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More "Self-destruction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... times, the desire becomes almost overpowering, in its intensity. It is not mere curiosity, that prompts me; but more as though some unexplained influence were at work. Still, I never go; and intend to fight down the strange longing, and crush it; even as I would the unholy thought of self-destruction. ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... those ties which still bound Napoleon to the clerical cause, knew that there were limits which Italy could not at present pass without ruin. The centre of Mazzini's hopes, an advance upon Rome itself, he knew to be an act of self-destruction for Italy, and this advance he was resolved at all costs to prevent. Cavour had not hindered the expedition to Sicily; he had not considered it likely to embroil Italy with its ally; but neither had he been the author of this enterprise. The liberation of Sicily might be deemed the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... places this letter in the summer of 1826, when his nephew attempted self-destruction in Baden, which reduced Beethoven to the most miserable state of mind, and brought afresh to his recollection those dear friends of his youth, whom he seemed almost to have forgotten in the society of Holz and his colleagues. Schindler states that the more immediate ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... strong enough and courageous enough to take the responsibility of opposing it, it was carried out: Greece rushed headlong into war with a superior power and was smashed. Upon King Constantine, then Crown Prince, had devolved the tragic duty of leading the Greek army to self-destruction, and it was upon his devoted head that afterwards the nation visited the criminal levity of M. Delyannis. Was he to suffer calmly a repetition of the same catastrophe on an infinitely larger scale—to see his country trampled ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... that we forget ourselves in the commission of deeds unspeakably wicked; we possibly degrade ourselves in the eyes of all men by falling even into the clutches of the law, or we border on the verge of self-destruction in our unspeakable ennui. We would have the half, while Nature planned the whole, and we pay the last farthing. The results are naturally so appalling that it is not to be wondered that men sought to express them under the image of a fire which ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... a law, doubtless, but a law neither more nor less normal than that of destruction, even self-destruction. Is it possible that the whole normal law of humanity is contained ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... perspiration oozing from his forehead. "What a wedding-eve! And they are laughing down there. Listen to them. I even imagine I hear Gilbertine's voice. Is there unconsciousness in it, or just the hilarity of a distracted mind bent on self-destruction? I cannot tell; the sound conveys ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... abuse of their professional brethren) discourse upon this topic—on that overdose of chloral which poor B. took, and on that injudicious self-application of chloroform which carried off poor C. With the law in such a barbarous state in relation to self-destruction, and taking into account the feelings of relatives, there was, of course, only one way of wording the certificate, but—and then they shake their heads as only doctors can, and help themselves to port, though they know it ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... starvation or quick suicide. She had soothed and comforted then. Since the previous evening, when he had gone out, in spite of her protestations, and left her alone, his manner had changed. He was still nervous and irritable, but no longer threatened self-destruction, and seemed, for some unexplained reason, more hopeful and less desperate. Sylvester had 'phoned, saying that he would call at the apartment at two, and since Stephen had received the message he had been in a state of suppressed excitement, scarcely keeping still ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Pharsalia. On that memorable battle-field the republic perished. The battle was fairly and bravely fought on both sides, but victory inclined to the Caesarians, in two distinct actions, after an interval of twenty days, B.C. 42. Both Cassius and Brutus fell on their own swords, and their self-destruction, in utter despair of their cause, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... this abnormal and apparently unnecessary waste of human life. Among such questions are: Upon what general and world-wide conditions does suicide depend? Are any of its causes removable? What are the reasons for the steady and progressive increase of self-destruction in civilized countries? Is suicide controlled or affected by any natural laws, and, if so, by what laws? These are all questions of practical importance, because upon the answers to them depends the possibility of economizing human life and increasing the sum total ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... he was intending to do; it darted across his mind that this might be the best solution of the difficulty—he had only to keep silent for a few seconds. Was it certain even now that he could prevent this self-destruction if he would? But such inhumanity was impossible to him. Instinctively he rushed forward out of the shadow and, seizing Mark by the arm as he sprang upon the parapet, dragged him roughly back. 'You coward!' he ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... room at the Salvation Army Headquarters in Queen Victoria Street. He unfolds an incoherent tale. He is an unpleasant and disturbing person whom any lawyer or business man would get rid of as soon as possible. He vapours about self-destruction, he hints at dark troubles with his wife. He produces drugs or weapons—a point at which most people would certainly show him out. But the Officers in charge do nothing of the sort. They laugh at him or give him a cup of tea. They bid him brace himself together, ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... Roaring Bill had tarried long enough to unpack. The horses grazed on picket. It was borne in upon her that short of actually meeting other people her only recourse lay in sticking to Bill Wagstaff, whether she liked it or not. To strike out alone was courting self-destruction. And she began to understand why Roaring Bill made no effort to watch or restrain her. He knew the grim power of the wilderness. It was his best ally in what he had set ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... highly uncomplimentary estimate of the frivolous character of my quondam fiancee. It could serve no purpose for me to enlighten her as to the real truth, for did she know the truth she might be haunted by the dread spectre of self-destruction. So her last words as we parted were an admonition to me not to think that all women were as blind and as faithless ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... much for others, dear friend! You are now distressed because you have heard the story of one unhappy man who sought to find God by self-destruction, and you are pained also lest another man should lose God altogether by the deliberate telling of lies. All such mistakes and follies of the world weigh heavily on your heart, but they should not do so,—for did not Christ ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... unusually miserable crew, we got breakfast about two P.M. To-day our tent lamp finished its erratic life, according to the Dhobie's account, by self-destruction! That good for nothing piece of charcoal had, however, doubtless dashed the solid cut-glass globe, which formed the chief glory of the instrument, against a rock, while thinking of his hubble bubble, and his little ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... state between fixation and reviviscence. 'Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' is a Hebraism for 'this death which the body is.' For matter itself is but 'spiritus in coagulo,' and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being restored; it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital organ. In short, Taylor seems to fall into the very fault he reproves in Bellarmine, and with this additional evil, that his reasoning looks more like tricking or explaining away a mystery. For wherein does the Sacrament of the Eucharist ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... was superbly accurate and shattered the periscope. Thereupon the submarine, now a blinded thing, rushed along under water in imminent danger of self-destruction from collision ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... they called "notions," i.e. views, beliefs, or creeds. They are never weary of insisting that a person may go on endless pilgrimages to holy places, he may repeat unnumbered "paternosters," he may mortify his body to the verge of self-destruction, and still be unsaved and unspiritual; so, too, he may "believe" all the dogma of the most orthodox system of faith, he may take on his lips the most sacred words of sound doctrine, and yet be utterly alien {xlvii} to the kingdom of God, a stranger and a foreigner to the spirit of Christ. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the house was arrested, myself included. There was an inquest; but no clue to his death, beyond that of suicide, could be obtained. Curiously enough, he had made several speeches to his friends the preceding week, that seemed to point to self-destruction. One gentleman swore that Simon had said in his presence that "he was tired of life." His landlord affirmed, that Simon, when paying him his last month's rent, remarked that "he would not pay him rent much longer." All the other evidence corresponded, the door locked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the mate, scenting a little excitement, took him gently by the coat-sleeve and led him from the brink. Sympathy begets confidence, and, within the next ten minutes, he had learned that Arthur Heard, rejected by Emma Smith, was contemplating the awful crime of self-destruction. ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... dissipated my little fortune, friends forsook me; and by quick stages in the descending scale I found myself, as I said before—an outcast! Yet, through all my troubles I have never entertained the thought of self-destruction. I have no ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... those things which had driven her poor aunt to her present unyielding attitude toward the world to be the ravings of an insane mind. And suddenly panic gripped her, that panic which, in a moment of weakness, so easily tends toward self-destruction. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... by argument.* That Lyttelton made his will 'a few weeks before his death,' providing for his fair victims, may be accounted for, as we shall see, by the threatening state of his health, without any notion of self-destruction. Walpole, in his three letters, only speaks of 'a pistol' as the common construction of 'sudden death;' and that remark occurs before he has heard any details. He rises from a mere statement of Lord Lyttelton's, that he is 'to ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Michelangelo was thrilled by a passionate love of beauty; beauty absolute, eternal and immutable. He felt profoundly the need of salvation, and he possessed an unprecedented power of spiritual vision. In the end, added to all these things, came consuming love for a woman, love raised to the pitch of self-destruction, an adoration which entitles us to regard him, next to Dante, as the greatest metaphysical lover ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... was defeated with the loss of sixteen men. The coolie corps here came to the front, and, rushing into the water, held up the pontoons while the French and some English troops dashed across. But all their efforts to scale the wall were baffled, and it seemed as if they had only gone to self-destruction. While the battle was thus doubtfully contested, Major Anson, who had shown the greatest intrepidity on several occasions, succeeded in cutting the ropes that held up a drawbridge, and an entrance was soon effected within the body of the works. The Chinese still resisted nobly, and it was computed ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... arcade called the Romulus. It was at Rheims where the holy ampoule, or oil for consecrating the Kings of France was kept—who were usually crowned here. A Jacobin ruffian, of the name of Ruht, destroyed this ampoule during the revolution. This act was succeeded by his own self-destruction. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... deliberate philosophic argument and investigation, by which its votaries have reached the dispassionate conclusion that there is no real good or pleasure in the world that is not clearly outweighed by evil or pain, and that therefore self-destruction, or at least final annihilation is the ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... on the one hand and on the other a widespread effort to bring into existence Acts of Parliament. Self-destruction contrasted ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... suicidal idea persisted. It had become the one final, overpowering, directing resolution. There is no passion more persistent than that which leads to self-destruction. In the midst of the blinding swirl of his thought he maintained his purpose to put himself above the world of human effort and to become a brother of the clod, to ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... too strong for him, and on the next opportunity he would break out again. How can one renounce the faith for which one has lived? That were to renounce life. What is the good of laboring to think thoughts other than one's own, to be like one's neighbor or to meddle with his affairs? That leads to self-destruction, and no one is benefited by it. The first duty is to be what one is, to dare to say: "This is good, that bad." One profits the weak more by being strong than by sharing their weakness. Be indulgent, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... his head and turned his irresolute feet towards the upper extremity of the garden, indicated by the priest, which seemed to offer more seclusion and security than the avenue of pear-trees. He was dazed and benumbed. The old dogged impulses of self-destruction—revived by the priest's reproaches, but checked by the vision of his dead and forgotten father, which the priest's words had called up—gave way, in turn, to his former despair. With it came a craving for peace and rest so insidious that in some vague fear of yielding to ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... for a while and then, about a hundred yards from me, they turned straight in toward the foot of the frowning cliffs. From where I was it seemed that they were bent upon self-destruction, since the roar of the breakers beating upon the perpendicular rock-face appeared to offer only death to any one who might venture within ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of the required formula: Auctor laudabiliter se subjecit et opus reprobavit. "The author has laudably made his submission and reprobated his work." No error could have been confessed, no hope could have accomplished self-destruction with loftier despair, more sovereign grandeur. But what frightful irony: that book which he had sworn never to withdraw, and for whose triumph he had fought so passionately, and which he himself now ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... while, preoccupied with the obsession for self-destruction, he lay there face downward, exhausted, trying to fight off the swimming sense of horror that was creeping over him again..... Little by little it mounted like a tide from hell.... He struggled to his feet with the unuttered cry of a dreamer tearing his throat. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... companion of her flight, being wanting? It was a strange thing altogether, and the country was alive with wild theories and wild reports. But in a few days a letter from Mr. Dundas to the rector, and another to Edgar, set the question of self-destruction at rest, though also they gave loose to other energies of conjecture, for in both he said, "No harm has come to her, and I am content to let her remain where she has elected to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... self-destruction. As heretofore shown, its progress is suspended, and even defeated, by the very genius which it is supposed to develop; the Bible invites us to enter fields of inexhaustible opportunity wherein each achievement can be made a stepping-stone ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... never be known. Preble always believed that Tripolitans had attempted to board the Intrepid and that Somers had deliberately fired the powder magazine rather than surrender. Be that as it may, no one doubts that the crew were prepared to follow their commander to self-destruction if necessary. In deep gloom, the squadron returned to Syracuse, leaving a few vessels to maintain a fitful blockade off the ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... produced a terrifying number of cases. They see and hear what none but themselves do. Genius thrown into this peculiar state has produced some noble effusions. KOTZEBUE was once absorbed in hypochondriacal melancholy, and appears to have meditated on self-destruction; but it happened that he preserved his habit of dramatic composition, and produced one of his most energetic dramas—that of "Misanthropy and Repentance." He tells us that he had never experienced such a rapid flow of thoughts and images, and he believed, what a physiological history ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... with great fury by clergymen, editors and the writers of letters. These people contend that the right of self-destruction does not and can not exist. They insist that life is the gift of God, and that He only has the right to end the days of men; that it is our duty to beat the sorrows that He sends with grateful patience. Some have denounced suicide as the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... almost most lost the habit of looking from windows. The train which took him to the city every morning passed through a country in the terminal stages of a long war of self-destruction. Whatever had been burned, botched, poisoned or exhausted in that struggle had been filled along the right-of-way, among drifts of soot and ground-mists of sulphurous smoke and chemical flatulence, to form a long ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... stop,—like an Alpine climber on a snow-slope, who, having once slipped, in a few minutes' rush loses all that he has gained by toilsome climbing, and becomes less able to make new effort because of his wounds and bruises. Among our Lord's disciples, we see Judas swiftly rushing on self-destruction, whereas Peter and John received years of discipline, before they were fully prepared to fulfil their mission. No doubt, in such cases evil may have been, making slow and stealthy advance under the surface, though the result appears with startling suddenness, just as gas ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... the ferns, wakened from sleep by the cries of her child on the left and the shouting of her man on the right, found herself face to face with the question, 'Shall I court self-destruction in attempting to save It, or shall I seek safety with Him?' Do we know how she answered that question? Undoubtedly she took ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... forming in his black eyes and trickling along his scarred muzzle, till they pattered down upon the floor of the cage. If he had ever heard of such a thing as suicide, it may be that his soul would have known the final humiliation of self-destruction that night. But there is something that strikes a balance, as well in a Wolfhound's life ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... celebrating a great feast within the last few weeks. When they look into the mirror of public opinion they find their own reflex touchingly beautiful, big, very human. Want was about to commit self-destruction in abolishing poverty, tears and the despair ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Ceremonial Mutilations.—Turning now to the subject of self-mutilation and self-destruction from the peculiar customs or religious beliefs of people, we find pages of information at our disposal. It is not only among the savage or uncivilized tribes that such ideas have prevailed, but from the earliest times they have had their influence upon educated minds. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... touches of the master; that the deed of revenge is only flashed upon him from without; and that, in the intervals between such awakenings of memory, he relapses to the thought-sickness of the first soliloquy; that on the only occasion when the bitterness of his sorrow leads him to meditate self-destruction, there is no question of the ghost, the murder, or the king; that the only ungovernable bit of fury is in the presence of his mother; and that from this scene the drama is developed, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Board will not pass a picture in which there is a suicide or any suggestion of a suicide, with incidents leading thereto. The purpose of the Board is to prevent all suggestion of self-destruction to ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... some means of accomplishing his plan of self-destruction, when he heard a bustle and confusion outside. In a few moments the door was opened and a man was thrust into the same cell—a man who staggered a few steps, fell heavily to the floor, and began to snore loudly. It was ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... antagonist. It is happy, therefore, that nature breaks the force of all sceptical arguments in time, and keeps them from having any considerable influence on the understanding. Were we to trust entirely to their self-destruction, that can never take place, until they have first subverted all conviction, and ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... toes. When the smoke of the shot had cleared away, I fully expected to see the Icelander prostrate; but he was already reloading with the greatest expedition. Determined to prevent the repetition of so dreadful an attempt at self-destruction, I rushed to the spot. Guess then my relief when the bloody body of a ptarmigan—driven by so point blank a discharge a couple of feet into the snow—was triumphantly dragged forth by instalments from the sepulchre which it had received contemporaneously with its death ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... discover the retreats of the unbelievers. In Germany alone they slaughtered more than a thousand Jews, notwithstanding all the efforts of the clergy to save them. So dreadful was the cruelty of their tormentors, that great numbers of Jews committed self-destruction to avoid falling into ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... part of the idea; and that it is a proper motive for man. But the deep bishop, in saying all that, is away back at the creation-scheme and Eden-state of human nature. He has not as yet come down to human nature in its present state of overthrow, dismemberment, and self-destruction. But when he does condescend and comes close to the mind and the heart of man as they now are in all men, even Butler becomes as outspoken, and as eloquent, and as full of passion and pathos as if he were an evangelical Puritan. Self-love, Butler startles ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... now recalled by many of the poor girl's acquaintance,—hints of love, unrequited and hopeless,—of base and unfeeling treachery,—of remediless sorrow, appealing to the deepest sympathy, and not the less because her heart found utterance in rude and homely phrases. This idea of self-destruction gained the more currency because no one had seen the least trace of the girl after the twilight of the preceding night, and it was deemed improbable that she could have made her way on foot the whole distance to the railway-station without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... which she kept in her mouth to take away the smell of the spirits, I found myself very much taken with such beauty of person, combined with so much vigour of mind; and in the second, that one so young should carry on a system of deceit and self-destruction. When I rose to go away she put five guineas in my hand, to enable me to purchase what she required. "Add to this one small favour," said I, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... persons who have been murdered. The French commit suicide for reasons which appear frivolous to the American or Englishman. The loss of a favorite mistress, an unsuccessful love-intrigue, the bursting of a bubble of speculation, and sometimes a mere trifle is enough to induce self-destruction. Sometimes a man and his mistress, or a whole family shut themselves up in a room with burning charcoal, which is a favorite method of committing suicide. A great many bodies are fished out of the Seine, for it is very easy for ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... it is probable that we ourselves should never have discovered it,) were under these painful circumstances made aware of my beloved Belinda's partiality for me. Having communicated thus her wish of self-destruction, I thought her example a touching and excellent one, and proposed to all the ladies that they should follow it, and that at the entry of the enemy into the fort, and at a signal given by me, they should one and all make away with themselves. ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trainmen hurled to their death that dividends may be wrung from soft roadbeds and rotten rails, for excursion boats so built as to prevent the saving of passengers in case of accident; and what must be said of those economic and social conditions that drive thousands to self-destruction every year and that destroy all Christian and political ideals, the proper development of which would preclude ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... Brahmana is the highest sin, and there is no expiation for it. I think a reluctant sacrifice of one's own self is better than the reluctant sacrifice of a Brahmana. O blessed lady, in sacrificing myself I do not become guilty of self-destruction. No sin can attach to me when another will take my life. But if I deliberately consent to the death of a Brahmana, it would be a cruel and sinful act, from the consequence of which there is no escape. The learned have said that the abandonment of one who hath come ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... tide her over the shoal of self-destruction,' said Falconer. 'But I cannot help doubting whether any one has a right to prevent a suicide from carrying out his purpose, who is not prepared to do a good deal more for him than that. What would you think of the man who snatched the loaf from a hungry thief, threw it back into the baker's ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... they were, but must make their escape from that spot at all hazards. "Yes," said Brutus, "we must indeed make our escape from our present situation, but we must do it with our hands, and not with our feet." He meant by this that the only means now left to them to evade their enemies was self-destruction. When his friends understood that this was his meaning, and that he was resolved to put this design into execution in his own case, they were overwhelmed with sorrow. Brutus took them, one by one, by the ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... who formed the nucleus of the Christian church and who had the advantage of the personal teaching of the Christ, one was a doubter, another was worldly-minded, a betrayer, and a son of perdition who sought relief from the stings of conscience by self-destruction; a third was a deserter and vacillator, who drew from the great apostle of the Gentiles a stinging rebuke for stultifying his conscience during that exciting controversy which was to settle once for all whether Christianity was to ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... cowardly disposition, developing a ferocious temper, rejecting medical advice, cursing everybody who came around, so that he lay for months at our charge, until we really got to wish that he would carry out his threat of self-destruction. He did not, but he was crippled for life and did not leave a ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable. Presently, passing to particular instances, we recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... her go through with whatever she had under way; though he had no conception of her plan's extent, and could, of course, not know of the intention of her overwrought mind to give her plan its final touch in what amounted to her own self-destruction, and in her vanishing utterly out of the knowledge of all ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... too long, they have other ways of escaping from a life which cuts and dries everything for its miserable subjects, defeats all the natural instincts, confounds all individual characteristics, and makes existence such a colossal bore, as your worldly people say, that self-destruction becomes ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... according to the moods that came to him. And we have reason to believe that the sublime soliloquy in "Cato" was written by Addison when the blankness of his prospects and the blackness of the future had forced the question of self-destruction upon him. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... I became so unhappy in a place where I was secluded and destitute of all agreeable society, that I earnestly requested her to allow me to leave Canada. I believe she felt ready to have me removed to a distance, that she might not be in danger of having my attempt at self-destruction, and my confinement in ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... home. O! place no difficulties in my path; your son is dwelling in a burning house, would you indeed prevent his leaving it! To solve a doubt is only reasonable, who could forbid a man to seek its explanation? Or if he were forbidden, then by self-destruction he might solve the difficulty, in an unrighteous way: and if he were to do so, who could restrain ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... if her daughter had been a member of Mr. Keller's family. With floods of tears, with eloquent protestations, with threats even of self-destruction, could she venture on making the ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... then came in sight of the church where his mother used to go, and then memories of all her holy teachings. Should he find her if he attempted self-destruction? ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... morning to a realizing sense of her position her first impulse is to self-destruction, but she deludes herself with the thought that her "dancing" companion will right the wrong by marriage, but that is the farthest from his thoughts, and he casts her off—"he wishes a pure woman ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... Mithradates had instead of embarking for Asia marched on Rome, that the most celebrated Roman generals were fighting battles with each other in order to settle to whom the chief command in the Asiatic war should belong. Rome seemed zealously employed in the work of self-destruction: it is no wonder that, though even now minorities everywhere adhered to Rome, the great body of the natives of Asia Minor joined the Pontic king. Hellenes and Asiatics united in the rejoicing which ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... strong enough to leap after and try to save him. In all probability, the effort would have been idle, and worse; for the mad fancy that seemed urging him to self-destruction might still influence his mind, and carry another victim into the same vortex with himself. Restrained by this thought, they stood up in the boat, and watched for ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... maiden also appeared to be bent upon self-destruction; and Boots's eyes opened wider and wider in sheer amazement at the capacity of woman in embryo for rations sufficient ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the poor wretch had not made way with herself. Escape seemed out of the question. That must have been clear to her from the beginning, else why was she going back there to give herself up? What better way out of it all than self-destruction? Sara Wrandall reached a sudden conclusion. She would advise the girl to leave the car when they reached the centre of a certain bridge that spanned the river! ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... something from her testimony, we are leaving her very much to her own devices, and do not cross her in anything. You will therefore listen to what she says, and, if possible, aid her in anything she may undertake, unless it points directly towards self-destruction. My opinion is that she will surprise you. But you are becoming accustomed to surprises, ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... has nothing to do with the matter. If he was a deep man, and knew the stupidness of Scotland Yard, he probably sent the notes to an enemy. If not, they may have been given to a friend. Nothing is more calculated to prepare the mind for self-destruction than the prospect of a night ride on the Scotch express, and the view from the windows of the train as it passes through the northern part of London is particularly ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... not safe if I am left at liberty," he exclaimed, frantically tearing his hair. "I have looked at the past. I look at the future. I am miserable. I see nothing but wretchedness before me. I contemplated self-destruction. I purposed dropping quietly over the stern into the water. I did not wish to create confusion. If I had jumped overboard before you all, a boat would have been lowered, and I should have been picked up; but—must I own it?—my ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... dizzying and fascinated contemplation down into the cypress-sided vale of self-destruction; that ravine which gets its glance from most and even the best of us. It seemed to her that she could not even think for the rush of its dark waters pressing against her reason; but love of life was strongest of all in Lilly. It was ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the Serpentine. The distance of time between June, 1814, and November, 1816, and the new ties formed by Harriet in this interval, prove that there was no immediate connexion between Shelley's abandonment of his wife and her suicide. She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, as Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has amply recorded; and it may be permitted us to suppose that, finding herself for the second time unhappy in her love, she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and cut the knot of life and all ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the case of suicides. There are many who in a frenzy of despair commit the crime of self-destruction. It is easy to believe that there is sympathy and helpfulness for them on the ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... gazed down into the deep abyss I felt my head reeling. There is a fascination in great heights that impels one to thoughts of self-destruction. A sudden dizziness seized me as I placed my foot over the edge of the fearful precipice, and were it not for Kona, who, noticing my condition, gripped me by the arm, I should have certainly missed my footing and been dashed to pieces on the needle-like ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... suffer; pain is the means of his preservation. His childhood is happy, knowing only pain of body. These bodily sufferings are much less cruel, much less painful, than other forms of suffering, and they rarely lead to self-destruction. It is not the twinges of gout which make a man kill himself, it is mental suffering that leads to despair. We pity the sufferings of childhood; we should pity ourselves; our worst sorrows are ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... to his children in equal shares. In the will he described himself as "of perfect memorye in sowle, but sicke in bodye". Two days after its execution he was buried, having died, not from disease, but from a fall from an upper window. His death had so much the appearance of self-destruction that L220 had to be paid to the High Almoner, Dr. Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, in satisfaction of his official claim to the goods and chattels of suicides. Herrick's biographers have not failed to vituperate the Bishop for his avarice, but dues allowed by law are hardly to be abandoned ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... asked if the introduction of the guinea pigs would be prejudicial to the interests of the higher and nobler Irish animal who, he would remind the Minister for Public Worship, was not to be confounded with the herd whose example was clearly emulated by the present government in seeking self-destruction by running down a steep place into the sea. (Cries of "Order, order!") If there was any doubt before, the honorable member continued, as to the influence which was at work in that Gadarene herd, which assumed the functions of Her Majesty's government, the sounds that now came from ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... one's own hand some years after taking life insurance is regarded as coming under the ordinary rules of chance. Yet it is to be feared that this liberal policy serves as a temptation at times to crime and to self-destruction. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... and lived through the full force of the blight and misery—would persuade me that it all means nothing, and is a mere amusing trifle! Trifle, indeed, that breaks hearts and leads to despair and self-destruction and dishonour! No, no, no—nothing shall lead me to a gamester! though Frank may be lost to me! He will be! he will be! We deserve that he should be! I deserve it—if family sins fall on individuals—I deserve it! It is better for ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wailing;[21] deprived, my child, of the white robes, I receive in exchange around me these dark and dismal weeds. But the old man in the palace deprived of sight, always preserving with tears regret for the unanimity of the brothers which is separated from the family, has madly rushed on self-destruction with the sword and with the noose above the beams of the house, bewailing the curse imprecated on his children; and with cries of woe he is always hidden in darkness. But thou, my child, I hear, art both joined in marriage, and hast the joys of love in a foreign family, and cherishest a foreign ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... than expected by me. I had cast a thought to my understanding that the philosophy of Confucius did not contemplate self-destruction, and had been divided between relief and wonder ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... completely rejected the old legend. He never makes Orestes even think of pleading Apollo's command to him to slay his mother. He is concerned with the defence which a contemporary matricide might make before a modern Athenian assembly and with the fitting doom of self-destruction which would overtake him. Like Vanity Fair, the play shows us the life of people who try ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... she said doffing her bonnet and making a deep courtesy. "I was not planning self-destruction. Life holds too much of promise to end it now. I was but wondering which of these two roads led to Chartley, and thought to follow the one toward which a throw of the dagger ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... appeal to greed and covetousness is so much more convincing than that to honor and truth, that the baser impulses are quicker with their response? It was a great bubble upon credit, and carried with it the seeds of self-destruction. True, the bank held mortgages on rows of flimsy-built houses where walls were cracking apart, foundations settling, plumbing in such a condition that it was a hotbed of disease. They would not cover the indebtedness. The available cash had been drawn out by large depositors, the ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... before he could collect energy enough to talk. When he did, he made an effort to tell her the story of the boy's death, and the father's self-destruction. He told it leaning forward in his chair, his eyes on the ground, his hands loosely joined, his voice broken and labored. Julie listened, gathering from his report an impression of horror, tragic and irremediable, similar to that which had shaken the balance of his own mind. And when he suddenly ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... extended as far as the neighbourhood of Charleston, depended upon the control of the water, and are a conspicuous example of misapplication of power to the point of ultimate self-destruction. They were in 1778-79 essentially of a minor character, especially the maritime part, and will therefore be dismissed with the remark that the Navy, by small vessels, accompanied every movement in a country cut up ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... the bullet had traveled that interested Britz. The absence of powder marks, the disappearance of the pistol with which the mortal shot was fired, effectually eliminated the theory of suicide. Yet, a man seated in a chair, and bent on self-destruction, might easily have inflicted the wound described by the Coroner's physician. Before arriving at any definite conclusion, however, as to the position of the assassin when he sent the bullet into Whitmore's body, the detective decided to study the enlarged photograph of the wound ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... very hard a death; and I actually had it in consideration whether I should not cut my way into the great butt, and in this way end my misery! This was during my moments of despair, when I seriously contemplated self-destruction; but these moments had passed, and I again felt an unaccountable desire that my ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... hand and pressed it. Then he left her, bewildered by the subtle atmosphere that seemed to surround her. He did not fear her threat. There was a vitality and self-command about Mrs. Pendean that seemed to shut out any likelihood of self-destruction. She was young and time could be trusted to do its inevitable work. But he perceived the quality of her love for the man who was too certainly destroyed. She might face life, proceed with her own existence, and bring happiness into other lives; but it did not follow ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... night of the second of July, 1798, a man at a little old tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky, committed suicide. If ever there was a justifiable case of self-destruction, it was this. No human being is permitted to take his own life, but there are instances in which the burden of existence becomes well-nigh intolerable. In the case just mentioned, the man went to his room and took poison. He ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... crossed his mind, and from very tenderness kept returning? At the last gasp, as it seemed, in the close and ever closer siege of misfortune, he was almost ready, like the Jews of Masada, to conquer by self-destruction. But ever and again the sad eyes of his wife turned him from the thought, and he would plod on, thinking, as near as ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... brought her to me, brought a note instead. It was dated boldly 'August tenth.' It was without beginning or signature. It said—I can repeat every word—'Of the two roads to self-destruction open to me, I have chosen the one that will, in the end, give the least pain to you. I love you. I have always loved you since I was a child. I do not regret anything yet! Thank God for me that I depart without ever having ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... those nations who would make themselves our adversaries, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace; before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course. . .both sides overburdened by the ...
— Kennedy's Inaugural Address
... fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction."—Morgan. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... in the house was arrested, myself included. There was an inquest; but no clue to his death, beyond that of suicide, could be obtained. Curiously enough, he had made several speeches to his friends the preceding week, that seemed to point to self-destruction. One gentleman swore that Simon had said in his presence that "he was tired of life." His landlord affirmed, that Simon, when paying him his last month's rent, remarked that "he would not pay him rent much longer." All the other evidence corresponded, the door ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... incurred? The "orthodox" not merely admit, but maintain it. Their creed justifies it by the doctrine, that his death was a "sacrifice" so pleasing to God, as to expiate the sins of the world. This honestly meets the objections to self-destruction; for how better could life be used, than by laying it down for such a prize? But besides all other difficulties in the very idea of atonement, the orthodox creed startles us by the incredible conception, that a voluntary sacrifice of life should ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... anything you wish. I will make myself good, great, and renowned for your sake. Your smiles will keep me from every temptation. But I warn you that if you cast me off—if you trifle with me—I shall become a reckless man. I shall be ruined. My only impulse will be self-destruction." ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the one hand and on the other a widespread effort to bring into existence Acts of Parliament. Self-destruction contrasted with efforts ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... the right to perpetuate such a race, which will be a curse to itself and to future generations? Would she not confer a boon upon mankind if, by destroying herself, she sweetened the life-blood of humanity? For by self-destruction she would forever cut off the turbid current of the Kurt blood which had darkened the vital stream of the race for centuries. The moral exaltation which manifests itself in this struggle is most vividly portrayed. She clings to life desperately; she is young and strong, unsentimental, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... affair neither of "works" nor of what they called "notions," i.e. views, beliefs, or creeds. They are never weary of insisting that a person may go on endless pilgrimages to holy places, he may repeat unnumbered "paternosters," he may mortify his body to the verge of self-destruction, and still be unsaved and unspiritual; so, too, he may "believe" all the dogma of the most orthodox system of faith, he may take on his lips the most sacred words of sound doctrine, and yet be utterly alien {xlvii} to the kingdom of God, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... yet flattered, at Lizette's account of his conduct at the Taverne de Menut; for, although pleased to think that Le Gardeur loved her to the point of self-destruction, she honestly pitied him, and felt, or thought she felt, that she could sacrifice anything ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Christ and the temporal reign of the saints on earth,—a sort of Mahometan paradise, which has as little warrant in Scripture as in reason. Their minds of necessity became unsettled; they meditated self-destruction; and, as it appears by a paper left behind in the handwriting of both, came to an agreement that the husband should first kill his wife and their four children, and then put an end to his own existence. This was literally executed,—the miserable man striking off the heads of his wife ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... man, who doubtless knew more of the girl's real character than her benevolent mistress, flatly refused to make her his wife. Hannah, in an agony of rage and contrition, had confided her situation to her mistress; and implored her not to turn her from her doors, or she would end her misery in self-destruction. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... number, meanwhile, were engaged in dispatching themselves by thrusting into their throats the arrows shot by the enemy, and hanging themselves with the cords taken from some beds that happened to be there, and with strips made from their clothing; adopting, in short, every possible means of self-destruction, and also falling victims to the missiles of their enemies on the roof. Night came on while these horrors were enacting, and most of it had passed before they were concluded. When it was day the Corcyraeans threw them in layers upon ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... his reply to the short speech of the Surgeon-General. I heard him say: "The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious—all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"—into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction; forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things—THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... proved effective in saving patients from the emotional and traumatic strain of surgical operations—the principle of anoci-association. That is, by disconnecting one or more of the activating organs from the brain, the motor mechanism might be saved from its self-destruction. ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... conditions with tolerable grace. Before they parted Polly even assured him that if ever there was anyone else she would deal honestly with him and let him know. This being as much as to say that he might still hope, Christopher cast away his thoughts of self-destruction, and went home with an appetite ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... the Spanish commander could unite the strength of his vessels and that of the coast defenses, Dewey might find it impossible to destroy the Spanish fleet. In that case, the plight of the American squadron would be precarious, if its ultimate self-destruction or internment did ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... man took a bundle of papers from his breast-pocket. They were all telegraphic messages, and each was a suggestion towards self-destruction in one form or another. "Suicide's corner" at Niagara, poison, the rope—all couched in language of devilish ingenuity in innuendo, and ending in every instance with the expression, "Is life more than ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... and part of the idea; and that it is a proper motive for man. But the deep bishop, in saying all that, is away back at the creation-scheme and Eden-state of human nature. He has not as yet come down to human nature in its present state of overthrow, dismemberment, and self-destruction. But when he does condescend and comes close to the mind and the heart of man as they now are in all men, even Butler becomes as outspoken, and as eloquent, and as full of passion and pathos as if he were an evangelical ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... to such an extent that she would be driven to the deed by sheer rage. Failing in this, he resumed his wheedling tactics. It would be impossible, he argued, for any one to know that she had given him the soothing poison. The doctors would always believe that he had overcome his prejudice against self-destruction and had taken the tablets, just as they intended and evidently desired him to do. But he would not take his own life. He would go on suffering for years before he would send his soul to purgatory by such an act. He believed ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... June, 1814, and November, 1816, and the new ties formed by Harriet in this interval, prove that there was no immediate connexion between Shelley's abandonment of his wife and her suicide. She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, as Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has amply recorded; and it may be permitted us to suppose that, finding herself for the second time unhappy in her love, she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and cut the knot of life ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... suspected nothing, feared nothing; I simply felt dedicated to my country. What a stupendous joy there was in this unquestioning surrender. Verily had I realized how, in thoroughness of self-destruction, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... very dangerous feeling," smiled Merry. "You know that an average of sixteen suicides a year take place here at the falls. People cannot resist the fascination of the rushing water. Many times no real reason can be given for these acts of self-destruction. You know there are moments when every human brain falters and seems touched by the fleeting finger of insanity. People who stand on great heights often feel an almost irresistible longing to fling themselves down. Here ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... refuses to share in the debates, and, what is worse, votes with the revolutionaries to exclude the members of the Constituent from the Legislative Assembly. Thus, not only does it abandon its own cause, but it commits self-destruction, and its ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and of all the reasons, and of all the unreasons.... Blasts of wind from the abyss; sightless and raging forces issuing from the seething depths of animalism; a mad impulse towards destruction and self-destruction; the crude appetites of the herd; distorted religion; mystical erections of the soul enamoured of the infinite, and seeking the morbid assuagement of joy through suffering, through its own suffering, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... and then deliberately stuffed the paper into a corner of the fire. It flamed up, singeing the cooking meat, but John Gaspar paid no heed. He was staring off down the hill to make sure that Sinclair should not return in time to see that little act of destruction. An act of self-destruction, too, it well ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... myself.—[Exit COUNTESS.] I pause!—Oh! yes—to compose myself! [Ironically.] She little thinks it is but to gain one solitary moment to vent my soul's remorse. Once the purpose of my unsettled mind was self-destruction; Heaven knows how I have sued for hope and resignation. I did trust my prayers were heard—Oh! spare me further trial! I feel, I feel, my heart and brain can bear no ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... Morselli devotes a chapter of his interesting treatise upon this subject to proving that "the purer the German race—that is to say, the stronger the Germanism (e.g., Teutonism) of a country—the more it reveals in its psychical character an extraordinary propensity to self-destruction." ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... suicide for reasons which appear frivolous to the American or Englishman. The loss of a favorite mistress, an unsuccessful love-intrigue, the bursting of a bubble of speculation, and sometimes a mere trifle is enough to induce self-destruction. Sometimes a man and his mistress, or a whole family shut themselves up in a room with burning charcoal, which is a favorite method of committing suicide. A great many bodies are fished out of the Seine, for it ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... path; your son is dwelling in a burning house, would you indeed prevent his leaving it! To solve a doubt is only reasonable, who could forbid a man to seek its explanation? Or if he were forbidden, then by self-destruction he might solve the difficulty, in an unrighteous way: and if he were to do so, who could restrain ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... and hastily jotted down something on a piece of paper which he tossed over to me. It read: 1.Love, family trouble. 2.A romantic disposition. 3.Temporary insanity, self-destruction. 4.Criminal ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... assisted by heat, moisture, and the nourishment of the earth, resists the tendency to decay and preserves it alive and growing. The air, the earth, nay, the ocean itself, philosophers assure us, contain powers sufficient to self-destruction. But I will not enlarge here. Let the necessary cause be exerted which will give vent to this hidden power and actions the most astonishing and destructive would be the effect. These are often witnessed in the tremendous ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... solemnized. Cybele being informed of this, hastened to Pessinus, and, destroying the gates, met with Attis, who had concealed himself behind a pine tree, and caused him to be emasculated; on which Agdistis committed self-destruction in a ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... fighting scrapes with rustlers; but as a patient he showed a most cowardly disposition, developing a ferocious temper, rejecting medical advice, cursing everybody who came around, so that he lay for months at our charge, until we really got to wish that he would carry out his threat of self-destruction. He did not, but he was crippled for life and did ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... safely leaving the hovel. A sudden, dire, revolution in her religious impressions was wrought, or rather completed, in that dismal scene. David had more than once wrung her very soul by dark hints of self-destruction in the event of her ever forsaking him. He had thus been led into discussions on suicide, and had even argued for the moral right of man to end his own being under circumstances. Persuasion hangs on the lips of those we love. What she would have rejected as impious, from some immoral ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... at first, she presently extricated herself from the man's encircling arm, and switched on the light. She dared not lie in the darkness with the thoughts that assailed her. Never for one instant before had the possibility of the wife's self-destruction occurred to her. Yet, all at once, how probable, how ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... kind which in a groove has poison that makes its wound mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the fireplace, there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would seem as if some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend had put all sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that, in some frenzied moment, he might ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of a man at the top strong enough and courageous enough to take the responsibility of opposing it, it was carried out: Greece rushed headlong into war with a superior power and was smashed. Upon King Constantine, then Crown Prince, had devolved the tragic duty of leading the Greek army to self-destruction, and it was upon his devoted head that afterwards the nation visited the criminal levity of M. Delyannis. Was he to suffer calmly a repetition of the same catastrophe on an infinitely larger scale—to see his country trampled under German and ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... two-thirds to his children in equal shares. In the will he described himself as "of perfect memorye in sowle, but sicke in bodye". Two days after its execution he was buried, having died, not from disease, but from a fall from an upper window. His death had so much the appearance of self-destruction that L220 had to be paid to the High Almoner, Dr. Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, in satisfaction of his official claim to the goods and chattels of suicides. Herrick's biographers have not failed to vituperate the Bishop for his avarice, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... cards between young Beresford and yourself in which you were the winner—by what knavery you best know—the stakes so heavy that, on perceiving that he had lost, the young man cried out that he was ruined, and in his mad despair attempted self-destruction. It is quite possible that you may not have observed me in the crowd that gathered about your wretched victim; but I can never forget the face of the man who had wrought ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... seeing how fruitless were her feeble struggles against the strong grasp of her preserver, the unhappy girl—she was but a girl—shrank down submissively on to the seat, still trembling and moaning, whilst brave-hearted Sally stood over her to prevent any further attempt at self-destruction. Pollie looked on in bewildered surprise at this sad scene, not knowing what to make of it; but she still kept her hold on the woman's dress, as if her small strength could be of any service; but Sally had told her to "hold ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... an instant, that Dr. Webb would have committed the crime of self-destruction. But in my then romantic state of mind, what more easily believed than that he had deliberately removed himself out of our lives—and in a way to make it appear ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... that the maniac had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not hesitated to end his life—a life which was, no doubt, already threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the thought that he dragged down my life with his. For, so far as I could see at the moment, my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had been ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... could not even think. My mind seemed like some untenanted recess in the unfathomable depths below. Instantaneous death, and even eternal perdition afterwards, could have presented no new horrors then. It was haply the design of Providence that the thought of self-destruction should not occur to me. With the means in my reach, I would in all probability have rushed, uncalled and unprepared, into the presence of ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... trees and flowers looked more beautiful reflected in their depths. Ah, I used to think, one plunge into that lovely mirror, and I should reach that happy world—should know all. But this I said in my simplicity, for I knew not at that tender age that self-destruction was a sin; that man was forbidden to unclose a gate of which the Almighty held the key. His merciful hand was stretched over the creature of his will, and I ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... his cheeks were flushed. The flavour of living was sweet upon his palate. Here he was, who, only twelve hours ago, had gone skulking in the shadows looking out upon life with terrified eyes, tempted even to self-destruction, suddenly in touch once more with the things that were dear to him, realising for the first time some of the dreams which had filled his brain in those long, sleepless nights upon the hill-top. He was a wanderer in Bohemia, ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... nothing to do with the matter. If he was a deep man, and knew the stupidness of Scotland Yard, he probably sent the notes to an enemy. If not, they may have been given to a friend. Nothing is more calculated to prepare the mind for self-destruction than the prospect of a night ride on the Scotch express, and the view from the windows of the train as it passes through the northern part of London is particularly conducive to thoughts ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... comforted then. Since the previous evening, when he had gone out, in spite of her protestations, and left her alone, his manner had changed. He was still nervous and irritable, but no longer threatened self-destruction, and seemed, for some unexplained reason, more hopeful and less desperate. Sylvester had 'phoned, saying that he would call at the apartment at two, and since Stephen had received the message he had been in a state of suppressed excitement, scarcely ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness. She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with a tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to tragical self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but was unable to find the right one; glancing again out of the window he saw that he was too late. Having come up, she stopped, looked at the gate, picked up a little stick, and using it as a bayonet, pushed open the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... means to be confounded with churchdom) the antagonism is irreconcilable. Hence all priestdom is in absolute need of supplements to the Gospel; it must have tradition; it cannot give it up without self-destruction. This is not the place to pursue this observation further; but it could not be wholly overlooked, because thus only are we able to account for the sudden change of feeling in a man liberal in other respects. As late as May 1521, he had ridiculed ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... more, has many a dark page recording how despairing love has ended in self-destruction. At the beginning of the present century, a sad catastrophe befell the Shuckburghs of Shuckburgh Hall. It appears the Bedfordshire Militia were stationed near Upper Shuckburgh, and the officers were in the habit of visiting the Hall, whose hospitable owner, ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... These frenzied attempts at self-destruction, which seem to have taken the place of the epileptic seizure, were related to my father casually by the boy's mother; but in other cases, similar incidents, although of the utmost importance to the criminologist, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... Geography of England in Relation to its History III. Roman Britain; A Civilization which did not civilize IV. The Coming of the Saxons[1]; the Coming of the Normans V. The Norman Sovereigns[1] VI. The Angevins, or Plantagenets; Rise of the English Nation[1] VII. The Self-Destruction of Feudalism VIII. Absolutism of the Crown; the Reformation; the New Learning[1] IX. The Stuart Period; the Divine Right of Kings versus the Divine Right of the People X. India gained; America lost—Parliamentary Reform—Government by the People A General Summary of English Constitutional ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... a strange habit of self-destruction, contracting its skin at two or three different points, and writhing till it snaps itself into "junks," as the sailors would say, and then dies. My specimens, on breaking up, threw out from the wounded part long "ovarian filaments" (whatsoever those may be), similar to those thrown out ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... With a bottle close beside him and the shingle on his breast. Well, they analysed the liquor, and it would appear that he Qualified his drink with something good for setting spirits free. Though 'twas plainly self-destruction — ''twas his own affair,' they said; And the jury viewed him sadly, and they found — that he ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... be known. Preble always believed that Tripolitans had attempted to board the Intrepid and that Somers had deliberately fired the powder magazine rather than surrender. Be that as it may, no one doubts that the crew were prepared to follow their commander to self-destruction if necessary. In deep gloom, the squadron returned to Syracuse, leaving a few vessels to maintain a fitful blockade off ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... my attention. I cannot now recollect the purport of it; but before I had finished it, it appeared demonstratively true to me that it was a libel or satire upon me. The author appeared to be acquainted with my purpose of self-destruction, and to have written that letter on purpose to secure and hasten the execution of it. My mind, probably, at this time began to be disordered; however it was, I was certainly given to a strong delusion. I said ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... accurate and shattered the periscope. Thereupon the submarine, now a blinded thing, rushed along under water in imminent danger of self-destruction from collision with the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... the old legend. He never makes Orestes even think of pleading Apollo's command to him to slay his mother. He is concerned with the defence which a contemporary matricide might make before a modern Athenian assembly and with the fitting doom of self-destruction which would overtake him. Like Vanity Fair, the play shows us the life of people who try to do ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... all according to the moods that came to him. And we have reason to believe that the sublime soliloquy in "Cato" was written by Addison when the blankness of his prospects and the blackness of the future had forced the question of self-destruction upon him. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... up more who, within the compass of my knowledge or observation, really drowned themselves in that year than are put down in the bill of all put together, for many of the bodies were never found who yet were known to be lost; and the like in other methods of self-destruction. There was also one man in or about Whitecross Street burnt himself to death in his bed. Some said it was done by himself, others that it was by the treachery of the nurse that attended him; but that he had the plague upon him, ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... namely, those in whose minds passion so wholly overpowers reason as to deprive the party of his sober senses. Few people are entitled to more compassion than young men thus affected: it is a species of insanity that assails them; and, when it produces self-destruction, which it does in England more frequently than in all the other countries in the world put together, the mortal remains of the sufferer ought to be dealt with in as tender a manner as that of which the most merciful construction of the law will ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... was the accoucheur, Sir Richard Croft, Bart. This distinguished gentleman was so deeply affected with the unlooked-for result, that his mind refused to recover its tone, and within a month afterwards he committed self-destruction. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... with suicides, that we find reason to suppose, if they had survived their gloomy purpose, that they would, at a subsequent period, have been considerably happy. It arises indeed, in some measure, out of the very nature of a spirit of self-destruction; which implies a degree of anguish, that the constitution of the human mind will not suffer to remain long undiminished. This is a serious reflection, Probably no man would destroy himself from an impatience of present pain, if he felt a moral certainty ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... destined to act against Mithradates had instead of embarking for Asia marched on Rome, that the most celebrated Roman generals were fighting battles with each other in order to settle to whom the chief command in the Asiatic war should belong. Rome seemed zealously employed in the work of self-destruction: it is no wonder that, though even now minorities everywhere adhered to Rome, the great body of the natives of Asia Minor joined the Pontic king. Hellenes and Asiatics united in the rejoicing which welcomed the deliverer; it became usual to compliment ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... everywhere made for the missing body, but without effect. When the matter was related to the king he was much troubled, and would fain have had masses said for the repose of the soul of the unfortunate keeper, but the priests refused to perform them, alleging that he had 'committed self-destruction, and was therefore out of the pale of ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... be wrung from soft roadbeds and rotten rails, for excursion boats so built as to prevent the saving of passengers in case of accident; and what must be said of those economic and social conditions that drive thousands to self-destruction every year and that destroy all Christian and political ideals, the proper development of which would ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... offspring of the individuals which possess it, in consequence of their superior numbers, a greater chance of survival in the battle of life. It is, therefore, directly under the control of natural selection, which acts both by the self-preservation of fertile and the self-destruction of infertile stocks—except always where correlated as above, when they become useful, and therefore subject to be increased ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... and she sought to cheer me with a highly uncomplimentary estimate of the frivolous character of my quondam fiancee. It could serve no purpose for me to enlighten her as to the real truth, for did she know the truth she might be haunted by the dread spectre of self-destruction. So her last words as we parted were an admonition to me not to think that all women were as blind and ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... to find some means of accomplishing his plan of self-destruction, when he heard a bustle and confusion outside. In a few moments the door was opened and a man was thrust into the same cell—a man who staggered a few steps, fell heavily to the floor, and began to snore loudly. It was only a ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... thoughtless, with your brain clouded with drink, and for the mere excitement of the thing, you are determined to risk all in a contest for which there is no chance for you,—and by which you acknowledge you will be driven to self-destruction, as the ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... lady (Swaha) at first assuming the disguise of Siva, sought the presence of Agni unto whom she said, 'O Agni, I am tortured with love for thee. Do thou think it fit to woo me. And if thou dost not accede to my request, know that I shall commit self-destruction. I am Siva the wife of Angiras. I have come here according to the advice of the wives of the other Rishis, who have sent me ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... bound to secure the enrichment and social advantage of his fellows. To love one's self at the expense of one's fellows is for selfness to become malignancy. To love one's neighbors more than one's self is foolishness and self-destruction. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... my oath; my self-destruction is proof that I am sincere in the belief that I have acted for the ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... head dolefully. "His Reverence has the Talent, there's no doubt of that, but now he's pitted against another man who has it—a man whose mind is bent on self-destruction in the long run." ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... listened to was too real, too full of those things which had driven her poor aunt to her present unyielding attitude toward the world to be the ravings of an insane mind. And suddenly panic gripped her, that panic which, in a moment of weakness, so easily tends toward self-destruction. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the unfortunate victim of play lost all relish for life; and sought in death the only refuge he could fancy from the infamy and misery which he had brought upon himself. But whilst fully resolved on self-destruction, he thought, before carrying his fatal purpose into execution, he might as well do his tradesmen an act of justice, even if in so doing he should do injustice to others. He insured his life to the extent of his debts, amounting to several thousand pounds. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the reanimated Savior came forth; no one witnessed it, and the only persons of whom we are told that they might have been able to see it with their bodily eyes were smitten with blindness. And in like manner, neither do we know how the soul, lying, so to speak, in the tomb of self-destruction, is wrought upon by the angel of the Lord in order to call forth the life of God in it. It arises unseen in that grave-like silence, and can not be perceived until it is actually present; what is properly the beginning of it is hidden, as every ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... scandal; but things could never go on as in the past. She had realized that the night before, when still that chance of which she had spoken to Stafford was hers; when she had wound the coil of her wonderful hair round her throat, and had imagined that self-destruction which has tempted so many of more spiritual make than herself. It was melodramatic, emotional, theatrical, maybe; but the emotional, the theatrical, the egotistic mortal has his or her tragedy, which is just as real as that which comes to those of more spiritual vein, just as real as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the highest sin, and there is no expiation for it. I think a reluctant sacrifice of one's own self is better than the reluctant sacrifice of a Brahmana. O blessed lady, in sacrificing myself I do not become guilty of self-destruction. No sin can attach to me when another will take my life. But if I deliberately consent to the death of a Brahmana, it would be a cruel and sinful act, from the consequence of which there is no escape. The learned have said that the abandonment of one who ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... endorse that saying without a thought of possible self-destruction. So, for Davenport's very silence on that way of escape from his tasteless life, Larcher thought he might ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... being an unusually miserable crew, we got breakfast about two P.M. To-day our tent lamp finished its erratic life, according to the Dhobie's account, by self-destruction! That good for nothing piece of charcoal had, however, doubtless dashed the solid cut-glass globe, which formed the chief glory of the instrument, against a rock, while thinking of his hubble bubble, and his ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... AWAKENING: It would seem at first as though nothing but self-destruction could come to that struggling, praying, throat-cutting population that terrorized Italy during the Mediaeval Period. The people were ignorant, the rulers treacherous, the passions strong, and yet out of the Dark Ages came light. In the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... and, rushing into the water, held up the pontoons while the French and some English troops dashed across. But all their efforts to scale the wall were baffled, and it seemed as if they had only gone to self-destruction. While the battle was thus doubtfully contested, Major Anson, who had shown the greatest intrepidity on several occasions, succeeded in cutting the ropes that held up a drawbridge, and an entrance was soon effected within the body of the works. The Chinese still ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... contemplating self-destruction, were you?" said the Doctor, whose curiosity led him to adopt a light ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... and very beautiful, attended Lord Byron for nearly a year in the habit of a page. Love, desperate and all-engrossing, seems to have been the cause of her singular conduct. Neglected at last by the man for whom she had forsaken all that woman holds dear, she resolved upon self-destruction, and provided herself with poison. Her designs were discovered by Lord Byron, who changed the poison for a sleeping potion. Miss G., with that delicate feeling of affection which had ever distinguished ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... toward me for a while and then, about a hundred yards from me, they turned straight in toward the foot of the frowning cliffs. From where I was it seemed that they were bent upon self-destruction, since the roar of the breakers beating upon the perpendicular rock-face appeared to offer only death to any one who might ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the whole truth. She knew the motivation for their madness of self-destruction. It was not insanity, but the sublime courage of a few human beings sacrificing themselves to save the rest of their civilization. They smashed the Guardian Wheel to keep the Sickness there. And Mryna had already escaped before that happened! She was being ...
— The Guardians • Irving Cox
... all of the strength of those ties which still bound Napoleon to the clerical cause, knew that there were limits which Italy could not at present pass without ruin. The centre of Mazzini's hopes, an advance upon Rome itself, he knew to be an act of self-destruction for Italy, and this advance he was resolved at all costs to prevent. Cavour had not hindered the expedition to Sicily; he had not considered it likely to embroil Italy with its ally; but neither had he been the author of this enterprise. The liberation of Sicily might be deemed ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... anything with or for these people. The fiat for their overthrow had evidently been issued. The fatuity which leads to self-destruction was fixed upon them; and, with a feeling rather of commiseration than anger, I prepared to leave the house. In this interview, I made a discovery, which tended still more to lessen the hostility I ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... her desolation and shame, the thought of self-destruction had surged up in the lava of other tumultuous thoughts occasioned by the artist's scorn, and at first she had shrunk from it with natural and instinctive dread. But the awful thought began to fascinate her like ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... wise, and prudent, and thoughtful men in the United States, who had made the science of government a study, and human nature their daily reading, who perceived principles of self-destruction in the French constitution. They saw its want of balances, and the course of the representatives under it, which must inevitably allow the gallery to rule the legislature, and mobs to give color to the opinions of the executive. They clearly perceived, what Lafayette ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... sense of effort hopelessly wasted. She had not tried to see Dorset alone: she had positively shrunk from a renewal of his confidences. It was Bertha whose confidence she sought, and who should as eagerly have invited her own; and Bertha, as if in the infatuation of self-destruction, was actually ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... years been ordered to be present, but forbidden to celebrate; in punishment for his having, uncanonically, fought as a Chouan—if not also for attempted suicide. But we hear of no amorousness, and the husband Le Hardouey's jealousy, though prompted by his wife's apparent self-destruction, is definitely stated to have no foundation in actual guilt with the priest. On the contrary, she declares that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... law of France, I thought she could. Then again, would she forgive me the three years of remorse? the three years during which she had been under the stigma of having, by her barbarity, caused her child to commit self-destruction? the three years of reproach which she must have experienced from my father's clouded brow? Would she ever forgive me for having obtained my independence by the very talents which she would not allow me to cultivate? No, never, ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... when prompted by covetousness, he betrayed Him to the chief priests, the thought of having been accessory to the death of one so kind and so holy, continued to torment him, until it drove him to despair and to self-destruction. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... would be ruinous. Every society has a purpose, and the criminal population of Omega is bent upon its own self-destruction. Barrent, you look surprised. Couldn't ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... the former practice was when Yamato-dake presented to the Ise shrine the Yemishi chiefs who had surrendered to him in the sequel of his invasion of the eastern provinces. The same fate seems to have befallen numerous captives made in the campaign against the Kumaso, and doubtless wholesale acts of self-destruction committed by Tsuchi-gumo and Kumaso when overtaken by defeat were prompted by preference of death to slavery. The story of Japan's relations with Korea includes many references to Korean prisoners who became the property of their captors, and that a victorious general's ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... came sooner than expected by me. I had cast a thought to my understanding that the philosophy of Confucius did not contemplate self-destruction, and had been divided between relief and wonder ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... to avoid that death he was courting came a flash of reason. If he had resolutely thrown himself from the pier head as he intended, would he have undergone a hopeless revulsion like this? Was he sure that this might not be, after all, the terrible penalty of self-destruction—this inevitable fierce protest of mind and body when TOO LATE? He was momentarily touched with a sense of gratitude at his escape, but his reason told him it was not from his ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... life came the fatal news that Mars was undoubtedly preparing to deal us a death blow. The sudden revulsion of feeling flitted like the shadow of an eclipse over the earth. The scenes that followed were indescribable. Men lost their reason. The faint-hearted ended the suspense with self-destruction, the stout-hearted remained steadfast, but without hope and knowing not what ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... So she drifts into neurasthenia and has fits of crying and periods of melancholia. She is more irritable, more impatient, more dissatisfied with herself, her family, and her friends. She loses faith in herself, in the future, and even in her religion, and she may contemplate self-destruction. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... our attachment, (indeed, but for these extraordinary circumstances, it is probable that we ourselves should never have discovered it,) were under these painful circumstances made aware of my beloved Belinda's partiality for me. Having communicated thus her wish of self-destruction, I thought her example a touching and excellent one, and proposed to all the ladies that they should follow it, and that at the entry of the enemy into the fort, and at a signal given by me, they should ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... light, and kept confined if necessary, in a straight jacket, so as to walk about the room or lie down on the bed at pleasure; or by strops, etc., he may, particularly if there appears in the patient a strong determination to self-destruction, be confined on the bed, and the apparatus so fixed as to allow him to turn ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... no unwholesome hours, tried no dangerous experiments, committed no excesses. But there is no man who can habitually study from twelve to seventeen hours a day (his friend Mr. Clarke contracts it to "from six to twelve," but I have Mr. Parker's own statement of the fact) without ultimate self-destruction. Nor was this the practice during his period of health alone, but it was pushed to the last moment: he continued in the pulpit long after a withdrawal was peremptorily prescribed for him; and when forbidden to leave home for lecturing, during the winter of 1858, he straightway ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window, while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Within six to ten years the nation will again be fit to act. Palmerston will cut his throat if nothing comes of the Neapolitan business, and just the same if he cannot make "a good case;" the principle of intervention even against Bomba is self-destruction for England, and disgraceful in the highest degree. The fox cannot begin war in Italy at the present moment from want of money, and his accomplices are afraid of losing their stolen booty. So he tries to gain time. He will still live ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... herself wondering why the poor wretch had not made way with herself. Escape seemed out of the question. That must have been clear to her from the beginning, else why was she going back there to give herself up? What better way out of it all than self-destruction? Sara Wrandall reached a sudden conclusion. She would advise the girl to leave the car when they reached the centre of a certain bridge that spanned the river! No ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... That Lyttelton made his will 'a few weeks before his death,' providing for his fair victims, may be accounted for, as we shall see, by the threatening state of his health, without any notion of self-destruction. Walpole, in his three letters, only speaks of 'a pistol' as the common construction of 'sudden death;' and that remark occurs before he has heard any details. He rises from a mere statement of Lord Lyttelton's, ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... that the appeal to greed and covetousness is so much more convincing than that to honor and truth, that the baser impulses are quicker with their response? It was a great bubble upon credit, and carried with it the seeds of self-destruction. True, the bank held mortgages on rows of flimsy-built houses where walls were cracking apart, foundations settling, plumbing in such a condition that it was a hotbed of disease. They would not cover the indebtedness. The available cash ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... say that your brother would have given you the proofs of this statement about his marriage if he had meditated self-destruction," Mr. Brimsdown observed. "The proofs must be in existence, of course, but I do not think that they are at Flint House. Did your brother confide the information to you beforehand—before his public ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... little courage, and he asked for a sign, something to indicate that he was not the sport of fate, the creature of circumstance; something, anything, to indicate that God had not completely forgotten him. With bowed head Von Barwig prayed that he might be saved from himself; that thoughts of self-destruction might never again come into his mind; for he felt that he might not always have the power to reject them. He asked that the desire to live might again come upon him; for it dawned upon him that perhaps his duty lay in the direction ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... expiate their crimes, apologize for errors, escape from disgrace, redeem their friends, or prove their sincerity. When enforced as a legal punishment, it was practiced with due ceremony. It was a refinement of self-destruction, and none could perform it without the utmost coolness of temper and composure of demeanor, and for these reasons it was particularly befitting the profession ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... those of the required formula: Auctor laudabiliter se subjecit et opus reprobavit. "The author has laudably made his submission and reprobated his work." No error could have been confessed, no hope could have accomplished self-destruction with loftier despair, more sovereign grandeur. But what frightful irony: that book which he had sworn never to withdraw, and for whose triumph he had fought so passionately, and which he himself now denied and suppressed, not because he deemed it guilty, but because he had just ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... is the desire of the solitary prisoner to behold some one of his own species! It amounts almost to a sort of instinct, as if in order to avoid insanity, and its usual consequence, the tendency to self-destruction. The Christian religion, so abounding in views of humanity, forgets not to enumerate amongst its works of mercy the visiting of the prisoner. The mere aspect of man, his look of commiseration, and his willingness, as it were, to share with you, and bear a part ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... as I have pointed out so many times, the race was between maturity and the petulant self-destruction of protracted adolescence. Mankind had either to take thought or to perish, and it has chosen (perhaps sensibly after all) to perish. I am too old now to protest ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... if the introduction of the guinea pigs would be prejudicial to the interests of the higher and nobler Irish animal who, he would remind the Minister for Public Worship, was not to be confounded with the herd whose example was clearly emulated by the present government in seeking self-destruction by running down a steep place into the sea. (Cries of "Order, order!") If there was any doubt before, the honorable member continued, as to the influence which was at work in that Gadarene herd, which assumed the functions of Her Majesty's government, the sounds ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... had passed when the bereaved mother, who had refused to be consoled for the death of her only child, was found drowned at the bottom of the well in the harem garden. The household was plunged in lamentation over her pitiful act of self-destruction, and now I became vaguely conscious that friends and neighbours, as well as servants, were looking at me askance, and were beginning to shun my presence as if a curse ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... which during 1779 extended as far as the neighbourhood of Charleston, depended upon the control of the water, and are a conspicuous example of misapplication of power to the point of ultimate self-destruction. They were in 1778-79 essentially of a minor character, especially the maritime part, and will therefore be dismissed with the remark that the Navy, by small vessels, accompanied every movement in a country cut up in all directions by watercourses, big and little. "The defence ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... the last line had been read, and I sat in a maze of astonishment and awe. What my thoughts were, what my judgment upon this astounding act of self-destruction for conscience sake, it will not interest you to know. In a matter so complicated with questions of right and wrong, each man must feel for himself, and out of his own nature adjudge praise, or express censure; I, Constance Sterling, ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... to be, for as the Penal Code distinctly states, owing to the impossibility of reaching the successful perpetrator no forfeiture is imposed. But the new law lifts the ban from futile efforts in the matter of self-destruction, and one need not pay the hitherto exacted fine of a thousand dollars by way of a ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... utilitarians are with their axiom that everyone pursueshis own happiness. He exposes over and over again, with nerve-rending subtlety, how intoxicating to the human spirit is the mad lust of self-immolation, of self-destruction. It is really from him that Nietzsche learnt that wanton Dionysic talisman which opens the door to such ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... scientific progress into the sphere of morality. It is conceivable that the progress of science might involve for us no progress at all. It might be, and some have feared that it may become, a step towards the self-destruction ...
— Progress and History • Various
... been saddened much in the same way through the suicide of his young cousin, Prince Alfred of Coburg; the self-destruction of the young prince, who had been placed under the immediate care and guardianship of his majesty, having been due, as I have intimated, to enormous losses at the card tables of Berlin and Potsdam. In spite of all the well-meant efforts of the ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... never bade us good-night without a tear moistening his cheek. We parted with the hunter as with an old friend; and we never met again. His fate was a sad one. After we left that part of the country, he fell into a moping melancholy, which ended in self-destruction. But a kinder, warmer-hearted man, while he enjoyed the light of reason, has ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... as she read that melancholy farewell, expressed in language at once wild and childish. If he survived his desperate attempt at self-destruction, to what end would it lead? In silence, the woman who loved him put his letter back in her bosom. Watching her attentively—affected, it was impossible to say how, by that mute distress—Fanny Mere proposed to go downstairs, and ask once more what hope there might be for the wounded ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... limits were to be set to toleration was far from easy. The Church seemed like a fortress beleaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted her foundations. To loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to stand in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for all who could not accept the special ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... to ride through the zone controlled and swept by effective Infantry fire may be looked on as synonymous with self-destruction, only such moments must be chosen for a charge during which the enemy is prevented from bringing his full fire power to bear against the assailants. These, however, only occur—except always where the nature ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... children. Visiting him twice daily, and sometimes even more frequently, I found the way somehow into his heart, and he would do almost anything for me and longed for my visits. When again the fit of self-destruction seized him, they sent for me; he held out his hand eagerly, and grasping mine said, "Put all these people out of the room, remain you with me; I will be quiet, I will do ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... and misfortunes. He is depicted with a marvellous art, though it is impossible to sympathise with him. He upsets a love-affair of his sister's, he quarrels with and insults her lover, who commits suicide; he also drives to self-destruction a wretched little Hebrew who has become a freethinker and can't stand the strain of his apostasy; he is the remote cause of another suicide, that of a weakling, a student full of "modern" ideas, but whose will is quite sapped. Turgenieff's Fathers and Sons is recalled ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the result of deliberate philosophic argument and investigation, by which its votaries have reached the dispassionate conclusion that there is no real good or pleasure in the world that is not clearly outweighed by evil or pain, and that therefore self-destruction, or at least final annihilation is the consummation devoutly to ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... ignorance as to the corrosive properties of fire. You have betrayed confiding womanhood, an act abhorrent to all notions of gentility. There is but one conclusive proof of your repentance.—Need I mention that I allude to self-destruction?" ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... bottom of all killing is that of injustice; but in self-destruction where the culprit and the victim are one and the same person, there can be no question of injustice. Akin to, and a substitute for, the law of justice is that of charity, by which we are bound to love ourselves and do ourselves no harm or injury. The saying "charity begins at home" ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... sworn enemy of royalty. On that account the sanguinary agents of the self-created Assembly employed him to frequent the Temple. His special commission was to stimulate the King and Royal Family by every possible argument to self-destruction. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... herself, and while we still hope something from her testimony, we are leaving her very much to her own devices, and do not cross her in anything. You will therefore listen to what she says, and, if possible, aid her in anything she may undertake, unless it points directly towards self-destruction. My opinion is that she will surprise you. But you are becoming accustomed to surprises, are ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... over Mrs. Richardson's elm, over the topmost branch—hurrah! out of sight! Margaret adds her voice to the acclamations. Beat that if you can, Mary! That doubtful wind keeps yours suspended in a graceful minuet; its pace is accelerated—but earthwards! it has committed self-destruction by running foul of a rose-bush. A ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... night. The fire had gone out, but Reardon still sat in the cold room. Thoughts of self-destruction were again haunting him, as they had done during the black months of last year. If he had lost Amy's love, and all through the mental impotence which would make it hard for him even to earn bread, why should he still live? ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... a friend of her youth, a man noble and true, to whom she owed much, and whom she felt it a kind of murder to desert. It was one of those fallacious chivalries of feeling which are the danger of sensitive and imaginative minds. Religion strengthened it, as it is so apt to strengthen any form of self-destruction, short of technical suicide. There was but a month to their marriage when we met. For us it was a month of rapture and agonies, of heaven shot through with hell. I saw further than she. I begged her at least to wait a year; but the force of my appeal was weakened by scruples similar ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... spoken, if her daughter had been a member of Mr. Keller's family. With floods of tears, with eloquent protestations, with threats even of self-destruction, could she venture on ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... those who appear on this world's stage poor and friendless, have a desperate struggle to maintain. According to the quality of their minds they turn to action or to self-destruction. When they have resolution to set to work, as I have done, they often play the winning game. A man must live; he must conquer a position, and make for himself an abiding-place. I have made mine as a cannon-ball ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... while in this condition I should become hypochondrical, and fearful suggestions of self-destruction occasionally presented themselves. I experienced an insatiable desire for sleep, but on retiring would lie awake for a long time, tormented with troubled reflections, and when at last I did fall into an uneasy slumber of short duration, it ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... making such a mistake. He believed in development, in the progress of the organic world from a lower to a higher stage. Progress and development, however, were conditional upon life, and he who has recourse to self-destruction sets an example of unseemly revolt against one of the most beautiful and comforting of all the laws of nature. Moreover, suicide was a waste of force on which it was simply heartrending to have to look. There were so many great deeds to be done which called for the ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... several devices for elevating and reforming it, but failed, partly because he was himself a man of no ideals but those of the counting-room, and largely because the paper could not recover from the strong slant given it without self-destruction. So the Events continued what Bartley Hubbard had made it, and what the readers he had called about it liked it to be: a journal without principles and without convictions, but with interests only; a map of busy life, indeed, but glaringly colored, with crude endeavors at picturesqueness, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... now to the subject of self-mutilation and self-destruction from the peculiar customs or religious beliefs of people, we find pages of information at our disposal. It is not only among the savage or uncivilized tribes that such ideas have prevailed, but from the earliest times they have had ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... partial mental alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruction, which came so near taking place in the hero of the allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is, next to the Bible and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi," the best-known religious ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dreaded worse than death, was past—they were sold to Jamaica. The necessity of doing this was bewailed by the whole family as a most dreadful calamity, and the culprit was carefully watched on his way to New-York, lest he should evade the sentence by self-destruction. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... account that these words were addressed by the Lord to his apostles—to the elect of the elect—with particular reference to the sin of betraying the Son of man, which was exemplified by the outward act of Judas, who also by his self-destruction exhibited the damnatory power of the inward consciousness of such guilt. The exceeding sinfulness of such apostasy as that which Judas, chosen to be {83} an apostle, was guilty of, may be assigned as the reason that it was denounced ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... He that has just now accused me has recommended the torture to be applied; he has already had his wish, for what torture can be more agonising than to find myself where I now am? So tortured, indeed, have I been through a short yet wretched life, that I have often felt that anything short of self-destruction which would release me would be a blessing; but within these few minutes I have been made to acknowledge that I have still feelings in unison with my fellow-creatures; that I am not yet fit for death, and all too young, too unprepared to die: for who would not reluctantly leave this ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... was long before he could collect energy enough to talk. When he did, he made an effort to tell her the story of the boy's death, and the father's self-destruction. He told it leaning forward in his chair, his eyes on the ground, his hands loosely joined, his voice broken and labored. Julie listened, gathering from his report an impression of horror, tragic and irremediable, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a girl of this disposition is really self-destruction. You never can have either property or peace. Earn her a horse to ride, she will want a gig: earn the gig, she will want a chariot: get her that, she will long for a coach and four: and, from stage to stage, she will torment you to the end of her or your days; for, still there will ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... came in sight of the church where his mother used to go, and then memories of all her holy teachings. Should he find her if he attempted self-destruction? ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
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