"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Mr. Pennington has a mania for cats. He and Mrs. Pennington have a standing disagreement about it. The last girl left here because she couldn't stand the cats; they affected her nerves, she said. I ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the money, as they certainly would, still the money would be there. Gwendolen's imagination dwelt on this course and created agreeable consequences, but not with unbroken confidence and rising certainty as it would have done if she had been touched with the gambler's mania. She had gone to the roulette-table not because of passion, but in search of it: her mind was still sanely capable of picturing balanced probabilities, and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing thrust itself on her with alternate strength and made a vision from which her ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... than he had at first supposed, within the sanctity of his tent, longing for an order to take him elsewhere, and dreading the possibility of again having to encounter this girl, who remained to him so perplexing an enigma. Glencaid meanwhile recovered from its mania of lynch-law, and even began exhibiting some faint evidences of shame over what was so plainly a mistake. And the populace were also beginning to exhibit no small degree of interest in the weighty matters which concerned the fast-culminating ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... cried Crofter angrily, "you have said more than enough! Your hobby has become a mania, sir! How you obtained possession of the vase I do not know, nor do I know how my friend has traced the theft to you; least of all how this scandal is to be hushed up. But have the decency to admit facts! There is no ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest, which he endeavors to conceal by passing to matters of greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe, is in what he pronounces "a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy". His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... mania. This is the most pernicious disease that has ever seized humanity since the days of the Garden of Eden, and in no better place can it be seen at its worst than on a steamer calling at foreign ports: ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... I assure you, nothing that we—that is—I—did not already have good cause to suspect and know. It came to me from Robinson, Mac, before you dreamed of anything of the kind, so you are in no wise responsible. She must have a mania, there's no other explanation for it; but we're going to keep it all quiet. No one is to know until Captain Forrest gets back at the end of the campaign. Then he will be told, and restitution be made. But isn't ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... of his day, Greek as well as his native Latin. His aim was to be an "artist," but if the want of balance which too often goes with what is called the "artistic temperament" ever manifested itself in its worst form, it was in Nero. Apart from his passion for music and verse, he developed an early mania for horse-racing, and when he was caught talking in school—where such conversation was forbidden—about a charioteer who had fallen out of his chariot and been dragged along the ground, he explained that he was discussing the passage in Homer where Achilles drags the body of Hector round ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... begun with what appeared a fresh impetus to national prosperity—a new start full of life and vigour, by which the whole resources of the country should be at once stirred up and rendered ten times more available than they had ever been before. This was known afterwards as "the Railway Mania," which, like other manias, if they are not mere fever-fits of speculation, but are founded on real and tangible gains, had its eager hopeful rise, its inflated disproportioned exaggeration, its disastrous collapse, its gradual recovery, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... astonishing what a mania for card-playing existed in Corsica at that time—and it is probably the same now. The clubs and cafes were watched by the police, for the young men ruined themselves at a game called bouillotte. In ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... but I will never consent," cried Angus, with a resoluteness through which his first eager sense of relief was clearly discernible. Truly, there was coming upon him, with this mania of speculation, the same desperation which causes the gambler to clutch money from the starving hands of those who even yet are ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... pints of milk a cow would give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes. I was out against the universe. But it wasn't serious at all—just a boy's mania—till one day my father met me in London when I came down from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street. There was the thing that finished me. I was twenty-one, and restless-minded, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... perfectly clear! Nothing is easier! Traverse shall come and read medicine in my office! I shall be glad to have the lad there. It will amuse me to give him instruction occasionally. I have a positive mania for teaching!" ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... on. Their bringing-up made him what he was, I am sure. He went nowhere; he always fancied people were laughing at him. His feeling about his—his mother's lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life. He exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania. If you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human being—one of the million crawling units on the earth—could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance. It was pitiful. He went nowhere, and saw no one. I believe he thought that Providence had sent ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... himself for nobody knows what,—then we fell naturally into lamenting the waste of such fine material, and conned over various particulars of his former life and prospects—the great promise of past years, the present melancholy mania to make money and be useful. Upon which points George and I fought as usual. Then we grew tired of the subject and of the mud—turned short about—and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... My dream's come true. Ho, lodgers, ho, This portent view. Glyce has vanished, carrying off my cock, My cock that crew! O Mania, help! O reads of the rock Pursue! pursue! For I poor girl, was working within, Holding my distaff heavy and full, Twir-r-r-r-r-rling my hand as the threads I spin, Weaving an excellent bobbin ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... "ride your hobby" at a dinner party, and the real truth as to the cause of the sudden social ostracism of young Freddie H——, a New York clubman of some years ago (now happily deceased), is that on one occasion this young fellow, who had developed a craze for marksmanship amounting almost to a mania, very nearly ruined a dinner party given by a prominent Boston society matron by attempting to shoot the whiskers off a certain elderly gentleman, who happened to be a direct descendant of ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... there were many who gave the new rules outward observance, but embraced every opportunity of indulging secretly in those flesh-pots to which they had been accustomed. It was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle. It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher's knife ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... he laughed in their faces, he told them they were a bunch of fools, they belonged in the nursery; for Jimmie classed German spies with goblins, witches and sea-serpents. And here suddenly the bewildered little man found himself in the midst of a German spy mania, the like of which he could ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... my passion for gambling grew into a veritable mania, and I no longer felt any inclination for those things which at one time had lured me to student life. I became absolutely indifferent to the opinion of my former companions and avoided them entirely; I now lost ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... had not neglected—by a refinement of benevolence strange in such primitive beings—to provide him with a desire difficult to attain, and with an enemy hard to overcome. The envy of Lingard's political and commercial successes, and the wish to get the best of him in every way, became Abdulla's mania, the paramount interest of his life, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... answered; "if I were to sell my whole library to-morrow, I could hardly raise the money;" for he was poor, and it was rumoured that his mania had already made him acquainted ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... on account of his propensity for purloining things that belonged to others, just to add to his "collection." The thing that struck Hugh as bordering on the comical was that even a small colored boy might have the same mania for gathering "trophies" of his visits that possessed Madame Pangborn. He felt that the good lady would herself be amused at the coincidence, and be ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight, pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... had finished the Pantheon we drove to the Conciergerie; for I wanted to see the prison of the hapless Marie Antoinette. That restless architectural mania, which never lets any thing alone here, is rapidly modernizing it; the scaffoldings are up, and workmen busy in making it as little historical as possible. Nevertheless, the old, gloomy arched gateway, and the characteristic peaked Norman towers, still remain; ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... will be very pleasant—not worrying and fidgeting—so calm and kind. I refused at first, Cecil. People always want what they can't get, and if it's any satisfaction to you, I don't mind confessing that I have had, for years, a perfect mania for somebody else. A hopeless case for at least three reasons: he's married, he's in love with someone else (not even counting his wife, who counts a great deal) and, if he hadn't either of these preoccupations, he would never look at me. So I've given ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... least two hundred years old, instead of two. But Downing's advent had already wrought miracles here and there in our land; and a little while before Mr. Remington had been bitten with an architectural mania. So under the transplanted trees, and beneath trailing vines of Virginia creeper and Boursault roses, there peeped the brown gables of a cottage, which arose and stood there as reposeful and weather-stained as if it had been built before the Revolution. Mr. Remington showed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... inquiries to the objects contained within his wooden home. The various phases and phenomena of the weather, the aspects of the sky, and the wonders of the deep, claimed his earnest attention. To know the reason of everything was with him a species of mania, and in pursuit of this knowledge he stuck at nothing. "Never venture never win," became with him as favourite a motto as it had been with his father, and he acted on it more vigorously than his father ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... seized with the mania. There were several other matters that occupied their attention. John was to be married in January, and to go in business with his employer, who would be his father-in-law. And in December, two granddaughters were ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... our form of apocalyptism. In France it began with sentimentalism, developing normally into homicidal mania. In England it took the form of a kind of Deuteronomic religion. As a reward for our national virtues, our population expanded, our exports and imports went up by leaps and bounds, and our empire received additions every decade. It was plain that ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... time Worth would bring word of him. What boats does he mend, Aunt Kate wanted to know, and what business has he landing them on our Island? To which came the answer that he mended boats sick unto death with speed mania and other social disease, and that he didn't land them on the Island, but on an island off the tip of the Island, a tiny island which the Lord had thoughtlessly left lying disrespectfully close to the Isle of Dignity. Katie was too true a ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... effects as Paganini does on the violin, and performs wonders which one would never have imagined possible. Hiller, too, is an excellent player, powerful and coquettish enough. Both are a little infected by the Parisian mania for despondency and straining after emotional vehemence [Verzweif-lungssucht und Leidenschaftssucherei], and often lose sight of time and repose and the really musical too much. I, on the other hand, do so perhaps too little. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... motive for concealment, I am permitted to use them, and accordingly send you a transcript, simply omitting technical details of seamanship and supercargo. It almost seems as though the captain had been seized with some kind of mania before he had got well into blue water, and that this had developed persistently throughout the voyage. Of course my statement must be taken cum grano, since I am writing from the dictation of a clerk of the Russian consul, who kindly translated ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... of hissing steam pipes and machinery; once across greasy deck-plates and through a maze of dimly lit alleys, you would find Nosey shovelling coal into the furnaces under the direction of a hairy-chested individual afflicted, men said, by religious mania, who sucked pieces of coal as an antidote to chronic thirst, and spat ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... portcullis alternating with each other, intimating that, as the portcullis was the second defence of a fortress when the gate was broken down, so he had a second claim to the crown through his mother, daughter of John de Beaufort. After the accession of the Tudor dynasty there arose a mania for heraldic devices; in some cases an unsatisfactory mode of decoration, but in this building one that possesses not only historical interest, but ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... reverie. These constitutions are indolent to voluntary exertions, and dull to irritations. The natives of South-America, and brute animals of this temperament. III. Of increased voluntarity; these are subject to locked jaw, convulsions, epilepsy, mania. Are very active, bear cold, hunger, fatigue. Are suited to great exertions. This temperament distinguishes mankind from other animals. IV. Of increased association. These have great memories, are liable to quartan agues, and stronger sympathies of parts with each other. V. Change of temperaments ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the trees, and by the road as we passed we looked through hedges and over low walls into gardens full of crocuses, snowdrops, narcissuses, early pansies and daffodils, for spring gardens have become rather a mania in England within ten or twelve years. Here and there older fragments of wall lined the road, and over one of these, from a height of eight feet or so, dropped a curtain of glossy, pointed leaves, making a background for the star-shaped yellow blossoms, nearly as large as passion-flowers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Chiefswood], Mr. L——w [Scott's Laidlaw] and others. The whole thing ends with a very well written bit of rationalisation of the now familiar kind, discussing the authenticity of the Memoirs, and concluding that they are probably the work of some one suffering from religious mania, or perhaps a sort of parable or allegory worked out ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... second-class coaches was longer than usual, filled with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... see he is a lunatic, prince?" whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch in his ear. "Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends to pass the examinations. I am expecting ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... everything in my power for your friends. Are you well-bred folk as well bred as we, Republican bourgeois, with the coarse hands (though you once told me mine were psychic hands when the mania of palmistry had not yet been succeeded by that of the Reconciliation between Church and State), I wonder, that you should apologize, you whose father fed me and housed me and clothed me in my exile, for giving me the horrid trouble of hunting for ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... disaster, is so altogether removed from the sphere of reason that we ought perhaps to regard it as comparable to those manias which, in former centuries, have assumed other forms more attractive to the neurotic temperament of those days; fortunately, it is a mania which, in the nature of things, is powerless to realize itself, and we need not anticipate that the outcry against small families will have the same results as the ancient outcry ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... followed to Egypt, but unfortunately his temper was gloomy and misanthropic, which made him extremely sullen and disagreeable; and the favor which Roustan enjoyed perhaps contributed to increase this gloomy disposition. In a kind of mania he imagined himself to be the object of a special espionage; and when his hours of service were over, he would shut himself up in his room, and pass in mournful solitude the whole time he was not on duty. The First Consul, when in good humor, would joke with him upon this savage disposition, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fashion to read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends assembled to applaud them. The taste ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... her husband's name. The de did not cost anything and gave categoria to the name. When she signed herself, she wrote Victorina de los Reyes de de Espadana. That de de Espadana was her mania. Neither the lithographer who printed her cards, nor her husband, could get the idea out of ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... herself to every jeweller's window, and remain fascinated by the richness there displayed, till led away by force. On this occasion, however, her mania led to good results; for, at the ninth window, as her keepers were about to drag her away, a ring of peculiar antiquity caught their eyes simultaneously, and, to Mat's amazement, both plunged into the ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... money from us and to keep it for themselves. If your father were well, the division between us would soon be over; he would listen to me; he is loving and kind; he would see his mistake. But now his mind is affected, and his prejudices against me have become a fixed idea, a sort of mania with him. It is one result of his illness. Your father's fondness for you is another proof that his mind is deranged. Until he fell ill you never noticed that he loved you more than Pauline and Georges. It is all caprice with him now. In his affection ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... constitutional theories, who were governed by that passion to see immediate results which the thoughtless ever confuse with achievement, these were becoming hysterical over delay. Why did not the government do something? Everywhere voices were raised accusing the President of cowardice. The mania of suspicion was not confined to the Committee. The thoughts of a multitude were expressed by Congressman Hickman in his foolish words, "These are days of irresponsibility and imbecility, and we are required to perform two offices—the office of legislator ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... doesn't happen to be my God," said Paul, once more suspicious—and now hideously so—of religious mania. "And possibly the real God is somebody else's God altogether. Anyway, England's the only God I've got left, and I'm ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... letter to Morse he says: "Which of my friends was it who lately observed to you that I had a picture mania? You made, I understand, a most excellent reply, 'You wished I would come to town, then, and bite a dozen.' Indeed, my very good sir, was it in my power to excite in them a just admiration of your talents, I would readily come to town and bite the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... camp, indeed, was seized with a mania for collecting: old Haji Wali again gathered bits of quartz, which he once more presented as gold-stone to his friends and acquaintances at Zagazig; and Anton, the dragoman, triumphantly bore away fragments bristling with mica-slate, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... for the gold mania has gone. That vale was grand with its mighty trees, but it was the work of a generation to clear that forest. Through me, that place was swept clean in a couple ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... be eaten," said Bill, "that's this Puddin's mania. Well, to oblige him, I ask you to ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... of recent experience and sufferings still more recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... of her offspring and disaster to the race. So, for the sake of the generations unborn, we—that is, the male men of the earth—who still retain our grip on affairs, have about decided to put a stop to this foolish mania among our young women. We will probably pass laws, setting a limit in the several branches of study beyond which girls shall not be allowed to go, either at school ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... and—as far as human fraility will allow—conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... his arrest marked the end of his trouble; you might say that his brain simply snapped back into health and began to function normally again, after a period of temporary mania from shell-shock. It is true that his memory was left blank, but there doesn't seem to be any organic reason for it to be blank—other than lack of incentive to remember. Catch me up, if you don't follow me. In other words, he has ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... officially described by the U.S. War Department as "an error of judgment." Then General Brown, backed by an army of 6,000 U.S. veterans, swooped down like "a wolf on the fold" on Fort George, and annexed it and the garrison of 170 men. The British general, Riall, still possessing the fighting mania, and some 1,800 men, locked horns with General Brown and 3,000 of his veterans, and the Battle of Chippewa added another victory to the American record. The enemy then pillaged St. David's, while Riall—both sides having suffered heavily—retreated to the head of Lundy's Lane, a narrow roadway ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... the one strength of the argument for Mattioli's claims to the Mask. M. Lair replies, "Saint-Mars had a mania for burying prisoners under fancy names," and gives examples. One is only a gardener, Francois Eliard (1701), concerning whom it is expressly said that, as he is a prisoner, his real name is not to be given, so he is registered as Pierre Maret (others read ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... confirmed uplifters. We are never happy except when we are reforming something or saving somebody. It doesn't matter greatly whom we are saving or what we are reforming; the game is the thing. This uplift urge expresses itself in the "movement" mania, the endemic home of which is United States. The American cannot live by bread alone; he must have committees, clubs, constitutions, by-laws, platforms, and resolutions. These things, the machinery of uplift are his meat and wine. The American society women takes ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... dog was infected by the snapping mania. He was not a brave dog, he was not a vicious dog, and no high-breeding sanctioned his pretensions to arrogance. But like his owners, he had contracted a bad habit, a trick, which made him the pest of all timid visitors, and indeed ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sake of need. The profit-grabber has grown superfluous just as his patron, the state, which at present serves by means of its taxes and revenues, his anti-humanitarian purposes and hinders the reasonable consumption of goods. From the governing mania the foundation will be withdrawn; for those strata in society will be lacking which therefore had grown rich and fat by monopolizing the earth and its production. They alone needed legislatures to make laws against the disinherited. They needed courts ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... something in the world besides wheat and cows, after all. You know, I think he's in a kind of trance. He's mesmerized by wheat. It was so necessary in those first years, when he was fighting against actual starvation, that it has become a kind of mania. Nothing short of some great shock will bring him out of it. If you would come—if you would only come ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... A mania for burning money. Contracted in a Pennsylvania blast furnace, developed in a Scotch castle and now epidemic in American ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz
... this mania you all have for gossiping about a man who has never done any of you any harm? Tell me, what ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... Perhaps some of the elaborate fantasies of De Quincey (himself naturally a Ciceronian, and saturated in the rhythms and cadences of the finest Latin prose) are the nearest parallel to this piece in modern English. The opening words of Scipio's narrative, Cum in Africam venissem, Mania Manilio consuli ad quartam legionem tribunus, come on the ear like the throb of a great organ; and here and there through the piece come astonishing phrases of the same organ-music: Ostendebat autem Karthaginem de excelso et pleno stellarum inlustri et claro quodam ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION." Survival of the belief in diabolic activity as the cause of such epidemics Epidemics of hysteria in classical times In the Middle Ages The dancing mania Inability of science during the fifteenth century to cope with such diseases Cases of possession brought within the scope of medical research during the sixteenth century Dying-out of this form of mental disease in northern Europe In Italy Epidemics of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... yet because he is writing about himself he manages to suggest so many other qualities, and such amiable and noble ones, that we are all in love with Hamlet, in spite of his irresolution, erotic mania and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... big, prosperous Westchester farm where she lived—had always lived with her grandfather since her parents' death. It was turning out to be very valuable because of the mania of the wealthy for Westchester acreage and a revival in a hundred villages of the magnificence ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Emperor suppressed the matter where he could, but in the vicinity of the Rhine and the neighbouring land of Burgundy, the mania spread like wildfire, and as in France, overcame all opposition, until in little over a month after the first preaching of Nicholas, his bands were ready to depart for the Holy Land, while Stephen, Prophet and leader in France, was still waiting ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... knew that man ten years ago. I was making my first venture out in the world, and it was a very bad one. I fell in love with his pretty face, and married him. Before long I discovered that matrimony was a mania of Mr. Percy's—by-the-by, he sailed under another name then. I found that he had another wife living; a woman he had married for her money. Well, being sensitive, I took offense, and after a little, ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Scheme, projected in France by John Law to develop the resources of the American State of Louisiana, alarmed the shareholders; but the managers declared that they had avoided the errors of Law in their finances, and the enterprise still prospered. A mania for stock-gambling spread over England, and the people seemed to have lost their wits. The most tremendous excitement prevailed. The crisis came, and it was realized that the scheme was a fraudulent one. Some of the biggest operators ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... possession." Travellers in remote parts of the East at the present day tell of alleged cases of demoniacal possession, but investigation does not reveal any difference between these cases and epilepsy or acute mania. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... what had been discussion into controversy, and from a theologian became a powerful ecclesiastical manager. Others dropped their religious interests, and cultivated cynicism and letters. The railway mania, the political outbursts of 1848, utilitarian liberalism, all in turn swept over the Oxford field, and obliterated the old sanctuaries. Pattison went his own way alone. The time came when he looked back upon religion with some of the angry contempt with which George Eliot makes ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... music, which she did not particularly relish, or even than the opera, to which they went often. The theatres pleased her more, though the amusements there were tamer than she had expected. Society was delightful to her because it was real London society. She acquired a mania for dancing; went out every night, and seemed to herself far more distinguished and attractive than she had ever been in Wiltstoken, where she had nevertheless held a sufficiently favorable opinion of ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Margaret bitterly. It was all started, apparently, by a worthless 'felly' from Castleton, who had a great reputation as a medium, and would come over on summer evenings to conduct seances at Frimley and the places near. 'Lias, already in an excitable, overworked state, was bitten by the new mania, and could ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has become quite a mania with my host. I thought it best to let him grumble his fill, and then endeavoured to thank him for his ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... should tell us something. When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!—it is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in the Agamemnon—the first play of this last of his trilogies; and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the Eumenides—where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he returned to Sicily ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... dead by giving any details just now—even to you and Miss Lawton—of matters which have not yet been fully substantiated by the attorneys. I know only from Mr. Lawton's own private statements that he was interested, to the point one might almost say of mania, in a gigantic scheme from which we, his friends, tried in vain to dissuade him. He urged me especially to go in on it with him, but because of the very position I hold, it would have been impossible for me to consider it, ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... morality was purely negative, if not actually low. We acted, as it were, from instinct, and often wondered at the sublime sacrifices which were being made by our betters. Most of us were killed or injured in one way or another; but a blind and obstinate mania for not giving in possessed us. We were a simple lot." The dragoman paused and fixed his eyes on the empty hearth. "I will not disguise from you," he added, "that we were fed-up nearly all the time; and yet—we couldn't stop. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... was soon again established with his family in a house in Louisville. His drawings of birds still continued and, he says, became at times almost a mania with him; he would frequently give up a head, the profits of which would have supplied the wants of his family a week or more, "to represent a little ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... he explained, "are staying here too long and are devouring much of the supplies designed for us. A strange mania hath overtaken them, little Sister; they are mad for gold. They believe that the streams about here are full of the dust they and our men of Jamestown value more than life itself. It is more to them ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... Irishmen,—more, however, than all beside, the inevitable rebound and counter-growth of internal dignity from the everlasting commerce with lofty speculations, these agencies in constant operation had imbittered my school disgust, until it was travelling fast into a mania. Precisely at this culminating point of my self-conflict did that scene occur which I have described with Miss Bl——. In that hour another element, which assuredly was not wanted, fell into the seething caldron of new-born impulses, that, like the magic ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the climbing mania, and are unable to throw it off. A famous climber, of that sex, had attempted the Weisshorn a few days before our arrival, and she and her guides had lost their way in a snow-storm high up among the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... memory excepting for his disasters, that he accuses his wife, as he accuses his life, for marriage is but a life within a life. Yet people whose habit it is to take their opinions from newspapers would perhaps despise a book in which they see the mania of eclecticism pushed too far; for then they absolutely demand something in the shape of a peroration, it is not hard to find one for them. And since the words of Napoleon served to start this book, why should it not end as ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... house-cleaning mania, and has dragged me into it by representing the sin and misery of those deluded mortals who think servants know how to sweep and to scrub. In spite of my resolution not to get under her thumb, I have somehow let her rule and reign over me to such an extent that I can hardly sit ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... an individual, "that the Anglo-mania is nowhere stronger than in this part of the world. Whatever comes from England, be it Congreve rockets, or vegetable pills, must needs be perfect. Dr. Morrison is indebted to his high office for the enormous consumption of his drugs. It is clear ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... retreat for the suffering poor, his continual theme. Nor did his thankful spirit confine itself to this. To listen to him, you would have believed him an especial object of divine as well as human benevolence—all things working for his good. The doctor used to say, that No. 12 had 'a mania for happiness;' but it was a mania that in creating esteem for its victim, infused fresh courage into all that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... of Lord Lister's antiseptic surgical dressing which rendered the invasion of the peritoneal cavity comparatively safe, came the laparotomy or celiotomy mania. When it was discovered that opening the abdomen was really a minor operation, it was soon legitimatized by professional opinion, and rapidly became standardized as a necessary procedure in all questionable cases—in all obscure cases of abdominal disease—where the diagnosis was in doubt. The ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... lassitude of mechanical exertion which succeeded the American Revolution, We utility of steam-engines appears to have been forgotten; but the subject afterward started into very general notice in a form in which it could not possibly be attended with success. A sort of mania began to prevail, which, indeed, has not yet entirely subsided, for impelling boats by steam-engines. Dr. Franklin proposed to force forward the boat by the immediate application of the steam upon the water. Many attempts to simplify ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... cruel to think, dear Julia, that this amusement of yours should deprive me of the few moments during which I could speak to you of my love, and last night I wrote on the subject some verses that I cannot help repeating to you, so true is it that the mania of reciting one's verses is inseparable from the ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... the regiment Duke Louis, who, during February, 1813, had been admitted into the hospital of Wilna, suffering from quiet mania without being feverish, was constantly ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... were especially valuable. His strength as a critic lay in his artistic temperament and in the incisive intellect that enabled him to analyze the effects produced in his own creations and in those of others. His weaknesses were extravagance; a mania for harping on plagiarism; lack of spiritual insight, broad sympathies, and profound scholarship; and, in general, the narrow range of his genius, which has already been made sufficiently clear. His severity has been exaggerated, as he often praised highly, probably erring ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... increased her importance, in the eyes of the young gentlemen, by the announcement that various pyrotechnical wonders were to be obtained at her shop. There are few boys who have not at some time of their boyhood had a mania for pyrotechnics—in plain English, fire-works—and there are few parents, and parents' neighbours, who can say that they relish the smell ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... Belladonna, the Mandrake, &c., each one strengthening his opinion from coeval writers. In this uncertainty I should incline to the Henbane from the following description by Gerard and Lyte. "This herbe is called . . . of Apuleia-Mania" (Lyte). "Henbane is called . . . of Pythagoras, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him who congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or the goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd. Rousseau has said in his Emile ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Lord Michin Malicho,{1} Lord Facing-both-ways, and two or three other arch-quacks, have taken to merry-andrewising in a new arena, which they call the Science of Pantopragmatics, and they have bitten Lord Curryfin into tumbling with them; but the mania will subside when the weather grows cool; and no doubt we shall still have him at Thornback Bay, teaching the fishermen how to know a herring from ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... has been even more than the usual amount of lecturing in our principal cities. The mania lasts longer than was thought possible. The "phenomenon" has really become a feature of the times. It absorbs a great share of the current literary enthusiasm—much of which it has created, and will, it is to be feared, entirely satisfy. Professor Pease, of the University ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... gone from my life, but a horror has entered it beyond the conception of any soul that has not yielded itself to the unimaginable influences emanating from an accomplished crime. I can not be content with having pressed that spring once. A mania is upon me which, after thirty years of useless resistance and superhuman struggle, still draws me from bed and sleep to rehearse in ghastly fashion that deed of my early manhood. I can not resist it. To tear ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... There's a model in this week's Queen which will be just the thing, and I have a piece of flowered pink silk upstairs which will do for you as well as for me. It is a remnant which I bought in Paris. I have a mania for remnants. I always think they will come in usefully, but somehow they don't. This will be the exception, however, and it will be ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be rude—especially to Nancy's family—but the impulse to get everyone but Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months—and there is still her "grand news" to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... submissive as a faithful friend, but with a sarcastic reproach in his eyes. All that for the "Bella Fregolina"! The master was cracked; he was in his second childhood! If only this visit would cure him of his mania, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... This city mania is a very extraordinary disease in the United States, and is the cause of much disappointment to the traveller. In the Iowa territory, I once asked a ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... yet is able to persuade a daughter of the Castlemans to make her an intimate! Possibly she is an honest fanatic. Dr. Perrin tells me she was the wife of a brutal farmer, who mistreated her. No doubt that has embittered her against men, and accounts for her mania. You see that her mind leaped at once to the most obscene and hideous explanation of this misfortune of ours—an explanation which pleased her because it blackened the ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the speed mania is born of a vain desire to enjoy a leisure that never comes or, on the contrary, how the seeming haste of the world has given men shorter hours off labor and more time for ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... result that they are more successful in its requirements. The distractions of more numerous social interests may actually accompany the later years of school age. In reference to the social distractions of girls, Margaret Slattery says,[23] "This mania for 'going' seizes many of our girls just when they need rest and natural pleasures, the great out-of-doors, and early hours of retiring." But surely such distractions are not peculiar to the girls alone. The economic needs that arise at the age of ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... world the East, who waved his chromatic wand to Liszt, Tschaikowsky, Saint-Saens, Goldmark, Rubinstein, Richard Strauss, Dvorak and all Russia with its consonantal composers. This Polish psychologist—a fulgurant expounder of Nietzsche—finds in Chopin faith and mania, the true stigma of the mad individualist, the individual "who in the first instance is naught but an oxidation apparatus." Nietzsche and Chopin are the most outspoken individualities of the age—he forgets Wagner—Chopin himself the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... subdivided into the counties of Anson, Bladen, Cumberland, Moore, Richmond, Robeson and Sampson, but the greater portion established themselves within the present limits of Cumberland, with Fayetteville the seat of justice. There was in fact a Carolina mania which was not broken until the beginning of the Revolution.[26] The flame of enthusiasm passed like wildfire through the Highland glens and Western Isles. It pervaded all classes, from the poorest crofter ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... The autographic fan mania had left its mark over the divan in the shape of a gigantic fan constructed of little fans and opening out towards the ceiling. A few pen-and-ink and pencil sketches and studies, apparently the cast-off of many studios, were tacked up here and there. The high ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... popular among the boys as the pedagogue himself. His instructions are not limited to school hours; and having inherited the musical taste and talents of his father, he has bitten the whole school with the mania. He is a great hand at beating a drum, which is often heard rumbling from the rear of the school-house. He is teaching half the boys of the village, also, to play the fife, and the pandean pipes; and they weary the whole neighbourhood with their vague ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... to flower, but he has feeling Now comes the worst of all—in one sense; that is, looking on it as people of the world; and being in the world, we must take a worldly view occasionally. Mr. Pole—you remember how he behaved once at Besworth: or, no; you were not there, but he used your name. His mania was, as everybody could see, to marry his children grandly. I don't blame him in any way. Still, he was not justified in living beyond his means to that end, speculating rashly, and concealing his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... majority : plimulto; plenagxo. make : fari, -igi; fabriki. male : vira, virseksa. malicious : malica. mallow : malvo; "(marsh—)" alteo. malt : malto. mammal : mambesto. manage : administri, "(—a house)" mastrumi. mane : kolharoj. mange : favo, skabio. mania : manio. manna : manao. manner : maniero; tenigxo, mieno. manners : moroj. manoeuvre : manovro. mantle : mantelo. manufacture : fabriki, manufakturo. manure : sterko. manuscript : manuskripto. map : karto, geografikarto. maple : acero. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... their last card. These dreamers did not even pause to wonder why after the terrible successes of the Federal army in Georgia, Lincoln should be expected to reverse his policy and restore the Union with the Southern States on the old footing. The peace mania also invaded South Carolina and was espoused by one of its Congressmen, Mr. Boyce, but he made few converts among his own people. The Mercury scouted the idea; clear- sighted and disillusioned, it saw the only alternatives ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... dagger. Feeling the cold iron he woke, and his yellow eyes fixed themselves instantly on his wife. By a privilege seldom granted even to men of genius, he awoke with his mind as clear, his ideas as lucid as though he had not slept at all. The man had the mania of jealousy. The lover, with one eye on his mistress, had watched the husband with the other, and he now rose quickly, effacing himself behind a column at the moment when the hand of the old man fell; after which he disappeared, swiftly as a bird. The lady lowered her eyes ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... that poor Jean's brain was wrong in some way. Heloise devoted herself to him with infinite patience,—though she felt no special affection for him, only pity,—and while he was with her he seemed sane and quiet. But at night some strange mania took possession of him. If he had worked on his Prix de Rome picture in the daytime, while Heloise sat by him, reading aloud or singing a little, no matter how good the work, it would have vanished in the morning, and he would ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... request from Mrs. Eylton for the loan of some article in our possession; a repetition of which would naturally lead one to conclude that ministers merely procured a house, and then depended for everything else on the charity of the public. This borrowing mania appeared to gather strength from indulgence, for none of the neighbors would refuse, whatever the article might be; and our waffle-iron, toasting-fork, Dutch-oven, bake-pan, and rolling-pin were frequently from home on visits of a week's ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... had a mania for big soldiers. With infinite expense and trouble he gathered a regiment of the biggest men he could find, which was known as the "Potsdam Giants,"—a regiment numbering 2400 men, some of whom were eight feet in height. Not only ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the habit of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... England seems to have become a temporary mania. The ascent of Messrs. Barral and Bixio, of which a detailed and very interesting account will be found in a preceding page, has encouraged imitators in various styles. One M. Poitevin made an ascent in Paris seated on a horse, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... an iron fighter with a mania for personal valour, standing where he had been standing for an hour, in a pleasantly exposed spot, clapped on his hat and beckoned for his horse. The ground about him showed furrowed as for planting, and a neighbouring oak tree was so riddled with bullets that the weight ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... heeded by the others; but allowed to totter about, and give speech to their incoherent mumblings!—sometimes diversified by yells, or peals of mania laughter,—always thickly interlarded with oaths and ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... OF FISH among the ancient Romans rose to a real mania. Apicius offered a prize to any one who could invent a new brine compounded of the liver of red mullets; and Lucullus had a canal cut through a mountain, in the neighbourhood of Naples, that fish might be ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... sport. First one, then another joined till game after game was closed, and each moment the crowd had grown in size and enthusiasm so that its fever crept into him, imperceptibly at first, but ever increasing, till the mania mastered him. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... of their existence. It engendered a sense of importance, gave life fulness and variety; and this far outweighed the trifling inconveniences such welldoing implied. Indeed, he throve on them. For, in his mild way, Dove had a touch of Caesarean mania—of a lust for power. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... at least, the seventeenth was a century pre-eminent for quaint conceits and fantastic similes: the literature of that period, whether devotional, poetical, or polemical[1], was alike infected with the universal mania for strained metaphors, and men vied with each other in giving extraordinary titles to books, and making the {486} contents justify the title. Extravagance and the far-fetched were the gauge of wit: Donne, Herbert, and many a man ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... whatever to do with the Revolutionary movement, but absolute innocence does not free people from the police inquisition, and five or six years ago, when the Search mania was at its height, a case is on record of a poor lady whose house was searched seven times within twenty-four hours, though there was no evidence whatever that she was connected with the Nihilists; the whole affair was, in ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... of Trajan continued to be kept open, after the building mania, to which it owed its origin, had ceased. It had extended the sphere of the export trade of the Delta; and it continued to serve as the means of transporting the blocks of porphyry—for which there was a constant demand at Rome and Constantinople, and, indeed, in almost every city of wealth in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... (see vol. iv. 143). Here it may be advisable to give the names of the Seven Heavens (which are evidently based upon Ptolemaic astronomy) and which correspond with the Seven Hells after the fashion of Arabian system-mania. (1) Dar al-Jall (House of Glory) made of pearls; (2) Dr al-Salm (of Rest), rubies and jacinths; (3) Jannat al-Maaw (Garden of Mansions, not "of mirrors," as Herklots has it, p. 98), made of yellow ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... means a large one, and the increasing expenses of his family rendered the struggle to make ends meet yearly more severe. His father had been possessed of a small private fortune, but had rashly entered into the mania of railway speculation, and at his death had left about fifteen thousand dollars to his son. This sum Frank Hardy had carefully preserved intact, as he had foreseen that the time might come when it would, for his children's sake, be advisable to emigrate. He had long looked forward to this, ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... Black Death" here translated by Dr. Babington was Hecker's first important work of this kind. It was published in 1832, and was followed in the same year by his account of "The Dancing Mania." The books here given are the two that first gave Hecker a wide reputation. Many other such treatises followed, among them, in 1865, a treatise on the "Great Epidemics of the Middle Ages." Besides his "History of Medicine," which, in its second volume, reached into the fourteenth ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... with a passion for fighting, and he indulged the passion until it became a mania. The louder the bullets whistled, the redder the gleaming blades grew, the ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... woman of disordered mind, the appearance presented by Mrs. Taylor at his entrance greatly astonished Mr. Gryce. There was a calmness in her attitude which one would scarcely expect to see in a woman whom mania had just driven into crime. Surely lunacy does not show such self-restraint; nor does lunacy awaken any such feelings of awe as followed a prolonged scrutiny of her set but determined features. Only grief of the most intense and sacred character could account ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... sophrosunae] involves the idea of Prudence, and is a most noble virtue, yet properly marked by Plato as inferior to sacred enthusiasm, though necessary for its government. He opposes it, under the name "Mortal Temperance" or "the Temperance which is of men," to divine madness, [Greek: mania,] or inspiration; but he most justly and nobly expresses the general idea of it under the term [Greek: ubris], which, in the "Phaedrus," is divided into various intemperances with respect to various objects, and set forth under the image of a black, vicious, diseased and furious horse, yoked by ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... may be taken as a general resume of what follows in detail, but this vigorous speech to the priests was clearly among the new king's first acts. No doubt his purpose had slowly grown while his father was affronting Heaven with his mania for idols. Such decisive, swift action does not come without protracted, previous brooding. The hidden fires gather slowly in the silent crater, however rapidly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... morning I am always awakened at the same hour by the striking of the cuckoo-clock in the workroom; and whether it is scarcely daylight or not, I dress myself as quickly as possible; my shoes and stockings are here, my soap and all articles of toilette there—a true mania for order. Yet you may well believe that I was not born so! Oh no! On the contrary, I was the most careless person possible. Mother was obliged to repeat to me the same words over and over again, that I might not leave my things in every corner of the house, for I found it easier to scatter them ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... collection. Thus there came for me a time when I looked forward to a journey less because it meant movement and change for myself than because it meant another label for my hat-box. A strange state to fall into? Yes, collecting is a mania, a form of madness. And it is the most pleasant form of madness in the whole world. It can bring us nearer to real happiness than can any form of sanity. The normal, eclectic man is never happy, because he is always craving something of another ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... it is an all-pervading mania, and as man is "a bundle of habits," the most moral persons in this country (always excepting one or two ladies who express their opinions strongly against it) see nothing in it to condemn, and are ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... epithet that Evelyn did not apply to Mr. Basil Bainrothe during her hysterical mania, and before the doctor's arrival; but, on her recovery, she begged me to repeat nothing of the sort, if she had been indiscreet enough to let out her true opinion of him and his measures, in a moment of irrepressible emotion. "For," she pursued, "it is ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... busy with his head man, his plotter, his planner; giving directions concerning still further improvements that are to be made, in his grounds and park, during our absence. You know his mania. Improvement is his disease. I have before hinted to you that I do not like this factotum of his, this Abimelech Henley. The amiable qualities of his son more than compensate for the meanness of the father; whom ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Poor woman!" So if the garters had proved stronger, she would have strangled there minute by minute. Nothing but religious mania—that is what drove ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... taking in a bag with a peck of oats—"to feed at three o'clock, Frank, when we stop to grub, which must do al fresco—" my friend explained—"for the landlord, who kept the only tavern on the road, went West this summer, bit by the land mania, and there is now no stopping place 'twixt this and Warwick," naming the village for which we were bound. "You ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... habitations. The whole was encircled by a wall eight feet in breadth, and it was probably of considerable height, for some of the parts now standing are twelve feet high, though the average height does not exceed three or four feet. The mania of digging for treasures every year makes encroachments on these vestiges of a bygone age, whose monuments are well deserving ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... were so worthily engaged in suppressing piracy, they might at the same time be acquiring information respecting countries little known, and adding to our stock of geography and science. A few severe examples and constant harassing would soon cure this hereditary and personal mania for a rover's life; and while we conferred the greatest blessings on the rest of the Archipelago, Magindano itself would be improved ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... postmaster to accept them as mail. I told him that it was mail and that I had no other place to deposit it. Nevertheless he said he would not have them left at the postoffice and told me do anything I wanted to with them, saying at the time that people all around there had a mania for ordering those books, but never intended to take them when they ordered them. I took the books around to the stage station and discovered four wagonloads ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... believed he could find magazine publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would commend him to the book-publishing houses. "Ephemera" he likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden's prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print. He did not intend, however, to publish it without the other's permission. His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and, thus armed, again to wrestle with ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... few minutes later, verified the statement. It was evident that the old gardener, for years insane, had been so influenced by Miss Merrick's death that he had wandered into the stables where he received his death blow. When he regained consciousness the mania had vanished, and in a shadowy way he could remember and repeat that last scene of the tragedy that had deprived him of his reason. The story was logical enough, and both Mr. Watson and John Merrick ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... published about Balzac since his entry as a writer. And just see what a fascination this devil of a man—as Theophile Gautier once called him—exercises over his followers; I am fully convinced that these little details of Balzacian mania will cause the reader to smile. As for me, I have found them, and still find them, as natural as Balzac's own remark to Jules Sandeau, who was telling him about a sick sister: "Let us go back to reality. Who is going ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... and roar and complexities, seems far away. How satisfying it is to strip off the husks and get at the kernel of things! There is more chance for high thinking when one is big enough to have plain living. How we surround ourselves with non-essentials, how we are dominated with the "mania of owning things"—one feels all this afresh in looking around at this simple, well-built cabin with its few needful things close at hand, and with life reduced to the simplest terms. One sees here exemplified the creed Mr. Burroughs outlined several years ago in ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... of outsiders is not encouraged," said Palliser languidly. "And where if a patient dies in a fit of mania there are always respectable witnesses to explain that his case ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... handsome silver tea-pot and a vote of thanks for her courage and humanity. Portraits of her were sold in the print-shops all over the land; and the enthusiasm, which at first was the natural impulse of admiration for one who had performed a noble and heroic deed, at last rose to a species of mania, in the heat of which not ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... Committee on Public Accounts was further investigated. The Committee had reported that a certain stationery contract for the Air Ministry had been extravagant and improper. The AIR MINISTER at the time was the noble Lord who has lately been so eloquent about "squander-mania," but he has since, in a letter to the Press, declared that he never signed or initialled the order. Lieut.-Colonel ARCHER-SHEE and Mr. ORMSBY-GORE sought the opinion of the Treasury on the transaction, and Mr. BALDWIN ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... the worthy man did justice to the great masters of our day; a masterpiece finely rendered brought tears to his eyes; but his religion never bordered on mania, as in the case of Hoffmann's Kreislers; he kept his enthusiasm to himself; his delight, like the paradise reached by opium or hashish, lay within his ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... does to a large extent convey the qualities that were uppermost in the earlier years, at any rate, of his influence. His insistence upon continuity pervaded the Society, was re-echoed and intensified by others, and developed into something like a mania for achieving Socialism without the overt change of any existing ruling body. His impetus carried this reaction against the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite. Then arose Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the unorganized people cannot ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... to have a mania for buying, is to possess a revenue." Many are carried away by the habit of bargain-buying. "Here's something wonderfully cheap; let's buy it." "Have you any use for it?" "No, not at present; but it is sure to come in useful, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert. She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon |
