"Lunacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly forfeited that superiority which belongs ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Shoko (101st sovereign), then twelve years old. This sovereign abandoned himself to the profligacy of the era. It is doubtful whether his reason was not unhinged. Some accounts say that he fell into a state of lunacy; others, that he practised magic arts. At all events he died childless in 1428, and was succeeded by a grandson of the Emperor Suko, Go-Hanazono, then in his tenth year. Thus, the claims of the Southern dynasty were ignored twice consecutively, and its partisans made armed ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... does every doctor. And so does everybody—including you —for that matter. And THAT was the important thing that authorized you to venture to disobey my orders and imperil that woman's life! Look here, Hester Gray, this is pure lunacy; that girl COULDN'T tell a lie that was intended to injure a person. The thing is impossible —absolutely impossible. You know it yourselves—both of you; you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... been unable to prepare a suitable address, Mr. Oldfield had kindly consented to read some precious records recently discovered by him. A little rustling breath went over the audience. So this amiable lunacy had its bearing on the economy of life! They were amazed, as may befall us at any judgment day, when grays are strangely alchemized ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... soul, gentle or simple, can stand on level ground. As to getten up hill to the church, 'tis perfect lunacy. And I speak of foot-passengers. As to horses and carriage, 'tis murder to think of 'em. I am going to send straight as a line into the breakfast-room, and say 'tis a closer.... Hullo—here's Clerk Crickett and John ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being "out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or of those who have "lost their mind," ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Ashley he seconded Mr. Gordon's Bill, and first came publicly forward in support of measures designed to advance the interests of the insane. A laborious and sometimes fruitless examination of Hansard, from the earliest period of lunacy legislation, has been necessary in order to present a continuous narrative of the successive steps by which so great a success ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... deliberate orders in German for murder, murdering for their lives; and they, too, were like himself, and ate and drank and either laced their boots or had them laced daily. And the staggering apprehension of the miraculous lunacy of war swept through ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... and brought our batteries and battalions to their very doors. But now they were fugitives every one from the city of their pride, which they had surrendered without striking a solitary blow for its defence; while the actual building in which their lunacy took final shape, and launched itself on an astonished Christendom, I beheld full to overflowing with the deadly fruit of their doing. In the very presence of the president's chair of state, here a Boer, there a Briton, it may be of New Zealand birth or Canadian ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... Does not lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner table of ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... indeed, gave indications of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad in a Cheshire ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... 1860 assumed proportions which twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams. Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy. $30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of philanthropy. The enterprise of New York houses, in either following ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for the loan is equal to the entire cost of the whole undertaking; the result is that each family must pay about twice the amount of rent that it would otherwise have to pay if the Council had not incurred interest charges through borrowing other people's credit. Was there ever greater lunacy in public affairs? ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Knights Grand Cross of Victorian Order. Knights Commanders of the various Orders (in the same order of progression). Knights Bachelors. Commanders of Victorian Order. County Court Judges. Serjeants-at-Law. Masters in Lunacy. Companions of the various Orders. Members of Fourth Class of Victorian Order. Companions of Distinguished Service Order. Eldest Sons of the Younger Sons of Peers. Eldest Sons of Baronets. Eldest Sons of Knights. Members of Fifth Class of Victorian Order. Baronets' Younger Sons. Knights' ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... this morning, Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... he was bringing desolation on my hearth, and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feeling must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was declining, my fortune embarrassed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... thinking of itself, because such work, not being of a religious character, partook of the nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. I believe," he continues, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... Horace Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... of Drowne's lunacy, if credit were due to the rumor that he had been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady, and gazing with a lover's passionate ardor into the face that his own hands had created. The bigots of the day hinted that it would be no matter of surprise if an evil spirit were allowed to enter this ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she named her first-born Samuel? Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the self-willed peasant-mind? Was it whim or fancy?—the one streak of lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind? Or, reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? or—and a subtler thought—was ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... causes of insanity are heredity and stress or strain. Lunacy is not infrequent in children of epileptic, alcoholic, or insane parents, and those born of parents suffering from nervous disease frequently are in such condition that shock, intense emotion, dissipation, or exhausting diseases ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... life. That park, or estate, or whatever it is, had taken such an unhealthy hold upon his imagination, that he was half-way to insanity. If Gramarye is permitted again to take the helm.... Well, the ship is half-way across—half-way across those narrow straits which divide reason from lunacy. We've got to take the helm and put it over just as hard as ever we can. You understand? In a word, if, for instance, Major Lyveden were to revisit Gramarye, I think the game would be up. That, of course, can't happen. But ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... confront his end with more philosophy. I made him no reply, therefore, in words; and presently the evening fell so chill that I was glad, for my own sake, to kindle a fire. And yet God knows, in such an open spot, and the country alive with savages, the act was little short of lunacy. Ballantrae seemed never to observe me; but at last, as I was about parching a little ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perils of disease and death; it is to "purge it of its offenses." We shall not educate the intelligence if we weary it by making it learn things. This is patent in these days of ours, when the victims of nervous disorders and lunacy abound, and when, even among those who are considered healthy, the material consequences of madness may explode, threatening the whole of humanity ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... grumble. It seemed just as if Long Tom Lane was making game of an old man in trouble. 'Twas either that or lunacy. And there was no time for nonsense off the Gingerbread coast in a spring gale ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... in government suits against combinations. That idea has got to be killed! And the regulation of security issues of railroads—preposterous! Why, the President's crazy! If Mall and Gossitch and Wells don't oppose that in the Senate, I'll see that they are up before the lunacy commission—and I have some ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... was all lunacy, sheer clotted madness, as he told himself, but this was a day to riot in illusions, for undreamt-of things had happened, and who could swear that the days of fairies had passed? To meet a dream-Irene on his way to Kieff was unlikely, to rescue her from ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... opera-composers crazy. Several of Richard's pieces had been played; he had occupied one responsible position and been asked to take another; he had the finished score of his opera; and he was young and by nature sanguine to the verge of lunacy. He thought he had only to call on the Intendant of the opera with his masterpiece and its production would be assured. He did call, and soon he received a promise that his work would be done. But Leipzig was now Mendelssohn's ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... quarter fill it with liquid mud, and then invite four or five comrades, all arrayed in much warlike impedimenta, but lacking more extra covering than a waterproof sheet each, to the hole to spend two nights and a day in it—I should be credited with lunacy. Yet I should be offering a fair sample of front-line accommodation ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the body and animal spirits that circulated in the nerves. One spoke, as did still Prof. Pomme at the end of the eighteenth century, "of the shrivelling up of the nerves."[14] But above all, one preserved the conviction that these queer disorders were very different to the mental disorders of lunacy. These peculiar individuals had, it was said, all their reason; they remained capable of understanding their fellow creatures and of being understood by them; they were not to be expelled from society like ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... long enough to be in want of fresh supplies. Ophelia has obeyed her father's command (given in I. iii.), and has refused to receive Hamlet's visits or letters. What has Hamlet done? He has put on an 'antic disposition' and established a reputation for lunacy, with the result that his mother has become deeply anxious about him, and with the further result that the King, who was formerly so entirely at ease regarding him that he wished him to stay on at Court, is now extremely uneasy and very desirous ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... maleadministration, be forfeited by the sovereign: that to dethrone a king and to elect his successor, was a practice quite unknown to the constitution, and had a tendency to render kingly power entirely dependent and precarious: that where the sovereign, from his tender years, from lunacy, or from other natural infirmity, was incapacitated to hold the reins of government, both the laws and former practice agreed in appointing a regent, who, during the interval, was invested with the whole power ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that only some fifty years before the times of Columbus Christian Europe had no lunatic asylum,—not that there was a lack of lunatics or that the existence of lunacy was entirely ignored, but that the then state of medicine and the general intelligence was not emancipated from the idea of demoniacs,—and we are told that the lunatics were in many instances hung, quartered ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... have suborned witnesses to prove that there was black blood in the veins of Valentine Hawkehurst. If he had not been opposed to so strong an opponent as Dr. Jedd, he might have tried to get a commission of lunacy to declare Charlotte Halliday a madwoman, and thus invalidate her marriage. As it was, he knew that he could do nothing. He had failed. All was said ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... What then? He that says that the doctor's skill is wanted in the case of a slight skin-eruption or whitlow, but is not needed in the case of pleurisy, fever, or lunacy, in what respect does he differ from the man that says that schools and teaching and precepts are only for small and boyish duties, while great and important matters are to be left to mere routine and accident? For, as the man is ridiculous who says we ought to learn to row but not to steer, so ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... any man's affection? Would it not be painful to owe his appearance of regard more to his honour than his love? and is not my person, already faded, likelier to fade sooner, than his? On the other hand, is his life a good one? and would it not be lunacy even to risque the wretchedness of losing all situation in the world for the sake of living with a man one loves, and then to lose both companion and consolation? When I lost Mr. Thrale, every one was officious to comfort and to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... think have been to some extent averted had his appearance been different. London is a home of madmen and casually permits any lunacy so that public peace is not endangered; had poor Wilbraham looked a fanatic with pale face, long hair, ragged clothes, much would have been forgiven him, but for a stout, middle-aged gentleman, well dressed, well groomed.... What could be supposed but ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... use, pure, duke, tune, tube, blue, duty, flew, new, student, subdue, pursue, absolute, illumine, tumult, suit, during, pursuit, presume, lunacy, Tuesday, numeral. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Pleasure. Remove the Vicar's magic-lantern and the try-your-weight machine opposite the post office, and you practically eliminated the temptations to tread the primrose path. The only young men in the place were silent, gaping youths, at whom lunacy commissioners looked sharply and suspiciously when they met. The tango was unknown, and the one-step. The only form of dance extant—and that only at the rarest intervals—was a sort of polka not unlike the movements of a slightly ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... substantial improvements effected in the administration of justice during the late session, and of which the last volume of the statute-book affords abundant evidence, principally under the heads of bankruptcy, insolvency, and lunacy. Great and salutary alterations have been effected in these departments, as well as various others; the leading statutory changes being most ably carried into effect by the Lord Chancellor, who continues to preside over his court, and to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... litigant has reached a stage where things simply are as he wants them to be. Whether this poor derelict will be permitted by his deluded or unscrupulous attorneys to end his days in peace at the Hospital, time alone will tell. Thus far his lunacy case has been carried by them to the ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... had ever so remotely hinted at the possibility of what was taking place in him. Bazarov had a great love for women and for feminine beauty; but love in the ideal, or, as he expressed it, romantic sense, he called lunacy, unpardonable imbecility; he regarded chivalrous sentiments as something of the nature of deformity or disease, and had more than once expressed his wonder that Toggenburg and all the minnesingers and troubadours ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... run on in such a surprising manner with your narrations, imprecations, admirations, and interrogations, that, upon my education, sir, I believe you are approaching to insanity, frenzy, lunacy, madness, ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... Brother Bonaday with him. They are off to the river, for Brother Copas carries his rod. What a strange fascination has that dry-fly fishing! And I can remember old anglers discussing it as a craze, a lunacy." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... if a poor fellow should touch his hat in the street and say, "Pardon, sir, your buttons are awry," he would answer, "Off, villain! Zounds, knave! Know you not that my Divine buttons are the model of things?" and so forth, until he fell into a perfect lunacy. ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... former self, the wreck of what he was, and a picture of fallen and shattered genius. To drive away the hideous phantasmagorias that tortured him, as with the stings of demons, he had recourse to gin, and soon became a confirmed drunkard: the next stage was lunacy; and he was confined for fourteen months in Saint ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... this Morning's Operations Looked Like; Whether an Officers' Ward or a Men's Ward is the nicer; Who Deserves Stripes; C.O.'s Parade and its Terrors; Advantages of Volunteering for Night Duty; The Cushy Job of being in charge of a Sham Lunacy Case; Other Cushy Jobs less cushy than They Sounded; and so forth; until at last protests began to be voiced by the wearier folk ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... Ronain. St. Ronan is said to have been Abbot of Kingarth, Bute, where he died in 737. Holy wells bear his name at Strowan (Perthshire), Chapelton in Strathdon (Aberdeenshire), and the Butt of Lewis; the latter is famed for the cure of lunacy. ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... it; or, if she had, would she have understood its contents? Without that letter, what would the course of events have been? Go back and think of it! Imagine old Mrs. Picture in charge of Widow Thrale, groundedly suspected of lunacy, miserable under the fear that the suspicion might be true—for who can gauge his own sanity? Imagine Granny Marrable, kept away at Denby by her daughter, that her old age should not be afflicted by a lunatic. Imagine the longing of Sapps Court to have Mrs. Picture back, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the results of strange experiments and the accomplishment of learning, men were abled to conceive of matters now closed to our conceptions, even as we of this day may haply give a calm ear to talk, that in the days of our fathers would have been surely set to the count of lunacy. And this is ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Lunacy.—Whether it arises from political heat, religious ecstacies, intemperance, or the cares and worry of the universal hunt for wealth, it is certainly a painful fact to chronicle that in proportion ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... true: The most may err as grossly as the few? And faultless kings run down by common cry, For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790 If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead's images, But government itself at length must fall To nature's state, where all have right to all. Yet, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... so much as dreamed of by his judges, they would have formed the most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace. They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, have no right to sneer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... cobwebs off the sky"—in other words, to set the Church, our cathedrals and bishops' palaces in order—and augured well; but this old woman journeyed not alone, in her hand she carried a broom (Brougham). It may have been a case of ultra-lunacy this journey of ninety-nine times as high as the moon, and "one cannot help thinking," said a writer of that period, "of the song, 'Long life to the Moon'; but this saying became common, 'If that time goes the coach, pray what ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... sit up here, and write, and read Renan's Origines, which is certainly devilish interesting; I read his Nero yesterday, it is very good, O, very good! But he is quite a Michelet; the general views, and such a piece of character painting, excellent; but his method sheer lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is used as the ingredient of pills to increase fertility, facilitate parturition, to bring back life to people on the brink of death and it is the main ingredient "in medicines for lunacy, convulsions, epilepsy, etc." (p. 397). "It gives rest to the heart, nourishes the blood, increases the breath, and strengthens the tsing" ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... lunacy rampant, and a whole city is left after such a visitation an asylum of melancholia—Mad Melbourne. Lunacy frequently takes the form of egotism. Peasants imagine themselves princes; Calibans believe themselves to be Adonises; beggars imagine themselves millionaires. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... be continually putting up English women into outlandish casks; who if they be not shifted anew once in a few months grow too sour for their husbands.... He that makes coats for the moon had need take measure every noon, and he that makes for women, as often to keep them from lunacy." ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Sidney's constitutional temperament, and the little service through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... got the plague or something. And if I'm with you, Kennedy suddenly remembers an appointment, and dashes off at a gallop in the opposite direction. If I had to award the bronze medal for drivelling lunacy in this place, you would get it by a narrow margin, and Kennedy would be proxime, ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... our men.[554] That is next door to freedom. And, after all, if we have to choose our masters, it is less disgrace to put up with Roman emperors than with German priestesses.' Thus the common people: the chieftains used more violent language. 'It was Civilis' lunacy that had driven them to war. He wanted to remedy his private troubles[555] by ruining his country. The Batavians had incurred the wrath of heaven by blockading Roman legions, murdering Roman officers, and plunging into a war which ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... seventy-five thousand people in this town, and there'll be seventy-five thousand bankrupts if this lunacy goes on. And there's seventy-five thousand maggots in your brain, and seventy-five thousand in John Pintard's; and if you two live to see nineteen hundred, you'll have twice five million two hundred and fifty-seven thousand four hundred and ninety-three—whatever that may be!" And he thrust ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... Holden without any expression at all in his voice. "They used to put lunatics in snake-pits. When they were people who'd taken to lunacy for escape from reality, it made them go back to reality to escape from the snakes. Shock-treatments used to be used, later, for the same effect. We're too soft to use either treatment now. But Johnny gave himself the works. The odds are that from now on he will never want ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... or two extracts from the novel "Der Mondschtige,"[18] the title of which is misleading since it in no way treats of one afflicted with lunacy but of a veritable moon lover, presumably our poet himself. There the nephew, Ludwig Licht(!), writes to his uncle: "It is now three months since I had a very serious quarrel with my friend, a quarrel which almost ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... power to the colonial authorities to legislate away any rights enjoyed by the subjects of the British Empire. He dwelt strongly upon the insanity question, and said the jury were convinced of the prisoner's lunacy, ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... to her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy had been continually by his side, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I bought a dog—a queen! Ah Tiny, dear departing pug! She lives, but she is past sixteen And scarce can crawl across the rug. I loved her beautiful and kind; Delighted in her pert Bow-wow: But now she snaps if you don't mind; 'Twere lunacy ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... ghosts with red eyes which flash like lightning. The "amok" devil which comes from the swamp, differs from those which drive people to commit suicide — these again being quite distinct from those which cause merely harmless lunacy. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... a fearful sect of fakirs devoted to Siva and to Bhairava, the god of lunacy, who associate with evil spirits, ghouls and vampires, and practice hideous rites of blood, lust and gluttony. They tear their flesh with their finger-nails, slash themselves with knives, and occasionally engage in a frantic dance from which ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... With all his torments and infernal terror? What should I say? what yet remains to do? My brain is dry with weeping all too long; My sighs be spent in utt'ring of my woe, And I want words wherewith to tell my wrong. But still distracted in love's lunacy, And bedlam-like thus raving in my grief, Now rail upon her hair, then on her eye, Now call her goddess, then I call her thief; Now I deny her, then I do confess her, Now do I curse her, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... guards looked askance at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the minister's camel, so as to prevent him from falling. The friendly negro ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... cause of hallucination and illusion is sought in the over-excitement of the cerebro-spinal system. As this stimulation may be very various in its intensity and significance, from the momentary rush of blood to complete lunacy, so hallucinations and illusions may be insignificant or signs of very serious mental disturbances. When we seek the form of these phenomena, we find that all those psychical events belong to it which have not been *purposely performed or ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and within me ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... clearly useless to resist a legalised process, I gave in, and thus was I, a perfectly sane man, incarcerated in a lunatic asylum! There I had to remain while Sir Lockesley saw my solicitors, communicated with the Commissioners in Lunacy and others, and after much correspondence and innumerable interviews, at last secured my release; but not until I had endured more than a week's confinement in ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... she was light this long while and not good in the head, and at the last lunacy came on her and she was tied and bound. Sometimes singing and dancing she does ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... Reader, good-natured, middle-aged reader, remember that she was only thirty-eight, and that hitherto she had known nothing of the delights of love. By the young, any such hallucination on her part, at her years, will be regarded as lunacy, or at ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... importance to tell you in regard to your daughter-in-law. I shall be waiting to see you at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. The matter is so utterly vital to the happiness of all your family, that I cannot imagine you will fail to come." Now, what's the meaning of it? Is it sheer impudence, or lunacy, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Venice has heard of the lunacy of the Marchioness de Strozzi," was the reply. "It is for that reason that she never goes out. The marquis perhaps thought she might be trusted to see the regatta; but he was mistaken. You must have remarked how closely he watched her for ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... evidently much excited, "I want you to work your way out upon that limb as far as you can. If you see anything strange, let me know." By this time what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity, was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... give each of the officers a drop of whiskey from my flask, and I never saw men drink so thirstily. Their hands and lips trembled as they took it, and their eyes shone like lunacy, as the hot drops sank to the cold vitals, and pricked the frozen blood. Mingling with the privates, I stirred up some native specimens of patriotism, that appeared to be in great doubt as to the causes and ends of the war. They were very much in the political ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... brainless observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... and more time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness. And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten history, unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or impossible adventures of lunacy, he encountered the monsters created of man's first morality that ever since have vexed him into the spinning of fantasies to elude them ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... of modesty, even if they have it not. To rail at 'fact mongers' is, doubtless, far easier than to overturn facts themselves. The 'Shepherd' calls Atheists 'Chaotics' and Materialism 'the philosophy of lunacy,' which is a very free and very easy way of 'Universalising.' But arguments grounded on observation and experience are not to be borne down by hard names. Man, like the magnet, is something—he acts. Dust and ashes he was; dust and ashes he will ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Dickens shall die during the composition of the said work of the Mystery of Edwin Drood, or shall otherwise become incapable of completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as agreed, it shall be referred to John Forster, Esq, one of Her Majesty's Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or refusal to act, then to such person as shall be named by Her Majesty's Attorney-General for the time being, to determine the amount which shall be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors or administrators, to the said Frederic Chapman ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... philosophy, and as he did so Marty became dazed and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally Joe wound ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... me after I left Lord Byron by the persons in constant intercourse with him, added to those doubts which had before transiently occurred to my mind, as to the reality of the alleged disease, and the reports of his medical attendant, were far from establishing the existence of any thing like lunacy. Under this uncertainty, I deemed it right to communicate to my parents, that if I were to consider Lord Byron's past conduct as that of a person of sound mind, nothing could induce me to return to him. It therefore appeared expedient, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... for his nephew's pay.' [Footnote: Mr. Ralph Charlton Palmer was Lord Selborne's second cousin, and secretary to Lord Selborne in the Lord Chancellor's Office. He was afterwards a Commissioner in Lunacy.] ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... mar her value, by renouncing her heart, denying her purpose. For days she would tie her kerchief over her ears and eyes, and crouch in a corner, strangling her impulses. She even malingered, refused food, became dumb. And she might have succeeded in making herself salable through incipient lunacy, if through no other way, had she been able to maintain her role long enough. But some woman or baby always was falling into some emergency ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... here alone and seem sound of mind,—except for—" Harry King smiled, "except for a certain unworldliness that would pass for lunacy in the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... paradise of her returning smiles? All this, however, came to nothing; and simply because she positively would not quarrel. And the jealousy fell through, because there was no decent subject for such a passion, unless it had settled upon an old music-master whom lunacy itself could not adopt as a rival. The quarrel meantime, which never prospered with the daughter, silently kindled on my part towards the father. His offence was this. At dinner, I naturally placed myself by the side of M., and it gave me great pleasure to touch her hand ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the confines of lunacy. ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... improbable circumstance were to occur, I should be heartily sorry for poor Adelais! Only imagine me with such a wife as she would make! Why I wouldn't have so transparent, white- skinned a beauty about my house all day for a mine of gold! I should be seized with lunacy before long, through mere contemplation of her very unearthliness, and be goaded into fancying her a picture, and hanging her up framed and glazed over my drawing-room mantelpiece! No, no, I'll leave Miss Cameron for you, you're just her style, I take it; but as for me, I never ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... wires. "What lunacy are you talking? You might as well ask me whether I'm going to ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... the jungle, a treat he rarely had leisure for now. He invited the Dalehams to accompany him. Noreen accepted eagerly, but her brother was obliged to decline, much to his regret. For Parry was now always in a state bordering on lunacy, and his brutal treatment of the coolies, when his assistant was not there to restrain him, several times nearly drove them into open revolt. So Dermot and ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... needs relaxation. Already it is recognised that in cases of cruelty the child may be divorced from the parent. But there is a hopeless incompatibility of temper and temperament which is not necessarily attended with cruelty. Drunkenness, lunacy, and criminality should also be regarded as valid grounds for divorce, the parent being no longer allowed to bear the name of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... under a stone porch flung out from the front of the house. A wide porch, almost a verandah; to the delighted eyes of the Australians, who considered verandah-less houses a curious English custom, verging on lunacy. Near the house it was shut in with glass, and furnished with a few lounge chairs and a ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... of great importance. He had, it appeared, been spending some weeks in the south of France, and was full of a project the value of which had, so he said, been amply proved by experiment. To me at first sight it seemed no better than lunacy. I could not for some time even bring myself to consider it seriously. This project was to play a new system at Monte Carlo. It was a system founded on one which, devised by Henry Labouchere, had been—such was Beckett's contention—greatly improved by himself, and he and a companion had been ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... fought for years for your tests and your atmosphere with plain business men not able to understand such lunacy. Quite right ... atmosphere's all that matters. If one and one don't make two by ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... hushed in an unconscious darkness she would be upon that river, floating through a long, winding night towards a dim, very distant day. If she were to drink, darkness would sink upon her, and all this visible world, the continual sight of which she felt must end in lunacy, would pass from her. So great was the temptation that she did not dare to get out of bed and put the bottle away—if she did she must drink it, so she lay quite still, her face turned against the wall, trying to find courage in the thought ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... whole Christian dogma, but conceived himself to be the second embodiment [of Christ], and proclaimed himself as such and summoned the missionaries to acknowledge him." It sounds much like blasphemy, or mere lunacy; but in India one learns not to be shocked at what in Europe would be rankest blasphemy; the intention must decide the innocence or the offence. Hakim Singh "professed to work miracles, preached pure morality, but also venerated the cow,"—strange ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... against women exercising their right to vote; no disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror—and none but disfranchised persons can be women's peers; nor has the legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers whatever stand to-day between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... person being human and mortal, and not otherwise privileged than the rest of mankind, is subject to all the defects and failings of it. He may therefore be incapable of directing the government and dispensing the public treasure, &c. either by absence, by infancy, lunacy, deliracy, or apathy, whether by nature or casual infirmity, or lastly, by some invincible prejudices of mind, contracted and fixed by education and habit, with unalterable resolutions superinduced, in matters wholly inconsistent and incompatible with the laws, religion, peace, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various |
