|
|
|
More "Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men there twenty-five or thirty years old, dressed with extreme elegance, members of the association of Avengers, who seemed possessed with the mania of assassination, the lust of slaughter, the frenzy of blood, which no blood could quench—men who, when the order came to kill, killed all, friends or enemies; men who carried their business methods into the business of murder, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... has carried this hostility to the Yankees to the highest pitch, was an attempt made by that all-pervading race to get possession of Communipaw itself. Yes, Sir; during the late mania for land speculation, a daring company of Yankee projectors landed before the village; stopped the honest burghers on the public highway, and endeavored to bargain them out of their hereditary acres; displayed ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Mania did not speak for a moment. In her heart she said, "Lord help me to make this plain to ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... already green and wavy, fringed the foot of the trees, and by the road as we passed we looked through hedges and over low walls into gardens full of crocuses, snowdrops, narcissuses, early pansies and daffodils, for spring gardens have become rather a mania in England within ten or twelve years. Here and there older fragments of wall lined the road, and over one of these, from a height of eight feet or so, dropped a curtain of glossy, pointed leaves, making a background for the star-shaped yellow blossoms, nearly as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... with travelling without a ticket a Walworth girl was stated to have a mania for travelling on the Tube. The Court missionary thought that a position could probably be obtained for her as scrum-half at a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... of the party asked the meaning of certain tall buildings, he was told that they were pawnbrokers' offices; for the Chinese have a mania for pawning their clothes, or whatever they have, even if not in need of the money, to save the trouble of taking care of the articles. Before the third day of the stay in Canton was over, some of the party had ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... giving any details just now—even to you and Miss Lawton—of matters which have not yet been fully substantiated by the attorneys. I know only from Mr. Lawton's own private statements that he was interested, to the point one might almost say of mania, in a gigantic scheme from which we, his friends, tried in vain to dissuade him. He urged me especially to go in on it with him, but because of the very position I hold, it would have been impossible for me to consider it, even if my ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... his chromatic wand to Liszt, Tschaikowsky, Saint-Saens, Goldmark, Rubinstein, Richard Strauss, Dvorak and all Russia with its consonantal composers. This Polish psychologist—a fulgurant expounder of Nietzsche—finds in Chopin faith and mania, the true stigma of the mad individualist, the individual "who in the first instance is naught but an oxidation apparatus." Nietzsche and Chopin are the most outspoken individualities of the age—he forgets Wagner—Chopin himself the finest flowering of a morbid and rare culture. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... tolerantly. Most of us have hobbies; I knew a man once who carried his handkerchief up his sleeve and had a mania for old colored prints cut out ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... life, never read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds. It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... origin and development of the South Sea Company, of the forming and collapse of the "bubble," and of the spread of the speculative mania which manifested itself in so many other extravagant projects, makes a fitting counterpart to this historian's narrative of the rise and fall of the contemporary scheme in his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... would not be able to do this if—h'm!—the thief had stolen through need, but rather as an instance of a collector's mania, of scientific interest, of the ambition to make ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... thinks of becoming skilled in dancing, or in music, or in mathematics, or in logic, without long and close application to the subject."—Id. "Caspar's sense of feeling, and susceptibility of metallic and magnetic excitement, were also very extraordinary."—Id. "Authorship has become a mania, or, perhaps I should say, an epidemic."—Id. "What can prevent this republic from soon raising a literary standard?"—Id. "Courteous reader, you may think me garrulous upon topics quite foreign to the subject before me."—Id. "Of the Tonic, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Quintilian (who was born about 40, and died about 118), was the first to receive from the public treasury a regular salary, and had among his pupils the younger Pliny and the two grand-nephews of Domitian. The influence of the mania for rhetoric was more and more to impart an artificial character to literature and art. The epic poems of such writers as Lucan and Statitis are to a large extent imitations; although Lucan's principal poem, "Pharsalia," gives evidence ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... criticism, imitation, when book-making has become an easy and respectable pursuit for the many who cannot dig, and are ashamed to beg. And yet, by adding that same prestige of authority, not to mention of good society and Court favour, to the popular mania for literature, they help on the growing evil, and increase the multitude of prophets who prophesy out of their own heart and have ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... conscience. To him, the current of his time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology under lock and key; he insisted on maintaining his absolute standards; on aiming at ultimate Unity. The mania for handling all the sides of every question, looking into every window, and opening every door, was, as Bluebeard judiciously pointed out to his wives, fatal to their practical usefulness in society. One could not stop to chase doubts as though they ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... wildest panic. Amongst the thousands of herds like ours which were driven over the trail during its brief existence, none ever made the trip without encountering more or less trouble from runs. Frequently a herd became so spoiled in this manner that it grew into a mania with them, so that they would stampede on the slightest provocation,—or ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!—it is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in the Agamemnon—the first play of this last of his trilogies; and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the Eumenides—where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he returned to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... said Aristide, with his back against the end of the dining-table and gazing at the masterpiece. "I have so many at the Chateau de Mireilles. When one begins to collect, you know—and when one's grandfather and father have had also the divine mania——" ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... you are not armed with a pencil and paper. Have you been seized with a mania for taking notes?" This Eurie said to Ruth. "Now I'm going to get out my note book too. Here is a card—it will hold all I care to write I dare say. Let me see, who knows but I shall go to teaching in Sabbath-school one of these days! I am going to make a list of the things which according ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... controlled by a certain instinctive tact, began to affect Kate nearly as it had the others. She found herself laughing over the work she had undertaken in a pure sense of duty; she joined in the hilarity produced by Lee's affected terror of her surgical mania, and offered to undo the bandages in search of the thimble he declared she had left in the wound with a view to ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... as a money mania—in one instance it feeds the clergy on fat salaries, so that they might proclaim the virtue of self-denial, sobriety and prudence; in another instance it builds Sunday schools for young numbskulls and political aspirants who pretend to listen ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... hidden ways of the street hint that there is not a house in it but has its secrets of large or small operations undertaken on account of the firm. The practice of buying and selling on commission is unquestionably the safest, but the mania for wealth leads many clear, cool-headed men into the feverish whirl of speculation, and keeps them there until they have realized their wildest hopes, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... mania had left its mark over the divan in the shape of a gigantic fan constructed of little fans and opening out towards the ceiling. A few pen-and-ink and pencil sketches and studies, apparently the cast-off ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... The present mania for dragging voices up, and out of their legitimate tessitura, has become a very grave evil, the consequences of which, in many instances, have been most disastrous. Tolerable baritones have been transformed into very mediocre tenors, capable ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... army. I had some adventures in the Boxer rising; and though Heaven knows I have no grudge against the Japanese, the fight I made later on the Russian side gave me something to do for two years. After the Peace with Idleness, came the motor mania, and I thought of nothing else for a time. But when you have run your car for months, motoring for its own sake ceases to be all in all. You ask yourself what country you would like best to visit with the machine ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... education has steadily deteriorated in quality as the output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for them. Soured ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... for anger is defined to be the lust of revenge. They, then, who are said not to be masters of themselves, are said to be so because they are not under the government of reason, to which is assigned by nature the power over the whole soul. Why the Greeks should call this mania, I do not easily apprehend; but we define it much better than they, for we distinguish this madness (insania), which, being allied to folly, is more extensive, from what we call furor, or raving. The Greeks, indeed, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... portion of the year he applied himself wholly to reading the old books of knighthood, and this with such keen delight that he forgot all about the pleasures of the chase, and neglected all household matters. His mania and folly grew to such a pitch that he sold many acres of his lands to buy books of the exploits and adventures of the knights of old. These he took for true and correct histories, and when his friends the curate of the village, or Mr. Nicholas the worthy barber of the town, came ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... source of embarrassment to the government: rather would he be a martyr. O beloved religion! is it necessary that a bourgeoisie which stands in such need of you should disown you? . . . Into what terrible struggles of pride and misery does this mania for universal instruction plunge us! Of what use is professional education, of what good are agricultural and commercial schools, if your students have neither employment nor capital? And what need to cram one's self till the age of twenty with all sorts of knowledge, then to fasten ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... their own individuality in religious devotion to authority and tradition, Pusey turned what had been discussion into controversy, and from a theologian became a powerful ecclesiastical manager. Others dropped their religious interests, and cultivated cynicism and letters. The railway mania, the political outbursts of 1848, utilitarian liberalism, all in turn swept over the Oxford field, and obliterated the old sanctuaries. Pattison went his own way alone. The time came when he looked ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... Festival of the Thesmophoriae, and of Lysistrata, is to throw ridicule on the relations and the manners of the female sex. In the Clouds he laughs at the metaphysics of the Sophists, in the Wasps at the mania of the Athenians for hearing and determining law-suits; the subject of the Frogs is the decline of the tragic art, and Plutus is an allegory on the unjust distribution of wealth. The Birds are, of all his pieces, the one of which the aim is ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the formation of the Scottish Midland; and I may mention that he was also employed in regard to the original Forfar and Laurencekirk line. In his conduct of the latter case a characteristic incident occurred which shows the highly honourable nature of the man. It was at the time of the railway mania, when fancy fees were being given to counsel, and when some counsel were altogether exorbitant in their demands. Mr. Hope-Scott was to have replied on behalf of the Forfar and Laurencekirk line, but intimated that he would ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... chapter on the "Spirit of the Hive." In the domestic and international policy of the Prussian State, in the Hohenzollern dynastic tradition, we discover such a collective spirit, the "Spirit of the Prussian Hive," the evil spirit of war mania and megalomania, the treachery, the brutality, the greed, and, above all, the predatory instinct dignified into the name of Real Politik. And Europe will only enjoy permanent peace and security if she succeeds in destroying ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... that Miss Ruth fell to thinking about her father till it got to be a sort of mania with her—wondering and wondering what it all meant. Her life was secluded, but she was fondly attached to her grandparents and to a number of friends who were received at the house, while her mother was most tenderly enshrined in ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... Mary, Queen of Scots, in our National Portrait Gallery, is loaded with chains, brooches, and pendants, enough to stock the show-case of a modern manufacturer. This love of elaborate jewellery was a positive mania with many nobles in the olden time. James I. was childishly fond of such trinkets, and most portraits represent the king with hat-bands of jewels, or sprays of jewellery at their sides. His letters to his favourite, Buckingham, are often ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... leaf in the province, and seems to have been a model wife and parent, she yet retained a sore heart against the mother country. The feeling of these two was early inculcated into the minds of their children, and their eldest son, in whom it amounted almost to a mania, transmitted it on to his own successor, our Mr. Faringfield of ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... she would be seen and captured by an Allied cruiser, and always the fear that, failing such happy consummation, when she came back to us we might again be put on board her. The Germans seemed to have a perfect mania for taking photographs—we were, of course, not allowed to take any, and cameras were even taken away from us—and one day Lieutenant Rose showed me photos of various incidents of the Wolf's cruise, ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... he had built for himself in that fair vale, that poor mad Ludwig, the late King of Bavaria, drowned himself. Poor King! Fate gave him everything calculated to make a man happy, excepting one thing, and that was the power of being happy. Fate has a mania for striking balances. I knew a little shoeblack once who used to follow his profession at the corner of Westminster Bridge. Fate gave him an average of sixpence a day to live upon and provide himself with luxuries; ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... because man has no memory excepting for his disasters, that he accuses his wife, as he accuses his life, for marriage is but a life within a life. Yet people whose habit it is to take their opinions from newspapers would perhaps despise a book in which they see the mania of eclecticism pushed too far; for then they absolutely demand something in the shape of a peroration, it is not hard to find one for them. And since the words of Napoleon served to start this book, why should it not end as it began? Before the whole Council ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... sheer bravado, or fear, or personal hatred. Something more potent was beneath the tramp's motives—some incentive that was almost a religion. So far, Winthrop was correct. He erred, however, in supposing Overland to be obsessed with a mania for gold for its own sake. The erstwhile sheriff of Abilene had dreamed a dream about an adopted waif and a beautiful young girl. The dream was big. Its fulfillment would require much money. There was more of the poet in Overland Red than ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... busy with his head man, his plotter, his planner; giving directions concerning still further improvements that are to be made, in his grounds and park, during our absence. You know his mania. Improvement is his disease. I have before hinted to you that I do not like this factotum of his, this Abimelech Henley. The amiable qualities of his son more than compensate for the meanness of the father; whom I have long suspected to be and am indeed convinced that he is artful, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... "Not to have a mania for buying, is to possess a revenue." Many are carried away by the habit of bargain-buying. "Here's something wonderfully cheap; let's buy it." "Have you any use for it?" "No, not at present; but it is sure to come in ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... side, felt quite re-invigorated when he parted from her. He tried, too the effect of work upon the nervous depression from which he suffered. He was a man of a very methodical temperament, and sometimes carried out his plans for the allotment of his time with a strictness that bordered on mania. He shut himself up two evenings a week in order to write an exhaustive work on Cayenne. His modest bedroom was excellently adapted, he thought, to calm his mind and incline him to work. He lighted his fire, saw that the pomegranate ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... has borne all the earmarks of a national ego-mania. The whole German people, as a nation, not always, perhaps, as individuals, have fallen victim to the most colossal attack of ego-mania which the world ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... features of the shah-mania that British journalism was overrun and surfeited with Persian topics, Persian allusions and fragments of the Persian language and literature. Every pedant of the press displayed an unexpected and astonishing acquaintance with Persian history, Persian ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... to suppose it the ruling motive of half the discontented talk in clubs and public-houses, of nearly every business man who suspects a foreign financier, or nearly every working man who grumbles against the local pawn-broker. Religious mania, unfortunately, is not so common. The Zionists do not need to deny any of these things; what they offer is not a denial but a diagnosis and a remedy. Whether their diagnosis is correct, whether their remedy is practicable, we will try to consider later, with something ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... blind to the fact that a handful of men have made it their secret and uncontrolled business to direct the fate of the European democracies. With the press at one's command one can easily drive a poor people to a mania of enthusiasm, when they will carry on their shoulders the criminals who have led to the brink ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... been nonsense. Odd he might have been—Gadzooks! he looked it—but "queer"? Never. The fact that Miss Apperthwaite could picture such a man as this "sitting and sitting and sitting" himself into any form of mania or madness whatever spoke loudly of her own imagination, indeed! The key to "Simpledoria" was to be ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... baronet, I believe, sustained an accident in childhood which unhappily made him a cripple and a hunchback. He grew up a misanthrope. He hated his only brother because he was tall and strong as befitted one of the race, and his hatred became a mania when Captain Henry Royson married a young lady on whom the dwarf baronet had set his mind. There never was the least reason to believe that she would have wed Sir Richard, but that did not prevent him from pursuing her with a spite and vindictiveness that earned him very bad repute in Westmoreland. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... devils. These fits grew upon him, until at last he became raving mad, and had to be seized and bound with ropes to prevent him doing injury to himself or to others. At times he suffered from violent spasms of mania, while at others, again, though undoubtedly insane, he was quiet and subdued. He would then talk incessantly to himself, and bemoan the sad fact that the dread God of the City was sending evil spirits to torment him because ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... a strange atmosphere of peace in the cottage that evening, though nobody seemed to do any thing or say very much. Now and then Mr. Roy read aloud bits out of his endless newspapers—he had a truly masculine mania for newspapers, and used to draw one after another out of his pockets, as endless as a conjurer's pocket-handkerchiefs. And he liked to share their contents with any body that would listen; though I am afraid nobody did listen much to-night except Miss Williams, who sat beside him at ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the glittering statistical array that can be adduced in support of any chimerical venture, the inventor's repute, and their unbaked experience, imagined that the alluring Orient was ready to yield, like over-ripe fruit, to their shadowy grasp; and tainted as he evidently was with hereditary mania, Brunel resolved to seize the illusionary immortality that he fondly imagined to be within ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... by Jove! Head turned, eyes distorted, heart generally upset, circulation brought up to fever point, peace of mind gone, and a general mania in the place of the old ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... gave the new rules outward observance, but embraced every opportunity of indulging secretly in those flesh-pots to which they had been accustomed. It was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher's knife ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... uncongenial society of Andrea Contini. As for the work itself, it was beginning to have a sort of fascination for him as he understood it better. The love of building, the passion for stone and brick and mortar, is inherent in some natures, and is capable of growing into a mania little short of actual insanity. Orsino began to ask himself seriously whether it were too late to study architecture as a profession and in the meanwhile he learned more of it in practice from Contini than ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... the Emperor suppressed the matter where he could, but in the vicinity of the Rhine and the neighbouring land of Burgundy, the mania spread like wildfire, and as in France, overcame all opposition, until in little over a month after the first preaching of Nicholas, his bands were ready to depart for the Holy Land, while Stephen, Prophet and leader ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... as recklessly as he who places his substance on the cast of the die. So completely has the mania seized every one, that the obvious truth, a truth which is as apparent as any other law of nature, that nothing can be sustained without a foundation, is completely overlooked, and he who should now proclaim, in this building, principles that bitter experience will cause every man to feel, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out. In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed, humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... honour of the Lord of the Admiralty, and the bay where he had anchored, Swallow. Although convinced that it was identical with the land named Santa Cruz by the Spaniards, the navigator nevertheless followed the prevailing mania of giving new appellations to all the places he visited. He then coasted the shore for a short distance, and ascertained that the population was large. He had many a crow to pick with the natives. These obstacles, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... that you are not, nor ever could have been, Madam. The nervous excitement of which you speak is entirely within the control of medicine, which mania proper is not. You will use the means that I prescribe and your continued calmness will go far to convince even these dullards that ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... require such resisting strength as has been provided; he would not be likely to conceal a lunatic's confinement from the woman; no lunatic could consume all the food that he provides; so extremely violent mania as these precautions indicate could not continue three years; if there is a lunatic in the case it is very probable that there should have been communication with some one outside concerning the patient, and there has been none; the woman has listened at the keyhole and has heard no human ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues—and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other. Not a year passes in England ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... premise," began Villiers, addressing himself to the attentively listening De Courcy, "that such is the mania for dancing in this country, scarcely any obstacle is sufficient to deter a Canadian lady, particularly a French Canadian, from indulging in her favorite amusement. It is, therefore, by no means unusual to see women drawn in sleighs over drifting masses of ice, with chasms occasionally ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... it, other men were betting with him, animated purely by greed and craze of the sport. First one, then another joined till game after game was closed, and each moment the crowd had grown in size and enthusiasm so that its fever crept into him, imperceptibly at first, but ever increasing, till the mania mastered him. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... that most of the modern religions and philosophies were like the argument by which a madman suffering from persecution mania proves that he is in a world of enemies: it is complete, it is unanswerable, yet it is false. The madman's mind "moves in a perfect but narrow circle. . . . The insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, only it is not so ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... chance the debtor has of raising this amount is by successful gambling. Of course it hardly ever happens that he is successful; but, like all gamblers, he always thinks he will be, and thus gambling becomes a mania with him, which he will gratify at all costs, caring little by what means he gets money for play so long as ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... perceived it. Then, for a short time you appeared to love me. It was at that period you told me all that nonsense about your fondness for your creations. You held such shadows in pity when you were with me; but it didn't last. You returned to them, oh! like a maniac returns to his mania. I, though living, no longer existed for you; it was they, the visions, who again became the only realities of your life. What I then endured you never knew, for you are wonderfully ignorant of women. I have lived by your side without your ever understanding me. Yes, I was jealous of those ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... are a richer girl than I knew," said Emma's worthy husband, coming forward, with his round pleasant face. "I congratulate you; at this particular crisis, when hundreds are being ruined by last year's mania for railway speculation, it is most fortunate ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... way in some things, poor dear; but in others—I may talk till I have no voice left, and she won't listen. And she was set on this scheme. She has a mania for—for that sort of thing. One would never believe that she was your sister. She would hate to live like other people. She simply loves to be a nobody. I can't understand it. You try your ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... comfortable,' continued he, without noticing my words; 'and while you do it, the other fancies fade away—but this only strengthens.—Go on—go on, till it vanishes, too. I can't stand such a mania as this; it would ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... ere long, the existence of good schools near themselves, planned by persons of sufficient thought to meet the wants of the place and time, instead of copying New York or Boston, will correct this mania. Instruction the children want to enable them to profit by the great natural advantages of their position; but methods copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta, are as ill suited to the daughter of an ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... cases of houses of 'notorious rebels' burned down by the orders of Sir James Macdonell, Colborne's second-in-command. Colborne himself acquired the nickname of 'the old Firebrand'; and, while he cannot be charged with such a mania for incendiarism as some writers have imputed to him, it does not appear that he took any effective measures to stop the arson or ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... brother John is seized with a poetic mania, and is now rhyming away at the rate of three lines per hour—so much ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... height of the ten per cent. mania, a school of railway economists sprang up which advocated placing the construction and the profits of railways in the hands of government, and they supported their theories by ex post facto criticism on the blunders of railway companies,—on the astonishing ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Prebendary Row, in a work on "The Supernatural in the New Testament Possible, Credible, and Historical"—one of the volumes issued by the Christian Evidence Society in answer to "Supernatural Religion"—deals fully with this difficulty; it has been urged that possession was simply a form of mania, and on this Mr. Row say: "Now, on the assumption that possession was simple mania, and nothing more, the following suppositions are the only possible ones. First, that our Lord really distinguished between mania ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... had found it, and a few steps brought us to a little house I had not before noticed, with a neat garden in front of it, all the garden beds symmetrically bordered with conch-shells. Shells were evidently the simple-hearted fellow's mania, his revelation of the beauty of the world. Here in a neat parlour, also much decorated with shells, tea was served to us by the little girl I had first seen and an elder sister, who, I gathered, made all the lonely dreamer's family. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... agreeable mania he had the satisfaction of biting his son, the hope of his name and race, who had borne off from Oxford the highest academical honours; and who, treading in his father's footsteps to honour and fortune, had, by means of a portion of the old gentleman's ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... acids derived from it overstimulates the brain and the nervous system, causing nervousness, irritability, hysteria and the different forms of mania. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... was by no means universally beloved. In her sharp and disagreeable voice she said much good of herself and much evil of others. She had a mania for titles and was ever ready to mention some count, baron or marquis. In her drawing-room, Balzac found a direct contrast to the Royalist salon of the beautiful Duchesse de Castries which he frequented. In both salons, he ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... the people for one minute pulled themselves up and conquered their mania for money and machine excitement, the whole thing would be solved.—Would you like me to find Winnie and tell her to say good ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... the soil largely owns and dictates to the men who are compelled to live upon it and derive their subsistence from it. The colored people of the South recognize this fact. And if there is any one idiosyncrasy more marked than another among them, it is their mania for buying land. They all live and labor in the cheerful anticipation of some day owning a home, a farm of their own. As the race grows in intelligence this mania for land owning becomes more and more pronounced. At first their impecuniosity will compel them to purchase poor ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... other reason. Sometimes we see housekeeping brought to its highest perfection by the same woman who never did understand the simplest rudiments of home-making. The woman who becomes the victim of the housekeeping mania never realizes it; it ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... ideas in the South were played out. She would not understand him any the better for that; she would not know how little his own views could be gathered from such a limited admission. What her sister imparted to him about her mania for "reform" had left in his mouth a kind of unpleasant aftertaste; he felt, at any rate, that if she had the religion of humanity—Basil Ransom had read Comte, he had read everything—she would never understand him. He, too, had a private vision of reform, but the first principle ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... beneath his shaggy eyebrows observed with delight that Gibson, tapping his forehead significantly, gave a warning glance at the others, while all four sitting in a row watched anxiously for the first signs of acute mania. ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... herself a prey to emotion and agitation, when unawares sorrowful accents also struck her ear, from the direction of the mound. "Every one," she cogitated, "laughs at me for labouring under a foolish mania, but is there likely another fool besides myself?" She then raised her head, and, casting a glance about her, she discovered that it was Pao-y. "Ts'ui!" eagerly cried Tai-y, "I was wondering who it was; but is it truly ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... M. and I had finished the Pantheon we drove to the Conciergerie; for I wanted to see the prison of the hapless Marie Antoinette. That restless architectural mania, which never lets any thing alone here, is rapidly modernizing it; the scaffoldings are up, and workmen busy in making it as little historical as possible. Nevertheless, the old, gloomy arched gateway, and the characteristic peaked Norman towers, still remain; and we stopped our carriage ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Her mania lay chiefly in a belief that her husband Maximilian was alive, and she spent her days in hourly expectation of his arrival. She appeared to have forgotten all the troubles which had unbalanced her mind, and to be unaware of the cruel ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 47, September 30, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Mutiny broke out, and a little time before the siege of Delhi, a regiment of Native Irregular Horse was stationed at Peshawur on the Frontier of India. That regiment caught what John Lawrence called at the time 'the prevalent mania,' and would have thrown in its lot with the mutineers had it been allowed to do so. The chance never came, for, as the regiment swept off down south, it was headed up by a remnant of an English corps into the hills of Afghanistan, ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... lycanthropists suffered may have arisen from various causes. The older writers, as Forestus and Burton, regard the were-wolf mania as a species of melancholy madness, and some do not deem it necessary for the patient to believe in his transformation for them to regard ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of Plato's two higher forms of "divine" mania—has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the "defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... and telling us that this cock and the other have won mucho dinero, "much money." Each has also its appointed value;—this cock is worth forty dollars, this four ounces, this one six ounces,—oh, he is a splendid fellow! No periodal and sporadic hen-fever prevails here, but the gallo-mania is the chronic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... did not fail me, I find. As to insanity in the sense intended by Gulielmus, namely, as 'mania',—I should as little think of charging Swedenborg with it, as of calling a friend mad ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to Georgia the mania for writing such doggerel spread with a rapidity only equalled by the avidity with which the people seized upon the songs, and sung them. A complete collection of these remarkable efforts of poetic art would form an amusing volume, and from it alone a history of political movements ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... strength of the argument for Mattioli's claims to the Mask. M. Lair replies, "Saint-Mars had a mania for burying prisoners under fancy names," and gives examples. One is only a gardener, Francois Eliard (1701), concerning whom it is expressly said that, as he is a prisoner, his real name is not to be given, so ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... period, the English nation were intoxicated and led astray by one of those great commercial delusions which so often take place in all civilized countries. No mania ever was more marked, more universal, and more fatal than that of the South Sea Company. The bubble had turned the heads of politicians, merchants, and farmers; all classes, who had money to invest, took stock in the South Sea Company. The delusion, however, passed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... must always be a matter of the degree of the primary structural weakness and the energy and persistence of the operative forces; on these must depend the mere gentle, persistent illusion, or that fury of mania which transforms man, the "image of the Creator," into a wild beast. That insanity, no matter what its form or degree, is an evolution from an ancestral structural legacy, not essentially different from the structural conditions evolved from those of any other chronic ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... strong desire to stick the royal arms over the shop-door, and a great rage for mahogany, varnish, and expensive floor-cloth. Then, the hosiers were infected, and began to pull down their shop-fronts with frantic recklessness. The mania again died away, and the public began to congratulate themselves on its entire disappearance, when it burst forth with tenfold violence among the publicans, and keepers of 'wine vaults.' From that moment it has spread among them with unprecedented rapidity, exhibiting ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... or try to. We could spend our lives looking on. Consider our museums for instance: they are a sign of our breed. It makes us smile to see birds, like the magpie, with a mania for this collecting—but only monkeyish beings could reverence museums as we do, and pile such heterogeneous trifles and quantities in them. Old furniture, egg-shells, watches, bits of stone.... And next door, a "menagerie." Though our victory ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... erected under Napoleon I., by Percier and Fontaine, in imitation of the Arch of Septimius Severus at Rome, and once crowned by the famous bronze Roman horses from St. Mark's at Venice. The arch, designed as an approach to the Tuileries during the period of the classical mania, is too small for its present surroundings, since the removal of the Palace. The north wing, visible to your right, is purely modern, of the age of the First and Second Empire and the Third Republic. The meretricious character of the reliefs ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... see this and that one wearing the blazonry which wealth wins, and which the man of the world is sure to covet,—your weak soul glows again with the impassioned desire, and you hunger, with brute appetite and bestial eye, for riches. You see the mania around you, and it is relieved of odium by the community of error. You consult some gray old veteran in the war of gold, scarred with wounds, and crowned with honors, and watch eagerly for the words and the ways which have won ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... less despised. Richard Millers "Pink Lady" does not look a bit convincing, cleverly as it is painted; it is not interesting enough in the large surfaces of overnaturalistic pink flesh. Half that size would have been just enough for this canvas, which is chiefly a concession to the modern mania for painting large exhibition pictures to attract attention by their size alone. Groll's desert pictures are disappointing. They have neither interesting colour nor sufficient atmosphere to come up to the standard of this typical ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... suspecting doubtless, that he was but a tool in the hands of the Extremists. Martin was brought to the Minister, who questioned him and at once perceived that the poor creature was in no way dangerous. He spoke to him as he would to a madman, endeavouring to regard the subject of his mania as if it were real, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... born at Great Marlow in 1822, and probably acquired his scientific bent while engaged at a manufacturing chemist's business in Dublin. On the outbreak of the railway mania in 1845 he took to surveying, and through his brother, Mr. Edwin Clark, became assistant engineer to the late Robert Stephenson on the Britannia Bridge. While thus employed, he made the acquaintance of Mr. Ricardo, founder ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... there is a marvellous revelation of the inner affairs and methods of the stamp-collecting world; but the main interest of the book, to our mind, is its remarkable story, and it can and will be read with pleasure by many who care nothing whatever about the philatelic mania.... It would be spoiling a very good thing to tell the rest of the story of the adventures of these two, ... and we shall be much mistaken if this book, in popular form, does not ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... this pestilent heresy, delivered by the author before the Kennington Branch of the Church of England Young Men's Society, and is worth the attention of those who wish to know something of this now wide-spread mania. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidious a fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that he makes the language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or a line as any one else could have written it. His hatred of the commonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after the best that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose he would have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every line sparkle; like a lady who puts on ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... in his verbose mania, spoke of Jaime's ancestors, of the illustrious Febrers, the finest and noblest ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... bowers are not the labour and the property of a single couple; they are the result of the collaboration of several households, who come together to shelter themselves there. These birds feed only on grains, so that it is to a very pronounced taste for collecting that we must attribute this mania of piling up before the entrance of the bower white stones, shells, and small bones. (Fig. 25.) These objects are intended solely for the delight of these feathered artists. They are very careful also only to collect pieces which have been whitened ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... This mania for assassination completed the depression of spirits which for some time past had been noticeable in the French emperor. Severely wounded in the great toe at Ratisbon, he had there been compelled ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... a kind of mania for organisation which is the sworn enemy of order; in its efforts to discover the best place for everything, it ends by diverting everything from its right function and locality, and making everything as inopportune as itself. It was a mistake to cut off all the lights this evening, on some pretext ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... rainy season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... progenitors, or of the near relatives of the patient, will be found to have manifested unmistakable marks of unsoundness of mind. In the remaining one-half cases no such tendency can be traced, and in these it must be presumed that the mania is a purely local and temporary disorder of the brain. The incurable cases are usually found in the first class of patients, as ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster—poor, silly, and unattractive—whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret's heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! "I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the midday ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... to school an end would be put to the "collections" which troubled her tidy mind, she was much deceived. Neither Leo nor I were bookworms, and we were not by any means so devoted as some boys to games and athletics. But for collections of all kinds we had a fancy that almost amounted to mania. ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of piano mania, which has just passed its crisis; a period which it is necessary to have lived through, in order to believe in the possibility of such follies. When, in the beginning of this century, the piano attained such ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... the Widow and Old Charley and Stiff Neck George was no mystery to Wiley Holman—it was the same form of mania which he encountered everywhere when he went to see men who owned mines. If he offered them a million for a ten-foot hole they would refuse it and demand ten million more, and if he offered them nothing they immediately scented a conspiracy to starve them out and gain possession ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... for the gold mania has gone. That vale was grand with its mighty trees, but it was the work of a generation to clear that forest. Through me, that place was swept clean in ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... day's rising sun shone upon Stratford-on-Avon; and here revived in some degree my Shakspearian mania, to the still higher exaltation of my English stilts, and the deeper debasement of all "rough Irish kernes." At Shrewsbury we parted with a kind old lady, who had shown me some good-natured attentions, and I was left with only an elderly ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... me to be torn by jealousy," she said, "and often to suffer from the mania of persecution! Really, they ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... theological controversy. I was surprised to find she had not marked his diary and journals at all; I hardly knew how to leave them unmarked at all. Those Italian journals of his made me almost sick with longing. It is odd that this southern mania should return upon me so strongly after so many years of freedom from it, merely because there seemed to arise just now a possibility of this long-relinquished hope being fulfilled. I know that I could not live in Italy, and I suppose that I should be dreadfully ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... dabbled in stocks, and no modern operator is half so conversant an he is with the juggles of the Stock Exchange. PUNCHINELLO, though as fresh and frisky, in mind and body, as a kid on a June morning, is older than he chooses to let every body know. Bless you all, readers dear! he was by when the Tulip Mania was hatched, (mixed figure,) and it was he who punctured the great South Sea Bubble, and sent it on a burst. Ha! ha! he-e-e!—how he laughs when he recurs to those days of the long, long ago, with their miserable little swindles, no better than farthing candles, (allowable rhyme,) and their ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... influences and impulses, formidably stimulating as a powerful drug. There came, amongst other evils, materialism and covetousness and irreligion; overweening arrogance, an impatient contempt for the rights of the weak, a mania for world dominion, and a veritable lunacy of power worship. There came also a fixed and irrational distrust of the intentions of other nations, for the evil which had crept into their own souls made them ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... household, the names of the pet animals, and even of the children. I was called Mary, in a fever of chivalrous enthusiasm for the fair and luckless Queen of Scotland, and Fatima received her name when the study of Arabic had brought about an eastern mania. My father had wished to call her Shahrazad, after the renowned sultana of the 'Arabian Nights' but when he called upon the curate to arrange for the baptism, that worthy man flatly rebelled. A long discussion ended in my father's making a list ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and dumb creatures of many sorts, each statue standing upon its separate pillar, to the intense admiration of the gaping rustics who visited the town to inspect it; and he fairly beat the Scottish Earl of Buchan, who was infected with a similar mania. Upon an arch directly opposite his front door, he had placed Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. Adams, on the right, was bareheaded, and upon an inquiry by some one why this distinction was made, since Jefferson's chapeau ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... this vers brise (run-over lines, enjambement) that they are making so much noise about. "From 1830 to 1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (genre historique) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... very same tone with which they would have pealed for James's. Men were loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the storm. As in the South Sea Bubble, almost everybody gambled; as in the Railway mania—not many centuries ago—almost every one took his unlucky share: a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at his opportunity. His bitterness, his ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the power and nature of life in all its glory. But he could not realize the nature and effect of death and sorrow until he should eat of the fruit of the tree of death, and become intoxicated with the mania of its devastating forces. And for this cause Jehovah commanded Adam that he should not eat of the fruit of the tree of ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... She's done lots for me, in all sorts of ways—cataloguing my curios, you know, and going with me to hunt up things. In fact, she seems the happiest when she IS doing something for me. It's come to be a sort of mania with her, I'm afraid—to do something for me. Kate, I'm really worried. What do you suppose ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... the fence to have a talk!—last spring, that was; ever so many are dead now, for all I know, and all off at the war. Now I work for the edification of proper young women, who look in astonishment at me, as they would consider themselves degraded by the pursuit. A delicate pair of hands my flower mania will leave me! ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... But he has almost a mania for spying on his companions, and pointing out to the teacher every little action that might be considered ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... had gradually gained Adrienne's friendship. From an ostentatious desire to be able to tell of what happened at the ministry; to be on the first list of guests, when the minister received or gave a ball, Sabine Marsy, who had suffered from the mania of aspiring to become an artist, patronized the intransigeant painters and exhibited at the salon, now set her mind on playing the role of a political figure in Paris. Madame Gerson, Blanche, as Sabine called her, had a similar ambition, but simply from a ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... he implored. "I can't stand it—I really can't! Incipient verse-mania is too much for me. Forest-empress, sea-goddess, sun-angel—by Jove! what next? You are evidently in a very bad way. If I remember rightly, you had a flask of that old green Chartreuse with you. Ah! that accounts for it! Nice stuff, but a little ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... ever lived with more contempt for mere sedentary theories or a fiercer mania for the jagged and multifarious edges of life's pluralistic eccentricity. For any reader teased and worried by idealistic perversion this obstinate materialistic sage will have untold value. And yet he knows, none better, the place of sentiment ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... the gang-plank out than we all made a rush for the trading stores in search of curios. The faculty of acquisitiveness grows with what it feeds on; and before the Alaskan tour is over, it almost amounts to a mania among the excursionists. You should have seen us—men, women and children—hurrying along the beach toward the heart of Juneau, where we saw flags flying from the staves that stood by the trading-stores. It was no easy task to distance ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... of distinction! People have the mania, nowadays, to invite all Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs: their gowns were horribly smashed, and ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... the ancients that anger is a short madness. When we reflect in cold blood on the things we have said in hot, how impossible they seem! how out of character with our real selves! And this is one of the recognized symptoms of mania. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the sake of gain turned out bad music. No doubt, the love of money plays an inordinate role in the man's life, and keeps on playing a greater and greater. But it is probable that Strauss's desire for incessant gain is a sort of perversion, a mania that has gotten control over him because his energies are inwardly prevented from taking their logical course, and creating works of art. Luxury-loving as he is, Strauss has probably never needed money sorely. Some money he doubtlessly inherited through his mother, the daughter of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... reverie. These constitutions are indolent to voluntary exertions, and dull to irritations. The natives of South-America, and brute animals of this temperament. III. Of increased voluntarity; these are subject to locked jaw, convulsions, epilepsy, mania. Are very active, bear cold, hunger, fatigue. Are suited to great exertions. This temperament distinguishes mankind from other animals. IV. Of increased association. These have great memories, are liable ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Indecent, indelicate, immodest, shameless, ribald, lewd, lustful, lascivious, libidinous, obscene. Insane, demented, deranged, crazy, mad. Insanity, dementia, derangement, craziness, madness, lunacy, mania, frenzy, hallucination. Insipid, tasteless, flat, vapid. Intention, intent, purpose, plan, design, aim, object, end. Interpose, intervene, intercede, interfere, mediate. Irreligious, ungodly, impious, godless, sacrilegious, blasphemous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... human being from whom the philosopher of the complex vision would draw his standard of evil would be a type very different from any perverted type even from those whose mania might take the form of erotic cruelty. It would be a type whose recurrent "evil" would take the form of a sneering and malignant inertness, the form of a cold and sarcastic disparagement of all intense feeling. It would be a type entirely obsessed by "the illusion of dead matter"; ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... observed Vincent, "to trace the origin of this melancholy mania. People are wrong to attribute it to poor Lord Byron—it certainly came from Germany; perhaps Werter was the first hero ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... A diagnostic which was wanting for the confirmation of his disease. This may turn to mania. ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... fast riding. If I remember correctly, all of my guests were a little afflicted with the speed mania. It is a common disease with New-Yorkers. I hope, Stevens, that you will not give them reason to think we are altogether steeped in the slow, dreamy manana languor ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... to do in order to win a place on the stage, or to dress herself properly; but he could not endure to be deceived for the sake of love. Was he the sort of man to commit a crime, to do something dreadful? That was what she could not decide. She recalled his mania for handling firearms. When she used to visit him in the Rue des Martyrs, she always found him in his room, taking an old shot-gun to pieces and cleaning it. And yet he never went shooting. He boasted of being a dead shot, and carried a revolver on his person. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... missed. It is enough in itself that the deranged brain which takes windmills for giants, and carriers for knights, and Rosinante for a Bucephalus, has fixed upon Sancho Panza—the crowning proof of its mania—as the fitting squire of a knight-errant. To him—to this compound of somnolence, shrewdness, and good nature—to this creature with no more tincture of romantic idealism than a wine-skin, the knight addresses, without ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... in my mouth I could not on the instant respond to the lash. And as Corkran would have said, it takes more than one swallow to make a speech. Ruthlessly he rapped, seizing what I wished might be his dying chance to indulge a mania ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... his present mood he was almost ready to admit that the sanest philosophy of life was that which brought the greatest happiness. And sanity such as his own was only a sober kind of madness after all, a quiet mania which sought out the soul of things and in the seeking fed itself upon the problems of the world, a diet which too much prolonged might lead to mental indigestion. Morbid—was he? Introspective? A "grouch"? He was—he ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... seemed stupid this morning, for he was usually such a good worker; while Phil was quite hopeless. Both boys were bitten with the snow mania, and longing to be out-of-doors, in all the exhilarating brilliancy of sunshine, frost, and snow. Noon came at last, books were packed away; the boys rushed off like mad things, while Katherine went more soberly ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... counties of Anson, Bladen, Cumberland, Moore, Richmond, Robeson and Sampson, but the greater portion established themselves within the present limits of Cumberland, with Fayetteville the seat of justice. There was in fact a Carolina mania which was not broken until the beginning of the Revolution.[26] The flame of enthusiasm passed like wildfire through the Highland glens and Western Isles. It pervaded all classes, from the poorest crofter to the well-to-do farmer, and ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... "Mr. Pennington has a mania for cats. He and Mrs. Pennington have a standing disagreement about it. The last girl left here because she couldn't stand the cats; they affected her nerves, she said. I ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the money, as they certainly would, still the money would be there. Gwendolen's imagination dwelt on this course and created agreeable consequences, but not with unbroken confidence and rising certainty as it would have done if she had been touched with the gambler's mania. She had gone to the roulette-table not because of passion, but in search of it: her mind was still sanely capable of picturing balanced probabilities, and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing thrust itself on her with alternate strength and made a vision from which her ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... than he had at first supposed, within the sanctity of his tent, longing for an order to take him elsewhere, and dreading the possibility of again having to encounter this girl, who remained to him so perplexing an enigma. Glencaid meanwhile recovered from its mania of lynch-law, and even began exhibiting some faint evidences of shame over what was so plainly a mistake. And the populace were also beginning to exhibit no small degree of interest in the weighty matters which concerned the fast-culminating ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... cried Crofter angrily, "you have said more than enough! Your hobby has become a mania, sir! How you obtained possession of the vase I do not know, nor do I know how my friend has traced the theft to you; least of all how this scandal is to be hushed up. But have the decency to admit facts! There is no ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest, which he endeavors to conceal by passing to matters of greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe, is in what he pronounces "a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy". His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... I assure you, nothing that we—that is—I—did not already have good cause to suspect and know. It came to me from Robinson, Mac, before you dreamed of anything of the kind, so you are in no wise responsible. She must have a mania, there's no other explanation for it; but we're going to keep it all quiet. No one is to know until Captain Forrest gets back at the end of the campaign. Then he will be told, and restitution be made. But isn't ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... of his day, Greek as well as his native Latin. His aim was to be an "artist," but if the want of balance which too often goes with what is called the "artistic temperament" ever manifested itself in its worst form, it was in Nero. Apart from his passion for music and verse, he developed an early mania for horse-racing, and when he was caught talking in school—where such conversation was forbidden—about a charioteer who had fallen out of his chariot and been dragged along the ground, he explained that he was discussing the passage in Homer where Achilles drags the body of Hector round ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... begun with what appeared a fresh impetus to national prosperity—a new start full of life and vigour, by which the whole resources of the country should be at once stirred up and rendered ten times more available than they had ever been before. This was known afterwards as "the Railway Mania," which, like other manias, if they are not mere fever-fits of speculation, but are founded on real and tangible gains, had its eager hopeful rise, its inflated disproportioned exaggeration, its disastrous collapse, its gradual recovery, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... astonishing what a mania for card-playing existed in Corsica at that time—and it is probably the same now. The clubs and cafes were watched by the police, for the young men ruined themselves at a game called bouillotte. In ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... but I will never consent," cried Angus, with a resoluteness through which his first eager sense of relief was clearly discernible. Truly, there was coming upon him, with this mania of speculation, the same desperation which causes the gambler to clutch money from the starving hands of those who even yet are ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... pints of milk a cow would give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes. I was out against the universe. But it wasn't serious at all—just a boy's mania—till one day my father met me in London when I came down from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street. There was the thing that finished me. I was twenty-one, and restless-minded, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... perfectly clear! Nothing is easier! Traverse shall come and read medicine in my office! I shall be glad to have the lad there. It will amuse me to give him instruction occasionally. I have a positive mania for teaching!" ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... on. Their bringing-up made him what he was, I am sure. He went nowhere; he always fancied people were laughing at him. His feeling about his—his mother's lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life. He exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania. If you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human being—one of the million crawling units on the earth—could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance. It was pitiful. He went nowhere, and saw no one. I believe he thought that Providence had sent ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... himself for nobody knows what,—then we fell naturally into lamenting the waste of such fine material, and conned over various particulars of his former life and prospects—the great promise of past years, the present melancholy mania to make money and be useful. Upon which points George and I fought as usual. Then we grew tired of the subject and of the mud—turned short about—and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... My dream's come true. Ho, lodgers, ho, This portent view. Glyce has vanished, carrying off my cock, My cock that crew! O Mania, help! O reads of the rock Pursue! pursue! For I poor girl, was working within, Holding my distaff heavy and full, Twir-r-r-r-r-rling my hand as the threads I spin, Weaving an excellent bobbin ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... "ride your hobby" at a dinner party, and the real truth as to the cause of the sudden social ostracism of young Freddie H——, a New York clubman of some years ago (now happily deceased), is that on one occasion this young fellow, who had developed a craze for marksmanship amounting almost to a mania, very nearly ruined a dinner party given by a prominent Boston society matron by attempting to shoot the whiskers off a certain elderly gentleman, who happened to be a direct descendant of ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... there were many who gave the new rules outward observance, but embraced every opportunity of indulging secretly in those flesh-pots to which they had been accustomed. It was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher's knife ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... he laughed in their faces, he told them they were a bunch of fools, they belonged in the nursery; for Jimmie classed German spies with goblins, witches and sea-serpents. And here suddenly the bewildered little man found himself in the midst of a German spy mania, the like of which he could ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... my passion for gambling grew into a veritable mania, and I no longer felt any inclination for those things which at one time had lured me to student life. I became absolutely indifferent to the opinion of my former companions and avoided them entirely; I now lost ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... had not neglected—by a refinement of benevolence strange in such primitive beings—to provide him with a desire difficult to attain, and with an enemy hard to overcome. The envy of Lingard's political and commercial successes, and the wish to get the best of him in every way, became Abdulla's mania, the paramount interest of his life, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... answered; "if I were to sell my whole library to-morrow, I could hardly raise the money;" for he was poor, and it was rumoured that his mania had already made him acquainted ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... on account of his propensity for purloining things that belonged to others, just to add to his "collection." The thing that struck Hugh as bordering on the comical was that even a small colored boy might have the same mania for gathering "trophies" of his visits that possessed Madame Pangborn. He felt that the good lady would herself be amused at the coincidence, and be ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight, pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... had finished the Pantheon we drove to the Conciergerie; for I wanted to see the prison of the hapless Marie Antoinette. That restless architectural mania, which never lets any thing alone here, is rapidly modernizing it; the scaffoldings are up, and workmen busy in making it as little historical as possible. Nevertheless, the old, gloomy arched gateway, and the characteristic peaked Norman towers, still remain; ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... will be very pleasant—not worrying and fidgeting—so calm and kind. I refused at first, Cecil. People always want what they can't get, and if it's any satisfaction to you, I don't mind confessing that I have had, for years, a perfect mania for somebody else. A hopeless case for at least three reasons: he's married, he's in love with someone else (not even counting his wife, who counts a great deal) and, if he hadn't either of these preoccupations, he would never look at me. So I've given ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... least two hundred years old, instead of two. But Downing's advent had already wrought miracles here and there in our land; and a little while before Mr. Remington had been bitten with an architectural mania. So under the transplanted trees, and beneath trailing vines of Virginia creeper and Boursault roses, there peeped the brown gables of a cottage, which arose and stood there as reposeful and weather-stained as if it had been built before the Revolution. Mr. Remington showed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... inquiries to the objects contained within his wooden home. The various phases and phenomena of the weather, the aspects of the sky, and the wonders of the deep, claimed his earnest attention. To know the reason of everything was with him a species of mania, and in pursuit of this knowledge he stuck at nothing. "Never venture never win," became with him as favourite a motto as it had been with his father, and he acted on it more vigorously than his father ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... seized with the mania. There were several other matters that occupied their attention. John was to be married in January, and to go in business with his employer, who would be his father-in-law. And in December, two granddaughters were ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... our form of apocalyptism. In France it began with sentimentalism, developing normally into homicidal mania. In England it took the form of a kind of Deuteronomic religion. As a reward for our national virtues, our population expanded, our exports and imports went up by leaps and bounds, and our empire received additions every decade. It was plain that ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... time Worth would bring word of him. What boats does he mend, Aunt Kate wanted to know, and what business has he landing them on our Island? To which came the answer that he mended boats sick unto death with speed mania and other social disease, and that he didn't land them on the Island, but on an island off the tip of the Island, a tiny island which the Lord had thoughtlessly left lying disrespectfully close to the Isle of Dignity. Katie was too true a ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... effects as Paganini does on the violin, and performs wonders which one would never have imagined possible. Hiller, too, is an excellent player, powerful and coquettish enough. Both are a little infected by the Parisian mania for despondency and straining after emotional vehemence [Verzweif-lungssucht und Leidenschaftssucherei], and often lose sight of time and repose and the really musical too much. I, on the other hand, do so perhaps too little. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... motive for concealment, I am permitted to use them, and accordingly send you a transcript, simply omitting technical details of seamanship and supercargo. It almost seems as though the captain had been seized with some kind of mania before he had got well into blue water, and that this had developed persistently throughout the voyage. Of course my statement must be taken cum grano, since I am writing from the dictation of a clerk of the Russian consul, who kindly translated ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... of hissing steam pipes and machinery; once across greasy deck-plates and through a maze of dimly lit alleys, you would find Nosey shovelling coal into the furnaces under the direction of a hairy-chested individual afflicted, men said, by religious mania, who sucked pieces of coal as an antidote to chronic thirst, and spat ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... portcullis alternating with each other, intimating that, as the portcullis was the second defence of a fortress when the gate was broken down, so he had a second claim to the crown through his mother, daughter of John de Beaufort. After the accession of the Tudor dynasty there arose a mania for heraldic devices; in some cases an unsatisfactory mode of decoration, but in this building one that possesses not only historical interest, but ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... the trees, and by the road as we passed we looked through hedges and over low walls into gardens full of crocuses, snowdrops, narcissuses, early pansies and daffodils, for spring gardens have become rather a mania in England within ten or twelve years. Here and there older fragments of wall lined the road, and over one of these, from a height of eight feet or so, dropped a curtain of glossy, pointed leaves, making a background for the star-shaped yellow blossoms, nearly as large as passion-flowers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Chiefswood], Mr. L——w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind, discussing the authenticity of the Memoirs, and concluding that they are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... second-class coaches was longer than usual, filled with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... see he is a lunatic, prince?" whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch in his ear. "Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends to pass the examinations. I am expecting ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... everything in my power for your friends. Are you well-bred folk as well bred as we, Republican bourgeois, with the coarse hands (though you once told me mine were psychic hands when the mania of palmistry had not yet been succeeded by that of the Reconciliation between Church and State), I wonder, that you should apologize, you whose father fed me and housed me and clothed me in my exile, for giving me the horrid trouble of hunting for ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... disaster, is so altogether removed from the sphere of reason that we ought perhaps to regard it as comparable to those manias which, in former centuries, have assumed other forms more attractive to the neurotic temperament of those days; fortunately, it is a mania which, in the nature of things, is powerless to realize itself, and we need not anticipate that the outcry against small families will have the same results as the ancient outcry ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... followed to Egypt, but unfortunately his temper was gloomy and misanthropic, which made him extremely sullen and disagreeable; and the favor which Roustan enjoyed perhaps contributed to increase this gloomy disposition. In a kind of mania he imagined himself to be the object of a special espionage; and when his hours of service were over, he would shut himself up in his room, and pass in mournful solitude the whole time he was not on duty. The First Consul, when in good humor, would joke with him upon this savage disposition, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... her husband's name. The de did not cost anything and gave categoria to the name. When she signed herself, she wrote Victorina de los Reyes de de Espadana. That de de Espadana was her mania. Neither the lithographer who printed her cards, nor her husband, could get the idea out of ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... herself to every jeweller's window, and remain fascinated by the richness there displayed, till led away by force. On this occasion, however, her mania led to good results; for, at the ninth window, as her keepers were about to drag her away, a ring of peculiar antiquity caught their eyes simultaneously, and, to Mat's amazement, both plunged into the ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... money from us and to keep it for themselves. If your father were well, the division between us would soon be over; he would listen to me; he is loving and kind; he would see his mistake. But now his mind is affected, and his prejudices against me have become a fixed idea, a sort of mania with him. It is one result of his illness. Your father's fondness for you is another proof that his mind is deranged. Until he fell ill you never noticed that he loved you more than Pauline and Georges. It is all caprice with him now. In his affection ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... constitutional theories, who were governed by that passion to see immediate results which the thoughtless ever confuse with achievement, these were becoming hysterical over delay. Why did not the government do something? Everywhere voices were raised accusing the President of cowardice. The mania of suspicion was not confined to the Committee. The thoughts of a multitude were expressed by Congressman Hickman in his foolish words, "These are days of irresponsibility and imbecility, and we are required to perform two offices—the office of legislator ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... doesn't happen to be my God," said Paul, once more suspicious—and now hideously so—of religious mania. "And possibly the real God is somebody else's God altogether. Anyway, England's the only God I've got left, and I'm ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... letter to Morse he says: "Which of my friends was it who lately observed to you that I had a picture mania? You made, I understand, a most excellent reply, 'You wished I would come to town, then, and bite a dozen.' Indeed, my very good sir, was it in my power to excite in them a just admiration of your talents, I would readily come to town and bite the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... camp, indeed, was seized with a mania for collecting: old Haji Wali again gathered bits of quartz, which he once more presented as gold-stone to his friends and acquaintances at Zagazig; and Anton, the dragoman, triumphantly bore away fragments bristling with mica-slate, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... be eaten," said Bill, "that's this Puddin's mania. Well, to oblige him, I ask you to ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... of recent experience and sufferings still more recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... of her offspring and disaster to the race. So, for the sake of the generations unborn, we—that is, the male men of the earth—who still retain our grip on affairs, have about decided to put a stop to this foolish mania among our young women. We will probably pass laws, setting a limit in the several branches of study beyond which girls shall not be allowed to go, either at school ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... and—as far as human fraility will allow—conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... his arrest marked the end of his trouble; you might say that his brain simply snapped back into health and began to function normally again, after a period of temporary mania from shell-shock. It is true that his memory was left blank, but there doesn't seem to be any organic reason for it to be blank—other than lack of incentive to remember. Catch me up, if you don't follow me. In other words, he has ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... officially described by the U.S. War Department as "an error of judgment." Then General Brown, backed by an army of 6,000 U.S. veterans, swooped down like "a wolf on the fold" on Fort George, and annexed it and the garrison of 170 men. The British general, Riall, still possessing the fighting mania, and some 1,800 men, locked horns with General Brown and 3,000 of his veterans, and the Battle of Chippewa added another victory to the American record. The enemy then pillaged St. David's, while Riall—both sides having suffered heavily—retreated to the head of Lundy's Lane, a narrow roadway ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... the one strength of the argument for Mattioli's claims to the Mask. M. Lair replies, "Saint-Mars had a mania for burying prisoners under fancy names," and gives examples. One is only a gardener, Francois Eliard (1701), concerning whom it is expressly said that, as he is a prisoner, his real name is not to be given, so he is registered as Pierre Maret (others read ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... confirmed uplifters. We are never happy except when we are reforming something or saving somebody. It doesn't matter greatly whom we are saving or what we are reforming; the game is the thing. This uplift urge expresses itself in the "movement" mania, the endemic home of which is United States. The American cannot live by bread alone; he must have committees, clubs, constitutions, by-laws, platforms, and resolutions. These things, the machinery of uplift are his meat and wine. The American society women takes ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... dog was infected by the snapping mania. He was not a brave dog, he was not a vicious dog, and no high-breeding sanctioned his pretensions to arrogance. But like his owners, he had contracted a bad habit, a trick, which made him the pest of all timid visitors, and indeed ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sake of need. The profit-grabber has grown superfluous just as his patron, the state, which at present serves by means of its taxes and revenues, his anti-humanitarian purposes and hinders the reasonable consumption of goods. From the governing mania the foundation will be withdrawn; for those strata in society will be lacking which therefore had grown rich and fat by monopolizing the earth and its production. They alone needed legislatures to make laws against the disinherited. They needed courts ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... something in the world besides wheat and cows, after all. You know, I think he's in a kind of trance. He's mesmerized by wheat. It was so necessary in those first years, when he was fighting against actual starvation, that it has become a kind of mania. Nothing short of some great shock will bring him out of it. If you would come—if you would only come ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... A mania for burning money. Contracted in a Pennsylvania blast furnace, developed in a Scotch castle and now epidemic in American ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz
... this mania you all have for gossiping about a man who has never done any of you any harm? Tell me, what ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... Perhaps some of the elaborate fantasies of De Quincey (himself naturally a Ciceronian, and saturated in the rhythms and cadences of the finest Latin prose) are the nearest parallel to this piece in modern English. The opening words of Scipio's narrative, Cum in Africam venissem, Mania Manilio consuli ad quartam legionem tribunus, come on the ear like the throb of a great organ; and here and there through the piece come astonishing phrases of the same organ-music: Ostendebat autem Karthaginem de excelso et pleno stellarum inlustri et claro quodam ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION." Survival of the belief in diabolic activity as the cause of such epidemics Epidemics of hysteria in classical times In the Middle Ages The dancing mania Inability of science during the fifteenth century to cope with such diseases Cases of possession brought within the scope of medical research during the sixteenth century Dying-out of this form of mental disease in northern Europe In Italy Epidemics of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... yet because he is writing about himself he manages to suggest so many other qualities, and such amiable and noble ones, that we are all in love with Hamlet, in spite of his irresolution, erotic mania and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... big, prosperous Westchester farm where she lived—had always lived with her grandfather since her parents' death. It was turning out to be very valuable because of the mania of the wealthy for Westchester acreage and a revival in a hundred villages of the magnificence ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Emperor suppressed the matter where he could, but in the vicinity of the Rhine and the neighbouring land of Burgundy, the mania spread like wildfire, and as in France, overcame all opposition, until in little over a month after the first preaching of Nicholas, his bands were ready to depart for the Holy Land, while Stephen, Prophet and leader in France, was still waiting ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... knew that man ten years ago. I was making my first venture out in the world, and it was a very bad one. I fell in love with his pretty face, and married him. Before long I discovered that matrimony was a mania of Mr. Percy's—by-the-by, he sailed under another name then. I found that he had another wife living; a woman he had married for her money. Well, being sensitive, I took offense, and after a little, ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Scheme, projected in France by John Law to develop the resources of the American State of Louisiana, alarmed the shareholders; but the managers declared that they had avoided the errors of Law in their finances, and the enterprise still prospered. A mania for stock-gambling spread over England, and the people seemed to have lost their wits. The most tremendous excitement prevailed. The crisis came, and it was realized that the scheme was a fraudulent one. Some of the biggest operators ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... possession." Travellers in remote parts of the East at the present day tell of alleged cases of demoniacal possession, but investigation does not reveal any difference between these cases and epilepsy or acute mania. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... what had been discussion into controversy, and from a theologian became a powerful ecclesiastical manager. Others dropped their religious interests, and cultivated cynicism and letters. The railway mania, the political outbursts of 1848, utilitarian liberalism, all in turn swept over the Oxford field, and obliterated the old sanctuaries. Pattison went his own way alone. The time came when he looked back upon religion with some of the angry contempt with which George Eliot makes ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... music, which she did not particularly relish, or even than the opera, to which they went often. The theatres pleased her more, though the amusements there were tamer than she had expected. Society was delightful to her because it was real London society. She acquired a mania for dancing; went out every night, and seemed to herself far more distinguished and attractive than she had ever been in Wiltstoken, where she had nevertheless held a sufficiently favorable opinion of ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Margaret bitterly. It was all started, apparently, by a worthless 'felly' from Castleton, who had a great reputation as a medium, and would come over on summer evenings to conduct seances at Frimley and the places near. 'Lias, already in an excitable, overworked state, was bitten by the new mania, and could ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has become quite a mania with my host. I thought it best to let him grumble his fill, and then endeavoured to thank him for his ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... should tell us something. When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!—it is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in the Agamemnon—the first play of this last of his trilogies; and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the Eumenides—where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he returned to Sicily ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... dead by giving any details just now—even to you and Miss Lawton—of matters which have not yet been fully substantiated by the attorneys. I know only from Mr. Lawton's own private statements that he was interested, to the point one might almost say of mania, in a gigantic scheme from which we, his friends, tried in vain to dissuade him. He urged me especially to go in on it with him, but because of the very position I hold, it would have been impossible for me to consider it, ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... morality was purely negative, if not actually low. We acted, as it were, from instinct, and often wondered at the sublime sacrifices which were being made by our betters. Most of us were killed or injured in one way or another; but a blind and obstinate mania for not giving in possessed us. We were a simple lot." The dragoman paused and fixed his eyes on the empty hearth. "I will not disguise from you," he added, "that we were fed-up nearly all the time; and yet—we couldn't stop. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... was soon again established with his family in a house in Louisville. His drawings of birds still continued and, he says, became at times almost a mania with him; he would frequently give up a head, the profits of which would have supplied the wants of his family a week or more, "to represent a little ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... he explained, "are staying here too long and are devouring much of the supplies designed for us. A strange mania hath overtaken them, little Sister; they are mad for gold. They believe that the streams about here are full of the dust they and our men of Jamestown value more than life itself. It is more to them ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... Irishmen,—more, however, than all beside, the inevitable rebound and counter-growth of internal dignity from the everlasting commerce with lofty speculations, these agencies in constant operation had imbittered my school disgust, until it was travelling fast into a mania. Precisely at this culminating point of my self-conflict did that scene occur which I have described with Miss Bl——. In that hour another element, which assuredly was not wanted, fell into the seething caldron of new-born impulses, that, like the magic ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the climbing mania, and are unable to throw it off. A famous climber, of that sex, had attempted the Weisshorn a few days before our arrival, and she and her guides had lost their way in a snow-storm high up among the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... memory excepting for his disasters, that he accuses his wife, as he accuses his life, for marriage is but a life within a life. Yet people whose habit it is to take their opinions from newspapers would perhaps despise a book in which they see the mania of eclecticism pushed too far; for then they absolutely demand something in the shape of a peroration, it is not hard to find one for them. And since the words of Napoleon served to start this book, why should it not end as ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... house-cleaning mania, and has dragged me into it by representing the sin and misery of those deluded mortals who think servants know how to sweep and to scrub. In spite of my resolution not to get under her thumb, I have somehow let her rule and reign over me to such an extent that I can hardly sit ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... an individual, "that the Anglo-mania is nowhere stronger than in this part of the world. Whatever comes from England, be it Congreve rockets, or vegetable pills, must needs be perfect. Dr. Morrison is indebted to his high office for the enormous consumption of his drugs. It is clear ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... retreat for the suffering poor, his continual theme. Nor did his thankful spirit confine itself to this. To listen to him, you would have believed him an especial object of divine as well as human benevolence—all things working for his good. The doctor used to say, that No. 12 had 'a mania for happiness;' but it was a mania that in creating esteem for its victim, infused fresh courage into all that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... of Lord Lister's antiseptic surgical dressing which rendered the invasion of the peritoneal cavity comparatively safe, came the laparotomy or celiotomy mania. When it was discovered that opening the abdomen was really a minor operation, it was soon legitimatized by professional opinion, and rapidly became standardized as a necessary procedure in all questionable cases—in all obscure cases of abdominal disease—where the diagnosis was in doubt. The ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... lassitude of mechanical exertion which succeeded the American Revolution, We utility of steam-engines appears to have been forgotten; but the subject afterward started into very general notice in a form in which it could not possibly be attended with success. A sort of mania began to prevail, which, indeed, has not yet entirely subsided, for impelling boats by steam-engines. Dr. Franklin proposed to force forward the boat by the immediate application of the steam upon the water. Many attempts to simplify ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... cruel to think, dear Julia, that this amusement of yours should deprive me of the few moments during which I could speak to you of my love, and last night I wrote on the subject some verses that I cannot help repeating to you, so true is it that the mania of reciting one's verses is inseparable from the ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... the regiment Duke Louis, who, during February, 1813, had been admitted into the hospital of Wilna, suffering from quiet mania without being feverish, was constantly ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... were especially valuable. His strength as a critic lay in his artistic temperament and in the incisive intellect that enabled him to analyze the effects produced in his own creations and in those of others. His weaknesses were extravagance; a mania for harping on plagiarism; lack of spiritual insight, broad sympathies, and profound scholarship; and, in general, the narrow range of his genius, which has already been made sufficiently clear. His severity has been exaggerated, as he often praised highly, probably erring ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... increased her importance, in the eyes of the young gentlemen, by the announcement that various pyrotechnical wonders were to be obtained at her shop. There are few boys who have not at some time of their boyhood had a mania for pyrotechnics—in plain English, fire-works—and there are few parents, and parents' neighbours, who can say that they relish the smell ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... Belladonna, the Mandrake, &c., each one strengthening his opinion from coeval writers. In this uncertainty I should incline to the Henbane from the following description by Gerard and Lyte. "This herbe is called . . . of Apuleia-Mania" (Lyte). "Henbane is called . . . of Pythagoras, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his Emile ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Lord Michin Malicho,{1} Lord Facing-both-ways, and two or three other arch-quacks, have taken to merry-andrewising in a new arena, which they call the Science of Pantopragmatics, and they have bitten Lord Curryfin into tumbling with them; but the mania will subside when the weather grows cool; and no doubt we shall still have him at Thornback Bay, teaching the fishermen how to know a herring from ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... has been even more than the usual amount of lecturing in our principal cities. The mania lasts longer than was thought possible. The "phenomenon" has really become a feature of the times. It absorbs a great share of the current literary enthusiasm—much of which it has created, and will, it is to be feared, entirely satisfy. Professor Pease, of the University ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... gone from my life, but a horror has entered it beyond the conception of any soul that has not yielded itself to the unimaginable influences emanating from an accomplished crime. I can not be content with having pressed that spring once. A mania is upon me which, after thirty years of useless resistance and superhuman struggle, still draws me from bed and sleep to rehearse in ghastly fashion that deed of my early manhood. I can not resist it. To tear ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... There's a model in this week's Queen which will be just the thing, and I have a piece of flowered pink silk upstairs which will do for you as well as for me. It is a remnant which I bought in Paris. I have a mania for remnants. I always think they will come in usefully, but somehow they don't. This will be the exception, however, and it will be ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be rude—especially to Nancy's family—but the impulse to get everyone but Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months—and there is still her "grand news" to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... submissive as a faithful friend, but with a sarcastic reproach in his eyes. All that for the "Bella Fregolina"! The master was cracked; he was in his second childhood! If only this visit would cure him of his mania, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... This city mania is a very extraordinary disease in the United States, and is the cause of much disappointment to the traveller. In the Iowa territory, I once asked a ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... yet is able to persuade a daughter of the Castlemans to make her an intimate! Possibly she is an honest fanatic. Dr. Perrin tells me she was the wife of a brutal farmer, who mistreated her. No doubt that has embittered her against men, and accounts for her mania. You see that her mind leaped at once to the most obscene and hideous explanation of this misfortune of ours—an explanation which pleased her because it blackened the ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the speed mania is born of a vain desire to enjoy a leisure that never comes or, on the contrary, how the seeming haste of the world has given men shorter hours off labor and more time for ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... result that they are more successful in its requirements. The distractions of more numerous social interests may actually accompany the later years of school age. In reference to the social distractions of girls, Margaret Slattery says,[23] "This mania for 'going' seizes many of our girls just when they need rest and natural pleasures, the great out-of-doors, and early hours of retiring." But surely such distractions are not peculiar to the girls alone. The economic needs that arise at the age of ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... world the East, who waved his chromatic wand to Liszt, Tschaikowsky, Saint-Saens, Goldmark, Rubinstein, Richard Strauss, Dvorak and all Russia with its consonantal composers. This Polish psychologist—a fulgurant expounder of Nietzsche—finds in Chopin faith and mania, the true stigma of the mad individualist, the individual "who in the first instance is naught but an oxidation apparatus." Nietzsche and Chopin are the most outspoken individualities of the age—he forgets Wagner—Chopin himself the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... subdivided into the counties of Anson, Bladen, Cumberland, Moore, Richmond, Robeson and Sampson, but the greater portion established themselves within the present limits of Cumberland, with Fayetteville the seat of justice. There was in fact a Carolina mania which was not broken until the beginning of the Revolution.[26] The flame of enthusiasm passed like wildfire through the Highland glens and Western Isles. It pervaded all classes, from the poorest crofter ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... The autographic fan mania had left its mark over the divan in the shape of a gigantic fan constructed of little fans and opening out towards the ceiling. A few pen-and-ink and pencil sketches and studies, apparently the cast-off of many studios, were tacked up here and there. The high ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... popular among the boys as the pedagogue himself. His instructions are not limited to school hours; and having inherited the musical taste and talents of his father, he has bitten the whole school with the mania. He is a great hand at beating a drum, which is often heard rumbling from the rear of the school-house. He is teaching half the boys of the village, also, to play the fife, and the pandean pipes; and they weary the whole neighbourhood with their vague ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... to flower, but he has feeling Now comes the worst of all—in one sense; that is, looking on it as people of the world; and being in the world, we must take a worldly view occasionally. Mr. Pole—you remember how he behaved once at Besworth: or, no; you were not there, but he used your name. His mania was, as everybody could see, to marry his children grandly. I don't blame him in any way. Still, he was not justified in living beyond his means to that end, speculating rashly, and concealing his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... majority : plimulto; plenagxo. make : fari, -igi; fabriki. male : vira, virseksa. malicious : malica. mallow : malvo; "(marsh—)" alteo. malt : malto. mammal : mambesto. manage : administri, "(—a house)" mastrumi. mane : kolharoj. mange : favo, skabio. mania : manio. manna : manao. manner : maniero; tenigxo, mieno. manners : moroj. manoeuvre : manovro. mantle : mantelo. manufacture : fabriki, manufakturo. manure : sterko. manuscript : manuskripto. map : karto, geografikarto. maple : acero. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... their last card. These dreamers did not even pause to wonder why after the terrible successes of the Federal army in Georgia, Lincoln should be expected to reverse his policy and restore the Union with the Southern States on the old footing. The peace mania also invaded South Carolina and was espoused by one of its Congressmen, Mr. Boyce, but he made few converts among his own people. The Mercury scouted the idea; clear- sighted and disillusioned, it saw the only alternatives ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... dagger. Feeling the cold iron he woke, and his yellow eyes fixed themselves instantly on his wife. By a privilege seldom granted even to men of genius, he awoke with his mind as clear, his ideas as lucid as though he had not slept at all. The man had the mania of jealousy. The lover, with one eye on his mistress, had watched the husband with the other, and he now rose quickly, effacing himself behind a column at the moment when the hand of the old man fell; after which he disappeared, swiftly as a bird. The lady lowered her eyes ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... that poor Jean's brain was wrong in some way. Heloise devoted herself to him with infinite patience,—though she felt no special affection for him, only pity,—and while he was with her he seemed sane and quiet. But at night some strange mania took possession of him. If he had worked on his Prix de Rome picture in the daytime, while Heloise sat by him, reading aloud or singing a little, no matter how good the work, it would have vanished in the morning, and he would ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... request from Mrs. Eylton for the loan of some article in our possession; a repetition of which would naturally lead one to conclude that ministers merely procured a house, and then depended for everything else on the charity of the public. This borrowing mania appeared to gather strength from indulgence, for none of the neighbors would refuse, whatever the article might be; and our waffle-iron, toasting-fork, Dutch-oven, bake-pan, and rolling-pin were frequently from home on visits of a week's ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... had a mania for big soldiers. With infinite expense and trouble he gathered a regiment of the biggest men he could find, which was known as the "Potsdam Giants,"—a regiment numbering 2400 men, some of whom were eight feet in height. Not only ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the habit of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... England seems to have become a temporary mania. The ascent of Messrs. Barral and Bixio, of which a detailed and very interesting account will be found in a preceding page, has encouraged imitators in various styles. One M. Poitevin made an ascent in Paris seated on a horse, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... an iron fighter with a mania for personal valour, standing where he had been standing for an hour, in a pleasantly exposed spot, clapped on his hat and beckoned for his horse. The ground about him showed furrowed as for planting, and a neighbouring oak tree was so riddled with bullets that the weight ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... heeded by the others; but allowed to totter about, and give speech to their incoherent mumblings!—sometimes diversified by yells, or peals of mania laughter,—always thickly interlarded with oaths and ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... OF FISH among the ancient Romans rose to a real mania. Apicius offered a prize to any one who could invent a new brine compounded of the liver of red mullets; and Lucullus had a canal cut through a mountain, in the neighbourhood of Naples, that fish might be ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... sport. First one, then another joined till game after game was closed, and each moment the crowd had grown in size and enthusiasm so that its fever crept into him, imperceptibly at first, but ever increasing, till the mania mastered him. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... of their existence. It engendered a sense of importance, gave life fulness and variety; and this far outweighed the trifling inconveniences such welldoing implied. Indeed, he throve on them. For, in his mild way, Dove had a touch of Caesarean mania—of a lust for power. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... at least, the seventeenth was a century pre-eminent for quaint conceits and fantastic similes: the literature of that period, whether devotional, poetical, or polemical[1], was alike infected with the universal mania for strained metaphors, and men vied with each other in giving extraordinary titles to books, and making the {486} contents justify the title. Extravagance and the far-fetched were the gauge of wit: Donne, Herbert, and many a man ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... whatever to do with the Revolutionary movement, but absolute innocence does not free people from the police inquisition, and five or six years ago, when the Search mania was at its height, a case is on record of a poor lady whose house was searched seven times within twenty-four hours, though there was no evidence whatever that she was connected with the Nihilists; the whole affair was, in ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... of Trajan continued to be kept open, after the building mania, to which it owed its origin, had ceased. It had extended the sphere of the export trade of the Delta; and it continued to serve as the means of transporting the blocks of porphyry—for which there was a constant demand at Rome and Constantinople, and, indeed, in almost every city of wealth in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... (see vol. iv. 143). Here it may be advisable to give the names of the Seven Heavens (which are evidently based upon Ptolemaic astronomy) and which correspond with the Seven Hells after the fashion of Arabian system-mania. (1) Dar al-Jall (House of Glory) made of pearls; (2) Dr al-Salm (of Rest), rubies and jacinths; (3) Jannat al-Maaw (Garden of Mansions, not "of mirrors," as Herklots has it, p. 98), made of yellow ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... means a large one, and the increasing expenses of his family rendered the struggle to make ends meet yearly more severe. His father had been possessed of a small private fortune, but had rashly entered into the mania of railway speculation, and at his death had left about fifteen thousand dollars to his son. This sum Frank Hardy had carefully preserved intact, as he had foreseen that the time might come when it would, for his children's sake, be advisable to emigrate. He had long looked forward to this, ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... Black Death" here translated by Dr. Babington was Hecker's first important work of this kind. It was published in 1832, and was followed in the same year by his account of "The Dancing Mania." The books here given are the two that first gave Hecker a wide reputation. Many other such treatises followed, among them, in 1865, a treatise on the "Great Epidemics of the Middle Ages." Besides his "History of Medicine," which, in its second volume, reached into the fourteenth ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... with a passion for fighting, and he indulged the passion until it became a mania. The louder the bullets whistled, the redder the gleaming blades grew, the ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... woman of disordered mind, the appearance presented by Mrs. Taylor at his entrance greatly astonished Mr. Gryce. There was a calmness in her attitude which one would scarcely expect to see in a woman whom mania had just driven into crime. Surely lunacy does not show such self-restraint; nor does lunacy awaken any such feelings of awe as followed a prolonged scrutiny of her set but determined features. Only grief of the most intense and sacred character could account ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... sophrosunae] involves the idea of Prudence, and is a most noble virtue, yet properly marked by Plato as inferior to sacred enthusiasm, though necessary for its government. He opposes it, under the name "Mortal Temperance" or "the Temperance which is of men," to divine madness, [Greek: mania,] or inspiration; but he most justly and nobly expresses the general idea of it under the term [Greek: ubris], which, in the "Phaedrus," is divided into various intemperances with respect to various objects, and set forth under the image of a black, vicious, diseased and furious horse, yoked by ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... may be taken as a general resume of what follows in detail, but this vigorous speech to the priests was clearly among the new king's first acts. No doubt his purpose had slowly grown while his father was affronting Heaven with his mania for idols. Such decisive, swift action does not come without protracted, previous brooding. The hidden fires gather slowly in the silent crater, however rapidly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... morning I am always awakened at the same hour by the striking of the cuckoo-clock in the workroom; and whether it is scarcely daylight or not, I dress myself as quickly as possible; my shoes and stockings are here, my soap and all articles of toilette there—a true mania for order. Yet you may well believe that I was not born so! Oh no! On the contrary, I was the most careless person possible. Mother was obliged to repeat to me the same words over and over again, that I might not leave my things in every corner of the house, for I found it easier to scatter them ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... collection. Thus there came for me a time when I looked forward to a journey less because it meant movement and change for myself than because it meant another label for my hat-box. A strange state to fall into? Yes, collecting is a mania, a form of madness. And it is the most pleasant form of madness in the whole world. It can bring us nearer to real happiness than can any form of sanity. The normal, eclectic man is never happy, because he is always craving something of another ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... it is an all-pervading mania, and as man is "a bundle of habits," the most moral persons in this country (always excepting one or two ladies who express their opinions strongly against it) see nothing in it to condemn, and are ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... epithet that Evelyn did not apply to Mr. Basil Bainrothe during her hysterical mania, and before the doctor's arrival; but, on her recovery, she begged me to repeat nothing of the sort, if she had been indiscreet enough to let out her true opinion of him and his measures, in a moment of irrepressible emotion. "For," she pursued, "it is ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Poor woman!" So if the garters had proved stronger, she would have strangled there minute by minute. Nothing but religious mania—that is what drove ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... taking in a bag with a peck of oats—"to feed at three o'clock, Frank, when we stop to grub, which must do al fresco—" my friend explained—"for the landlord, who kept the only tavern on the road, went West this summer, bit by the land mania, and there is now no stopping place 'twixt this and Warwick," naming the village for which we were bound. "You ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... habitations. The whole was encircled by a wall eight feet in breadth, and it was probably of considerable height, for some of the parts now standing are twelve feet high, though the average height does not exceed three or four feet. The mania of digging for treasures every year makes encroachments on these vestiges of a bygone age, whose monuments are well deserving ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... were so worthily engaged in suppressing piracy, they might at the same time be acquiring information respecting countries little known, and adding to our stock of geography and science. A few severe examples and constant harassing would soon cure this hereditary and personal mania for a rover's life; and while we conferred the greatest blessings on the rest of the Archipelago, Magindano itself would be improved ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... postmaster to accept them as mail. I told him that it was mail and that I had no other place to deposit it. Nevertheless he said he would not have them left at the postoffice and told me do anything I wanted to with them, saying at the time that people all around there had a mania for ordering those books, but never intended to take them when they ordered them. I took the books around to the stage station and discovered four wagonloads ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... believed he could find magazine publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would commend him to the book-publishing houses. "Ephemera" he likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden's prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print. He did not intend, however, to publish it without the other's permission. His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and, thus armed, again to wrestle with ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... few minutes later, verified the statement. It was evident that the old gardener, for years insane, had been so influenced by Miss Merrick's death that he had wandered into the stables where he received his death blow. When he regained consciousness the mania had vanished, and in a shadowy way he could remember and repeat that last scene of the tragedy that had deprived him of his reason. The story was logical enough, and both Mr. Watson and John Merrick ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... published about Balzac since his entry as a writer. And just see what a fascination this devil of a man—as Theophile Gautier once called him—exercises over his followers; I am fully convinced that these little details of Balzacian mania will cause the reader to smile. As for me, I have found them, and still find them, as natural as Balzac's own remark to Jules Sandeau, who was telling him about a sick sister: "Let us go back to reality. Who is going ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... and roar and complexities, seems far away. How satisfying it is to strip off the husks and get at the kernel of things! There is more chance for high thinking when one is big enough to have plain living. How we surround ourselves with non-essentials, how we are dominated with the "mania of owning things"—one feels all this afresh in looking around at this simple, well-built cabin with its few needful things close at hand, and with life reduced to the simplest terms. One sees here exemplified the creed Mr. Burroughs outlined several years ago in ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... of outsiders is not encouraged," said Palliser languidly. "And where if a patient dies in a fit of mania there are always respectable witnesses to explain that his case ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... handsome silver tea-pot and a vote of thanks for her courage and humanity. Portraits of her were sold in the print-shops all over the land; and the enthusiasm, which at first was the natural impulse of admiration for one who had performed a noble and heroic deed, at last rose to a species of mania, in the heat of which not ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... Committee on Public Accounts was further investigated. The Committee had reported that a certain stationery contract for the Air Ministry had been extravagant and improper. The AIR MINISTER at the time was the noble Lord who has lately been so eloquent about "squander-mania," but he has since, in a letter to the Press, declared that he never signed or initialled the order. Lieut.-Colonel ARCHER-SHEE and Mr. ORMSBY-GORE sought the opinion of the Treasury on the transaction, and Mr. BALDWIN ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... the worthy man did justice to the great masters of our day; a masterpiece finely rendered brought tears to his eyes; but his religion never bordered on mania, as in the case of Hoffmann's Kreislers; he kept his enthusiasm to himself; his delight, like the paradise reached by opium or hashish, lay within his ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... does to a large extent convey the qualities that were uppermost in the earlier years, at any rate, of his influence. His insistence upon continuity pervaded the Society, was re-echoed and intensified by others, and developed into something like a mania for achieving Socialism without the overt change of any existing ruling body. His impetus carried this reaction against the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite. Then arose Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the unorganized people cannot ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... to have a mania for buying, is to possess a revenue." Many are carried away by the habit of bargain-buying. "Here's something wonderfully cheap; let's buy it." "Have you any use for it?" "No, not at present; but it is sure to come in useful, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert. She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
