"Insanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it not a happiness to meet with an enchantress, to bow down to the magic of her charms, and for a small half hour to dream of bliss? All other men are mad: why should I alone be reasonable? Come, then, spirit of love and bliss, heavenly insanity, take possession of my struggling soul. Let old age be wise and cool, I am young and warm. For a little while I will play the fool, and forget my ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... flourished finely, and the Bastille and the Palace de Tourvelles were erected. The Louvre also was repaired. Next came the unhappy reign of Charles VI., who was struck with insanity. In 1421 the English occupied Paris, but under Charles VII. they were driven from it and the Greek language was taught for the first time in the University of Paris. It had then twenty-five thousand students. Under the reign of successive ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... pierces to the very soul. It is the sublime which has manifested itself![30]" Even in cases where there is evident hallucination, e.g. when the visionary sees an angel or devil sitting on his book, or feels an arrow thrust into his heart, there need be no insanity. In periods when it is commonly believed that such things may and do happen, the imagination, instead of being corrected by experience, is misled by it. Those who honestly expect to see miracles will generally see them, without ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... golluf downwards. Take these here fight fans which chartered special trains for Toledo, Ohio, and paid a hundred dollars for a ringside seat, Mawruss, and to my mind it would take one of these here insanity experts to figure out just what made them do it at a time when on account of the raise in rent and living expenses, so many heads of families is staying home with their families these hot Sundays and reading the papers about the fight fans chartering ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... a dilating brightness, as if from the flickering of some inward fire which was slowly consuming the mortal part, and its expression was brilliant even to the verge of insanity. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Egypt, since he had failed in his undertakings; yet he did not quit the country, and through repeated delays his departure was retarded a whole year. Meanwhile his long sojourn in Africa, the report of his failures, and perhaps whispers of his insanity, had sown the seeds of discontent in Asia; and as Darius said in after-years, when recounting these events, "untruth had spread all over the country, not only in Persia and Media, but in other provinces." Cambyses himself felt that a longer absence would be injurious to his ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... encountering Inimitable in doorways, fades obsequiously into areas, and there encounters him again, and swoons with confusion. Several reams of blank paper constantly spread on the drawing-room walls, and sliced off again, which looks like insanity. Two men still clinking at the new stair-rails. I think they must be learning a tune; I cannot make out any other object ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... hitching-stalls for anybody. I thought, in that case, that I should stay where I was, and he politely informed me that I might stay and be—jammed. I found afterward that this individual was troubled with a kind of insanity peculiar to all headquarters, arising out of an exaggerated idea of his own importance. I had the pleasure, a few minutes afterward, of hearing him ordered to feed my horse. A thickset, gray-haired man sat near by, undergoing the process of shaving by a very nervous ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Wedgwood was in love, madly, insanely, tragically in love! And he was liberating that love in his work. Hence, among other forms that his "insanity" took, he planted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... novice in the fields of romance. In poetry, she was familiar with names as late as Dryden, and had once been seduced into reading "The Rape of the Lock;" but she regarded Spenser as the purest type of her country's literature in this line. Genealogy was her favourite insanity. Those things which are the pride of most genealogists were to her contemptible. Arms and mottoes set her beside herself. Ealfried of Ullathorne had wanted no motto to assist him in cleaving to the brisket Geoffrey De Burgh, and ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... extol blood-shedding; it is woman's place to abhor it. And because I know that they would have apotheosized any man who had crucified Jeff Davis, I abhor this, and call it foul murder, unworthy of our cause—and God grant it was only the temporary insanity of a desperate man that committed this crime! Let not his blood be visited ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... insanity. He had the best eye for beauty in the college, and yet he had been taking Miss Scroggs around to church socials and town affairs for two months. But college boys aren't slow, whatever you want to say about them. We had ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... effected by means of hypnotism. Within the last year a lady of beauty and refinement came to me in serious distress. She confided to me amid a copious effusion of tears that her husband was upon the verge of insanity. Her testimony was to the effect that the unfortunate man believed himself to be possessed of a large library, the fact being that the number of his books was limited ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... spiritual world has garments in accordance with his intelligence, that is, in accordance with truths which are the source of intelligence, so those in the hells, because they have no truths, appear clothed in garments, but in ragged, squalid, and filthy garments, each one in accordance with his insanity; and they can be clothed in no others. It is granted them by the Lord to be clothed, lest ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Phil, at a loss to understand such insanity. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he voiced the eternal ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... a plea of insanity, contrasting the two misdeeds in order to strengthen his argument. He had clearly proved that the theft of the two ducks came from the same mental condition as the eight knife-wounds in the body of Maramlot. He had cunningly analyzed all the phases of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... which an escape of gas can be accompanied by sensible risks to property or life. However unpalatable this assertion may be, its truth cannot be controverted; because, short of criminal intention or insanity on the part of the attendant, it is in the first place a mere matter of knowledge and skill so to construct an acetylene plant that an escape of gas is extremely unlikely, even when the apparatus is opened for recharging, or when it is manipulated ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... true that in the previous literature, under the head of pathological liars, cases of epilepsy, insanity, and mental defect have been cited, but that is misleading. A clear terminology should be adopted. The pathological liar forms a species by himself and as such does not necessarily belong to any of these larger classes. It is, of course, scientifically ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... rough-and-ready delimitation of the area within which Moral Philosophy must work, if it is to escape the reproach of insanity, the lecturer goes on, as becomes a divine, to champion his study against the reproach of tending to Atheism. He groups all our senses, faculties, and impulses together, and says: "All these things Moral ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... obscurity. Does the same man always agree with himself in the notions he forms of his God? No. His idea varies with the changes, which he experiences;—another sign of uncertainty. Men always agree in demonstrative truths. In any situation, except that of insanity, every one knows that two and two make four, that the sun shines, that the whole is greater than its part; that benevolence is necessary to merit the affection of men; that injustice and cruelty are incompatible with goodness. Are they thus agreed when they speak of God? Whatever they think, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... can only be added the still vaguer allegations of Lady Byron, that she conceived his conduct to be the result of insanity,—that, the physician pronouncing him responsible for his actions, she could submit to them no longer, and that Dr. Lushington, her legal adviser, agreed that a reconciliation was neither proper nor possible. No weight can be attached to the opinions ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... engagement, she was thus to be seen openly supping alone with the most notorious woman hunter about town—a man of bad reputation, a man, too, towards whom Sotherst was known to have a special aversion. Nothing but a break with Sotherst or a fit of temporary insanity seemed to explain, even inadequately, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... went up the stairs, in dread of the empty house—the horrible emptiness that made his heart ring with insanity. He opened the bedroom door, and his heart flashed with certainty that she had gone, that he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the suppositions; so that when the vapours were dispelled, they were convinced of the delusion. To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension[200]; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgement. That his own diseased ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... it so as to make it ask for the killing of the two men, creatures of his uncle, who had charge of him, which was done on their arrival. According to the style of romances, he married the king's daughter, and afterwards returned to Jutland, where, still pretending insanity, he contrived to surprise and slay his uncle. He succeeded his victim as governor, and married a second time, to a queen of Scotland, and was finally killed in battle. The main features of the tragedy correspond with the incidents of the story, but ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... place for her husband as a learned philosopher who was in advance of his age, or, as she prettily expresses it in French; (she likes to parade her French, this excellent wife,) "il devancait son siecle." This mania for inlaying her writing with French scraps rises with her Ladyship to a species of insanity. "Est il possible that I am going to Italy?" she exclaims. How much more forcible is this than the vulgar "Is it possible?" When the Duke of Sussex comes into a party, he does not excite anything so common-place as a great sensation; no,—it is a "grand mouvement!" Praise bestowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... full dress. His absence was noticed by many, and later in the evening the startling intelligence was announced that Captain Esdale, had destroyed himself by blowing out his brains while laboring under a fit of temporary insanity. This report spread like wildfire throughout the native town and soon reached the ears of his creditors, who flocked to the Bungalow like so many vultures, fighting and scrabbling with each other for admission, in order that they might secure for themselves whatever effects ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... and his sister Laure had been obliged to pawn all her brother's silver at the Mont-de-Piete, in order to save the notes from being protested. On the other hand, his mother was seriously ill; it was feared the result would be either death or insanity, and his brother Henri had reached a state in which he was on the point of blowing out his brains. Family sorrows, money troubles, such was perpetually his fate! and accordingly he redoubled his courage. ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... glimmer of reason through his murderous insanity was the consciousness of a rain of blows upon his head and shoulders, and a blackening face settling back to the earth ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... thought nothing of it if Lady Mason had been seen there every day for a week together, and regarded Mrs. Furnival's suspicions as an hallucination bordering on insanity. A woman be in love with Mr. Furnival! A very pretty woman endeavour to entice away from his wife the affection of such a man as that! As these ideas passed through Mrs. Orme's mind she did not perhaps remember that Sir Peregrine, who was more than ten years ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... were here, he might draw a companion picture of the Tombs. The one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, irrational, futile place, yet embodying very accurately a certain aspect of the civic attitude toward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. There is nothing intelligent, purposeful, trenchant or radical about it; it is planted in ignorance and grows ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... though shrinking with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been his fatality so often to become the topic of the day by some wild eccentricity of conduct, that people searched his lineage for a hereditary taint of insanity. But there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. If he were mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an aimless ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... or some of my friends, or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from which I fear she must be moved to an hospital.... My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.... ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... begins to agonize in prayer," he explained to me, "she will go mad again. So soon as she recovers from the insanity of evil she ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Brewsters stood him in good stead. This man was no weakling. Presently the rigidity of his face relaxed. He was himself again. Of all things in the world he loved his daughter most, and if, in whoever mood of temporary insanity, she had brought herself to suppose that this beastly daub was the sort of thing he would like for a birthday present, he must accept the situation like a man. He would on the whole have preferred death to a life lived in the society of the ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... the uncomely and apparently frail blocks standing. Everywhere in its track it annihilated houses, tore off roofs, destroyed trees and crops. The men were in the towns, the women and children at home in the country getting crippled, killed, frightened to insanity; and the rain deluging them, the wind howling, the thunder crashing, the lightning glaring. This for an hour or so. Then a lull and sunshine; many ventured out of safe shelter; then suddenly here ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... savages, among whom were two, called by Dillon Prince Brian Boru, and his Excellency Morgan M'Murrah, who espoused the quarrel of the captain, and offered to grill and eat the unfortunate physician. The jealousy and violence of Dillon strongly indicated insanity, and Dr. Tytler represented his fears to the second in command. This opinion became known to the captain, and led to the assault and imprisonment, from which the doctor was released by a writ of habeas corpus. The chief justice, in pronouncing judgment, explained the absolute power ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... wife in his cell in Stafford gaol, while awaiting his sentence. What Smith's motive could be for his conduct no one could conjecture. He would give no explanation on the subject though pressed to do so. It was supposed that a sudden fit of insanity had seized him, and that his violence was the result of it. During the journey the two gentlemen were on the most friendly terms, taking their meals together and acting as travellers thrown together usually do. Mr. Wainwright's presence was ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... action of the nervous system. It will sometimes show itself by severe pains in the arm, when in reality there is nothing whatever to cause pain; or it will raise a swelling on the head quite without cause. It is a tendency to nervous disease which in severe cases may lead to insanity. The word neurotic is a general term covering affection of the nervous system. It includes hysteria and much ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... beginning to shine only too ominously the wild light of that saeva indignatio which the inscription drawn up by his own hand for his tomb described as lacerating his heart. The ominous light at last broke out into the fire of insanity. We shall meet Swift again; just now we only stop to note him as a political influence. At this time he is Dean of St. Patrick's in Ireland; he has been lately in London trying, and without success, to ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... just returned from the moor, where Mrs. Blatherwick imagined her still indulging the hope of finding her baby, concerning whom her mistress more than doubted the very existence, taking the supposed fancy for nothing but a half-crazy survival from the time of her insanity before the Robertsons ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... abnormal thing; to brood over the rupture, to blame himself, to feel that he had been dishonorable, was to be expected, after such an act, from one of his temperament. Nothing, however, but temporary insanity or constitutional cowardice could explain such conduct as here described. Mr. Herndon does not pretend to found his story on any personal knowledge of the affair. He was in Springfield at the time, a clerk in Speed's store, but did not have then, nor, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... a kind look nor an understanding eye! Crime, passion, foulness, insanity. The sheer horror of her situation mercifully blotted out consciousness. She sank, a crumpled heap to ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... with whom he breakfasted. He had come to Loring, and now he was there he did not know what to do with himself. He had come there, in truth, not because he really thought he could do any good, but driven out of his home by sheer misery. He was a man altogether upset, and verging on to a species of insanity. He was so uneasy in his mind that he could read nothing. He was half-ashamed of being looked at by those who knew him; and had felt some relief in the society of Mr. Cockey till Mr. Cockey had become jovial with wine, simply because Mr. Cockey was so poor a creature ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... able for a season to banish the nameless forms that haunt the dim borders of insanity, he would sit in that valley for hours, regarding the wider-spread valley below him, in which he knew every height and hollow, and, with his exceptionally keen sight, he could descry signs of life ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... himself, perhaps, had she not responded, had he not seen the laughless eyes laugh alone for him, had she not once when a momentary insanity possessed them both confessed in words her love for him as he had done to her. But now? Well, now only this horrible tale of theft and untruth hung between them like a veil; now even with his arms locked about her, his eyes drowned in hers, his ears caught ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... Cesarini, clenching his hands. "Why am I to be detained here? Why are my nights to be broken by the groans of maniacs, and my days devoured in a solitude that loathes the aspect of things around me? Am I mad? You know I am not! It is an old trick to say that poets are mad,—you mistake our agonies for insanity. See, I am calm; I can reason: give me any test of sound mind—no matter how rigid—I will pass it; I am not mad,—I swear I ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in this meadow that he rehearsed his readings, and his talking, laughing, weeping, and gesticulating here "all to himself" excited among his neighbors suspicion of his insanity. From the front lawn a tunnel constructed by Dickens passes beneath the highway to "The Wilderness," a thickly-wooded shrubbery, where magnificent cedars up-rear their venerable forms and many somber firs, survivors of the forest which erst covered the countryside, cluster upon the hill ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... forget which, once said that a certain number of hours' sleep a day—I cannot recall for the moment how many—made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. However, there you are. I've given you the main idea of the thing; and a German doctor says that early rising causes insanity. Still, if you're bent on it——" After which he had handed ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... and with thy shadowy hands Cover me softly, singing all the night— In thy dear presence find I best delight; Even the saint that stands Tending the gate of heaven, involved in beams Of rarest glory, to my mortal eyes Pales from the blest insanity of dreams That ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... and the trouble it's making. I'm outside it and you're outside it, but we're being brought into it all the same—how can we help it when we love the people who are in it? It's so easy to say that it's nonsense, that people ought to be wiser nowadays; that it's hysteria, even insanity—I know all that and, of course, I don't believe for a moment that God's coming in a chariot of fire on New Year's Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn't end it—it ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... idea of its fascinating power. Some of our crew, of reputed good habits, became so bewitched with gaming that they plundered their companions and returned to their cards and wheels of fortune with a serious and anxious ardor, totally void of pleasantry, that seemed to me to border upon insanity. ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... Reputed to be insane, of which this attachment may be deemed an evidence. Such is Mr. Y. The other, Mr. S., a very handsome, genteel young man, who never carried a pack. They sat two hours, and Mr. Y. was not only rational, but amusing. The only evidence of insanity which I have heard is that he quarrels with his dear rib; and if this be deemed evidence, I fear our madhouses will soon be filled with married men. I ought to have excepted one incident, which has been related ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... their country involved in the European slaughter merely for the sake of gratifying Wilson's vainglorious ambition, there is hope that the common sense of the American people will assert itself and that they will not permit the appalling insanity to spread to the new world that holds the old world in a ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... limits to his insanity, and he did not follow the girl out on the veranda, but when Mr. Ross came down a few minutes later to get a cigar Clement plucked the proprietor of ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... Bubble. One thing, by the way, is still unaccountably neglected by writers on this question. How it was that the great Mississippi Bubble, during the Orleans regency in Paris, should have happened to coincide with that of London. If this were accident, how marvellous that the same insanity should possess the two great capitals of Christendom in the same year? If, again, it were not accident, but due to some common cause, why is not that cause explained? Pope to his nearest friends never stated ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... forgetting a pair of scarlet stockings, and a scarlet bonnet, proudly surmounted with a turkey's feather. Edward, whom he did not seem to observe, now perceived confirmation in his features of what the mien and gestures had already announced. It was apparently neither idiocy nor insanity which gave that wild, unsettled, irregular expression to a face which naturally was rather handsome, but something that resembled a compound of both, where the simplicity of the fool was mixed with the extravagance of a crazed imagination. He sung with great earnestness, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... women in Wyoming had very generally exercised the full suffrage since 1869, Mrs. Clara B. Colby, editor of the Woman's Tribune, Washington, D. C., compiled a report from the census statistics. Those relating to crime, insanity and divorce were ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... demanded the amazed officer, still tugging at the great figure holding down the smaller man. In the encounter between those two embattled enemies had lurked an intensity of passion which he could not understand, which seemed strangely akin to insanity itself. ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Burned the hot fever of unrest; Thine was the prophets vision, thine The exultation, the divine Insanity of noble minds, That never falters nor abates, But labors and endures and waits, Till all that it foresees it finds, Or what ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... married Mary Lum, a servant girl of great beauty, and something of a virago as well. The union was an unhappy one, as the husband and wife were utterly unsuited to each other. Seven years after her marriage, Mrs. Girard showed symptoms of insanity, which became so decided that her husband was compelled to place her in the State Asylum for the Insane. He appears to have done every thing in his power to restore her to reason. Being pronounced cured, she returned to her home, but in 1790 He was ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... have to set the facts that the terrible malady of insanity is distinctly on the increase—whether due to mere physical causes, to the high pressure at which modern society lives, or to the prevalent scepticisms which leave many wretched men so little tranquillising ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... its entire significance was made clear to him it came with a rush: it was like the instantaneous effect of some powerful drug or stimulant that turned the blood to fire and crazed the brain. The blind rage which made the room swing round was like the frenzy of insanity. Van Lennop's face went crimson and oaths that never had passed his lips came forth, choking-hot ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... fact, she hasn't it to give. No, what she will give you, and what you'll accept from her, because you can't help it, is—anguish, insanity, ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Feeble-mindedness, in so many ways a social evil, is readily reproduced, and the weak-minded are easily controlled by the sex instinct. To prevent this certain State legislatures have forbidden the marriage of any feeble-minded or epileptic woman under the age of forty-five. It is well known that insanity is a family trait, and that criminal insanity is liable to recur if those who are afflicted are permitted to indulge in parenthood. Certain States accordingly annul the marriage of insane persons. Venereal disease is easily ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... ground of morality: they have alleged—as they had a fair right to do—the probability of intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies have been enlisted—and who can blame them?—in loyalty to a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and—as they conceived—the innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... but he did, and was speedily in the hands of the police. He was examined and re-examined, and finally tried at the Central Criminal Court on 9 July, the trial lasting two days. The defence was the plea of insanity, and, as no bullets could be found, the jury brought in a verdict of "Guilty, he being, at the time, insane"; and, in accordance with such verdict, the judge sentenced him to be imprisoned during ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... laborers, who conveyed it to the city, where an inquest was held over it. A verdict of suicide was rendered by the jury, who, short-sighted souls, comprehended not the mysteries of duelling; and the 'rash act' was attributed by the erudite city newspapers to 'temporary insanity'! ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the marriage between Lincoln and Miss Todd. But they were interrupted by a painful occurrence—a sudden breaking out of a fit of melancholy, or temporary insanity, such as had afflicted Lincoln on a former occasion. This event has been made the subject of no little gossip, into which it is not now necessary or desirable to go, further than to mention that at about this time Lincoln seems to have formed a strong attachment for ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... judgment under circumstances so affecting, was, perhaps, only to be expected, but it is none the less evident, from certain passages in the " Diary, that the tainted Court atmosphere had already clouded, to some extent, her naturally clear understanding. The insanity of a sovereign is, to her, a purely private and personal matter, with respect to which the only business of the public is to offer up prayers for his majesty's speedy recovery. That ministers should take ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... upon the physical organism. Acute fear will paralyze the nerve centres, and sometimes turn the hair white in a single night. A mother's milk can be poisoned by a fit of anger. An eminent writer, Dr. Tuke, enumerates as among the direct products of fear, insanity, idiocy, paralysis of various muscles and organs, profuse perspiration, cholerina, jaundice, sudden decay of teeth, fatal anaemia, skin diseases, erysipelas, and eczema. Passion, sinful thought, avarice, envy, jealousy, selfishness, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... I could to keep him quiet, but it was useless, and such was his insanity, that he gradually neared the shore by steering against me with his paddle, so that I could not prevent it. I had drawn the shaft of the arrow through his arm, and he appeared to feel no pain. I expostulated with him at his ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... between him and the wayward, sorrowful Rousseau. Hercules, according to the old fable, "was afflicted with madness as a punishment for his being so near the gods;" and the imaginativeness of a brain which had in it a fibre of insanity, near which genius often perilously lies, may be supposed to account for much that is strange and sad in his career. The place of his birth was a fit cradle for a poet. On the edge of a bold cliff, overlooking the sea at Sorrento, is the Hotel Tasso, known to every ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... A horror, the horror of insanity, had descended upon him—a clammy, rose-scented mantle. The room, the incredible, book-lined room, was a red blur, surrounding the black, taunting eyes of the Eurasian. Everything was out of focus; past, present, and future were merged into a ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... getting over these facts. The aim of Germany had come to be nothing less than world-supremacy. The destiny of the whole globe was to be put to the test. Surely this was the very insanity of megalomania. ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... success. Therefore, in matters of polity the counsels of Brahmanas should be resorted to. And in secret affairs, these should not be consulted,—namely, a woman, a sot, a boy, a covetous person, a mean-minded individual, and he that betrayeth signs of insanity. Wise men only should be consulted, and affairs are to be despatched through officers that are able. And polity must be executed through persons that are friendly; but dunces should in all affairs be excluded. In matters religious, pious men; and in matters of gain, wise men; and in guarding ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... I was really in a good deal of trouble just the moment before I ran against your chair, Miss Earle, and I hope you will excuse me on the ground of temporary insanity. Why, you know, they even let off murderers on that plea, so I hope to be forgiven for being careless in the first place, ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... liar. After a more or less drawn battle, MacLean and Niekerk restored peace, so that both supper and narrative were finished without further interruption. But Niekerk, who had been unable to understand the words which gave rise to the disturbance, was confirmed in his ideas as to the essential insanity of the English. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... began in November and lasted more than two months. The defence was insanity. The assassin maintained that he was inspired to commit the deed, and that it was a political necessity. The "stalwart" Republicans, headed by Senator Conkling, had quarrelled with the President over certain appointments unacceptable to the New York senator; Guiteau ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... room. The mother tremblingly lit the candle. Helena's aspect distressed and alarmed her. The girl's face was masked as if in sleep, but occasionally it was crossed by a vivid expression of fear or horror. Her wide eyes showed the active insanity of her brain. From time to time she uttered strange, inarticulate sounds. Her mother held her hands and soothed her. Although she was hardly aware of the mother's presence, Helena was more tranquil. The father ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... was threatened with violent insanity. As the Mandanes' provisions dwindled, the Indians grew surlier toward us; and I was as deep in despondency as a man could sink. Frequently, I wondered whether Father Holland would find us alive in the spring, and I sometimes ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... melodies came to Blanka's ears nearly every evening, but she did not venture to tell any one about them. She tried to persuade herself it was all imagination on her part, and feared to relate her experience, lest she should incur suspicion of insanity and be consigned to a less desirable ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... sing and to cry 'Vive l'Empereur' till those frowning mountains over there echo with my shouts—and I'll have none of your English stiffness and reserve and curbing of enthusiasm to-day. I am a lunatic if you will—an escaped lunatic—if to be mad with joy be a proof of insanity. Clyffurde, my dear friend," he added more soberly, "I am honestly sorry ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... aware of certain thin and melancholy sounds that floated up from some room below. They struggled with the noises of the street, overcame, and rose strident and triumphant to invade the feast. They seemed to him in perfect keeping with the misery and insanity of the hour. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... will, and self-control resulting in negative, sensitive and subjective conditions which open the way to nervous prostration, control by other personalities (hypnotic influence, obsession, possession); the different forms of insanity, epilepsy, petit ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... murrain in other members of the flock. In both these instances the cow was sacrificed by being buried alive. The sacrifice of other living animals,[223] as of the cat, cock, mole, etc., for the cure of disease, and especially of fits, epilepsy, and insanity, continues to be occasionally practised in some parts of the Highlands up to the present day. And in the city of Edinburgh itself, every physician knows the fact that, in the chamber of death, usually the face of the mirror ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... was all the more noticeable from its gentle but utter indifference to the wishes of the party. He turned his back upon them as they gathered hurriedly around the elder gentleman, while the words, "He cannot be in his right mind," "It's your duty to do it," "It's sheer insanity," "Look at his eye!" all fell ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... he charges him with irreligion, indecency, and theft from the heirs of Julius II, and adds in a conciliating postscript, 'I only want to show you that if you are "divino," I am not "d'acqua." ' Aretino laid great stress upon it— whether from the insanity of conceit or by way of caricaturing famous men—that he himself should be called divine, as one of his flatterers had already begun to do; and he certainly attained so much personal celebrity that his house at Arezzo passed ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... as Gerald entered the firm, the convulsion of death ran through the old system. He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel eruptions. Terrible and inhuman were his examinations into every detail; there was no privacy he would spare, no old sentiment but he would turn it over. The old grey managers, the old grey clerks, the doddering ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... could not imagine you doing such a thing. It was like insanity. I wanted to tell you how horrible, how unseemly it was, because I was sure you had been dwelling ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... insane queen appears like a pallid spectre in Martyr's pages. Her caprices and vagaries are noted from time to time in the Opus Epistolarum; indeed the story of her sufferings is all there. The insanity of Dona Juana was not seriously doubted by her contemporaries—certainly not by Martyr, whose portrait of her character is perhaps the most accurate contemporary one we possess. He traces her malady from its incipiency, through the successive disquieting manifestations of hysteria, melancholia, ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... me in Paris that Tolstoy was a combination of genius and insanity. Undoubtedly Tolstoy is actuated by a genuine desire to free Russia, but the idea was unmistakably imbedded in my mind that his Christianity was like Napoleon's description of a Russian. Scratch it and you would find Tartar ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... knew how to manage him; but Isaac's parents acquired great influence over him by their uniform system of forbearance and tenderness; their own good sense and benevolence having suggested the ideas which regulate the treatment of insanity at the present period. The day spent in Woodbury and its vicinity was a bright spot in Friend Hopper's life, to which he always reverted with a kind of saddened pleasure. The heat of the season had been tempered by floating clouds, and when they returned to Philadelphia, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... God! 'Did you hear that? Did you look into her eyes and not see in them what fools would call insanity, and what I know is a knowledge of God above and Christ and the world beyond. 'God has afflicted her,' so this simple-minded native, whom many men in their unthinking moments would call a canting, naked kanaka, says; but ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... dead, I tell you. And there can be no divorce. Insanity bars all claim to a divorce. She is in an asylum. She had to leave him, and then she ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... in youth she did not give any promise of the charms for which she was afterwards so conspicuous, and which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, made Gore House in London famous for its hospitality. A marriage at an early age to a man subject to hereditary insanity was terminated by her husband's sudden death, and in 1818 she married the Earl of Blessington. Everything goes to prove that, in those few years during her first husband's life, she set herself earnestly to cultivating charm of manner and the ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A clay-coloured kerchief, folded round her neck, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like complexion. Two light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate. Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a sort of tribute with a feeling ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... information on heredity for breeders of animals and plants; and the third to discuss and classify the facts that were collected" (loc. cit., page 124).) would have awfully laborious work, and I doubt whether you could ever get efficient workers. As it is, there is much concealment of insanity and wickedness in families; and there would be more if there was a register. But the greatest difficulty, I think, would be in deciding who deserved to be on the register. How few are above mediocrity in health, strength, morals and intellect; and how difficult ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... wild desire to offer to kiss the finger and make it well. This, however, was not habit. It was insanity. He recognised this himself, and felt more than a trifle worried about it, because he had been in love quite a number of times before, but he had never had this ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... We have seen in our own time to what excesses occurrences of this kind may tempt the belief, even when defended with the armour of science. In the sixteenth century, when demoniacal possession was the explanation usually received even of ordinary insanity, we can well believe that the temptation must have been great to recognise supernatural agency in a manifestation far more uncommon; and that the difficulty of retaining the judgment in a position of equipoise ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... because a solitary prize of 25 lb. weight may largely remunerate an emigrant to California, therefore a whole generation of emigrants will find the average profits of gold-washing, golddigging, etc., beyond those of Russia or of Borneo, is an insanity quite on a level with all the other insanities of the case. But, says the writer in the Times, the fact has justified the speculation; the result is equal to the anticipation; in practice nobody has been disappointed; everybody has succeeded; ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... next morning he was quite recovered, so far as regarded his mere bodily health. Of his mind I say nothing, of course. I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sudden departure—an unconquerable desire to speak to you once more. I came here overmastered by an irresistible desire to see you alone, to look at you, to tell you what I have almost sworn should never pass my lips—what you may consider unmanly weakness—nay, insanity, on my part. We are face to face at last, man and woman, with the golden bars of conventionality and worldly distinction snapped asunder. I am no longer the man whom society would fain flatter, in atonement for past injustice; and ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... this man of imposture, and now, notwithstanding her secret conviction, she was obliged to appear as if she had no suspicion, as if she had been mistaken, to humiliate herself before the impostor, and ask forgiveness for the insanity of her conduct; for, having publicly renounced her accusation by refusing to swear to it, she had no alternative left. In order to sustain her part and to save the honour of her children, she must treat this man as her husband and appear submissive and repentant; ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... cause of the old man's illness. He lay sighing at intervals, so heavily that every sigh seemed like the parting of soul and body. Leonora wept to see him in such a state, whilst he beheld her feigned tears, as he deemed them, with a bitter smile, that looked like the grin of insanity. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... he at once became insane. He recovered for a time; but at Christmas, while he and five others were dancing, disguised as wild men, their garments of pitched flax caught fire. Four were burnt, and the shock brought back the king's madness. He became subject to fits of insanity of longer or shorter duration, and in their intervals he seems to have been almost imbecile. No provision had then been made for the contingency of a mad king. The condition of the country became worse than ever, and power ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she said. "I think he had a fit of something like insanity upon him, and had been swinging that strap——Well, I will not say against what, for I do not know, but might it not have been against the fiends and goblins with which crazy people sometimes imagine they ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... several documents, and, on reading them, I was astounded to find one was an order for my removal to a private lunatic asylum, the papers being signed by Josias Googery, J.P., and Dr. Loonem; and others contained statements of the evidences of my insanity, signed by ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... "lil' Ann" and, since the strange reticence and misunderstood joyousness remained, Lois Ann, at her wit's end, believing that death or insanity threatened, went secretly to the Greyson house to confess and ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... astonished at the choice made. A dread sovereign, fierce, and terribly opulent, and every way resplendent to such degree; and this threadbare Swiss gentleman-at-arms, once "my domestic" (as Ottocar loved to term it), preferred to me! Flat insanity, King Ottocar thought; refused to acknowledge such a Kaiser; would not in the least give up his unjust properties, or even do homage for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... clearly as it is possible to do: "From close personal observation, embracing a professional life of nearly forty years among the Negroes and from data obtained from professional brethren in different sections of the South, I have no hesitancy in declaring that insanity and tuberculosis were rare diseases among the Negroes of the South prior to emancipation. Indeed, many intelligent people of observation and full acquaintance of the Negro have stated to me that they never saw a crazy ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... knew more than one individual who believed in agamogenesis; she was unmarried, a lovely charac- 68:18 ter, was suffering from incipient insanity, and a Christian Scientist cured her. I have named her case to individuals, when casting my bread upon 68:21 the waters, and it may have caused the good to ponder and the evil to hatch their silly innuendoes and lies, since salutary causes sometimes incur these ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... sacred duty as they saw it in 1914 was to enslave the world in order to force upon the world the priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the shock of war that complex dilated into a form of real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English com-plex is fortunately milder than that; but none the less does it savor slightly, as any nerve specialist or psychological doctor would tell you—-it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of American men and women of every grade of education and ignorance ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... old lunatic with the whiskers—Hallett, I mean—made a statement that was, to say the least, surprising. I presume he was crazy. That was the most weird collection of insanity that I ever saw or heard. Ha, ha! Oh, dear!... Well, never mind. But what did old Hallett mean by saying he had sold YOU his four ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... have concentrated by beautiful imagination the cruel passions of men; and there is nothing in all the Divina Commedia of history more grotesque, yet more frightful, than the fact that, from the almost fabulous period when the insanity and impiety of war wrote themselves in the symbols of the shields of the Seven against Thebes, colors have been the sign and stimulus of the most furious and fatal passions that have rent the nations: blue against green, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... refuses to be fattened: he balks; he has colic and spasms; he lies down in harness; he impales himself upon a broken rail; he keels over upon the grass, whizzing like a capsized engine; he bites himself—and has driven the family to the verge of insanity when Dobbs returns and upon beholding the "noble old fellow," shouts that they have the wrong horse! "This is one I sold long ago for fifteen dollars!"—Mary Mapes Dodge, Theophilus ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... moment to the army. She besought her brother with tears to conduct her thither. Her doubts and terrors reached their paroxysm; and the poor girl, who for many hours had been plunged into stupor, raved and ran hither and thither in hysteric insanity—a piteous sight. No man writhing in pain on the hard-fought field fifteen miles off, where lay, after their struggles, so many of the brave—no man suffered more keenly than this poor harmless victim of the war. Jos could not bear the sight of her pain. He left his sister in the charge ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... opinion of women. He owned they might be delightful—frequently were—up to a certain point, and this was the point at which you began to take them seriously. But to treat any one of them as though the sun had ceased to shine because her presence was withdrawn, struck him as sheer insanity. It might be all right for youngsters like Holmes or Swaynston, the licensed fool of the smoking room, or Dyson, to whose senile enthusiasm for the mazy rout we have heard allusion made—the latter on the principle of "no fool like an old fool"; but not for him—not for ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... mental faculties, which I consider as the certain indication of that dreaded calamity which I anticipate with such terror. A strange idea has long haunted my mind, that Swift's dreadful fate will be mine. It is not ordinary insanity I so much apprehend, but something ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... of your letter afforded no indications of insanity, but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake don't think any more of "Independent Tartary." What have you to do among such Ethiopians? Is there no lineal ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... once broken by a well-meant rap upon the occiput, conferred through the instrumentality of a little angry-looking squat urchin of sixty years, and a remarkably good black-thorn cudgel, with which he was engaged in thwacking the heads of such sinners, as, not having the dread of insanity and the regulations of the place before their eyes, were inclined to sleep. I declare the knock I received told to such a purpose on my head, that nothing occurred during the pilgrimage ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... not fail me, I find. As to insanity in the sense intended by Gulielmus, namely, as 'mania',—I should as little think of charging Swedenborg with it, as of calling a friend mad who laboured under ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hair from her head! She uttered such groans and cries as are seldom heard on this earth—such as perhaps fill the murky atmosphere of hell. She impiously called on Heaven to strike her dead as she lay! She was indeed on the very brink of raving insanity. ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... insanity, which to an educated observer had perhaps presented features of some scientific interest and appeared grotesque rather than tremendous, fell upon the ignorant soul of Uncle Chirgwin in a manner far different. The mystery of madness, the sublimity and horror of it, rise only to tragic heights in ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... on high medical authority, that motoring is a cure for insanity. We would therefore recommend several motorists ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... in a hopeless state," replied the doctor; "this species of insanity is incurable. He thinks someone is trying to poison him, and nothing will persuade him to eat or drink anything; and, as it is impossible to force anything down his throat, he will die of starvation, after having suffered all ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story as "Jane Eyre" is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they ought to do, nor what they would do, nor it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. "Then, resuming his usual ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... falling when we reached the appointed place. We found Captain Stanwick angry and suspicious; it was not easy to pacify him on the subject of our delay. His insanity seemed to me to be now more marked than ever. He had seen, or dreamed of seeing, the ghost during the past night. For the first time (he said) the apparition of the dead man had spoken to him. In solemn words it had condemned ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... born during the full moon were vigorous and of long life. He also took notice of the lunar influence in epilepsy [375] of which fearful malady a modern physician writes, "This disease has been known from the earliest antiquity, and is remarkable as being that malady which, even beyond insanity, was made the foundation of the doctrine of possession by evil spirits, alike in the Jewish, Grecian, and Roman philosophy." [376] The terrible disorder was a fact; and evil spirits or the moon had ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... sunken one day From mine own truth-insanity, From mine own fervid day-longings, Of day aweary, sick of sunshine, —Sunk downwards, evenwards, shadowwards: By one sole trueness All scorched and thirsty: —Bethinkst thou still, bethinkst thou, burning heart, How then thou thirstedest?— THAT I SHOULD ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... his,—I do agree with Mrs. S. in declaring this case a forcible argument—not against marriage,—such a thing can not be—but against the marriage contract, as interpreted in the courts. What a burlesque upon insanity! Poor Minnie Gaines, the colored girl who shot her seducer the other day, in my neighborhood, was cleared upon as doubtful insanity as McFarland's, and she enjoys the benefit of the doubt in the insane asylum, where she will remain ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... A hypochondriacal tendency had shown itself in the banker's constitution of late; and a lack of sleep, which was really only a slight exaggeration of an habitual dyspeptic symptom, had been dwelt on by him as a sign of threatening insanity. He wanted to consult Lydgate without delay on that particular morning, although he had nothing to tell beyond what he had told before. He listened eagerly to what Lydgate had to say in dissipation of his fears, though this too ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... a poor lunatic, whom I had met on a small island, and who had attached himself to me. He followed me everywhere, and loved me with that absurd and touching constancy of which dogs and madmen alone are capable. My friend, whose insanity was of a mild and harmless character, fancied himself the greatest genius in the world. He was, moreover, under the impression that he suffered from a gigantic, monstrous tooth. Of the two idiosyncrasies, the latter alone made his lunacy discernible,—too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... suspending the Habeas Corpus bill, there was a stormy debate; but the measure was carried with the usual majorities. An attempt made by a maniac named Hadfield to shoot the king in Drury-lane theatre, led to the insertion of two additional clauses in the insanity bill, by which the privilege of bail to alleged lunatics was abridged, and the personal safety of the sovereign thereby consulted. Subsequently a committee of each house was appointed to consider of the most effectual means ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... opinion. Certainly it is true that if physicians and people would all adopt the views of the advocates of non-alcoholic medication the temperance problem would be solved, and the greatest source of disease, crime, pauperism, insanity and misery would be driven from the face ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... residence upon Johnson's mind was characteristic. The lad already suffered from the attacks of melancholy, which sometimes drove him to the borders of insanity. At Oxford, Law's Serious Call gave him the strong religious impressions which remained through life. But he does not seem to have been regarded as a gloomy or a religious youth by his contemporaries. When told in after years that he had been described as a "gay and frolicsome ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... nothing, and about nothing, but Mr. Povey imagined that they were exchanging eternal vows. He endured Mr. Scales's odious freedom until it became insufferable, until it deprived him of all his self-control; and then he retired into his cutting-out room. He meditated there in a condition of insanity for perhaps a minute, and excogitated a device. Dashing back into the shop, he spoke up, half across the shop, in a ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... had gone she went into the other side of the house and told Eunice. "There she has gone and made herself look like a perfect scarecrow," she said. "I wonder if there is any insanity in ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... is that in a fit of maniacal insanity he flung himself over the rocks into the sea. Another that he was shot by one of the mutineers whilst ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... not hurt because he is a fellow of delicate nerves, but because of his very strength, and the power with which he resisted until overcome by numbers, and subjected to treatment which left him insane. His insanity takes the form of harmless delusion, and the absurdity of his ways and talk enables the author to lighten the sombreness without weakening the moral, in a way that ought to win all boys to his ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... which the circle is 3-1/5 diameters. This volume is of 981 good folio pages, and treats of all things, mental and material. The author is not at all mad, only wrong on {136} many points. It is the weakness of the orthodox follower of any received system to impute insanity to the solitary dissentient: which is voted (in due time) a very wrong opinion about Copernicus, Columbus, or Galileo, but quite right about Robert Greene. If misconceptions, acted on by too much self-opinion, be sufficient evidence of madness, it would be a curious inquiry what is the least per-centage ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... to be mad, and then there will be a verdict of insanity; but you must carry it through everything, or it will be thought you are shamming. Mr Ramsden is acquainted with Dr B—, who has charge of the asylum at D—. It is only nine miles off: he will take you there, and when the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... connected. The origin of Hindu medicine is lost in remote antiquity. The Ayur Veda, written nine hundred years before Hippocrates was born, sums up the knowledge of previous periods relating to obstetric surgery, to general pathology, to the treatment of insanity, to infantile diseases, to toxicology, to personal hygiene, and to diseases of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... heard a distinguished alienist say that this reminiscent sensation is a symptom of approaching insanity. As it is not at all uncommon, there must be a great many ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... of coming idiocy or insanity lay upon me like some poisonous reptile with its fangs driven into my very marrow, so that I could not shake it off. It went with me wherever I went, it got up with me in the morning, walked about with me all day, and lay down with me at night. I managed, somehow or other, to do my ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... we need not enumerate; nor need we say with what unquestioning trust, and deafness to all the suggestions of probability, Jenny believed. Does not love, in fact, always believe what it hopes? Who would do away with the blessed insanity that clothes the marriage day with such enchantment? Who would dare to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... us; and we have bulky volumes to teach us what sorts of people have chest affections, what are most prone to stomachic diseases, who have ophthalmia, and who the gout. We are also instructed as to the kind of persons most disposed to insanity, and we have a copious list of occupations given us which more or less incline those who profess them to derangement. Even the Civil-Service Examiners have contributed their share to this mass of entertaining knowledge, and shown from ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... 1796 was a terribly eventful one for the Lambs. There was a taint of insanity in the family on the father's side, and on May 27, 1796, we find Charles writing to Coleridge these sad words,—doubly sad for the ring of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... that his daughter's mind was deranged. His interview with Gouache had convinced him that Faustina meant what she said, though he affected to laugh at it, but he was wholly unable to account for her conduct on any theory but that of insanity. Being at his wits' end he had sent for his wife, and while waiting for her he did not quite know what ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... in a recent work on the moral and physical causes of insanity, noticing the influence of professions in promoting this affliction, brings forward a curious table, showing the relative proportion of different professions in a mass of 164 lunatics. It runs thus:—merchants, 50; military men, 33; students, 25; administrateurs et employes, 21; advocates, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various |
