"Hypochondriac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not fall at Le Cayla on the shoulders of Maurice de Guerin. After all, he was a wretched hypochondriac, and a tinge of le cahier vert doubtless crept ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... activity of a very busy housewife with that of an unmarried virgin, and thinks the worth of the former to be higher, while the latter accomplishes more by way of "erotic fancies, intrigues, inheritances, winnings in the lottery, and hypochondriac complaints.'' This is very instructive from the criminological point of view. For the criminalist can not be too cautious when he has an old maid to examine. Therefore, when a case occurs containing characteristic ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Women against me:"—a frightful accident while it lasted! Then his little Daughter died on his hands; his Son had disorders, nervous imbecilities,—did not die, but did worse; went into hopeless idiotcy, and so lived for many years. Zimmermann, being dreadfully miserable, hypochondriac, what not, "his friends," he himself passive, it would seem, "managed to get a young Wife for him;" thirty years younger than he,—whose performances, however, in this difficult ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... credulous incredulity is a strange matter. But when a whole Nation is smitten with Suspicion, and sees a dramatic miracle in the very operation of the gastric juices, what help is there? Such Nation is already a mere hypochondriac bundle of diseases; as good as changed into glass; atrabiliar, decadent; and will suffer crises. Is not Suspicion itself the one thing to be suspected, as Montaigne feared ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... gentleman—that hypochondriac who goes along turning his head from side to side, seeking salutes? That's the celebrated governor of Pangasinan, a good man who loses his appetite whenever any Indian fails to salute him. He would have died if he hadn't issued the proclamation about salutes to which he owes ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... 2. his having lost his wits, that is, his understanding or judicial power; but not his reason or the use of his senses,—(such was Don Quixote; and, therefore, we love and reverence him, while we despise Hudibras): 3. his being out of his senses, as in the case of a hypochondriac, to whom his limbs appear to be of glass, although all his conduct is both rational, or moral, and prudent: 4. Or the case may be a combination of all three, though I doubt the existence of such a case, or of any two of them: 5. And lastly, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... for the mass of riches proposed in exchange for her. Daland nor she had probably in all their lives owned a precious stone. And this chest is full to the brim of jewels, and that ship contains more still a hundred-fold, and the man asking for his daughter's hand is clearly a hypochondriac, infinitely sea-weary, who sees in the prospect of home and settled life the whole desire of his heart, cloyed with riches and sick of wandering. If he, Daland, should hesitate, the suitor might change his mind. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... they sat down in a corner and plunged into animated talk. Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first have paid his respects to Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers, and the Countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, Mr. Urban Dagonet of Washington Square, who, in order to have the pleasure of meeting her, had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out between January and April. The two chatted together for nearly twenty minutes; then ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... you see," she told Sara, with the martyred air peculiar to the hypochondriac—the genuine sufferer rarely has it. "It is, of course, a great deprivation to me, and I don't think either Dick"—with an inimical glance at her husband—"or Molly come up to see me as often as they might. Stairs are no difficulty ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... affection, or goodness. He never spares himself, except now and then to assume a somewhat diaphanous anonymity. Without regard for his own dignity, he exhibits himself as humiliated, or drunken, or hypochondriac, or inquisitive, or resorting to petty subterfuge—anything for the accomplishment of his one main purpose. 'Nay, Sir,' said Johnson, 'it was not the wine that made your head ache, but the sense that ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Kashkine could not fathom the depth to which his thoughts had sunk. Certainly none but a Russian could, or can, comprehend the terrible reality of what must, to the inhabitants of the sunshine lands, seem the mere wilful depression of a hypochondriac. But those men and women who have dwelt all their lives beneath a sky of leaden gray, in an horizonless space of desolate, unbroken steppe; whose children and children's children must come into a heritage even heavier than their own, handed down from those first, hunted ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... horrible resemblance of his own coffin and mutilated corpse was in reality revealed to him by the agency of some supernatural power, or whether it was (as sceptics will say) the natural effect of his hypochondriac state of mind, producing an optical deception, we will not take upon us to determine; certain, however, it is, that with a calm voice and collected manner he described to his brother James, a scene the dreadful reality of which was ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... help remarking the strong contrast between them. He, with his sallow, delicately-shaped features—the thin mouth and long straight nose, of that form I have heard called the "melancholy nose," which usually indicates a feeble, pensive, and hypochondriac temperament; while his daughter—But I have described ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Innsbruck, where the Emperor Charles VI. had hoped to restrain her from so compromising a match; here, in the year 1720, Charles Edward had been born and had his baby fingers kissed by the whole sacred college; and here the so-called King of England had died at last, a melancholy hypochondriac, in 1766. The palace closes in the narrow end of the square of the Santissimi Apostoli, stately and quiet with its various palaces, Colonna, Odescalchi, and whatever else their names, and its pillared church front. There is a certain aristocratic serenity about that square, separated, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... sternly. He had ceased to be intimidated by the fiery little man and regarded him simply as a hypochondriac, who needed to be told ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... of devout women. At this happy juncture he fell into the company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She was a religious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom she honoured with her confidence. From the first time she heard Knox preach she formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after of his society. (1) Nor ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... America. I never saw him, and while I was in Congress I formed rather a disadvantageous idea of him. His letters received then showed him vain, and more attentive to ceremony and etiquette, than we suppose men of sense should be. I have now a constant correspondence with him, and find him a little hypochondriac and discontented. He possesses a very good understanding, though not of the first order. I have had great opportunities of searching into his character, and have availed myself of them. Many persons of different nations, coming from Madrid to Paris, all ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... thousand ailments? that German physicians attribute one half of the deaths among the young men of that country to tobacco? that the French Polytechnic Institute had to prohibit its use on account of its effects on the mind? that men grow dyspeptic, hypochondriac, insane, delirious ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... rather than diminish the disposition to nervous diseases, can be the means of improving the constitution and ultimately of prolonging human life? Every attentive person must have observed, that too frequent intercourse between nervous and hypochondriac patients is infectious; and if this be the case, public assemblies, for exhibiting magnetised individuals, can neither be safe nor proper. It is no small proof of the good sense of the people of this country, though they have at different times fallen into nearly similar delusions, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the catalogue of the transition school occurs the name of one who, like Gray, was a recluse, but with a better reason and a sadder one. He was a gentle hypochondriac, and, at intervals, a maniac, who literally turned to poetry, like Saul to the harper, for relief from his sufferings. William Cowper, the eldest son of the Rector of Berkhampsted in Hertfordshire, was born on the 15th of November, 1731. He was a delicate and sensitive child, and was seriously ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... form of it is the snake, in the tale of "The Bosom Serpent," one of those "allegories of the heart" which he apparently meant to write in a series of which he never found the key. The idea is an old one; the man with a snake in his bosom is a hypochondriac, who by centring his thoughts on himself has developed this fancy and is tortured by it. The cure is wrought when he forgets himself in returning to the love of his wife. The almost physical dismissal of the serpent into the fountain, which is neither ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... last the poet had "beat his music out," though his friends "still tried to cheer him." But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. "If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness," he said at this time; "for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done." The age had not la tete epique: ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... in expression and in limited range of ideas, or more truly comic, than the two that figure in this story. Nick Whickson, too, the good-natured ne'er-do-well, who is in his own and everybody's way till he finds his natural vocation as an aid to a dealer in horses, is a capital sketch. The hypochondriac Squire Plumworthy is very good, also, in his way, though he verges once or twice on the "heavy father," with a genius for the damp handkerchief ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... golden? Yes. But perhaps if a woman of the world should find herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... influence of that hypochondria and despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p. 082) die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... Manfred, was to me a wonderful phenomenon, and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is in this way so completely ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... with trouble; for when once a man has set out to find God, he must find him or die. This was the inside reality whose outcome set the public of Glaston babbling. It was from this that George Bascombe magisterially pronounced him a hypochondriac, worrying his brain about things that had no existence—as George himself could with confidence testify, not once having seen the sight of them, heard the sound of them, or imagined in his heart that they ought to ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... analyzing his physical state is called a hypochondriac. What shall we call the man who is constantly analyzing his moral state? As the hypochondriac loses all sense of health in holding the impression of disease, so the other gradually loses the sense of wholesome relation ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... Sir Patient Fancy, which recall touches in The Ten Pleasures. She introduces a Padua doctor on the stage. She shows, in several of her plays, a curious interest in medicine, especially quack medicine. Sir Patient, a hypochondriac, thinks he is swelling up like the "pipsy" husband. Isabella, in the same play, says "keeping begins to be as ridiculous as matrimony.... The insolence and expense of their mistresses has almost tired out all but the old and doting part of mankind." It is not inconceivable ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... nervous system these variations of sensibility become much more striking. The patient who has hyperaesthesia fears to touch a perfectly smooth surface, or he takes a knock at the door to be a clap of thunder. The hypochondriac may, through an increase of organic sensibility, translate organic sensations as the effect of some living creature gnawing at his vitals. Again, states of anaesthesia lead to odd illusions among the insane. The common supposition that the body is dead, or made of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... dwarfing the objects of his spite, and exaggerating the small atom that has arrayed itself against the universe. It is a species of insanity, wherein a mind has lost perception of the correct relationship between different existences. The poor hypochondriac who imagined himself a mountain was a living satire on many of his fellow-creatures, who differ only in being able to keep similar delusions ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... into hysteria; again it takes the form of hypochondria or chronic blues. The hypochondriac has a chronic, morbid anxiety about personal health and personal welfare. Frequently this state is ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... their family may be the skeleton, or the consciousness of coming and veritable misfortune, pecuniary or what-not. But the Medical Times, which no doubt ought to know, refers purely to cases of vague melancholy and hypochondriac foreboding. Apparently "The Spleen," the "English Disease," is as bad now as when Green wrote in verse and Dr. Cheyne in prose. Prosperous business men, literary gents in active employment, artists, students, tradesmen, "are all visited by melancholy, revealed ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... voiding them. The influence of constipation upon the functions of the liver, is indicated by the sympathy displayed between that organ and the mind. The patient manifests apprehension, mental depression, taciturnity, and melancholy, all indicative of hypochondriac ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... early life, been subject to hypochondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, and was more immediately inherited by him from his father. They had not, however, been so strong as to give uneasiness to his family. While he lived with ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... these movements with alarm, and began also to organize. Rhodolph, who, from his position as emperor, should have been their leader, was a wretched hypochondriac, trembling before imaginary terrors, a prey to the most gloomy superstitions, and still concealed in the secret chambers of his palace. He was a burden to his party, and was regarded by them with contempt. Matthias was watching him, ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... conversation with the King. They found him much better in bodily health than they expected, and in the course of conversation, found no signs of any confusion of ideas, and are of opinion that in the hands of a skilful European physician he would soon be quite well. His Majesty is hypochondriac, and frequently under the influence of the absurd delusions common to such persons; but he is quite sane during long intervals, and on all subjects ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... that my heart turned as heavy as lead within me. I stammered out some few halting words of congratulation, and then sat downcast, with my head drooped, deaf to the babble of our new acquaintance. He was clearly a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack nostrums, some of which he bore about in a leather case in his pocket. I trust that he ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this, and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and the knights to some useful ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Hypochondriac! essay the elastic flooring! It shall so pleasantly and gently jolt thee, as to shake up, and pack off the stagnant ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... off very like another on all ordinary occasions; we will not fatigue our readers by entering into any other detailed account of the domestic economy of the establishment. We will therefore proceed to events, merely premising that the mysterious tenant of the back drawing-room was a lazy, selfish hypochondriac; always complaining and never ill. As his character in many respects closely assimilated to that of Mrs. Bloss, a very warm friendship soon sprung up between them. He was tall, thin, and pale; he always fancied he had a severe pain somewhere or other, and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... "A hypochondriac!" said Joe. "You are a little sick, and you think yourself much worse. You look better and feel better within ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... did not fall at Le Cayla on the shoulders of Maurice de Guerin. After all he was a wretched hypochondriac, and a tinge of le cahier vert doubtless ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... continually speak of my illness, Mary, that I fear you have good right to think me that worst kind of bore, a hypochondriac. But something is now going on with me that raises all my hopes and fears. I dare not speak of it to Kate, lest she should be too sanguine, and be doomed to suffer again the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... such powerful corrosions in all the veins of the body, recesses of the heart, nerves of the members, roots of the hair, perspiration of the substance, limbo of the brain, orifices of the epidermis, windings of the pluck, tubes of the hypochondriac and other channels which in her was suddenly dilated, heated, tickled, envenomed, clawed, harrowed, and disturbed, as if she had a basketful of needles in her inside. This was a maiden's desire, a well-conditioned desire, which troubled her sight to such a degree that she no longer saw ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... whether illness to him is not rather a prerogative than an evil. I am sure that it is well worth while being sick to be nursed by a mother. There is nothing which I remember with such pleasure as the time when you nursed me at Aspenden. The other night, when I lay on my sofa very ill and hypochondriac, I was thinking over that time. How sick, and sleepless, and weak I was, lying in bed, when I was told that you were come! How well I remember with what an ecstasy of joy I saw that face approaching me, in the middle ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan |
