"Sanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the forked tongues of gossip began to play, reaching last, as usual, those who were most concerned, but, as usual, reaching them, too, in time. In the Blue-grass it was criticism of Colonel and Mrs. Pendleton, their indifference, carelessness, blindness, a gaping question of their sanity at the risk of even a suspicion that such a mating might be possible—the proud daughter of a proud family with a nobody from the hills, unknown except that he belonged to a fierce family whose history could be written in human blood; who himself had ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... unobserved by others. Many of those peculiarities of men of genius which are not fortunate, and some which have hardened the character in its mould, may, however, be traced to this period. Physicians tell us that there is a certain point in youth at which the constitution is formed, and on which the sanity of life revolves; the character of genius experiences a similar dangerous period. Early bad tastes, early peculiar habits, early defective instructions, all the egotistical pride of an untamed intellect, are those evil spirits which will dog genius to ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... their course. It was high noon when we reached his wagon and found the Mexican outfit still keening over their dead comrade. We pushed the cattle, a mixed herd of about twenty-five hundred, well past the camp, and riding back, dismounted among the howling vaqueros. There was not the semblance of sanity among them. The foreman, who could speak some little English, at least his employer declared he could, was carrying on like a madman, while a majority of the vaqueros were playing a close second. The dead man had been carried in and was lying under a tarpaulin in the shade of the wagon. ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... twenty-one years of age, and of sound mind, and all unmarried women of like age and sanity, may by will bequeath their property to whom they please. Infants, that is, all persons under twenty-one years of age, and married women, except where they have an estate to their "own separate use," are incapacitated, without the concurrence ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... nightfall, though the street lamps were not yet lighted. The glow of Mrs. Owen's kindness lingered with Sylvia as she walked toward Elizabeth House. She was constantly surprised by her friend's intensely modern spirit—her social curiosity, and the breadth and sanity of her views. This suggestion of a vocational school for young women had kindled Sylvia's imagination, and her thoughts were upon it as she tramped homeward through the slush. To establish an institution such as Mrs. Owen had indicated would require a large sum of money, and there were always ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... bristled there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this danger was, ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... sober sense of sanity Clay knew that this wonderful thing was not going to happen to him. He was not going to be given her happiness to hold in the hollow of his hand. Bee Whitford was a modern young woman, practical-minded, with a proper sense of the values ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... And I remember distinctly why I wept. The key that locked the muff unlocked in imagination the door of the home in New Haven which I believed I had disgraced—and seemed for a time to unlock my heart. Anguish beat my mind into a momentary sanity, and with a wholly sane emotion I keenly felt my imagined disgrace. My thoughts centred on my mother. Her (and other members of the family) I could plainly see at home in a state of dejection and despair over her imprisoned and heartless son. I wore the muff each night for several ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... South America are in The Master's power. Paraguay belongs to him, body and soul. Bolivia is absolutely his. Every man of the official class from the President down knows that he has two weeks or less of sanity if The Master's deputy shuts down on him—and he knows that at the crook of the deputy's finger he'll be assassinated before then. If they run away, they go murder mad. If they stay, they have to obey him. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... out his mad project to the letter. He did not altogether sever himself from golf. He was still to be seen occasionally on the links. But now—and I know of nothing more tragic that can befall a man—he found himself gradually shunned, he who in the days of his sanity had been besieged with more offers of games than he could manage to accept. Men simply would not stand his incessant flow of talk. One by one they dropped off, until the only person he could find to go round with him was old Major Moseby, whose hearing completely petered out as ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the absurd Frenchman with the case, which at first seemed a characteristic imbecility of his landlord, bewildered him the more he thought of it. Rejecting any hypothesis of the girl's affection for the antiquated figure whose sanity was a question of public criticism, he was forced to the equally alarming theory that Ferrieres was cognizant of the treasure, and that his attentions to Rosey were to gain possession of it by marrying her. Might she not be dazzled by a picture of this wealth? Was ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... tragedians may seem rather greater and more complete than another, their work as a whole has a single pervading quality. It is marked by grandeur, excellence, sanity, complete humanity, a high philosophy of life, a lofty way of thinking, a powerful intuition (Anschauung). We find these qualities in their surviving lyric and epic poetry as well as in their drama: we find them in their ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... century, that no isolated great personages have emerged. Never has there been so much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very abundance of good qualities has prevented our focusing upon those of any one individual. We all play our part in the realisation of God's sanity in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic end of Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no single individual of all the allied nations whose death can materially affect the great destinies ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... sanity brought was the suggestion that Ann, too, might be like that. Once before Ann had been "scattered" that way—oh she understood it now as she had not been able to do then. And perhaps Ann would have less power to ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... said, half rising, and looking at him with a bewildered air, a vague doubt of his sanity, and a half fear of his presence, creeping into her heart, "what can you possibly mean? How can disgrace, or cross-bearing, or trouble of any sort, be connected with ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... raised to the second power. A sound mind establishes regular relations, a modus vivendi, between things, men, and itself, and it is under the delusion that it has got hold of stable truth and eternal fact. Madness does not even see what sanity sees, deceiving itself all the while by the belief that it sees better than sanity. The sane mind or common sense confounds the fact of experience with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith that what is, is the measure of what ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... him is recorded by Rev. Samuel J. May, himself in full alliance with the Abolitionists, but a man of great sweetness and sanity, never diverted from his religious ministry or losing his mental balance. Dr. Channing dwelt on the excesses of the Abolitionists until Mr. May was aroused, and broke out: "Dr. Channing, I am tired of these ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... which Colonel Hampton clung, he could no longer doubt Jeb's earnestness nor his sanity. He saw that this son of his dead friend was speaking a horrible truth which he, himself, could not possibly understand. And then he seemed suddenly to have aged, to have grown ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... day must try to solve many social and industrial problems, requiring to an especial degree the combination of indomitable resolution with cool-headed sanity. We can profit by the way in which Lincoln used both these traits as he strove for reform. We can learn much of value from the very attacks which following that course brought upon his head, attacks alike by the extremists of revolution and by the extremists of reaction. He never wavered in devotion ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... was perhaps a solution to the problem of dying—a gentle sleep while the stomach was still full enough from the last meal to be reasonably comfortable and the throat yet unparched. Would it be the act of an unbalanced mind or one of the most supreme sanity? ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... off, in the same apparent condition we had first met them. But in their brains was boiling, enraged sanity, in a condition of complete rebellion, of ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... most preposterous assumptions with such coolness and apparent unconsciousness of their utter improbability to his readers, and with such an entire ignoring of the necessity of any further attestation than his own ipse dixit, as to warrant serious suspicions of his sanity. Take, for instance, his bear and whale story. Hearne reports having seen in the Arctic regions a bear swimming in the water for hours, with his mouth wide open, catching flies; and Mr. Darwin says if the supply ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... on the part of the creatures. I mistrusted it, and would sooner, far, have had them attack the house, openly. Then, at least, I should have known my danger, and been able to meet it; but to wait like this, through a whole night, picturing all kinds of unknown devilment, was to jeopardize one's sanity. Once or twice, the thought came to me, that, perhaps, they had gone; but, in my heart, I found it impossible to believe that it ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... reason—that her good master had gone out of his mind. But she presently changed her opinion, for after he had cried unrestrainedly until he was exhausted, Herr Ueberhell gave her a prompt proof of his sanity and returning health. In his kindly and polite manner of former times, he begged her to set out in the kitchen a bottle of the oldest and best Bacharacher. There he bade her bring a second glass and invited her to drink, and clink glasses with him because ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... salt, and a record of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll's investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another? And even granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the hoop, but not so rapidly, for here it was that the first faint doubt of his sanity came in. However, she brought it, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... desolating fury." In this sentiment there is not a reasonable man in the country, be he abolitionist or not, who will not coincide with him. We rejoice at the evidence we here have, in a gentleman of the influence and intelligence of Mr. Elmore, of the returning sanity of the South. How wildly and mischievously has she been heretofore misled! Whilst the Governors of Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas, have been repelling offers, made in respectful terms, of the fullest and most authentic ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... lookin' little thing that wuz ever made by a benignant Providence or a taxy-dermis. I couldn't tell which made it. I see it all, but I see also, so firm, sot is my reasun onto its high throne on my heart, I see that to preserve my pardner's sanity, I must control my reasun at the sight that had tottered ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... suddenly breaking a long silence. "Sanity—that's what's wrong with me and that's what will be wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you're old enough to be sane or insane. In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... his hand, while the doctor talked irritably: "No. You certainly can't see her, for some time. I shall not allow any one to see her, except the nurse. It will be a matter of weeks. She'll be lucky if she gets back her sanity at all. She was entirely out of her head there at the theater. She's worn out, nerves frayed to a frazzle. Horribly unhealthy life and unnatural. To take a country girl, an ignorant, untrained, healthy animal, bring her to the city and force her under ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... possible vividness the image of the object: and every artifice is exhausted to render the image as life-like, as close to the reality, as near an approach to actual hallucination, as is consistent with sanity. This degree of intensity having been, as far as practicable, attained, the effusion follows. Every person should compose his own form of prayer, which should be repeated not mentally only, but ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... puzzle my sick brain with the reason. I just waited for it to be revealed to me, if it were God's will ever to reveal it. And that I conceive to be the one spirit in which a man may contemplate, with equal sanity and reverence, the mysteries and the miseries of ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... and my sanity, my interests were, about this time, attracted into other ways—ways that led into London life, and were suitable for me to tread. In a restaurant where low-necked dresses and evening clothes crushed with loud exclamations, where there was ever an odour of cigarette and brandy and soda, I was introduced ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... terrible person to be on any one's track. Bert thought of the great black moustaches, the triangular nose, the searching bellow and the glare. His afternoon's dream of a marvellous seizure and sale of the great Butteridge secret crumpled up in his mind, dissolved, and vanished. He awoke to sanity again. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... reformers has not been sufficiently recognised. It is remarkable that, unlike other reformers, he has not contradicted error by an exaggeration, which itself very soon stands in need of contradiction, but by simple sanity which requires no correction. One reason for this peculiarity is that the Ethic was the result of long meditation. It was published posthumously and was discussed in draft for many years before his death. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... conscience may be. Conscientiousness is in itself a virtue. To this point we shall later return. We need only say here that conscientiousness is not enough. Life is not so simple a matter as that. We need judgment, sanity, insight, as well as a strong sense of duty. We need to correct and train conscience, to adjust it to our real needs, to recognize that it is ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... loftiness of thought hitherto satisfied by the hazards of war, drove him on an exploring expedition through Upper Egypt; his sanity or impulse directed his enthusiasm to a project of great importance, he turned his attention to that unexplored Central Africa which occupies the learned of today. The scientific expedition was long and unfortunate. He had ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... My wife's deeper sanity and clearer vision always inclined her to distrust our American acquaintance, Peter Ganns. From the first moment that Jenny's eyes fell upon that fine figure of a man, she judged him to be built on a very different mental pattern from Brendon. ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... sanity up to the day of his master's death there was no question; but more than one man with whom he had had dealings was ready to testify that there had been a change in his manner for the past few weeks—a sort of subdued excitement, quite unlike ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... Bernd when he came. It was as if a door had been flung open, and the freshness and sanity of early morning came into the room when he did. I hung on his arm, and looked up into his dear shrewd eyes, so clear and kind, so full of wisdom. The boarders were with one accord servile to him; even Doctor Krummlaut, a ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... boy fought for his sanity, bit his hand for the reassuring pleasure of physical pain, and prayed for help to the God in whom he had no reason to believe) that the case was "very unusual, very curious, v-e-r-y interesting indeed". Being healthier and stronger than at the time of previous attacks, Dam more ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... this abnormal thing called "insanity," one must fully understand the normal, called "sanity." There are four distinct states of consciousness in every individual; these must be kept co-related and all of them manifest through the common everyday mind. These four states of consciousness are instinct, reason, emotion ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... and sanity, I rose and began to consider my surroundings. Somewhere close at hand was the mouth of the cave—but where? The cliffs, as I have already said, were too steep for descent. Nothing but a fly could have crawled ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... take this knowledge, old and new, and with it, as educative material, help to shape opinions, and mold characters, and fashion destinies, thus transforming crude, unstable, and immature youth into men and women of virtue, and knowledge, and courage, and sanity, and poise, into whose trust, therefore, can be placed the guiding of a great, free, developing people—men of the classroom, teachers ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... said. But as I pass the barrier in Times path, formed by the death of my beloved, and proceed with the second era of my existence, I feel that a shadow gathers over my brain, and I mistrust the perfect sanity of the record. But let me on.—Years dragged themselves along heavily, and still I dwelled within the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass; but a second change had come upon all things. The star-shaped flowers shrank into the stems of the trees, and appeared no more. The tints of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... living out of water. His mental existence may be conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become incapable of sustained social life. He may become frantically self-seeking—incoherent... a stampede.... Human sanity may—DISPERSE. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... of those who sell macaroni and pasti, and of those who sell mighty umbrellas. And it is then, I think, that Pontedera is at her best; life which ever contrives in Italy to keep something of a gay sanity, disposing for that day at least of the surliness of this people, who are very poor, and far ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... to bay the moon to your heart's content. Perhaps Jasper will know where to find me a brain-wash." And with a final suspicious, wondering look at the whilom bibber, he passed into the house, much exercised on the score of the sanity of this family into which ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... of silvery gray, which, like the time-discoloured moss upon some ancient battlements, are the true emblems of antiquity: the eye alone is generally dull and sunken in the visage, but during his temporary gleams of sanity, or fancied flights of poetical inspiration, it is unusually bright and animated. According to professor Camper, I should think the facial line would make an angle of eighty or ninety degrees; and, judging upon the principles laid down by Lavater, poor Herbert might pass for a Solon. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... will-power, if directed at all, is as likely to be effectual for evil as for good. The psychic faculties may indeed be opened up and the unknown region explored, but at fatal cost, it may be, to all that constitutes normal sanity and physical well-being; in which case one may say with Hamlet it be better to "bear those ills we have, than fly to others that ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... appreciation of the mighty power that lies in propinquity—the propinquity of an inspiring ideal. Miss Farnham was never enthusiastic; that, perhaps, would be asking too much of an ideal; but what she lacked in warmth was made up in cool sanity, backed by a moral sense that seemed never to waver. Unerringly she placed her finger upon the human weaknesses in his book-people, and unfalteringly she bade ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... idea, and, leaving Tom to look after the auto, hastened down the ravine to Jones' Falls, and moved up and down the Falls, calling for the vanished damsel with a fervor that might have caused doubts as to his sanity had ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself. It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that I ask that the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... with all the gruesome details he had tried for so many months to forget. The haunting ghosts of the mental anguish that had left him an altered man—so altered that there were times when he had feared for his sanity! ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and stare at Mrs. Lippett's wallpaper in a sort of daze, feeling as though it's some bad dream, and I'm not really here. What on earth was I thinking of to turn my back upon my nice cheerful own home and the good times that by rights are mine? I frequently agree with your opinion of my sanity. ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... at this miserable spectacle!" he cried. "Here is a chance of getting something like a reconciliation of the old feud of English and Irish, and something like a settlement of these ancient distresses, and there seems no power, no conscience, no sanity in any of us, sufficient to save it from this cantankerous bitterness, this sheer wicked mischief of mutual exasperation.... Just when Ireland is getting a gleam of prosperity.... A murrain on ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... women of Britain as well as the awakening women of other nations east and west of the Atlantic, were so disgusted and alarmed by this persisting lack of self-control in embryonic politicians of their sex that they voted silently to preserve their sanity under the existing regime. It has formed one of the secret sources of the strength of the antis, that fear of the complete demoralization of their sex if freed from the immemorial restraints ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... passage and put his hand on the latch. Prudence, now quite certain of his sanity, felt sorely reluctant to let such impudence ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... origin and I am certain that they contain the poison which has robbed your father of his mentality. I am going to take them to a chemical laboratory where there will be proper facilities to have them analyzed. Perhaps there is an antidote that will restore your father's sanity." ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... asked to find artistic delight in the contemplation of a woman's maniacal thirst for a mother's blood. It is not necessary to recall the history of the opera at the Manhattan Opera House to show that the artistic sanity of New York was proof against ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "Shows such sanity, such breadth and tolerance of mind, and such penetration into the inner meanings of outward phenomena as to make it a book which no one can ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... of her sanity produced in Rebecca's mind a teasing compound of wrath and uneasiness. These people seemed to find something fundamentally irregular in her behavior. What could it be? The situation was intolerable, and she set to work in her straightforward, energetic ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... utter chaos? The strains of my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few others—the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering—should evoke from places in your memory that have nothing to do with this scene associates fitted to combine ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... when he went to the asylum. His sanity was blinding in its brilliancy; he voluntarily renounced the world of foolish faces and had himself locked away where he would not hear its foolish clacking. O Silence! gift of the gods, deified by Carlyle in many volumes and praised by me in many silly ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... such a crisis he should permit of any interruption hurt Helen deeply. She regarded him with unhappy eyes. Philip read the message three times. At last, and not without uneasy doubts as to his own sanity, he grasped the preposterous truth. He was worth almost a quarter of a million dollars! At the page he shoved his last and only five-pound note. He pushed the ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is no indication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters. But while we acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he has it, we need no arguments to dissuade us from sharing it. Each man may have his own loves, but the object in each case ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... that you discredit my story, and doubt even my sanity. But here is something that you can neither doubt nor discredit," she said, as she drew from her pocket the marriage certificate and ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... keep your eye on LULU Who Greater Britain sways From distant Woolloomooloo To Nova Scotia's bays; Whose sumptuous urbanity, Combined with well-groomed sanity And freedom from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... lanthorn to bring its dim light full upon his companion's face, gazing at him hard as if in doubt of his sanity. For the words were spoken as calmly and coolly as if he had been proposing some ordinary jump into ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... a very easy time in which to be killed. I was wearing an English trench coat and a fur cap, so to prevent any mistake of identity I stopped and presented a full view to each passing motor. Still I knew my continued existence depended on the sanity of any one of thirty or forty very excited men and boys on each truck, and when I reached the protection of the enormous crowd that was storming the entrance to the Duma I ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... Robespierre and St. Just; but they were convictions that grew out of the inherent geniality, benevolence, and rectitude of his nature, and were accordingly guided and limited in their application by the sanity and sweetness of the sentiments whence they drew their vitality. Whilst they made him capable of any self-sacrifice for freedom and humanity, they made him incapable of crime; and misfortune and failure never destroyed his faith in freedom, because his faith in freedom had not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... wonder:—why these incredible pains to seek out an amphibious battle ground whereon two sets of people who have no cause of quarrel can blow one another to atoms? Why are these Straits the cockpit of the world? What is it all about? What on earth has happened to sanity when the whale and elephant are locked in mortal combat making between them a picture which might be painted by one of H.M.'s Commissioners in Lunacy to decorate an ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... from whom she asked nothing, nothing at all, save to be permitted to think of him and to sacrifice everything, everything for him—even life. So strange had been the course of this love, that people would have doubted her sanity or her truthfulness had she described ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... makes me much happier. I put great faith in the healing power of the great winds and the sun. "Nature," as Walt Whitman says, "and her primal sanities." Mrs. S . . . , also, is a primal sanity. It is not, I believe, considered complimentary, in a common way, to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly, "You are thousands of years old." Or, "You seem to me as old as the mountains." Therefore I do not say it. But I always feel that anyone beautiful and strong is really ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... care and sympathy carried Nelly through the worst days of her trouble. There were times when Mary had to hold the girl's hands, to fight with all her might against the acute suffering which menaced for a time her sanity and her health. The horrors into which Nelly fell when she thought upon the things which happened in such wars as this with cruel and cunning savages, were the worst things to fight. There were hours in which all the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... exactly?" inquired Harley, and the tone of his voice suggested that he was beginning to entertain doubts of the Major's sanity or ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... The company decided at its annual meeting to invite me to take the position of one of the managers, and I shall soon go to the winter quarters of the show, to arrange to put it on the road about the 1st of May. Now any remarks may be made, pro or con, in regard to my sanity, see?" ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... the subject, or have even gone the length of debating how a man might attain invisibility. Now that I had a tangible proof of the existence of such beings, I was crushed by misgivings. Like many a man before the supposed impossible, I questioned my own sanity. As to the impression, however, the object I had touched or fancied I had touched was at once hard and soft, smooth and rough; I recalled it as each of these in turn, for it was moving, and at the moment of contact bounded ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... gates and paused before the darkened lodge. The wind had risen and was sweeping the snow into his race. The cold had him in its grasp again, and he stood uncertain. Should he put his sanity to the test and go back? He turned and looked down the dark drive to the house. A single ray shone through the trees, evoking a picture of the lights, the flowers, the faces grouped about that fatal room. He turned and ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour later, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... the ape were hopeless. Tyler gasped, staring at Bentley as though for a moment he thought him crazy. But in the next instant he doubted his own sanity, for the ape, slowly and ponderously, ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... will yet dawn when we will see that it takes two to generate thought; that there is the male man and the female man, and only where these two walk together hand in hand is there a perfect sanity and a perfect ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... spirit, family, credible, visible, charity, unity, sanity, humanity, ruin, promise, divide, divisible, dissolve, languid, negative, similar, abominable, imitate, inimitable, purity, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... 'The sanity of true genius' was a happy phrase of Charles Lamb's. Our greatest poets were our sanest men. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth might have defied even a mad ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... and the medical societies to do him up, added to this list of his enemies the Irish and the Catholic Church, because the prosecuting attorney in one county and the judge in that court were Irish and Catholic, and then turned against his wife because she now began to doubt his sanity. He brought suits in every superior court in the State, and at the time he was committed to an Insane Hospital he had forty trials on, had innumerable manuscripts of his contemplated reforms, in which were included the doing away with Insane ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... present incapacity for self-government is not intellectual, but social and moral. No one doubts that there is ability enough; but many believe that India must develop much upon the lower ranges of domestic sanity and social ethics before it is prepared for enhanced political privileges. The ignorance and the disabilities of women in India are a crying injustice, whose influence penetrates every department of Indian life, and for the removal of which educated Indians will ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... him with glances of astonishment, and doubts about his sanity. Some of them actually think he has ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... is as detestable as any known in the annals of the American colonies. Many of his acts, and all the closing scenes of his career, seem hardly compatible with moral sanity; in our day, when science is so prone to find the explanation of crime in insanity, he would undoubtedly have been adjudged to the nearest asylum. In his early years, he had been stupid and illiberal, but nothing worse; in his old age, he seemed to seek out opportunities of wickedness and ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... he had been, I felt no doubt: only, as the time had been put back to the beginning of the tete-a-tete he referred to, the whole of it had passed into oblivion, if not into nothingness! But I valued my own reputation for sanity too highly to venture on explaining to him ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... and quite awake, she had become aware that she, she herself, was that epileptic shape; that that epileptic shape was lying in her bed and that there was none other in the bed. Nor was this a fancy of madness! She knew that she was not mad, that she was utterly sane; and the conviction of sanity only intensified her awful discovery. She passed a trembling hand over her face, and felt the skin corrupt and green. Gazing into the darkness, she knew that her stare was apelike. She had felt, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... you see two or three different patients buttonhole a fourth and pour their grievances into a listening ear, you may safely suspect No. 4 of—sanity. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... instance of his decay: though I knew that he had not really withdrawn his affection from me, yet his air and mode of addressing me gave me constantly that feeling. So much the more affecting was it, when the sanity of his perceptions and his remembrances returned; but these intervals were of slower and slower occurrence. In this condition, silent or babbling childishly, self- involved and torpidly abstracted, or else busy with self-created phantoms and delusions, what a contrast did he offer to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... suddenly moved. She unclasped her long hands from about her knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning. This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the movement of a soul's resolution to be, to possess, to go forward, perhaps ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... reply; he was preoccupied with a new thought that was taking shape in his mind—what a scientist would have called an hypothesis; a detective, a theory. It might throw an added light, albeit a lurid one, upon such doubt of her sanity as her own assertion ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... have come to see that there is no possibility of peace or sanity for the world till that race of mad militarists is destroyed. I am still a pacifist, but, thank God, no longer a fool. Is there no other ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... has various uses; one is, that it makes us laugh; and certainly there are no speculations in philosophy, that excite the risible faculties, more than some of the serious stories related by fanciful philosophers.—One man cannot think with the left side of his head; another, with the sanity of the right side judges the insanity of the left side of his head. Zimmerman, a very grave man, used to draw conclusions as to a man's temperament, from his nose!—not from the size or form of it, but the peculiar ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... of the water was grateful to her senses. It was a plunge back into sanity and normal life again, drowning those ghosts of vague foreboding and anxieties which had kept such unpleasant vigil with her, and when the Turkish girl returned with a tray, Arlee was able to sit and eat breakfast ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... crush the heart out of him with the tombstones they piled up for great men, dead and honored now; yet in some future day, that mob penitent, baptized with a new spirit, like drunken men returned to sanity once more, shall search through all this land for marble white enough to build a monument to that prophet whom their fathers slew; they shall seek through all the world for gold of fineness fit to chronicle ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... wonderful was at work, something that drew him to them, with the half-fear of an animal, and yet with growing trust. He was pleading for their companionship, their friendship, and deep down in his heart Rod felt that the spark of sanity was not completely gone ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... for a perfect industrialism, is watching for the day when brotherly love will be the motive of all human conduct. But it is within the bounds of sanity to work toward an increase in understanding between the human factors in industry; it is justifiable to expect improved industrial conditions, once increased understanding is brought about. Industry needs experts in scientific management, in mental hygiene, in cost accounting—in ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... the bonds of a madness, which, after so many and heavy years of uninterrupted sanity, had at length laid hold upon me, I ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... traceable in one of his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar; and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of the young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of the hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... ever going there again. He must get away, at once, from everything which might remind him of the old life. He must cut himself adrift from it, immediately, altogether, if he wished to preserve his sanity. For himself, he cared nothing, at least at the moment; but, though he might never see her again once she had left London, he had to provide for Lalage. The Grierson strain in him had asserted itself in so far as it had made him determine to leave Lalage. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... heart would rise up and choke her. She realized instantly that the crisis had arrived, that Winston's life probably hung upon her next decision. Twice she endeavored bravely to speak, and when she finally succeeded, the strange calmness other voice made her doubt her own sanity. ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... sanity of farm-yards and smoking dung-heaps and Priapian jests beneath wintry hedges, and clear earth-sweet thoughtless laughter under large, liquid, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... world is gone from sanity, and how clearly science endorses Christ's teaching, may be seen in the modern craze for unhealthy excitement, and in the medical condemnation of that morbid passion. A well-known doctor in London, Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter, has lately condemned ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... effect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotional crisis which had awaited the full realization of my actual position, and all that it implied, was upon me, and with set teeth and laboring chest, gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently irretrievable chaos. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... except the undertaker. The fox presumably has an attack of acute indigestion. And there you are! Compare the moral of this with the moral of any one of the Old Cap Collier series, where virtue comes into its own and sanity is prevalent throughout and vice gets what it ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb
... quotations are usually from memory, though not always, as one out of three, perhaps, I had fortunately written down in a pocket-book; but no one date or fact has been drawn from any source but that of my unassisted memory. Now, this useful sanity of the memory I ascribe entirely to the accident of my having escaped in childhood all such mechanic exercises of the memory as I have condemned in the text—to this accident, combined with the constant and severe ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... they would be able to see it now, he had a sudden feeling of depression. He felt that he would give anything to turn back. A perspiration broke out on his forehead and his cheek. His eyes had a wavering, anxious look. Some of that old sanity of the once healthy man was making a last effort for supremacy, breaking in upon illusive ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... serum"—his tone was professional, cold; he might have been talking to a class in a lecture room—"a serum that robs the patient of every vestige of human emotion—and therefore sanity. All his intellect, his memories, however, remain, to serve him in carrying out my orders. He loses all his will to live and resist, and becomes nothing but an automaton, whose complete mental equipment is at ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... might have been a dream. But, was I not there, wide awake? Had not his mother heard him speak as well as me? though her half-waking state had rendered the matter less distinct than it had been to me? I was not going to be reasoned out of my sanity in that way, because he did not choose to wait until I came down to open the door—which I thought rather unkind, when he must be well aware, that my anxiety for his safety must quite equal that ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... than he can be hypnotised against his will. But between the recognition of such a fact, and the description of a cancer as an obstinate illusion, or a crushed limb as an "error of thought," there is just the difference which separates sanity from extravaganza. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the girl and she started up from the seat into which she had collapsed; frightened at the incoherent lack of sanity that sounded from ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... put me there you'll shut up the only wise man in the county," he returned. "If your sanity doesn't make you happy, I can tell you it's worth a great deal less than my craziness. Look at that dandelion, now—it has filled two hours chock full of thought and colour for me when I might have been puling indoors and nagging at God Almighty about trifles. The time has ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... red and blue, and a lot of old stores, which he had vainly condemned when mate, thrown overboard. The skipper stood by helplessly while it was done, and then went below of his own accord and turned in, as being the only way to retain his sanity, or, at any rate, the clearness of head which he felt to ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... thought rapidly. He comprehended the extreme desperation of their present situation. While the revolver blow might possibly restore Murphy to a degree of sanity, it was far more probable that he would awaken violent. Yet he could not deliberately leave this man to meet a fate of horror in the wilderness. Which way should they turn? Enough food, if used sparingly, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... between them, as it were, the bared sword of his ascetic will—no less than her own terrors and hesitations. But she set herself to lift him from the depths; and as they walked about the mountains and the forests, in a glory of summer sunshine, the sanity and sweetness of her nature made for him a spiritual atmosphere akin in its healing power to the influence of pine and ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
