wonder at the three shuffling boarders opposite him, and turning ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... awful intervals of about a minute, walking slowly through every street, lane, and close of the town. The children followed him in staring silence; the women gazed from their doors in awe as he passed. The insanity which gleamed in his eyes, and his pale long-drawn countenance, heightened the effect of the terrible prediction. His belief took theirs ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... forest, his features express insanity, his dress is disordered. Clouds gather overhead. He rushes frantically after a cloud which he mistakes for a demon that carried ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... a cruel wrong. He began to despair of himself; he wrestled in unceasing prayer, fasted and scourged himself. At one time the priests had to break into his cell in which he had been lying for days in a condition not far from insanity. With warm sympathy Staupitz looked upon such heart-rending torment, and sought to give him peace by blunt counsel. Once when Luther had written to him, "Oh, my sin! My sin! My sin!" his spiritual adviser gave him the answer, "You long to be without sin, and you have no real ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... thought was that the strain of eccentricity in his humble little friend had developed into actual insanity. But, on further consideration, he was disposed to take another view. He felt bound to admit that, though there had been a strangeness in the behaviour of the little man throughout his visit, it had not afforded any actual ground for the suspicion of insanity, ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... madman's reason is gone—we pity, but we cannot blame him; but in the victim of strong drink reason is suspended but not destroyed, and in all the distortion, grimaces, reelings, babblings, ravings of the miserable wretch while his sin is on him, we see a self-inflicted insanity, and a degradation which is not ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... that monotony and discomfort are the cause of nervous and mental breakdown, witness the often-mentioned insanity among farmers' wives and the nervous breakdowns attributable to pain and strain, even though it be, as in many cases of eyestrain, so slight as not to be recognized ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... countered, seeking to woo him into a better humor, "would you construe silence on a woman's part as necessarily a mark of insanity? It is a rare thing, I concede. But might it not sometimes be an admirable ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... who keep so tight a rein on the passions and propensities, that these make the most terrible work when they break loose. De Quincey, in one of his essays on his contemporaries, giving a sketch of a man of great genius and high scholarship, whose life was early clouded by insanity, gives some curious statements about the effects of the system of rigid restraint exercised by the Society of Friends, which I am not prepared either to support or contradict. After describing the system of restraint itself, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... fright,—as in the case of a fire—of rheumatic pains and lameness apparently incurable. But even dysentery has sometimes resolved an internal stoppage, and the itch has been a cure for melancholy madness and insanity: is the itch, for this, less ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... gained her; and I told her this in terms of respectful adoration. I worshipped the divinity, even while I attempted to profane the altar. When I had sent this letter I was in despair. Conviction of the insanity of my conduct flashed across my mind. I expected never to see her again. There came an answer; I opened it with the greatest agitation; to my surprise, an appointment. Why trouble you with a detail of my feelings, my mad hope, my dark despair! The moment for the interview ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... in the American Congress who boldly refuse to have their country involved in the European slaughter merely for the sake of gratifying Wilson's vainglorious ambition, there is hope that the common sense of the American people will assert itself and that they will not permit the appalling insanity to spread to the new world that holds the old world in ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color to her corpse-like complexion. Two light-blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate. She remembered Gow the pirate, who had been a native of these islands, in which he closed his career. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... consulate, and then divulge the affair. It may be mentioned here, that two days before arriving at Sockna, I turned to look at one of the female slaves, who was last of all, and being driven along by the whip, with several others, and thought I saw symptoms of insanity marked in her face. "Why," I observed to the driver, "this woman is mad!" "Mad!" he replied; "No, she went blind yesterday." On examining her, I found she was both blind and mad from over-driving. What a happiness if the poor creature had died or been flogged to death! She would then have ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... inflicts. Marriage and competency had protected this one from the deteriorations which almost inevitably await those of her class, but they could not save her from the natural process of an undisciplined mind, an ungoverned temper, and a caprice verging on insanity. This self-torment of caprice could be assuaged only by constant change of circumstance and surroundings; her only resource was to metamorphose things about her as often and as rapidly as possible. She changed her lodgings, her furniture, her clothes, retrimmed her bonnets continually, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... she do against all the laws, the political and commercial interests, the great public apathy? Relieve a case here and there, yes. But to dwell upon the gigantic evil, with no means of making head against it, was to invite insanity. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... illiteracy; families; health; temperance; crime; morality; pauperism; defectives; insanity; etc. ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... Aberdeen. She was an amiable and lovely woman. Dr Johnson, when he saw her in London, along with her husband, seemed to think more highly of her than of him. He was not aware, however, of a fact which became afterwards distressingly apparent—that from her mother she inherited a tendency to insanity, which broke out in capricious waywardness, some time before it culminated in madness. We know not but this may explain Dr Johnson's saying to Boswell—"Beattie," he said, "when he came first to London, 'sunk upon' us that he was married," 'i.e.', tried to hide that he was married. Perhaps the reason ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... body to be governed more completely by the instinctive mind. Less evolved humans are not affected, apparently, by the mental storms, psychic changes, and spiritual disharmonies that disturb the health of the more evolved types. We have an illustration of this in the case of some forms of insanity. The patient "goes out of his mind," with the result that his bodily health becomes wonderfully good. The instinctive mind takes control of things, and rude, robust animal health is the result. When the patient was sane and his mind filled with ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... Isaac's parents acquired great influence over him by their uniform system of forbearance and tenderness; their own good sense and benevolence having suggested the ideas which regulate the treatment of insanity at the present period. The day spent in Woodbury and its vicinity was a bright spot in Friend Hopper's life, to which he always reverted with a kind of saddened pleasure. The heat of the season had been tempered by floating clouds, and when they returned to Philadelphia, there was a faint rainbow ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... and mothers: "In the home, we do income-work for which we do not receive income. When strangers do this work, they are paid, and we are not." In addition, many a woman is so bound down by daily tasks, that her whole soul cries out, and we hear of the high rate of insanity among farmers' wives, of nervous prostration of the housewives in our towns, and become accustomed to such expressions as "the death of a woman ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in nature, in the very pattering of the drops and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... with their varied and suggestive metaphors, were interpolated on the blank page of the MS. The reference in the expression 'tottering throne' in line 104 is to the threatened insanity of ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... threw herself at the feet of the Queen, implored her pardon, and disturbed the Temple for many days with the sight and the noise of her madness. The Princesses, forgetting the denunciations of this unfortunate being, in consideration of her repentance and insanity, watched over her by turns, and deprived themselves of their own food to relieve her.—LAMARTINE, "History of the Girondists," vol. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... city. No labor was too hard for me, no study too difficult. I was becoming a new man, I saw all that was still lacking, and how to reach it, and I watched you, unknown, at a distance. Then I heard of your engagement: you were lost, and something of which I had begun to dream, became insanity. I determined to trample it out of my life. The daughter of the master-builder, whose first assistant I was, had always favored me in her society; and I soon persuaded her to love me. I fancied, too, that I loved her as most married men seemed to love ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... I don't know exactly what the trouble was. You know she had been in such an unusual state of exhilaration all that summer; and as soon as she left New Hampshire and began the old city-life, she became oppressed with a speechless melancholy, I believe, so that the doctors foreboded insanity. She expressed great disinclination to follow their advice, and her husband finally banished them all. It was a great care to him; he altered much. McLean surmised that she didn't like to see him, while she was in this state; for, though he used ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... a shuddering breath. She was afraid of Roger Delane. From the early days of her marriage she had been afraid of him. There was about him the incalculable something which means moral insanity—abnormal processes of mind working through uncontrolled will. You could never reason with or influence him, where his appetites or his passions were concerned. A mocking spirit looked out upon you, just before his blow fell. He was ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Insane Hospital, in his last annual report, states that he has carefully tabulated for many years the causes of insanity in his patients, and finds intemperance the highest on the list. First, intemperance in the use of liquor, secondly, of tobacco, and ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... name or rank should have engaged me," replied Rose, "to place myself where apprehension alone, even without the terrors of a real visitation, might have punished my presumption with insanity. But what, in the name of Heaven, did you see at this ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... of over twenty hours this man had been behaving oddly; and they had conceived something more than a suspicion of his insanity. The death of the sailor lying at the bottom of the boat, now the ninth, had rendered him for a time more tranquil, and he sat quiet on his seat, with elbows resting on his knees, his cheeks held between the palms of his hands. But the wild stare in his eyes seemed to have ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... expenses, beginning with twenty-five shillings per week as rent, possibly be met by the only actual certain family income, their 50 per annum from a mortgage? For the Misses Leaf were or that old-fashioned stamp which believed that to reckon an income by mere probabilities is either insanity ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. Her sorrows ask not words but tears; and her madness has precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away, and veil our eyes in reverential pity and too ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... agues, and above all, their indigestion, which is the prevailing trouble in that section of the country. But I confess that I was nearly tired out with these consultations. In consequence of frequent intermarriages there are many deaf and dumb persons among them, and epilepsy and insanity ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... you're outside it, but we're being brought into it all the same—how can we help it when we love the people who are in it? It's so easy to say that it's nonsense, that people ought to be wiser nowadays; that it's hysteria, even insanity—I know all that and, of course, I don't believe for a moment that God's coming in a chariot of fire on New Year's Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn't end it—it ought to end it, but it doesn't. There's more in some people's ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... put him to bed. The next morning he was quite recovered, so far as regarded his mere bodily health. Of his mind I say nothing, of course. I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to any ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and curiously at the girl talking so strangely to him. What had she heard? What did she know? or was this only an outburst of insanity? She certainly looked crazy as she lay there talking to him. He was sure of it a moment after when, as if the nature of her thoughts had changed suddenly, ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... of higher animals and the "instinct" of ants there is unquestionably a great gulf fixed. I make this statement unhesitatingly, notwithstanding that I should no more willingly attempt to define "instinct" than to give an exact definition of "insanity." In the latter case one may make the definition so limited as practically to exclude all save one class of cases, or so wide as to include even the judge on the bench. In the case of instinct, the rigid definition of one authority might cause ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various |
