"Monomania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intelligence bears the same relation to the brain as disordered respiration does to the lungs, it is not logical, reasoning a priori, to assume the possibility that the studious or other mental habits of a Kephalalgic, and gifted youth, can be reversed, and erotic monomania germinate, with all the morbid phenomena of isolation, dejection of the spirits, and abnormal exaltation of the powers of wit and ratiocination, without some considerable impairment, derangement, disturbance, or modification, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... we are face to face with a crime committed without any motive, as a result of some morbid impulse, a by no means uncommon occurrence, monomania or temporary insanity? ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... men poured into the Perche district from no one knows where, some armed with only a piece of salt pork, a little meal, and a prospecting pick; some mounted on mules, others on foot; old men and men half-crippled were among the number, but all bitten by the monomania which possesses every prospector. Now there are probably 2,000 men in the Perche district, and the number of prospects located must far exceed 1,000. Three miners from there with whom I was talking recently owned forty-seven mines ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... time, he was not only maligned by unknown enemies, and abused by anonymous writers, but attempts of other kinds are said to have been made to render his life as uncomfortable as possible. There are grounds, however, for doubting whether Shelley was not subject to a kind of monomania upon this and similar points. In 1821, he wrote his Adonais, a monody on the death of Keats. Part of this poem had its origin in the mistaken notion, that the illness and death of Keats were caused by a brutal criticism ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... Russia, advanced in civilization, and opened their medical schools to women; so did the United States: only the pig-headed Briton stood stock-still, and gloried in his minority of one; as if one small island is likely to be right in its monomania, and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... amongst themselves. The Doctor thought that he had been among some ruins, and met with a fall. Mr. Figgs suggested that he might have been run over. The Senator thought it was some Italian epidemic. Buttons was incapable of thinking rationally about any thing just then. He was the victim of a monomania: the Spaniards! ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... then in the beginning of the morbid attacks which some time later destroyed his health completely. He was sleepless, excitable, and possessed by the monomania of persecution. His family had tried to induce him to go away for a change, but the morbid condition made him unwilling to do so, and he never left his house until late in the evening, under the prepossession of being watched by enemies. I recommended him to try chloral, then a nearly ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... remarkable for a harsh, unyielding pride, a haughty consciousness of her hereditary and personal advantages, which made her almost incapable of control. Judging from many traditionary anecdotes, this peculiar temper was hardly less than a monomania; or if the acts which it inspired were those of a sane person, it seemed due from Providence that pride so sinful should be followed by as severe a retribution. That tinge of the marvellous which is thrown ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is how it is to be done," interposed Ezra. He was looking very nervous and uneasy. Hard as he was, he had neither the pseudo-religious monomania of his father, nor the callous brutality of Burt, and he shuddered at the thought of what was to come. His eyes were red and bleared, and he sat with one arm thrown over the back of his chair, while he drummed ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... about his Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she liked his young naivete and monomania; she liked his face and all his gestures, and the poise and movement ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... fate befell him. The monomania of his wife became chronic. A letter which she wrote and sent by special messenger called forth from Thomas this loving sympathy:—"You must endeavour to consider it a disease. The eyes and ears of many are upon you, to whom your conduct is unimpeachable with ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... covered in red Utrecht velvet, it fascinated Birotteau. From the day when the canon's friend first laid eyes on the red damask curtains, the mahogany furniture, the Aubusson carpet which adorned the vast room, then lately painted, his envy of Chapeloud's apartment became a monomania hidden within his breast. To live there, to sleep in that bed with the silk curtains where the canon slept, to have all Chapeloud's comforts about him, would be, Birotteau felt, complete happiness; he saw nothing beyond it. All the envy, all the ambition which the things of this world give birth ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... the possibilities of monomania," I answered. "There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the 'idee fixe,' which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way. A man who ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... family, was probably, nay, certainly, the possessor of an exclusive knowledge regarding the place of a vast secret hoard. All the crimes and horrors that ensued are attributable to the action of this monomania. On the 29th, he made the new Titular, Bedar Bakht, inflict corporal chastisement upon his venerable predecessor. On the 30th, a similar outrage was committed upon several of the ladies of Shah Alam's family, who filled ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... contemplation of his merits has confused you into a notion that they are your own, and you think him an usurper of the laurel crown that is yours by the divine right of genius. What an unhappy monomania! Still, your application for redress to us is unaccountable. You should know that we Black Foresters, lawless as you may suppose us, are Wordsworth's liegemen. He is our intellectual Chief. We call him the General! We are ever busy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... the countess had left Paris?" said la Peyrade, rushing at the chance of speaking on the subject of his present monomania. ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... opinions seemed to be incompatible with all organised government, except a popular despotism, such as the French empire exemplified. Hatred to England, her name, race, and institutions, seems to have amounted to a monomania with him; yet he was not himself of Celtic lineage. His intolerance of opinion and rashness of action would have been utterly unendurable, were it not for the directness of his aims, the sincerity of his motives, the disinterestedness ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the spiritual forces are mobilized, where Universities, Churches, and newspapers are subject to the State, there is nothing to counteract the doctrinaire spirit. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the heresy of race should have become a fixed idea, a monomania, in the German Empire. In Great Britain the theories of the apostate Englishman Chamberlain could not have struck deep root, notwithstanding all the enthusiastic praise which Mr. Bernard Shaw has given ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... crisis. Iscah Nicholas, though his strength was beyond question, was heavy and slow. Yet he was struggling with surprising agility. He was animated by a convulsive energy, a volcanic outburst characteristic of the obsession of monomania. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... necessary continually to remind ourselves, when we are tempted to be incensed at his deportment, of the mode in which he had been treated, of his consuming sense of a mission, and his determination, little short of monomania, to return to its service. He and everybody knew that his conviction was an act of legal violence. There was no prospect of rescue through the machinery of the law from an overwhelming disaster which demonstrated law to be without a conscience ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... see all kinds of monomania and insanity. We learn from them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in minds supposed to be sane, so that we have nothing but compassion for a large class of persons condemned as sinners by theologians, but considered by us as invalids. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of 'an ancient and fish- like smell' about it, and Calais blown and sea-washed pure; Calais represented at the Buffet by savoury roast fowls, hot coffee, cognac, and Bordeaux; and Calais represented everywhere by flitting persons with a monomania for changing money—though I never shall be able to understand in my present state of existence how they live by it, but I suppose I should, if I understood the currency question—Calais en gros, and Calais en detail, forgive one who has deeply wronged you.—I was not fully ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches. His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might, without exaggeration, be called a 'long disease,' should defend himself by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when exposed to the brutal horseplay ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... discernment, intelligence, power of judgment, strength of character; look at them, abased and made ridiculous, beyond all others, by their stupid ecclesiastical superstition, which appears amongst their other abilities like a fixed idea or monomania. For this they have to thank the circumstance that education is in the hands of the clergy, whose endeavor it is to impress all the articles of belief, at the earliest age, in a way that amounts to a kind ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... impression on me. Mrs. Ransome, the lady in whose house he lived, had left her home very suddenly. He anticipated a like return; so, ever since her departure, it had been his invariable custom to have the table set for three, so that he might never be surprised by her arrival. It had become a monomania with him. Never did he sit down without there being enough before him for a small family, and as his food was all brought in cooked from a neighboring restaurant, this eccentricity of his was well known, ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... reader already knows, was a somewhat unobservant man of what was passing around him in the world. He had his own deep, stern trains of thought, which he pursued with a passionate earnestness almost amounting to monomania. The actions, words, and even looks of those few in whom he took an interest, he could sometimes watch and comment on in his own mind with intense study. True, he watched without understanding, and commented wrongly; for he had too little experience ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... sighing. "I never can enter into the taste the others have for that style of thing; but Bobus might have succeeded. You must have expected it of him, at the time when he and I used to laugh at what we thought was a monomania on your part for our taking up medical science as a tribute to our father, when we did not ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... doctor's advice Nesta had gone to her as little as possible, while taking every care to guard her and see to her comfort. All day long she sat brooding—and only Esther Mawson, now for some time in her full confidence, knew that her brooding was rapidly developing into a monomania. Mrs. Mallathorpe, indeed, had but one thought in her mind—the eventual circumventing of Pratt, and the ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... brain[obs3]; delusion, hallucination; lycanthropy[obs3]; brain storm|!. vertigo, dizziness, swimming; sunstroke, coup de soleil[Fr], siriasis[obs3]. fanaticism, infatuation, craze; oddity, eccentricity, twist, monomania (caprice) 608; kleptodipsomania[obs3]; hypochondriasis &c. (low spirits) 837[Med]; melancholia, depression, clinical depression, severe depression; hysteria; amentia[obs3]. screw loose, tile loose, slate loose; bee in one's bonnet, rats in the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... steps for the safety or salvation of his command. I could but conclude that the man was either insane, premeditated treachery to his troops, or perhaps that his grossly intemperate habits long continued had produced idiocy or monomania. In either case the command was imperiled, and a military necessity demanded that something be done, and that without delay. I took the only step I believed available to save your troops. I arrested ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... attacking her beliefs, but I must be honest with you—I don't like Mr. Clarke. There's something unwholesome about him, and what you've told me to-day is not reassuring. Evidently he took the death of his wife very hard, and it has added to his natural tendency towards a sort of spiritual monomania. As a matter of fact, he's more Spiritualist than Calvinist at present. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... hundred yards before he heard soft footsteps tracking him. He turned and was disappointed to see that it was only Karospina, who came up to him, breathing heavily, and in his catlike eyes the fixed expression of monomania. He stuttered, waving his ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... surfaces of the soul or to penetrating into the accessible and illuminated caverns, restoring here and there the layers of capital sins, studying their veins, their growths, and noting, like Balzac for example, the layers of strata in the soul possessed by the monomania of a passion, by ambition, by avarice, by paternal stupidity, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... a comfortable seat. He ordered two cups of tea with wafers, and beckoned to some delightful men and women to whom he introduced me as his friend Miss Sanborn, thus putting me at my ease. He was also ever patient about my monomania of trying to prove that women possess both wit and humour. He spoke of his first wife as the wittiest woman he had ever known, giving convincing proof. A few men were on my side, but they could be counted on one hand omitting the thumb. But I worked on this theme until I had more than ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... prisoner knew what he was doing and whether it was wrong. But we have learnt that a man may be perfectly well aware that he is committing a murder, and know murders to be forbidden in the Ten Commandments, and yet unable to refrain from murder. He has, say the doctors, homicidal monomania, and it is monstrous to call in the hangman when you ought to be sending for the doctor. The lawyer naturally objects to the introduction of this uncertain element, which may be easily turned to account by 'experts' capable of finding symptoms of all kinds of monomania. Fitzjames, however, after ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... thin, emaciated, black, and hairy—signs denoting him greatly affected by the disease proceeding from a defect in the hypochondria; which disease, by lapse of time, being naturalised, chronic, habitual, ingrained, and established within him, might well degenerate either into monomania, or into phthisis, or into apoplexy, or even into downright frenzy and raving. All this being taken for granted, since a disease well-known is a disease half cured, for ignoti nulla est curatio morbis, ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... on to tell her how it was a pure platonic love for diamonds themselves that had turned me to trade in those lovely stones; how their iridescent glitter delighted my eye, and how the very act of handling them in their dull, rough, uncut state was a joy to me that almost amounted to monomania. The theme pleased her, and she asked me to go on. I had not spoken of diamonds once during all those long years of darkness, and to discourse about them again to any one who took the obvious interest in them that she did was for me an indulgence nothing short ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... times he had said to himself—with a shivering soul cowering within him—that this was only part of it all and was a beginning, perhaps, of religious monomania. ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... incendiary fires which arise from a species of monomania in boys and girls. Not many years ago, the men of the Brigade were occupied for hours in putting out no less than half a dozen fires which broke out one after another in a house in West Smithfield, and it was at last discovered that they were occasioned by a youth ...
— Fires and Firemen • Anon.
... is detached—two more are laid hold of. The piece gets rent down the middle—a rag is caught up, then another, and whatever comes to hand is sewn together in breathless haste. The effect of this stitching monomania has been, to keep constantly changing the map of Europe, to bring together, as chance willed it, races and religions of every pattern, and to trouble the existence of twenty peoples, without making the unity of a nation. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... once give an account of some out-of-the-way atrocity that has the charm of being novel, and certain depraved minds fasten to it like leeches. They brood over and revolve it—the idea grows up, a horrid phantasmalian monomania; and all of a sudden, in a hundred different places, the one seed sown by the leaden types ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... beauties of a marvellous cap. The brother and sister began to think the atmosphere of the rue Saint-Denis unhealthy, and the smell of the mud in the markets made them long for the fragrance of the Provins roses. They were the victims of a genuine nostalgia, and also of a monomania, frustrated at present by the necessity of selling their tapes and bobbins before they could leave Paris. The promised land of the valley of Provins attracted these Hebrews all the more because they had really suffered, and for a long ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... pursue the solution of the great Problem, might he not change that determination at a moment when he foresaw success? He was now fifty-nine years old. At that age a predominant idea contracts a certain peevish fixedness which is the first stage of monomania. ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... spelling out words from them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is and what that is; but his whole stock from beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for anything I can say. It's a monomania with him to think he is possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... don't you trouble; I shall find out quick enough. And don't be offended," he added. "You see, I'm obsessed—that's the new word, you know—by this detective business. I want to find out everything about everybody. But there's no harm in me; it's a kind of monomania; and if you don't want me to be ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... succeed him in the title—when he gained it. Time passed, and he became enraged. His anger crushed the timid woman who shared his strange lot. His dominating temperament and moody pride were too much for her gentle soul. She became desperately afraid of him and his stern ways, of that monomania which kept them wandering through the country searching for links in a [pedigree] which had to be traced back for hundreds of years before Robert Turold could grasp his ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... fight! It's a disease, I tell you—a monomania like any other monomania. Why don't they say to a crazy man in his lucid intervals, 'Trouble with you is your lack of will power and moral strength. Brace up. Go ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... Walpole remarks that they might be worth L80,000 for anybody who loved hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese. Scientific research, that is, revealed itself to contemporaries as a childish and absurd monomania, unworthy of a man of sense. John Hunter had not yet begun to form the unequalled museum of physiology, and even the scientific collectors could have but a dim perception of the importance of a minute observation of natural phenomena. The contempt for such collections naturally ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... from the very day on which the Union was proclaimed, the Catholic question became a ministerial difficulty. Pitt's administration failed on this very point, although it had seemed invincible a few weeks before. The obstinacy of the King, which, indeed, almost amounted to a monomania, was the principal cause. He made it a personal matter, declared it the "most jacobinical thing he had ever heard of;" and he informed the world at large that he would consider any man who proposed it his personal enemy. Pitt resigned. Opinions varied as to his motives. He returned ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... my mind, suggested an idea, which I was literally afraid to express openly, or even to encourage secretly. I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. I resolved, this time, in defence of my own courage and my own sense, to come to no decision that plain fact did not ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... foreigners from the wilds of America, the Cape of Good Hope, and even savages from the isles of the Pacific; in fact, she was the notorious lion-hunter of her age. It was supposed that she had a peculiar ignorance of the laws of meum and tuum, and that her monomania was such that she would try to get possession of whatever she could place her hands upon; so that it was dangerous to leave in the ante-room anything of value. On application being made, however, the articles were usually returned the following day, ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... word! 'pon my word!" said the doctor, "the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of! Who'd have thought that calm, clearheaded woman would ever have committed such a folly? It's a case of monomania; a real monomania, Father Antoine; never can be sure of such a brain's that; may take another, any day; clear case of monomania; most uncomfortable! uncomfortable! so embarrassing! don't you know? eh? What's going ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... fresh evidence may be forthcoming which may unmistakably bring the guilt home to him. I have talked it over with Ned several times, and he now takes the same view of it as I do. The idea of his guilt has become a sort of monomania with her, and nothing save the most clear and convincing proof of his innocence would have any effect upon her mind. If that is ever forthcoming she may recover, and the two may be brought together again. At the ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... the sooner we know it the better," she argued. "Daddy says little, but it is becoming a monomania with him—the dread. I wish to put an end to his suspense. Besides, if—if this Mr. Blake is as remarkable as you and the reports say he is, it will be interesting to meet him. My only fear is that so great an engineer will not think it worth ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... The kind of dream in which children often live is not without analogy to somnambulism. The fixed idea is another instance of the same phenomenon, which is produced in the waking state, and which, when exaggerated, becomes monomania, a kind of morbid monoideism; children, having very few ideas, would very soon acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... case there were as many as twelve or fifteen persons. This, however, is seldom stated in the indictment, as, if it is, the punishment is still death by the law, and it is supposed that a conviction is more easily obtained, by the capital charge being waived. Monomania is a rare cause of incendiarism, but still several well-certified cases have occurred in which no possible motive could be given. In one instance a youth of fifteen set fire to his father's premises ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... were weapons against which Mackintosh had nothing to counter, and he learned that the wisest thing was never to betray his irritation. He learned to control himself. But his hatred grew till it was a monomania. He watched Walker with an insane vigilance. He fed his own self-esteem by every instance of meanness on Walker's part, by every exhibition of childish vanity, of cunning and of vulgarity. Walker ate greedily, noisily, filthily, and Mackintosh ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... Lanfray wrote) "if you get a strange note from a very eccentric Italian, one Professor Tizzi, formerly of the University of Padua. I have known him for some years. Scientific inquiry is his monomania, and vanity his ruling passion. He has written a book on the principle of life, which nobody but himself will ever read; but which he is determined to publish, with his own portrait for frontispiece. If it is worth your while to accept the little he can offer you, take it ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... considered, it would be pleasant to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Landys-Haggert, and for a little time—only a very little time—to make believe that he was with Alice Chisane again. Every one is more or less mad on one point. Hannasyde's particular monomania was ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... operation the incipient symptoms of monomania were rarely noticed, and many were driven into confirmed madness and crime by neglect or improper treatment, whilst some of the supposed lunatics were really wiser than their keepers or the doctors who attended them. It often ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... were real, and how far they sprang from monomania it is impossible to say. Cardan's relations with his brother physicians had never been of the happiest, and it is quite possible that a set may have been made in the Pavian Academy to get rid of a colleague, difficult to live with at the best, and now cankered still more in temper by misfortune, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... day! That was ominous. It sounded like monomania. So ghostly and elusive! I began to suspect my American ally ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... defend myself in public from his private attacks. If in any of his publications he renews his claim, which I consider as long since settled by default, then it will be time and proper for me to notice him.... The most charitable construction of the Dr's. conduct is to attribute it to a monomania induced by ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... whom I met; and if I saw a nose upon any man's face, at all resembling my own, I immediately would wonder and surmise whether that person could be my father. The constant dwelling upon the subject at last created a species of monomania, and a hundred times a day I would mutter to myself, "Who is my father?" indeed, the very bells, when they rung a peal, seemed, as in the case of Whittington, to chime the question, and at last I talked so much on the subject to Timothy, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... Mackaye's stand for the Chicago anarchists was not due to sympathy with their political monomania, but rather championed justice which, only when rightly used, will stem the tide of overwrought minds. With the execution of these men, he believed the cause of anarchy would be strengthened by the general impression gained of their martyrdom. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy • Steele Mackaye
... the conscientious exercise of his power, he made the act a law by affixing his signature. The secretary of state had other than constitutional grounds for his opposition to the measure. He had conceived an irrepressible distrust of Hamilton. It seemed almost like a monomania. He considered the bank as one of the engines in a scheme intended by Hamilton to make the national legislature subservient to, and under the direction of, the treasury, for the purpose of promoting his monarchical schemes. He afterward affirmed that Washington was deceived by Hamilton, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... arrived, he threw aside his mantle of state and donned the mean garb of an Arab devotee, preached a crusade, and led an army into Italy, where he died of dysentery before the city of Cosenza. The only way of explaining his eccentric thirst for slaughter is to suppose that it was a dark monomania, a form of psychopathy analogous to that which we find in the Marechal de Retz and the Marquise de Brinvilliers. One of the most marked symptoms of this disease was the curiosity which led him to explore the entrails of his victims, and to feast his eyes upon their quivering ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... views; and the belief became fixed in his mind that there was a party in the United States continually at work, secretly and sometimes openly, for the overthrow of American republicanism. The idea became a monomania with Jefferson from which he never recovered till his death, more than thirty years afterward. Jefferson soon rallied under his standard a large party of sympathizers with the French revolutionists. Regarding Hamilton as the head and front of the monarchical party, he professed to believe that ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... to appeal to Lord Sandwich. There are many circumstances in the conduct of this unfortunate man, amounting to that perversion of common sense which, in our times, is fashionably and foolishly almost sanctioned as monomania. But nothing can be clearer than the fact, that the most unjustifiable, dangerous, and criminal passion, may be pampered, until it obtains possession of the whole mind, and leads to the perpetration of the most atrocious offences against society. The modern absurdity is, to look, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... shortly after the christening of Atherly town that an incident occurred which at first shook, and then the more firmly established, his mild monomania. His widowed mother had been for the last two years an inmate of a private asylum for inebriates, through certain habits contracted while washing for the camp in the first year of her widowhood. This had always been a matter of open sympathy to Rough and Ready; but it was a secret reproach ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... enthusiasm and roseate prospects of life and love had seized him as a passion was now a settled habit. And fortunately so, for it kept him from going mad. He had no thought of gain—only the achievement of a purpose, a monomania. ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... "spaniolated," to him. He seemed to recollect nothing but that Heaven had "made Spaniards to be killed, and him to kill them." If he had not been the most sensible of John Bulls, he would certainly have forestalled the monomania of that young Frenchman of rank, who, some eighty years after him, so maddened his brain by reading of the Spanish cruelties, that he threw up all his prospects and turned captain of filibusters in ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... daughter's sake, and by his brave wife's aid; but insanity, none the less, of the profoundest monomaniacal pattern, for all that. All day long, and every day, in his dealings with the outer world, he kept down his monomania. An able and trusted government servant, he never allowed it for one moment to interfere with his public duties. To his wife alone he let out what he thought the inmost and deepest secret of his real existence—that he was the Archangel Michael. To no one else did he ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... scarcely inferior to that which lends such lurid lustre to the "Oedipus;" and now she cowered in shame and loathing as she reflected upon all that she had deliberately arranged while sitting upon the terrace of the Villa Reale. Could the unbridled thirst for revenge have dragged her on into a monomania that would finally have ended in downright madness? Once nominally the wife of the man whom she so thoroughly abhorred, would not reason have fled before the horrors to which she linked herself? The rebellious bitterness of her soul melted away, and a fervent gratitude to Heaven ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... observation, I should think it the most unproductive source of satisfaction to the possessor. I have heard of many very wealthy men that have tormented themselves with the fear of coming to actual want, but I never heard of one man in moderate circumstances that was afflicted with this monomania." ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... examined Bertram unanimously gave it as their opinion that he was sane, and could only account for his extraordinary nocturnal actions by the supposition that he must be the victim of some strange monomania. His companions, with whom he was most popular, all testified to his amiability and lovable disposition. In the end he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, and after his release was never again heard of. There can, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. .. It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... refinements, would explain the phenomenon upon more ordinary principles, and reduce the enigma to a case merely of literary monomania. Mr Carlyle, they would say, has been striving to understand these Puritans till he has grown, for the time, to resemble them. In the effort to project his mind into their mind, he has overshot the mark; he has not been able yet to get his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... I must say, the Sisters Blue Showed delicate taste and judgment too. For finding the poor man suffering greatly From the awful stuff he has thrown up lately— So much so indeed to the alarm of all, As to bring on a fit of what doctors call The Antipapistico-monomania (I'm sorry with such a long word to detain ye), They've acted the part of a kind physician, By suiting their gift to the patient's condition; And as soon as 'tis ready for presentation, We shall publish the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... only have a craze," she thought hopelessly, "some harmless monomania which would fill my mind! The maniacs in Bedlam, who fancy themselves popes or queens, are happy in their foolish way. If I could only imagine myself something which I am not—anything except poor useless Violet Tempest, who has no place ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... restriction,—maybe, talked sometimes Of douche or horsewhip to,—for why? because The gentleman would crazily declare His best friend was—Iago! Ay, and worse— The lady, all at once grown lunatic, In suicidal monomania vowed, To save her soul, she needs must starve herself! They're cured now, both, and I tell nobody. Why don't you speak? Nay, speechless, each of you Can spare,—without unclasping plighted troth,— At least ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... musicians do, makes a failure of his simplest work, and has to go off and sharpen his wits at another trade. I am in that condition. For twenty months I sought the track of a man, who disappeared as if the air absorbed him where he last breathed. I did not find him. The search gave me a touch of monomania. For two months I have not been able to rest upon meeting a new face until satisfied its owner was not—let us say, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... education; besides teaching school, she went round the countryside in all weathers selling books, maps and sewing machines. Her devotion to those brothers was of course splendid, yet I now think that Wilma, temperamental and overworked, had let it become a kind of monomania with her. ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... weak points like the rest of us; and perhaps one of the weakest was the difficulty he found in amusing himself without bothering other people. He had quite a monomania for proposing the most troublesome "larks" at the most inconvenient moments; and if his plans were thwarted, an AEolian harp is cheerful compared to the tone in which, arguing ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and escapade are sometimes authorized and made right by parental tyranny or domestic serfdom. There have been exceptional cases where parents have had a monomania in regard to their sons and daughters, demanding their celibacy or forbidding relations every way right. Through absurd family ambition parents have sometimes demanded qualifications and equipment of fortune unreasonable to expect or simply impossible. Children ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... his plot had not succeeded, was more irritable than ever. The desire to rid himself of Moumouth became a fixed idea with him, a passion, a monomania; he dreamed of it day and night. Each letter in which Madame de la Grenouillere demanded news of the cat and repeated her promise of recompense to Mother Michel, each sign of interest given by the Countess to her two favorites, increased the blind fury of their ...
— The Story of a Cat • mile Gigault de La Bdollire
... coat-of-arms now used by Grand Lodge had been designed by an Amsterdam Jew, Jacob Jehuda Leon Templo, colleague of Cromwell's friend the Cabalist, Manasseh ben Israel.[333] To quote Jewish authority on this question, Mr. Lucien Wolf writes that Templo "had a monomania for ... everything relating to the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle of the Wilderness. He constructed gigantic models of both these edifices."[334] These he exhibited in London, which he visited in 1675 and earlier, and it seems not unreasonable to conclude ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... that: but the Snug within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan in his nightcap is the tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature shudders at the petrifaction of the intellect of Mr. F.'s aunt. Et patati, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... with an ardour that increased—as do all species of monomania—with increasing years; and in the accidental truth of some of his predictions, he forgot the erroneous result of the rest. He corresponded at times with the Englishman, who, after a short sojourn in England, had returned to the Continent, and ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lucky rival—the happy lover, could not expiate his rank offence by any amount of sacrifice in person or estate. According to our view of these lingering scenes of rancorous persecution, Philip gradually habituated himself to gloat over the sufferings of Perez with the morbid rapture of monomania. So long as the wretched man was within his reach, he contemplated placidly the anguish inflicted on him by the unjust or excessive malevolence of his enemies. He repeatedly checked the prosecutions of the Escovedo family, and sanctioned ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... tallied so exactly with the statements of his visitor of the previous day that Doctor Wesselhoff became more and more interested in the singular case, and was convinced that his patient was indeed afflicted with a peculiar monomania. ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... toward himself the dark atmosphere of the Shadow that was peculiarly his own, he watched also their mutual actions, and, throwing from his own obscurity a shade over all human deeds, he became possessed of the monomania, a practical belief that every mortal man, except it might be Jimmy Doane, was followed and overlooked by this terrible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... Elise," laughingly rejoined M. des Rameures, "but I must beg Monsieur de Camors to believe that I do not in any case intend to offend him. I shall also beg him to tolerate the monomania of an old man, and some freedom of language with regard to the only subject which makes him lose his ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... it? As for the London estate, mother, that is all moonshine. What if it were gone altogether? It may be that it is that which vexes my father; but if so, it is a monomania." ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... war temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... woman to come in every day to scrub, help make the bed, etc. It is much less trouble, and the only fault I have to find with her is an absolute incapability of discerning blacks. I believe she thinks I have a monomania against them.' ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his mind and temper. He was even inclined to treat his wife with more respect; and when informed by Dr. Moore of the birth of his son, he received the intelligence with less impatience than she had anticipated. But this gleam of sunshine did not last long. With returning strength his old monomania returned; and he began loudly to complain of the expense which his long illness had incurred, and to rave at the extortion of doctors and nurses; declaring the necessity of making every possible retrenchment, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... perpetuate its power by the aid of the Chinese, nor was there a defeated and unpopular section to be punished for its "treason" by being made over to Mongolian masters. Indeed, Congress, while rejecting Sumner's argument, made a concession to his monomania on the subject of Negroes, and a clause was inserted in the Act whereby no person "of African descent" should be excluded—with the curious result that to this day, while a yellow face is a bar to the prospective ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... and is very unlike the revolutionary hero I had pictured him to be. Mild, well-bred, and amiable in his manner, he seems much more suited to command a regiment in support of a legitimate monarchy, than to subvert one. Although liberty appears to be with him a monomania, the warmth with which he advocates it in conversation never urges him beyond the bounds ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... one of his excursions; these being the only times at which she can catch him. The last time he saw her, was five or six months ago, when they met and supped together on the St. Gothard! It is a monomania with him, of course. He is a man of some note; seconded one of Lord Melbourne's addresses; and had forty thousand a year, now reduced to ten, but nursing and improving every day. He was with us last Monday, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 'you see what comes of having too much soul. It is impossible but that such fixed attention to any one organ should prove injurious, even if the organ is not there. You really have a great deal to answer for, in encouraging this kind of monomania.' ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... of mental disease has come under my notice. The patient is not a pauper, but a gentleman of good standing and means. He is unmarried, and owns a lovely place in the country. He spent the early years of his life in India, and when there the craze began which now assumes the magnitude of a monomania." ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... my wife. The only woman who has the right to bear my name is one whom I married when I was a young colonial official. She was a rather eccentric woman, of feeble mentality and incredibly subject to impulses that amounted to monomania. We had two children, twins, whom she worshipped and in whose company she would no doubt have recovered her mental balance and moral health, when, by a stupid accident—a passing carriage—they were killed before her eyes. The poor thing ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... Mansions may see that somewhat excitable thing—free of charge. In another person, whom with maddening jealousy I suspect of being some inches taller than I am, I believe I notice the same tendency towards monomania. He also, being as I have so keenly pointed out, male, he also—I think has only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it: another male weakness ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the need of money, nor yet the desire for jewels, since you have means enough to purchase all you might wish, and you tried to sell those you stole. One would almost suppose that it was a sort of monomania ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... carefully examined five hundred cases, testified that alcohol, taken in excess, produced different forms of mental disease, of which he mentioned four classes: 1. Mania a potu, or alcoholic mania. 2. The monomania of suspicion. 3. Chronic alcoholism, characterized by failure of the memory and power of judgment, with partial paralysis—generally ending fatally. 4. Dypsomania, or an irresistible craving for alcoholic stimulants, occuring ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... the maniac is so cunning, and the risk of putting a superior officer under an arrest so tremendous, that they know not what to do. Besides, their captain is only mad on one subject at one time. Indeed, insanity seems sometimes to find a vent in monomania, actually improving all the faculties on all other points. Well, the monkey midshipmen did not behave very correctly; so, Captain Reud had them one afternoon all tied up to one of his guns in the cabin, and one after the other, well flogged ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... they are always the same. You may go into a theatre when it is empty and dark; but did you ever go into a private bar that was empty and dark? A private bar is as eternal as the hills, as changeless as the monomania of a madman, as mysterious as sorcery. Always the same order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the same time-tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing champagne on the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-trays on the counter, the same odour that wipes ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Berlin. "Yes, the opera is crowded every night when I sing. You know that I get flowers, enjoy triumphs enough to satisfy me. Well, I'm sick of it all. I believe that I shall end by going mad. It may become a monomania. I often say, Why all this feverishness, this art jargon? Why should I burn myself up with Isolde and weep my heart out with Sieglinde? Why go on repeating words that I do not believe in? Art! oh, I hate the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... earth, she cannot be anxious. She may only be glad or sorry, and continue her way. She is perfectly herself, whatever befall! even if frosts cut her off. Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfilment. It is not laisser aller. It is life-rootedness. It is being by oneself, life-living, like the much-mooted lily. One toils, one spins, one strives: just as the lily does. But like her, taking one's ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... some graceful female form above the ordinary stature, and plunging onward in pursuit, with his heart throbbing madly, and his fevered brain cheating him with phantoms. His search became almost a monomania. His mind, fixed strainingly upon this one, all-engrossing object, lost its balance, and he could no longer reason upon his own course, or see its futility, or devise a better. The invariable disappointment which closed every day's ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... gently as might be, to wean him from this fanatic worship of the Muses. It was his monomania; on all ordinary subjects he was sensible enough, and fain was she to engage him in ordinary topics. He questioned her sometimes about his place at Nunnely; she was but too happy to answer his interrogatories at length. She never wearied of describing the antique priory, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... or clothes. Our toil was rendered doubly toilsome by the Eastern travellers' dread—the demon of Thirst rode like Care behind us. For twenty-four hours we did not taste water, the sun parched our brains, the mirage mocked us at every turn, and the effect was a species of monomania. As I jogged along with eyes closed against the fiery air, no image unconnected with the want suggested itself. Water ever lay before me—water lying deep in the shady well—water in streams bubbling icy from the rock—water in pellucid lakes inviting me to plunge and revel in their treasures. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... intensity of our intellectual and moral activities. Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania. Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more or less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or the man of science. One calls ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... work of rescue was the fulfilment of an ideal. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of it! The senior partner of Hatch & Buckley had been quick to note this condition of mind and to reap the profits that came therefrom. Monomania means money, was a business axiom in that gentleman's office, but he had pumped the stream dry and Von Barwig was now at the end of his resources. By some strange process of thought, Von Barwig recognised this fact, but it seemed to him to mean that because his money ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... that young person's "tornsuls," as she termed them, was anticipated as might be anticipated the rising of the sun. Not that it was Belinda's fault, however; Belinda's anxiety to be useful amounted at all times to something very nearly approaching a monomania; the fact simply was, that, her ailment being chronic, it usually evinced itself at inopportune periods. "It's the luck of the family," said Phil. "We never loved a tree or ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... degrees, but all too soon, it became manifest that the memory of his passionate attachment for her mother possessed Victor to the point of monomania. It was only with an effort that he could force himself to talk to Sofia on other subjects. He thought of nothing else while with her; if she read his eyes aright, often glimpses of weird light flickering ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... present at dinner to-morrow evening, after his discharge, on the plea that Professors Hanky and Panky and Dr. Downie may give him counsel, convince him of his folly, and if possible free him henceforth from the monomania under ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... was his monomania for benevolence that it could not at all confine itself to the streets of Boston, the circle of his relatives, or even the United States of America. Mr. H. was fully posted up in the affairs of India, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... beautiful women; he sang airs from the operas, sad, broken little snatches, in a deep, mellow voice, finely trained,—fragments of a litany to the Virgin. Birkenshead's love of beauty was a hungry monomania; his brain was filled with memories of the pictures of the Ideal Mother and her Son. One by one they came to him now, the holy woman-type which for ages supplied to the world that tenderness and pity which the Church had stripped from God. Even in his delirium the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... treatment for madness, commiseration and benevolence for the terrible coercive means employed formerly; no more chains, no more blows, no more shower-baths; above all (save in some few cases), no more solitary confinement. His lofty understanding had comprehended that monomania, insanity, and madness were increased by confinement and abusive treatment; that, on the contrary, by allowing the patients to live together, a thousand distractions, a thousand incidents occurring at each moment, prevented them from being absorbed ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... a few of the exploits of this departed worthy, actually vouched for by contemporaries. His passion for stealing was undoubtedly a monomania, for he was known in many cases to make voluntary restitution of articles that he had purloined, and his circumstances did not allow him the plea of necessity which palliates the errors of desperately poor rogues in every eye except that ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... different aspect when found in company with the strong and cultivated understanding of his successor. Thus, for example, Frederic was as anxious as any prince could be about the efficiency of his army. But this anxiety never degenerated into a monomania, like that which led his father to pay fancy prices for giants. Frederic was as thrifty about money as any prince or any private man ought to be. But he did not conceive, like his father, that it was worth while to eat unwholesome cabbages for the purpose ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of lunacy was inept. The poor patients were whipped or otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania. Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings before whom the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... concentrated mind warped almost to the point of monomania, upon a child like Mara, predisposed from birth to share in a similar spirit, can be readily estimated. Peace and time, moreover, had not brought the ameliorating tendencies of prosperity, but rather a continuous and ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... deep regret, a paragraph going the round of the papers headed, "THE LADY THIEF AT LINCOLN," as if a lady could commit larceny! "Her disorder," says the newspapers, "is ascribed to a morbid or irrrepressible propensity, or monomania;" in proof of which we beg to subjoin the following prescriptions of her family physician, which have been politely forwarded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... mingled humor with his enthusiasm, and enthusiasm with his humor, so that it was almost impossible to tell whether he were in jest or earnest. Probably it was neither, but an eccentricity, an almost monomania, that has grown upon him,—perhaps the result of strong religious excitement. And, having been a backslider, he is cursed with a half-frenzied humor. In the morning he talked in the same strain at breakfast, while quaffing ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... length the thought that he might be more justly appreciated by his countrymen than by strangers seems to have risen in his mind. Just at this time he fell in with Fletcher of Saltoun, who happened to be in England. These eccentric men soon became intimate. Each of them had his monomania; and the two monomaniac suited each other perfectly. Fletcher's whole soul was possessed by a sore, jealous, punctilious patriotism. His heart was ulcerated by the thought of the poverty, the feebleness, the political insignificance of Scotland, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by threats of confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to him, a glass of sherry before dinner was a poison, whereas half the world, especially the Eastern half, prefers its potations preprandially; a quarter of the liquor suffices, and both appetite and digestion are held to be improved by it. The result ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... the subject as she might, the conviction at which Rosamond arrived at last was always the same. She believed that the mysterious change that had arisen in the husband she so fondly loved was a change in the mind itself—a sudden monomania, beyond the influence of the outer world—a wild hallucination of the brain, not to be cured ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... is insanity in the family," he thought to himself. "I am quite interested in this case. A new form of monomania! I should be quite sorry to lose sight of it. I shall be loath to give ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... or Monomania, also called Melancholia, is a form of the disease in which the patient becomes possessed of some single notion, contradictory alike to common-sense ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... or other was hard to get at, and escaped his two pursuers and the relentless man whose money had bought them. Business then took Sanquhar again to France, but on his return the brooding revenge, now grown to a monomania, once ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... vulgarian pores over Court Circulars and catalogues of aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with the world of commerce and another set of relations with ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... of such cases is in suicidal monomania, delusional insanity, etc. In that variety of the cerebral form in which a decided predisposition must be admitted to exist, to disorder of the intellectual faculties, there are found various forms of mental alienation. The chronic ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... Monomania had produced Great Things, in the form of a c/2 drive. It now proceeded to produce ...
— Subjectivity • Norman Spinrad
... assistance. The voice had come to him at the time of the accident. As a rule, however, the voices seemed vagarious, and he attached no importance to them, except as phenomena which interested him slightly. There was nothing flighty about him, no indication of monomania—he reasoned well, but from the point of view of a man who has had only an elementary education, knowing nothing of philosophy; he had no religious crotchets, and apparently thought little or not at all on religious ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... obstacle lay in the nature and opinions of Miss Barrett's father, who governed even his grown-up children by "an incredible system of patriarchal absolutism." By what was variously termed an obliquity of the will, an eccentricity, a monomania, he had decided that none of his children should marry, and on this point he demanded "passive obedience." It was perfectly clear that Miss Barrett could not gain his consent to her marriage, and so, after long hesitation and much unhappiness, she decided to marry Mr. Browning without that consent. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... to one whose fastidious tastes had been an example to the whole neighborhood. In her estimation Lady Clara could do nothing which was not in itself loveliest and best. The old lady had been so long without an object of affection, that her love of this girl became almost a monomania. ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... began to feel more and more that old age or his monomania had shaken White Henshaw's reason, but he said bitterly: "And I suppose, if that voice never fails you and if these South Seas natives can read the future, that you are ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... orders from him. He kills the flies, the bees, the birds, the frogs, because they are not his. I believe he would kill a man as quickly who stood out even for a second against him here. To that extent I believe he is crazy: a sort of monomania. But not otherwise. That is why I say he will kill you; I really ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... to save; but Cato's enmity was so ungovernable that he grudged Caesar the honor of forgiving him. His animosity had been originally the natural antipathy which a man of narrow understanding instinctively feels for a man of genius. It had been converted by perpetual disappointment into a monomania, and Caesar had become to him the incarnation of every quality and every principle which he most abhorred. Cato was upright, unselfish, incorruptibly pure in deed and word; but he was a fanatic whom no experience could teach, and he adhered to his convictions with the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... business, and add it to the roll of your companies. And I deprived you of that triumph. Your hatred of me grew and grew. Leading a solitary and narrow life, you allowed it to develop into a species of monomania. I had come out on top once too often for your peace of mind. In your opinion the world was too small to hold both of us. Accordingly, you evolved your terrific campaign. My business was to be seriously damaged. And I was to be murdered. And then you were to get the concern cheap from my executors, ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works as the "Rene" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks." We introduce two specimen extracts. The shadow of Rousseau's monomania will be ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... recording. The topic is one on which Southerners are never wearied; and a more uneasy people on the subject than South Carolinians it would be impossible to imagine: long before Secession, they existed in a state of chronic distrust and suspicion about it amounting to monomania. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... where she would be free from hardships and labors, from lingering disease and slow death, and from my ungoverned brutalities. Above all, however, I wanted to accomplish the second murder—made possible to me by the first. A monomania possessed me. I wanted to put an end forever to my strain of blood before it was too late—before it had escaped me through the body of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... passed, the proofs of "Mortimer Stant" had been corrected and the book was about to appear. To Peter now everything seemed to hang upon this event. It became with him, during the weeks before its appearance, a monomania. If this book were a success why then dare and Mrs. Rossiter and all of them would come round to him. It was the third book which was always so decisive, and there was ground to recover after the comparative failure of the second novel. As he corrected the proofs he persuaded himself that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... began again to move on. Then—after first ascertaining the number of the house—he flung himself back in the carriage, and tried to examine his own feelings, to reason himself into self-possession; but it was all in vain. He was seized with that amiable form of social monomania, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... talk over with his artist friend what he had read. It was the priest, pale and perturbed, who told him that war was upon the world. Peter didn't believe it. In his heart he thought that the fear of war with her great neighbor had become a monomania with the French. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the room with apparent aimlessness and I fancied had taken on a wild expression, such as is sometimes observed in cases of dementia. Perhaps this was my own imagination, but at any rate I was now persuaded that my friend was afflicted with a most singular and interesting monomania. Without, I trust, any abatement of my affectionate solicitude for him as a friend, I began to regard him as a patient, rich in possibilities of profitable study. Why not? Had he not described his delusion in the interest of science? Ah, poor fellow, he was doing more for science than he knew: not ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... anxiously and timidly inquiring as to "some suspicion of insanity," he replied with a composed and candid smile that his words had been exaggerated; that certainly the patient had some fixed idea, something approaching a monomania—he, Zossimov, was now particularly studying this interesting branch of medicine—but that it must be recollected that until to-day the patient had been in delirium and... and that no doubt the presence of his family would have a favourable ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... cherished and amiable monomania of gifted minds was realized. Upcott had every possible autograph from every known hand in his collection: Palissy succeeded in making glazed china; but Vertue left his ore to the hands of others to work out into shape, and the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... by little, passing away. His faculties evidently grew more feeble, as he concentrated them on a single thought. By a sad association of ideas, he referred everything to his monomania, and a human existence seemed to have departed from him, to give place to the extra-natural existence of the intermediate powers. Moreover, certain malicious rivals revived the sinister rumours which had spread concerning ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... boarding-school, which I couldn't fall asleep in. The chief among the waiters who visited this lonely retreat, where there was no other company but the swallows in the broad eaves over the window, was a man of one idea in connection with the English; and the subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord Byron. I made the discovery by accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast, that the matting with which the floor was covered, was very comfortable at that season, when he immediately replied that Milor Beeron had been much attached to that kind of matting. Observing, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens |
