"Breaking point" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this Basic Course of Reading provides a practicable formula for the everyday use of these vast resources. It will enable you to acquire the magical qualities and still more magical effects that spell success and happiness, without straining your will to the breaking point and making life a burden. It will give you a definite prescription like the physician's, "Take one before meals," and as easily compounded, which will enable you to be prosperous ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... her voice, high, screaming. Hysteria had come,—the wild, racking hysteria of a person driven to the breaking point: ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... all this because I was at breaking point, and could not any longer have kept up the game, but would have made an ignominious surrender, and have told her I loved her, and loathed the idea of a mistress, and would certainly murder any lover she ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... fell asleep, but I woke with a start, for I heard something coming through the bush. I wakened Mac, and we grasped our heavy walking sticks and lay still. The sound came nearer and nearer, and just when our nerves were at breaking point two bright eyes looked down at us over the edge of the little hollow we were in—it was a hedgehog. We couldn't keep from laughing at the scare it had given us. I wanted to take revenge, but Mac said, "No, let the little devil alone, it's a sign of good luck." Nothing else happened ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... spiritual life. Hence the current belief of an original Jewish philosophy borrowed or stolen by the Greeks, and still betraying its traces in the Bible and Talmud was more than welcome to the enlightened spirits of the time. And they worked this unhistorical belief to its breaking point ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... heard the story from Aunt Trudy, thought it her duty to lecture Rosemary during breakfast—at which Aunt Trudy did not appear—and Rosemary, whose nerves were already strained to the breaking point, answered snappishly. ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... the jungle—not an unusual occurrence on still days during the wet season—is unaccompanied by thud and shock. Encompassing vines and creepers, colossal in strength and overwhelming in weight, which have strained the tree to breaking point, ease their burden down, muffling its descent, though now and again the primal rupture of trunk or branch rings out a sharp protest, and following the fall is silence—that varying, elusive sensation not to he expressed by the absence of ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... sergeant, the last connecting link of discipline was strained nearly to the breaking point. An angry gleam appeared in his eyes, and he said in a low, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... get just so strong. Then, for him, it ceased to exist. A faulty cigarette lighter irritated him, a failing airlock control made him angry and sullen and then hysterical. When the drive controls wouldn't respond, he reached his breaking point. Everyone has such a breaking point, and arrives at it just that way if he's pushed ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... and fatter of body, enduring patiently the sneers and sarcasms of the indignant men of the village, while the mother's face grew thinner, her body weaker, and her once blond hair so gray that she looked ten years beyond her age. Then, four years after the son's return, the breaking point came. With the front of her garments dripping wet, she stood erect from her tub, looked at him where he sat near the kitchen fire—the base-burner had ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... them—and after all what were they worth? This was not only to be a day of triumph for him. It was to be a day of hardest trial and most bitter sacrifice as well; a trial which, as he knew even now, would strain his moral fibre very nearly to the breaking point. It was a struggle for which he had been bracing himself ever since that last conversation which he had had with Enid. From that day to this he had never clasped her hand or ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... peculiar sound which emanates from the blade on being drawn considerably tight and tense. Great experience is required to accustom the ear to the correct intonation, as in general the tensile strain on the saws approximates so closely to the breaking point that one or two extra taps on the keys are quite ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... now, and I was looking out on the river. Through the grip of his hand on my arm I could feel his body taut and quivering, his whole spirit hot with revolt. The same old Joe, but tenser now, strained almost to the breaking point. But I myself was different. In college he had appealed to me because there I was groping and had found nothing. But now I had found something sure. And so, though to my own surprise a deep emotional part of me rose up in sudden response ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... could be haled to court to answer for his short-comings. But that, in many instances, could not but work an unwarranted hardship. The expenses alone, of a journey to the state capital, would strain to the breaking point the means of some of the more impecunious. Insisting on the minutest technicalities would indubitably deprive many an honest, well-meaning homesteader of his entire worldly property. It was all very well to argue that ignorance of the law was no ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... as the united action of the working people of Millsburgh. The requirements of his profession made Jake Vodell a master of mob psychology. With the leaven of his chosen inner circle and the temper of the many strikers whose nerves were already strained to the breaking point by their weeks of privation, the agitator was confident that he could bend the assembled multitude to his will. Those who were opposed to his leadership and to his methods—disorganized and taken by surprise as they were—would be helpless. At the same time their presence in the mob ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... of love, and it is remarkable, in that it develops traits in human nature upon the subject of love and marriage, which are overlooked in questions applicable to the relations between the sexes, and that are so often strained to the breaking point. Indeed, it gives clues to a remedy which can not fail to ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... a spell of the set smile and the barren labours had brought me near to breaking point, Fanny would be frequently tearful and desperately peevish from her boredom, and from poor health; for I fancy she was in little better case than I as regards the penalties of a faulty and inadequate dietary, combined with ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... it was (p. 301) stipulated that the constitution should thereafter be modified only with the express approval of the people.[447] These reforms, however, were belated. They came only after the popularity of the Emperor had been strained to the breaking point, and by reason of the almost immediate coming on of the war with Prussia there was scant opportunity for ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... word of his babble, I could not hide from him my respect and interest. He misconstrued both into respect for the present soul of Charlie Mears, to whom life was as new as it was to Adam, and interest in his readings; and stretched my patience to breaking point by reciting poetry—not his own now, but that of others. I wished every English poet blotted out of the memory of mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest names of song because they had drawn Charlie from the path of direct narrative, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... best friend, he has to look beyond what is beneficial simply to the spiritual, mental and moral need of one individual. There is an abiding necessity to equate the personal problem to the whole philosophy within which a command operates. To keep in mind that every individual has his breaking point is everlastingly important. But to remember that the unit is also made of brittle ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... on him. He felt physically weak and worn. Nance's devoted love and courage made his heart beat high, indeed, but his fears on her account strung his laxed cords to breaking point, and then left them ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... father, I have asked you only this one thing, and this is just, you know how just it is—that you keep my future husband's father from a cruel, shameful death. And—now—" her voice was quivering, near the breaking point, and she cried: "And now, now you bring in blood and family. What are they in an hour like this! Oh, father—father, would my daddy—the fine, strong, loving daddy of my dreams do this? Would he—would ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... one second the happiness in Page Hanaford's face withered. Like a mask fear covered it. He thrust his strained body forward and with shaking hand grasped the shoulder of the girl. "Hid it! Tell me, in heaven's name, tell me where could a man hide a million dollars?" His voice was tense to the breaking point. He searched the girl's face as if all eternity depended ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... and a number of other similar cases, I should like to suggest, from a descriptive point of view, that the epileptiform seizure is of the nature of an orgasm. An orgasm is a sudden, explosive, discharge of nervous energy, raised to the breaking point of nervous tension. I should like to generalize the idea of orgasm. Ordinarily, of course, it is confined to the sexual sphere. In the last case I reported it seems to me fairly clear that the explosive actions, convulsive-like impulses, were closely associated in the mind of the patient with sexual ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10 |
