"Monomania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lasting impression on me. Mrs. Ransome, the lady in whose house he lived, had left her home very suddenly. He anticipated a like return; so, ever since her departure, it had been his invariable custom to have the table set for three, so that he might never be surprised by her arrival. It had become a monomania with him. Never did he sit down without there being enough before him for a small family, and as his food was all brought in cooked from a neighboring restaurant, this eccentricity of his was well known, and gave an added eclat to his otherwise hermit-like habits. To my ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... work, and begged him to come to his assistance. The voice had come to him at the time of the accident. As a rule, however, the voices seemed vagarious, and he attached no importance to them, except as phenomena which interested him slightly. There was nothing flighty about him, no indication of monomania—he reasoned well, but from the point of view of a man who has had only an elementary education, knowing nothing of philosophy; he had no religious crotchets, and apparently thought little or not at all on religious ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor Chadd was in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... all for the same cause, all found where they had no business, and speared by some indignant father of a family; the figure was given me by one of their contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived. The strange persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or a series of romantic passions; gin is the more likely key. The poor buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case; they drank; their brain was fired; they stumbled towards the nearest houses ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regret, a paragraph going the round of the papers headed, "THE LADY THIEF AT LINCOLN," as if a lady could commit larceny! "Her disorder," says the newspapers, "is ascribed to a morbid or irrrepressible propensity, or monomania;" in proof of which we beg to subjoin the following prescriptions of her family physician, which have been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... the war temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even these ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches. His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might, without exaggeration, be called a 'long disease,' should defend himself by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when exposed to the brutal horseplay common in that day, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... makes some men such deadly bores is a form of monomania. It is the same sort of trouble which afflicts a kleptomaniac. She will steal the veriest trash, just so she can be stealing. He hoards the most useless trifles until his mind is nothing but a garret filled with isolated bits of rubbish ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... remind ourselves, when we are tempted to be incensed at his deportment, of the mode in which he had been treated, of his consuming sense of a mission, and his determination, little short of monomania, to return to its service. He and everybody knew that his conviction was an act of legal violence. There was no prospect of rescue through the machinery of the law from an overwhelming disaster which demonstrated law to be without a conscience or sense of responsibility. As soon as the ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... patients he has put, for reason good, Under restriction,—maybe, talked sometimes Of douche or horsewhip to,—for why? because The gentleman would crazily declare His best friend was—Iago! Ay, and worse— The lady, all at once grown lunatic, In suicidal monomania vowed, To save her soul, she needs must starve herself! They're cured now, both, and I tell nobody. Why don't you speak? Nay, speechless, each of you Can spare,—without unclasping plighted troth,— At least one hand to shake! Left-hands will do— Yours first, my daughter! ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... by little, passing away. His faculties evidently grew more feeble, as he concentrated them on a single thought. By a sad association of ideas, he referred everything to his monomania, and a human existence seemed to have departed from him, to give place to the extra-natural existence of the intermediate powers. Moreover, certain malicious rivals revived the sinister rumours which had ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... the conventions earned her distrust of one of her own caste. As this personal idiosyncrasy fell in line with the de Laney pride, it was approved by the head of the family. Under encouragement it became almost a monomania. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... is violated in order to bring Mr. Delvile, Mr. Briggs, Mr. Hobson, and Mr. Albany into a room together. But when we have them there, we soon forget probability in the exquisitely ludicrous effect which is produced by the conflict of four old fools, each raging with a monomania of his own, each talking a dialect of his own, and each inflaming all the others anew every time he opens ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... shall never live here again. As long as I had work to do it was all right; but to continue to live in that house was impossible. And in twenty years it would be no less impossible. I should fall into a monomania, and one of a very ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... estimate his resolve as Mr. Barrett, so his daughter declared, regarded Horne when he heard of that poet having published "Orion" at a farthing: "Perhaps he is going to shoot the Queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania." ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... take orders from him. He kills the flies, the bees, the birds, the frogs, because they are not his. I believe he would kill a man as quickly who stood out even for a second against him here. To that extent I believe he is crazy: a sort of monomania. But not otherwise. That is why I say he will kill you; I really believe ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... be anxious. She may only be glad or sorry, and continue her way. She is perfectly herself, whatever befall! even if frosts cut her off. Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfilment. It is not laisser aller. It is life-rootedness. It is being by oneself, life-living, like the much-mooted lily. One toils, one spins, one strives: just as the lily does. But like her, taking one's own life-way amidst everything, and taking one's own life-way ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... preceding century the coat-of-arms now used by Grand Lodge had been designed by an Amsterdam Jew, Jacob Jehuda Leon Templo, colleague of Cromwell's friend the Cabalist, Manasseh ben Israel.[333] To quote Jewish authority on this question, Mr. Lucien Wolf writes that Templo "had a monomania for ... everything relating to the Temple of Solomon and the Tabernacle of the Wilderness. He constructed gigantic models of both these edifices."[334] These he exhibited in London, which he visited in 1675 and earlier, and it seems not unreasonable to conclude that this may have provided a fresh ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... more and more that old age or his monomania had shaken White Henshaw's reason, but he said bitterly: "And I suppose, if that voice never fails you and if these South Seas natives can read the future, that you are ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... themselves that had turned me to trade in those lovely stones; how their iridescent glitter delighted my eye, and how the very act of handling them in their dull, rough, uncut state was a joy to me that almost amounted to monomania. The theme pleased her, and she asked me to go on. I had not spoken of diamonds once during all those long years of darkness, and to discourse about them again to any one who took the obvious interest in them that she did was for me an indulgence nothing short of delicious. And when we parted ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... life than most people,' thought Graham, as he trotted briskly along, 'and there is nothing in it that I can see to upset him so. He hasn't forged, or coined, or murdered, or sold himself to Pluto-Pan Satan so far as I know; and he is too clear-headed and sane to have a monomania about a non-existent trouble. Dear, dear,' the doctor shook his head sadly, 'I shall never understand human nature; there is always an abyss below an abyss, and the firmest seeming ground is usually quagmire when you come to step on it. George ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... marvellous extent, and produce enduring changes in the direction and in the intensity of our intellectual and moral activities. Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania. Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more or less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or the man ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... unaccountable terror seize upon me," he thought. "Why was it that I saw some strange mystery in my friend's disappearance? Was it a monition, or a monomania? What if I am wrong after all? What if this chain of evidence which I have constructed link by link, is woven out of my own folly? What if this edifice of horror and suspicion is a mere collection of crotchets—the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor? Mr. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... at the instigation of some stupendous impetus, that blinds the victim to the nature of her mission. It must be a sort of obsession; an intense personal instinct, amounting to madness. Nature, being determined to be well served in this direction, has supplied the necessary monomania, and the domestic idea, as you call it, grows up round this ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... one knows where, some armed with only a piece of salt pork, a little meal, and a prospecting pick; some mounted on mules, others on foot; old men and men half-crippled were among the number, but all bitten by the monomania which possesses every prospector. Now there are probably 2,000 men in the Perche district, and the number of prospects located must far exceed 1,000. Three miners from there with whom I was talking recently owned forty-seven mines among them, and while one acknowledged ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... men—a preference rendered each day more decided in a country where statesmen are jostled aside by beardless boys, and the senseless giggle of pert school girls might drive Sappho into a second watery grave, sickened with disgust. His personal vanity became almost a monomania, and he sat there, clutching Mabel's book, pale as death, and with flecks of foam gathering upon his lips, longing to appease his mortified vanity by tearing fiercely at something, as a baffled hound digs his claws into the earth when ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... getting more excited instead of calmer, under this form of studied though friendly reproach, "your maternal feelings are turning into monomania, and you make life intolerable to every one but your children. The devil! suppose they are your children; I am their father, and, though I am not adored as they are, I have the right to request that my house be ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... thing in my life and that I got. Any person inspecting 60 Overstrand Mansions may see that somewhat excitable thing—free of charge. In another person, whom with maddening jealousy I suspect of being some inches taller than I am, I believe I notice the same tendency towards monomania. He also, being as I have so keenly pointed out, male, he also—I think has only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it: another male weakness which I ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... notion that Shah Alam, as the head of the family, was probably, nay, certainly, the possessor of an exclusive knowledge regarding the place of a vast secret hoard. All the crimes and horrors that ensued are attributable to the action of this monomania. On the 29th, he made the new Titular, Bedar Bakht, inflict corporal chastisement upon his venerable predecessor. On the 30th, a similar outrage was committed upon several of the ladies of Shah Alam's family, who filled the beautiful buildings with their shrieks of alarm and lamentation. ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... a craze," she thought hopelessly, "some harmless monomania which would fill my mind! The maniacs in Bedlam, who fancy themselves popes or queens, are happy in their foolish way. If I could only imagine myself something which I am not—anything except poor useless Violet Tempest, who has no place in ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... of England, who see a negro only as a wandering curiosity, are not at all aware of the repugnance generally entertained toward persons of color in the United States: it appeared to amount to an absolute monomania. As for an alliance with one of the race, no matter how faint the shade of color, it would inevitably lead to a loss of caste, as fatal to social position and family ties as any that occurs in the Brahminical system. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the grated door of a long room where the night's gatherings are lodged, and discovered my five friends, tattered and bruised, but holding a lively Dispensary in one corner. From that moment I despaired of the Doctor and resolved to let him manage his own monomania. I was still peeping when two of the police and a sly-looking man in citizen's dress came up and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... simplisme or naturalism, let us say that, carried to its utmost extreme, it becomes a fixed idea, a monomania; has not impressionalism attained to this even in the choice of colors? It has been said of certain painters that they had only to upset their palette on the canvas to compose their pictures! Yet this varicolored chaos is not the characteristic of the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... little good your wrecking their bronze panels, and if they don't, you will get it back as soon as you can ask for it. To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all." Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of such cases is in suicidal monomania, delusional insanity, etc. In that variety of the cerebral form in which a decided predisposition must be admitted to exist, to disorder of the intellectual faculties, there are found various forms ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... issuing successful from the present crisis. Iscah Nicholas, though his strength was beyond question, was heavy and slow. Yet he was struggling with surprising agility. He was animated by a convulsive energy, a volcanic outburst characteristic of the obsession of monomania. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... shrugged his shoulders and went to obey the order. The obstinacy of this self-willed egotist was surely growing into a monomania, and perhaps it would have been more dangerous to oppose him than to comply with his whim. In a few moments Dr. Cummins re-entered the room, followed ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... not recognizing you; but you are so altered - allow me to add, improved, - since I last saw you; you were not a bashaw of two tails, then, you know; and, really, wearing your beaver up, like Hamlet's uncle, I altogether took you for a dun. For I am a victim of a very remarkable monomania. There are in this place wretched beings calling themselves tradesmen, who labour under the impression that I owe them what they facetiously term little bills; and though I have frequently assured their messengers, who are kind enough to come ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... two before. But there was no great party hoping to perpetuate its power by the aid of the Chinese, nor was there a defeated and unpopular section to be punished for its "treason" by being made over to Mongolian masters. Indeed, Congress, while rejecting Sumner's argument, made a concession to his monomania on the subject of Negroes, and a clause was inserted in the Act whereby no person "of African descent" should be excluded—with the curious result that to this day, while a yellow face is a bar to the prospective immigrant, a black face is, theoretically at any ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... together on my mind, suggested an idea, which I was literally afraid to express openly, or even to encourage secretly. I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. I resolved, this time, in defence of my own courage and my own sense, to come to no decision that plain ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... full of romance and fancy, was, it is said, possessed by such unresting, wondering thoughts of the fair maiden sovereign, and her magnificent destiny, that for a time his more prosaic friends regarded his enthusiasm as a sort of monomania. Other imaginative young men with heads less "level" (to use an American expression) than that of the great novelist, actually went mad—"clean daft"—the noble passion of loving loyalty ending in an infatuation as absurd as it was unhappy. Before ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... to tear man's skin or clothes. Our toil was rendered doubly toilsome by the Eastern travellers' dread—the demon of Thirst rode like Care behind us. For twenty-four hours we did not taste water, the sun parched our brains, the mirage mocked us at every turn, and the effect was a species of monomania. As I jogged along with eyes closed against the fiery air, no image unconnected with the want suggested itself. Water ever lay before me—water lying deep in the shady well—water in streams bubbling icy from the rock—water in pellucid lakes ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... kinds of monomania and insanity. We learn from them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in minds supposed to be sane, so that we have nothing but compassion for a large class of persons condemned as sinners by theologians, but considered by us as invalids. We have constant reasons for noticing the transmission ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... advanced in civilization, and opened their medical schools to women; so did the United States: only the pig-headed Briton stood stock-still, and gloried in his minority of one; as if one small island is likely to be right in its monomania, and all civilized ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... picked up from Frank, all heaven and earth were "spaniolated," to him. He seemed to recollect nothing but that Heaven had "made Spaniards to be killed, and him to kill them." If he had not been the most sensible of John Bulls, he would certainly have forestalled the monomania of that young Frenchman of rank, who, some eighty years after him, so maddened his brain by reading of the Spanish cruelties, that he threw up all his prospects and turned captain of filibusters in the West Indies, for the express purpose of ridding them of their tyrants; ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... however, his weak points like the rest of us; and perhaps one of the weakest was the difficulty he found in amusing himself without bothering other people. He had quite a monomania for proposing the most troublesome "larks" at the most inconvenient moments; and if his plans were thwarted, an AEolian harp is cheerful compared to the tone in ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing |
