"Fanatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... escaped assassination from an Arabian youth whom he had taken into his service. Raymond had prayed to God, in some of his accesses of fanaticism, that he might suffer martyrdom in his holy cause. His servant had overheard him; and, being as great a fanatic as his master, he resolved to gratify his wish, and punish him, at the same time, for the curses which he incessantly launched against Mahomet and all who believed in him, by stabbing him to the heart. He, therefore, aimed a blow at his master, as he sat one day at table; but ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... flashed with a fanatic glow. "You die," said she, "and I shall live, will live, to see how God will avenge you upon these evil-doers. I will live, that I may constantly think of you, and in every hour of the day address to God my prayers for vengeance ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... influence to the singular sweetness of his disposition and the urbanity of his manners. His wide sympathies interested him in many causes, and even his antagonists were not enemies. Stephen, on the other hand, as Mr. Henry Adams says, was a 'high-minded fanatic.' To be interested in any but the great cause was to rouse his suspicions. 'If you,' he once wrote to Wilberforce, 'were Wellington, and I were Massena, I should beat you by distracting your attention from the main point.' Any courtesies shown by Wilberforce to ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... rumpled black suit; he had knobby wrists and big, awkward hands; black hair flecked with gray, and a harsh, bigoted face. Allan remembered him. Frank Gutchall. Lived on Campbell Street; a religious fanatic, and some sort of lay preacher. Maybe he needed legal advice; Allan could vaguely remember ...
— Time and Time Again • Henry Beam Piper
... enough; the priest demanded that I should give up to him a certain parchment that I had purchased from a Greek at Malamocco just before sailing. I had no recollection of it, but it was true. I laughed, and gave it to M. Dolfin; he handed it to the fanatic chaplain, who, exulting in his victory, called for a large pan of live coals from the cook's galley, and made an auto-da-fe of the document. The unlucky parchment, before it was entirely consumed, kept writhing on the fire for half an hour, and the priest did not fail to represent ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... or something very like it, in the first letter. There was no doubt left that the Mullah was trying to hide ignorance, as men of that fanatic ambitious mold so often will at the expense of better judgment. If fanatics were all-wise, it would be a poor world for the rest. "Very well," King said quietly. And with great pretense of copying the other letter ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... December of 1495 Charles VIII heard of her at Siena, and was stirred by a curiosity which he accounted devotional—the same curiosity that caused one of his gentlemen to entreat Savonarola to perform "just a little miracle" for the King's entertainment. You can picture the gloomy fanatic's reception of that invitation. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... believe Mr. F. W. Newman to be singularly at fault in pronouncing this attempt of Jesus upon Jerusalem a foolhardy attempt. According to Mr. Newman, no man has any business to rush upon certain death, and it is only a crazy fanatic who will do so. [21] But such "glittering generalizations" will here help us but little. The historic data show that to go to Jerusalem, even at the risk of death, was absolutely necessary to the realization of Jesus' Messianic project. Mr. Newman certainly would not have ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the master himself ceased to drive it," and we shall never know the spell of his genius. For one who had shown himself so uncompromising in action where his own beliefs were concerned, he was singularly gentle and humble. Followed from his church one day, by a specially sour and peevish fanatic, who announced to him with a frown that his ministry had become dark and ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... hesitate, he stops at nothing, and is as pitiless toward himself as toward all others. That is the principal quality which attracted me to him and which made me for a long time seek his cooeperation. There are those who pretend that he is nothing but a sharper, but that is a lie. He is a devoted fanatic, but at the same time a dangerous fanatic, with whom an alliance could only prove very disastrous for everyone concerned. This is the reason: He first belonged to a secret society which, in reality, existed in Russia. This society exists no more; all its members have ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... 'Our Father who art in Heaven,' yet men who ought to be brothers are divided into states, and hate each other as enemies. He said: 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven,' yet he who believes it ever will come is called a fanatic and a fool." ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... fond of too many pursuits. The man who succeeds is generally the narrow mall; the man of one idea, who works at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices everything to that: the fanatic, in short. By fanatics, whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by 'liberal- minded men' at all, has the world's work been done in all ages. Amid the modern cants, one of the most mistaken is the cant about the 'mission of genius,' the 'mission of the poet.' Poets, we hear in some ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... "fountain head," one of the sources of the Cabul river; it is a large pool stocked with a multitude of enormous fish that are held sacred by the few inhabitants of the adjoining hamlets, and which are daily fed by an aged fanatic, who for many years has devoted himself to their protection. As it would be deemed in the highest degree sacrilegious to eat any of these monsters, they are never molested, and are so tame as to come readily to the hand when offered food. Of course, my necessary ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... was succeeded in this mansion by a sour fanatic knight, a distant and collateral relation, who claimed the same merit for expelling the priestess of Baal, which his predecessor had founded on maintaining the votaresses of Heaven. Of the two unhappy nuns, driven from their ancient refuge, one went beyond ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... day and week after week the strike dragged on. Daily strength departed from it and entered into Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. The men had embarked upon it with enthusiasm, many of them with fanatic determination; but with the advent in their home of privation, of hunger, their zeal was transmuted into heavy determination, lifeless stubbornness. Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins that should have passed over the baker's ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... white-hot anger was the High Priestess, her heart a seething, molten mass of hatred for Tarzan of the Apes. The zeal of the religious fanatic whose altar has been desecrated was triply enhanced by the rage of a woman scorned. Twice had she thrown her heart at the feet of the godlike ape-man and twice had she been repulsed. La knew that she was beautiful—and she was beautiful, not by the standards of prehistoric Atlantis alone, but by ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the Bishop—it was rather perhaps that Foster did not like himself. Now it is the first rule of fanaticism that you should be so lost in the impulse of your inspiration that you should have no power left with which to consider yourself at all. Foster was undoubtedly a fanatic, but he did consider himself and even despised himself. Ronder distrusted self- contempt in a man simply because nothing made him so uncomfortable as those moments of his own when he wondered whether he were all that he thought ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... element. But their numbers and influence are sadly insufficient to secure such a result. The masses are strongly opposed to colored suffrage; anybody that dares to advocate it is stigmatized as a dangerous fanatic; nor do I deem it probable that in the ordinary course of things prejudices will wear off to such an extent as to make it a popular measure. Outside of Louisiana only one gentleman who occupied a prominent political position ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... leave the neighboring poor To starve and shiver at the schemer's door, While in the world's most liberal ranks enrolled, He turns some vast philanthropy to gold; Religion taking every mortal form But that a pure and Christian faith makes warm, Where not to vile fanatic passion urged, Or not in vague philosophies submerged, Repulsive with all Pharisaic leaven, And making laws to stay the laws of Heaven! And on the other, scorn of sordid gain, Unblemished honor, truth without a stain, Faith, justice, reverence, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... narrow table, under cover of stray articles and papers, grey bead-eyed geckoes craftily stalked moths and beetles and other fanatic worshippers of flame as they hastened to sacrifice themselves to the lamp. In the walls wasps built terra-cotta warehouses in which to store the semi-animate carcasses of spiders and grubs; a solitary ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... stood a long, narrow, thatched roof supported on poles. Beneath this, the Captain told me, were the beehives. They proved later to be in charge of a mild-eyed religious fanatic who believed the world ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... as Columbus himself, always rendering thanks to the Almighty for His favors, but was by no means a fanatic in religion. While Columbus ascribes his discoveries to the especial favor of some particular saint, on occasions, or his deliverance from danger to the direct interposition of Providence, Vespucci makes no such superstitious claims for himself, though ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... whilst every thing upon the surface of society wore a calm and peaceful aspect; whilst not one note of preparation was heard to warn the devoted inhabitants of woe and death, a gloomy fanatic was revolving in the recesses of his own dark, bewildered, and overwrought mind, schemes of indiscriminate massacre to the whites. Schemes too fearfully executed as far as his fiendish band proceeded in their desolating march. No cry for mercy penetrated their flinty bosoms. No acts of remembered ...
— The Confessions Of Nat Turner • Nat Turner
... he was not hopeless. He knew the adventurer and he knew the fanatic. It was quite probable that Stephen, the adventurer, would hold his tongue, through his mere histrionic pleasure in playing a part, his lust for clinging to his new cosy quarters, his rascal's trust in luck, and his fine fencing. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... with a hundred tongues, And Thou, O Henley! blest with brazen lungs; Fanatic Withers! fam'd for rhimes and sighs, And Jacob Behmen! most obscurely wise; From darkness palpable, on dusky wings Ascend! and shroud him who ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Menschikoff hastened to put into execution. Time pressed: the enemy had learnt through spies that an assault on Sebastopol was close at hand. Besides, the Grand Dukes had arrived, and the troops, worked up to the highest pitch of loyal fanatic fervour, were mad to fight under the eyes of the sons of their father, ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... been fundamentally opposed to the new missionary attitude of Paul. The doctrines of the Epistle to the Romans, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, are absolutely antipathetic to the ideal of the "Allegories of the Laws." Paul is allied in spirit—though his expression is that of the fanatic rather than of the philosopher—to the extreme allegorist section of philosophical Jews at Alexandria, attacked by Philo for their shallowness in the famous passage, quoted from De Migratione Abrahami (ch. 16[358]), who, because ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... great Cardinal such hearts most warm To one above all office and all state, Serenely wise, magnanimously great; Not as the pride of Oriel, or the star Of this host or of that in creed's hot war, But as the noble spirit, stately, sweet, Ardent for good without fanatic heat, Gentle of soul, though greatly militant, Saintly, yet with no touch of cloistral cant; Him England honours, and so bends to-day In reverent grief ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... materialized. Gabriel's riot planned in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, ended very much like that in New York. Another incident was the attempt in 1822 of a certain Negro, Denmark Vesey, to start an insurrection at Charleston, which utterly failed. Nat Turner, a religious fanatic, was the cause of the most serious uprising of all. In 1831 he organized a revolt in Virginia which cost the lives of several score of whites before it was quelled.[45] The other spontaneous turn of the worm was the Amistad incident,[46] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... ordinance which was to serve as a sign and a seal of His grace throughout all generations. His character is as sublime as it is original. It has no parallel in the history of the human family. The impostor is cunning, the demagogue is turbulent, and the fanatic is absurd; but the conduct of Jesus Christ is uniformly gentle and serene, candid, courteous, and consistent. Well, indeed, may His name be called Wonderful. "He was in the world, and the world was made by him, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... then. Or write fluffy criticisms about art or theaters. Or get into the magazine field. You can write; O Lord! yes, you can write. But unless you've got the devotion of a fanatic like McHale, or a born servant of the machine like 'Parson' Gale, or an old fool like me, willing to sink your identity in your work, you'll never be content as ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... their eyes stick out, tomorrow. If they won't let me go ahead and develop it, I'll resign, hunt up some more 'X', and do it myself. That bath is on its way to the moon right now, and there's no reason why I can't follow it. Martin's such a fanatic on exploration, he'll fall all over himself to build us any kind of a craft we'll need ... we'll explore the whole solar system! Great Cat, what a chance! A ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... the Emperor to get closer to Germany, in order to watch over that country and to see what was going on in France, where there had been a conspiracy whose leaders had been, for one day, in control of the capital. A fanatic, General Malet, had tossed a spark into Paris which could have started a fire, which, had he not encountered a man as far-seeing and energetic as Adjutant-major Laborde, might have put an ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... to London, where he makes enough, when he is sober, by painting pot-boilers for the dealers, to keep him in absinthe and tobacco, which are apparently his sole sustenance. In the meanwhile he is painting a masterpiece; at least, so he will tell you. He is a virulent fanatic, whose art is the most monstrous thing imaginable. He ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... democrat is wrong, and further, to him an object of hatred. In his eyes the distance between himself and the aristocrat is as the distance between truth and error, nay between good and evil, between honour and dishonour. The schoolmaster is the fanatic vassal of democracy. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... of ice and flame. He has no composition, no mean temperature. Hence he is rarely interested about any public measure but he becomes a fanatic, and oversteps, in his irrespective zeal, every decency and every right opposed ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... on the intruders with tremendous, nervous strides, they perceived him to be an old man, white of hair, cadaverous of countenance, with thin, straight lips, and burning, fanatic eyes beneath stiff ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was frenziedly crying that she had heard the devil and his Rocbert witches revelling in the prison dungeons the night before. Thereupon a long-haired fanatic, once a barber, with a gift for mad preaching, sprang upon the Pompe des Brigands, and declaring that the Last Day ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "He had long cultivated," he said, "the habit of connecting the most trivial and customary acts of life with a silent prayer." He took the Bible as his guide, and it is possible that his literal interpretation of its precepts caused many to regard him as a fanatic. His observance of the Sabbath was hardly in accordance with ordinary usage. He never read a letter on that day, nor posted one; he believed that the Government in carrying the mails were violating a divine law, and he considered the suppression of such traffic one of the most important ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... in result, was fought at Dreux, in which each of the commanders, Conde and Montmorency, fell into the hands of their antagonists; and then, in February 1563, Francis of Guise was assassinated by the fanatic Poltrot. About the same time died two of his brothers, D'Aumale and the Grand Prior. The result was the termination of the war by the Peace of Amboise, practically confirming the recent edict of toleration. Katharine still refused to adopt the policy, urged ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... soon lost their religious character, while they retained all the hardness of the fanatic and the feelings of Puritan conquerors towards a conquered Catholic people. 'I have eaten with them,' said one, 'drunk with them, fought with them; but I never prayed with them.' Their descendants became, probably, the very worst upper class with which a country was ever afflicted. ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... (if it may be called a life) ut sentiant se mori, that they may be the more sensible of their dying" (p. 56.). Sir Walter Scott quotes a curious tract in Woodstock, entitled Vindication of the Book of Common Prayer against the Contumelious Slanders of the Fanatic Party terming it "Porridge." The author of this singular and rare tract (says Sir W.) indulges in the allegorical style, till he fairly hunts down the allegory. The learned divine chases his metaphor ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... a desperate fanatic, and had entertained a resolution of assassinating Sharpe, archbishop of St. Andrews, who, by his former apostasy and subsequent rigor, had rendered himself extremely odious to the Covenanters. In the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... weather-beaten complexion, puckered with wrinkles born of jolly laughter, or by the somewhat austere and controlled set of his mouth and by the ardent luminous grey eyes, with their touch of the visionary and fanatic. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... The Moro could be no more treacherous if his ancestors had sprung from tigers' wombs. A Moro boy, employed for years by one of my American acquaintances at Iligan, rewarded his master recently by cutting his throat at night. As superstitious as he is fanatic and uncivilized, the Moro is a failure as a member of the human race. Even the children are the incarnation of the fiend. There was that boy at Iligan who worked at the officer's club, and who hung ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... and mosques; and Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: [55] nor did the sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; [56] the Greek emperor solicited his alliance; [57] and the conquest of Jerusalem diffused, and perhaps ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... been growing in Marzio's mind that it was his duty, for the sake of consistency, to abandon his trade. The thought saddened him, but the conclusion seemed inevitable. It was absurd, he repeated to himself, that one who hated the priests should work for them. Marzio was a fanatic in his theories, but he had something of the artist's simplicity in his idea of the way they should be carried out. He would have thought it no harm to kill a priest, but it seemed to him contemptible to receive a priest's money for providing the church with vessels ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... danced out in front of his horse waving a turban to frighten it, and at the same time whirling a wicked looking scimitar around his head. Roberts drew his pistol but the weapon missed fire. The fanatic sprang forward, and it is probable that the career of a future Field Marshal would have ended then and there, had not a lancer spurred his horse in between ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... outcome; and there is also a characteristic difference in point of religious convictions, which may go some way in the same direction. The followers of Islam appear on the whole to take the tenets of their faith at their face value—servile, intolerant and fanatic—whereas the Russian official class may perhaps without undue reproach be considered to have on the whole outlived the superstitious conceits to which they yield an expedient pro forma observance. So that when worse comes to worst, and the Turk finds himself at ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... joyful, exhortations to repentance, and thunders of prospective vengeance on sin. Even to her the sermon seemed a masterpiece of eloquence, and the artistic feeling in her rejoiced in the vigorous phrases and fervid declamation, though her whole being revolted against the hypocrite and fanatic who spoke, and she despised the crude bigotry of the ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... own pronouncement. She had come without scruple, to watch their effect. To weigh them in the balance of her scientific mysticism. She had come to watch the struggles of the young girl in the toils which enveloped her. Her mind was the diseased mind of the fanatic, prompted by a nature in which cruelty ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... on. Nothing is worse for insomnia than an unsolved mystery. Slipping into my clothes, I made my way softly to the spot. There in the seat where I was wont to pursue my even tenor as an orchid slumbered Martin Dyke, amateur desecrator of other men's houses, challenger of the wayward fates, fanatic of a will-o'-the-wisp pursuit, desperate adventurer in the uncharted realms of love; and in his face, turned toward the polychromatic abominations of the house, so soon to be deserted, was all the pathos and all the beauty of ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... understand," I said to Sylvia, "I never could forget such a lesson. I swore a vow over the poor lad's body, that I would never let a boy or girl that I could reach go out in ignorance into the world. I read up on the subject, and for a while I was a sort of fanatic—I made people talk, young people and old people. I broke down the taboos wherever I went, and while I shocked a good many, I knew that I helped ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... Russian; and that being the case he was presumably engaged in his present occupation for pay only, and I believed that I could turn what seemed to be a catastrophe into a decided advantage. Experience had taught me long ago that the Russian nihilist is a fanatic who possesses distorted ideas of patriotism upon which he builds a theory of government, and that nothing short of death can turn him from his purpose. But with the foreigners who ally themselves with ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... the Treaty of Westphalia applicable to you? Not mere fanatic mystics, as Right Reverend Firmian asserts; protectible by no Treaty?" That was Friedrich Wilhelm's first question; and he set his two chief Berlin Clergymen, learned Roloff one of them, a divine of much fame, to catechise the two Salzburg Deputies, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... similar cause produce a similar effect, as in the last clause of ver. 8 it has been threatened against Ephraim.—This prophecy and warning, one would have expected to have produced an effect so much the deeper, because they were not uttered by some obscure fanatic, but by a worthy member of a class which had in its favour the sanction of the Lawgiver, and which in the course of centuries had been so often and so gloriously ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... in iron. A Spanish chaplain, belonging to the army of the Emperor Charles V, passing through Paris in order to repair to Flayers, threw himself in this man's way, and worked on his mind till he had made him a complete fanatic: "Your king," said the friar, "protects Lutheranism in Germany, and will soon introduce it into France. Be revenged on him and your wife, by serving religion. Communicate to him that disease for which no certain remedy is yet known."—"And how am I to give it to him?" replied ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... their way down into the valley. Crossing this they ascended the steep road to the walls, brandishing their lances and giving yells of triumph; then riding two upon each side of their prisoner, to protect him from any fanatic who might lay a hand upon him, they passed under the gate known as the Gate of Suleiman into ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... down, the people began to realise what they had lost. This terrible fanatic had made them destroy that which they had come to love above all things. They turned against him, Savonarola was thrown into jail. He was tortured. But he refused to repent for anything he had done. He was an honest man. He had tried to live a holy life. He had willingly destroyed those who deliberately ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... influence. While thus endeavouring on one side to destroy the power of his enemies by depriving them of both authority and wealth, and on the other to consolidate his own by establishing a firm administration, he neglected no means of acquiring popularity. A fervent disciple of Mahomet when among fanatic Mussulmans, a materialist with the Bektagis who professed a rude pantheism, a Christian among the Greeks, with whom he drank to the health of the Holy Virgin, he made everywhere partisans by flattering the idea ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... was smilin' now; but it was the chillin' smile I had first seen durin' the card game. It wasn't a pleasant smile. "Judson, I did not cheat durin' that game, an' I never did cheat, although gamblin was my business. You have become a fanatic on the subject o' truth, an' I propose to tell you some. You are a bully; you have bullied this girl in order to make her consent; and you are a coward, a miserable coward. Any man afraid of his own past is a coward; and your past stands back ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... case it couldn't. 'I'm at my wit's end what to do with you, Le Breton,' he said kindly one morning to Ernest: 'but how on earth I'm to manage anything, I can't imagine. For my own part, you know, though your conduct about that poor man Schurz (a well-meaning harmless fanatic, I dare say) was really a public scandal—from the point of view of parents I mean, my dear fellow, from the point of view of parents—I should almost be inclined to keep you on here in spite of it, and brave the public opinion ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... "There are reasons for going slow with Tighe. He has hostage value, for one thing. But you're nobody. And while we aren't monsters I for one have little sympathy to spare for your kind of fanatic." ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... from you." "You cannot do that: for my treasure is laid up on high, where you cannot get at it?" "Then I will kill you." "You can not do that; for I have been dead these forty years: my life is hid with Christ in God." The king said, "What are you going to do with such a fanatic as that?" ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... advantages which the north derives from a continuance of that union which her fanatic population is so desirous to sever. A population with whom peace, humanity, mercy, oaths, contracts, and compacts, pass for nothing—whose promises and engagements are as chaff before the wind—to whom bloodshed, robbery, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... pure and simple; of course there are various grades of it, as there are of the popular one; for no man holds his own creed and nothing more; and it is good for him, in this piecemeal and shortsighted world, that he should not. Were he over-true to his own idea, he would become a fanatic, perhaps a madman. And so the modern evangelical of the Venn and Newton school, to whom mysticism is neology and nehushtan, when he speaks of "spiritual experiences," uses the adjective in its purely mystic ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... think a flying machine impossible, sir, and me, I presume, a fanatic? Well, well, you have Eusebius with you. 'Such an one,' he says—meaning me, and inventors like me—'is a little crazed with the ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... takes all the precautions that the courier mentions, for he does not care to awaken in the night and find a dark-faced fanatic of a Mohammedan in his room, sworn to accomplish ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... Constantinople and its surrounding provinces. Russia, all-powerful in the Black Sea, could at any moment force him to give up to her the key of the Dardanelles. Among the Turks (the only part of his subjects on whom he could rely) were many malcontents. Fanatic dervishes predicted his overthrow, and called him the Giaour Sultan. He had destroyed Turkish customs, outraged Turkish feelings, and by the massacre o the Janissaries, in 1826, he had sapped Turkish strength. He now began in his ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... in her ear, "One of his moments!" The phrase was to become very familiar to her on the lips of others, even more in her own thoughts. "His moments!" It implied a sort of intermittent inspiration, as though he were some ancient prophet or mediaeval fanatic through whose mouth Heaven spoke sometimes, leaving him for the rest to his own low and carnal nature. The phrase meant at once a plenitude of inspiration and a rarity of it. Not days, nor hours, but moments were seemingly what his friends valued ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... wrinkling his brows. "It seems to me that I saw that name on one of the banners carried by the rioters at the meeting. It may be that you are right. If he's the same man, he's a fanatic of the most dangerous kind and will stop at nothing. I hope that now your people have him under lock and key you'll keep him there. But I must go now, as I want to reach Mayence to-night if possible. I'm very glad to have had this few minutes' chat with you. By the way, when ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... dissenters, or more of actual encouragement given to rival sects, than under the New England theocracies. The Nationalist principle was exclusive; the men who held it in New England (subject though they were to the temptations of sectarian emulation and fanatic zeal) were ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... in spite of her endeavours to be brave, to face the impending fate heroically, she too had had her doubts throughout the long hours of their imprisonment—doubts as to whether death would indeed come to her with the merciful swiftness of a fanatic's bullet.... ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... here," said the little man—and about this time I noticed that he had the bright eyes of a fanatic—"I've been cruising with this Parnassus going on seven years. I've covered the territory from Florida to Maine and I reckon I've injected about as much good literature into the countryside as ever old Doc Eliot did with his five-foot shelf. ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... garrison would be withdrawn, Colonel Ross-Ellison commenced to put into practice his projected plans and arrangements. On the day that Mr. Dearman's coolies (after impassioned harangues by a blind Mussulman fanatic known as Ibrahim the Weeper, a faquir who had recently come over the Border to Gungapur and attained great influence; and by a Hindu professional agitator who had obtained a post at the mills in the guise of a harmless ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... he is just so, and you may take it or leave it; but he is not ashamed or sensitive, nor in any way abashed; he smiles his frank, good-natured smile; and suddenly one perceives the greatness of it! He is neither fanatic nor buffoon; he is not performing like the boxer or wrestler, nor is he sitting mournfully and patiently for the sake of the pence, like the fat man at the fair; he is merely trying to say what he thinks ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... plunged into the forest of Tarsheehhah, where the Shaikh of the principal village, that which gives name to the district, is a fanatic Moslem, who was then preaching religious revivals, and was said to engraft upon his doctrine the pantheism of the Persian Soofis. This was not considered improbable, seeing that the Moslems of the Belad Besharah are all of the Sheah sect, (here called Metawala,) out of which the Soofi heresy ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... influence on their passions. It is true that the best sorts of painting, as well as the best sorts of poetry, are not much understood in that sphere. But it is most certain that their passions are very strongly roused by a fanatic preacher, or by the ballads of Chevy Chase, or the Children in the Wood, and by other little popular poems and tales that are current in that rank of life. I do not know of any paintings, bad or good, that produce ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... madness cannot properly be attributed to his illness, though its accent might be. For a time he would be the grim Protestant Flagellant, pursuing the idea of self-castigation. That he was immolating Ruth on the altar of his conscience never broke in upon his thought for consideration. The fanatic has no such ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... exactly of his own size to meddle with, who should only have the odds of truth and honesty; which as I take it, would be an effectual way to silence him for ever. Upon this occasion, I cannot forbear a short story of a fanatic farmer who lived in my neighbourhood, and was so great a disputant in religion, that the servants in all the families thereabouts, reported, how he had confuted the bishop and all his clergy. I had then a footman who was fond of reading the Bible, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... talked to us plainly, and fully instructed us in our duty and gave the long-faced hypocrites such a lecture that much good was done. I had at that time learned to dread a religious fanatic, and I was pleased to hear the Prophet lay down the law to them. A fanatic is always dangerous, but a religious fanatic is to be dreaded by all men - there is no reason in one of them. I cannot understand how men will blindly follow fanatical teachers. I always ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... insurrections in northern Egypt. An angel had excited them, and the heavenly messenger, who had condescended to assume a name, was called the Mahdi, or El Mohdy. This religious extravagance, however, did not last long, and tranquillity was soon restored. All that the fanatic Mahdi, who shrouded himself in mystery, succeeded in doing was to attack our rear by some vagabonds, whose illusions were dissipated by a ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... with some show of plausibility. His free, erratic life, his little imprudences, his unguarded expressions, and the reckless "Chaldee MS.," might, with a little twisting, be turned to handles of offence, and wrested to his disadvantage. But the fanatic zeal of his opponents could not rest till their accusations had run through nearly the whole gamut of immoralities. He was not only a blasphemer towards God, but corrupt to wife and children. It seems comical enough at this day that he was obliged to bolster ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... were present at the execution, for it was then believed in the South that the Brown raid was not the mere suicidal stroke of an individual fanatic, but an organized movement on the part of the Republican party; an effort to rescue Brown was therefore apprehended. This idea was later shown to be a fallacy, Brown having made his own plans, and been financed by a few northern friends, headed by ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... of thrones and victory to the rest;— And they believe him!—oh, the lover may Distrust that look which steals his soul away;— The babe may cease to think that it can play With Heaven's rainbow;—alchymists may doubt The shining gold their crucible gives out; But Faith, fanatic Faith, once wedded fast To some dear falsehood hugs it to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... You think me a fanatic to-night, for you read history not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocian for the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... of Buddhist influence in Java ever since 603, when the Indian ruler, Guzerat, settled in Middle Java with five thousand of his followers. In the sixteenth century, when a wave of Mohammedanism swept the island from end to end, the Buddhist temples being destroyed by the fanatic followers of the Prophet and the priests slaughtered on their altars, the Buddhists, in order to save the famous shrine from desecration and destruction, buried it under many feet of earth. Thus the great monument remained, hidden and almost forgotten, for three hundred years, but during ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... which preceded ours regarded him only as a wild enthusiast, a fanatic, or a public enemy. The present generation sees in him the bold and honest reformer, the man of original, self-poised, heroic will, inspired by a vision of universal justice, made actual in the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... divided clans and antagonistic septs were to be unknown among them: only Catholic Irishmen were to remain ranked around the successors of "the saints" of old, all determined to be what they were, or die. But as laws, edicts, and measures of fanatic frenzy cannot destroy a nation, the new people was destined to survive for better ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... his own conversion is an instance of the kind of testimony which then worked the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery fanatic on a mission of persecution, with the midday Syrian sun streaming down upon his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the present day, and if a modern physician were consulted about it, he would say without hesitation, that it ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... old protestant and sings a ballad of the Huguenots to the young people, a song wild and fanatic. They laugh at his impotent wrath, when a lady is announced to Count Nevers, in whom Raoul recognizes ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... "Burne's a fanatic," he said to Tom, "and he's dead wrong and, I'm inclined to think, just an unconscious pawn in the hands of anarchistic publishers and German-paid rag wavers—but he haunts me—just leaving everything ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... thing, its chimerical duties as the most holy obligations, intolerance, and the spirit of persecution, as the true foundations of his future authority; they will try to make him a chief of party, a turbulent fanatic, and a tyrant; they will suppress at an early period his reason; they will premonish him against it; they will prevent truth from reaching him; they will prejudice him against true talents, and prepossess him in favor of despicable talents; finally ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... strength to the old world that he knew, the world that gave him leisure and quiet for contemplation. He had no wish to bring in converts, to stir England into a frenzy of terror and anticipation. God gave him no command to spread his beliefs; even his father, fanatic though he had been, had cherished his own small company of saints as souls to whom these things, hidden deliberately from the outside world, had ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... and a sincere fanatic in the hands of an agitator is the very devil. That is whence these fellows got their power. Half of them are fanatics ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... virtues" of man. And it is this, perhaps, that makes us feel his courage—not a self-courage, but a sympathetic one—courageous even to tenderness. It is the open courage of a kind heart, of not forcing opinions—a thing much needed when the cowardly, underhanded courage of the fanatic would FORCE opinion. It is the courage of believing in freedom, per se, rather than of trying to force everyone to SEE that you believe in it—the courage of the willingness to be reformed, rather than of reforming—the courage teaching that sacrifice ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... permitted to speak of God, the more he thought about Him; this child beheld God everywhere. What I should most dread as the result of this unwise affectation of mystery is this: by over-stimulating the youth's imagination you may turn his head, and make him at the best a fanatic ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... perfect plant. But a volcanic eruption is sterile, the ruin of the fertile ground. And am I, who love my country—who have nothing but that to love and put my faith in—am I to have my future, perhaps my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary fanatic?" ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... what you say. Listen, my child. I am a gambler. Not the man who lavishes his fortune at the gaming-table for excitement's sake; not the fanatic who stakes his own earnings—perhaps the confided earnings of others—on a single coup. No, he is the man who loses,—whom the world deplores, pities, and forgives. I am the man who wins—whom ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... had professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means careless. His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones. Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... had to interfere. He dispatched a rescript to Alexandria, enjoining the bishop, Theophilus, to destroy the Serapion; and the great library, which had been collected by the Ptolemies, and had escaped the fire of Julius Caesar, was by that fanatic dispersed. ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... in hand, contemplated the strange fanatic before him, and listened to his heated rhapsody, with indescribable bewilderment. He looked him in the face with curious particularity; saw there the marks of education; and wondered ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... assertions from his painfully acquired experience, such as the unfailing sexual agency in the causation of neurotic manifestations, and that his experience of many years has as yet shown no exception to this rule, which quite naturally provoked a good deal of bitter and fanatic criticism not only from lay people but from experienced physicians. The cause for this lies in the nature of the thing itself, that much tabooed subject of sexuality. Unfortunately, as Hitschmann[6] says, physicians in their personal ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... small coin. Although Cezanne lived like a bachelor, his surviving sister saw that his household was comfortable. His wife and son lived in Paris and often visited him. He was rich; his father, a successful banker at Aix, had left him plenty of money; but a fanatic on the subject of art, ceaselessly searching for new tonal combinations, he preferred a hermit's existence. In Aix he was considered eccentric though harmless. His pride was doubled by a morbid shyness. Strangers he avoided. So sensitive was he that once when he stumbled ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... was. If the man tired of her, if he found her too delicate for the trials she would have to endure, the girl's life in the desert would be terribly hard. Max dared not think what it might be. He had felt that it would tear his heart out to see her going unprotected except by that fanatic, to be swallowed up by the merciless mystery of the desert. But because she had decided to go, and because she thought she had need of no one in the world except Stanton, Max had made up his mind that he must stand by and let her go. Now, ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... he's a fanatic!" Mrs. Sandworth seized on a valuable piece of driftwood which the doctor's tempest ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... his wife as soon as they were seated in their carriage, "Dr. Fairfax is a narrow-minded extremist, a fanatic. What right had he to bring those street wanderers into the church this morning? The place for them is down at the mission. Do I not give liberally toward its support? To be sure, such as they need the Gospel, but I want them to stay where ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... life and one not devoid of danger. In 1895 she was wounded and barely escaped death in the Hwa Shan (Flower Mountain) massacre in which ten women and one man were brutally murdered by a mob of fanatic natives known as "Vegetarians." The Chinese Government was required to pay a considerable indemnity to Miss Hartford, which she accepted only under protest and characteristically devoted to missionary work in Kucheng where the ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... of the comrades have been slow or loath to realize it. Many of them have ascribed the strength of the Iron Heel to its system of reward and punishment. This is a mistake. Heaven and hell may be the prime factors of zeal in the religion of a fanatic; but for the great majority of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to right and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the right, unhappiness with anything less than the right—in short, right conduct, is the prime factor of religion. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... had broken up the Egyptian army, and had, for a time at least, practically assumed the direction of affairs there, they found themselves face to face with an insurrection under a fanatic who assumed the title of the Mahdi. The followers of this man had overrun the whole of the Soudan, shutting up the various Egyptian garrisons in the towns they occupied. One of the chiefs of the Mahdi, named Osman Digma, was threatening the port of Suakim, on the ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... blunt avowal, as a scheme of human ethics? No wolf in sheep's clothing he! He plotted against no man's pocket, no woman's honour; he had no sinister design of sapping the faith of congregations—a scheme, by-the-bye, which fanatic liberators might undertake with vast self-approval. If by a word he could have banished religious dogma from the minds of the multitude, he would not have cared to utter it. Wherein lay, indeed, a scruple to be surmounted. The Christian priest must be a man of humble temper; he ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... up from the lips about him. Fanatic and bloodthirsty as they were, the imminence of the ordeal that was to requite their wrongs startled them. Their preference was to curse their bosses and spur others to dangerous revenge. In moments of carefully developed hysteria they were reckless enough—when ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... truth. Else you are civil enough to Kate; and your 'homage' (such as it may happen to be) is always at the service of a woman on the shortest notice. But behind you, I see a worse fellow; a gloomy fanatic; a religious sycophant that seeks to propitiate his circle by bitterness against the offences that are most unlike his own. And against him, I must say one word for Kate to the too hasty reader. This villain, whom I mark for a shot if he does not get ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey |
