"Senility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the only repose he ever allowed it; for he had a habit of twitching and moving his lips such as some old men have. And occasionally, in an access of further senility, he fumbled with his fingers at his mouth. He was clean shaven, and even in his old age he was handsome beyond other men—standing an upright six ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... paid the full penalty of her stupid acquiescence in the rule of Disraeli and Salisbury; and it will cost her yet far more than she paid for the results of Tory infamy and Whig senility in the "Alabama" business, for she has enemies to deal with who are far less generous and far slyer than the people of the United States. It was under the Beaconsfield-Salisbury cabinet that Sir Bartle Frere made that infamous ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... The senility of the rancher was painfully apparent. Doubtless it was the result of his recent libations and excesses. The money-lender was quite aware that John had not come to him to discuss the "hustler." He had come to suggest ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... Semicolon punktokomo. Seminarist seminariano. Seminary seminario. Semolina tritikajxo. Senate senato. Senate-house senatejo, senatdomo. Senator senatano. Send sendi. Send away forsendi. Send back resendi. Senile maljuna. Senility maljuneco. Senior plenagxa, pliagxa. Sensation sentado. Sensational sensacia. Sense sento. Sense (meaning) senco. Senseless sensenta. Senseless (unmeaning) sensenca. Sensibility sentemo. Sensible (feelings) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... her knees to the basket, and, pulling aside the dog's hair, round about the head, examined the skin. Fossette was a sick dog and behaved like one. Fossette, too, was nine years older, and her senility was offensive. She was to no ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... a garden of my own. Let me grow my own flowers, and watch over them from seedhood to senility. Then shall I miss nothing of their glory, and when visitors come I can impress them with my stories of the wonderful show of groundsel which ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... content as soon as she was convinced of the return of her dead father and husband and son, and at present will not think of giving up her fancied communion, especially as the 'guides' constantly assure her that 'they' will protect the girl. But observe the senility of this note in Randall's diary: 'Martha comes regularly to me now, and I am happy in a renewed sense of her companionship. Indeed, I fancy at times that I can see her. She showed me her hands last night; I could see them plainly against the window. I had quite a controversy ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... think of their own future, so utterly brutalised. He wanted, by the simple force of desire, to seclude and shelter the old man, to protect the old man not only from the insults of stupid and crass bullies, but from the old man himself, from his own fatuous senility. He wanted to restore to him, by a benevolent system of pretences, the dignity and the self-respect which he had innocently lost, and so to keep him decent to the eye, if not to the ear, until death came to repair ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the failure of the powers. When the ambition can be satisfied with the less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are preferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... time of Moses, was more than three thousand years old. Egypt was then in the first stage of senility, entering upon her decline, for her best people had settled in the cities, and this completes the cycle and spells deterioration. She had passed through the savage, barbaric, nomadic and agricultural stages and ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... maturity, seniority; epoch, period, time; century; eon; climacteric; old age, dotage, senescence, senility, decrepitude, superannuation; longevity. Associated Words: nostology, geratology, geromorphism, coetaneous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... my senility—let others say senectitude," he shouts in his cheery way, "to a certain playful devilry of spirit, a ceaseless militancy, quite suffragettic, so that when I left the Indian Office on a bilked pension I swore by all the gods ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the motivating factor in sex misconduct, most careful guidance is necessary, lest the future love life be endangered. After relieving the child of feelings of guilt, the conduct of the older offender must be explained in terms of his senility or his mental state. "He is not normal." "He should be in a hospital." It is important that this person's abnormal conduct does not represent in the child's mind the natural ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... her, and that she could not pay; and the shame felt by that proud creature, perverted by the vile Quartier Saint-Georges, because of her intimacy with low wretches whom she despised; and the lamentable consciousness of the premature senility caused by drunkenness; and the inhuman exactions and brutality of the Alphonses of the gutter; and the temptations to suicide which caused me to pull her away from a window one day, when I found her leaning far out—and ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... that would die before morning if deprived of proper food and nourishment. Somewhat impressed by this pitiful lament, I enquired how his wife was getting along. The ancient, being in a placid state of senility, courteously thanked me for my interest, and answered that she had been dead for forty-nine years, come September. I overlooked ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Montaigne; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this purpling bloom, of Lamb;—in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoues and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Medusa, she went resolutely to work to educate her younger son, my father, until such time as he should be able to support himself. At about her eightieth year (which was not far distant when I came into the world) the senility of second childhood had set in; at that time I knew nothing about the tragedy of the loss of memory and I could not realize the vacancy of her mind ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... from El Paso to Fort Benton, men talk of Casey Ryan and smile when they speak his name. Old men with the flat tone of coming senility in their voices will suck at their pipes and cackle reminiscently while they tell you of Casey's tumultuous youth—when he drove the six fastest horses in Colorado on the stage out from Cripple Creek, and whooped past would-be ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... and that his commonplaces about "olive leaves," "calumets," "universal brotherhood," "fatherland," etc., have no more influence than the maudlin rigmarole of the madman whose preternatural force is lost in senility. It is time for Elihu Burritt to go back to his shop: the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... ripe for a new religion. It conquered because it threw in its lot with the ruling powers. It throve because it came with the tempting bribe of Heaven in one hand, and the withering threat of Hell in the other. The older religions, grey in their senility, had no such bribe ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... Blanchard in the crisp, brittle accents of senility; "so you're back again, eh? Well, well, well." There was no emphasis laid on the words. They were all struck from the same ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... since the mental competence of this man is concerned—since it is our contention that he is patently and plainly a victim of senility, an individual prematurely in his dotage—any utterances by him will be of no value whatsoever in aiding the conscience and intelligence of the court to arrive at a fair and just conclusion ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... dimensions, while there has been no corresponding development of thought. Its body politic has the size of a giant, while it still retains the mind of a child. Its hoary age is in danger of becoming but senility. Second, Confucius makes no provision for the intercourse of his country with other and independent nations. He knew indeed of none such. China was to him 'The Middle Kingdom [1],' 'The multitude of Great States [2],' 'All under heaven [3].' Beyond it were only rude and barbarous tribes. ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... Among coloured folk' one sometimes encounters women whose faces seem to have been lined by the passage of centuries, yet whose actual tale of years would entitle them to regard themselves, here in England, as in the prime of life. The senility of the fellow's countenance, besides, was contradicted by the juvenescence of his eyes. No really old man could have had eyes like that. They were curiously shaped, reminding me of the elongated, faceted eyes of some queer creature, with whose appearance I was familiar, although I ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the pretentious impostors who trade upon the claim, literature, contemporary literature, is the breath of civilized life, and those who sincerely think and write the salt of the social body. To mumble over the past, to live on the classics, however splendid, is senility. The New Republic, therefore, will sustain its authors. In the past the author lived within the limits of his patron's susceptibility, and led the world, so far as he did lead it, from that cage. In the present he lives within ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... alive, and an evil spirit had turned me to stone, and my hands were lying crossed over my breast and could not move. I grew up with a sister, and I see her as though it were yesterday"—at this point his face took on an expression of fantastic senility—"walking through the hall, proud, dainty, innocent, with roses in her hand. She is married to a captain of cavalry, a fellow who treats his men like Negro slaves, and who never returns the greeting of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Oldness. — N. oldness &c. adj[obs3].; age, antiquity; cobwebs of antiquity. maturity; decline, decay; senility &c. 128. seniority, eldership, primogeniture. archaism &c. (the past) 122; thing of the past, relic of the past; megatherium[obs3]; Sanskrit. tradition, prescription, custom, immemorial usage, common law. V. be old &c. adj.; have had its day, have ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... change," replied the official. "From infancy to senility the fingerprints of an individual change only in size, except as injuries alter the loops and whorls. But if imprints have been taken of the thumb and four fingers of both hands one must needs lose all ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and individuals is the record of their defeat in this struggle to be masters and not slaves of their material and intellectual attainments. Greece, the most intellectual of all nations of all times, died in mental senility of moral paralysis. Of Socrates's and Plato's "following after truth" nothing remained but the gossipy curiosity of a second childhood, living only to tell or to hear some new thing. And the schools of philosophy were closed ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... case of their valiant parent. At such times she was, of course, simply dreaming day dreams of the life she could have had if, as "he" had said, she had been twenty now; and the beatific expression that would come into her face was scarcely one of reconciliation to senility. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... use About the hunting-stables. I deduce He wrote the little tract 'On worming dogs,' 50 Whereof the name in sundry catalogues Is extant yet. A Protus of the race Is rumoured to have died a monk in Thrace, And if the same, he reached senility." ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... Belfort, cannot talk for more than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour without becoming completely aphonous. Different doctors consulted find no lesion in the vocal organs, but one of them says that M. X—— suffers from senility of the larynx, and this conclusion confirms him in the belief that he is incurable. He comes to spend his holidays at Nancy, and a lady of my acquaintance advises him to come and see me. He refuses at first, but eventually consents ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... license after games, spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental toil seem ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... had a rustic quality, or flavor, rather, which was delicately discriminated from the courtly refinement of his Sir Peter. There was the essential gentleman in both, but it was the country gentleman in one and the city gentleman in the other. The touch of chuckling senility in Hardcastle's pleasure with Diggory's enjoyment of his stories, and the uxorious fondness of Sir Peter, are both of a kind, but they are not the same, and you feel the difference. Neither of these characters can be dissociated from Gilbert by those who have seen him ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... to his sov'reign to prescribe The rustic precepts of senility? Would he with secret, rash, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and advancing age!" he said. "So I strike you as approaching senility, do I? I'll show you whether I'm the worn-out specimen you seem to think I am. Do you think I'll give you up just because I've made you angry? Why, I love you the more for it; it only makes me the more determined ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... imagined than thirty or forty of these formidable-looking monsters charging down upon him, bouncing several feet from the surface of the earth. The experienced horse treats them with the contempt such light-minded senility deserves, and wades through their phantom attack indifferent. After the breeze has died the debauched old tumbleweeds are everywhere to be seen, piled up against brush, choking the ditches, filling the roads. Their beautiful spherical shapes have been frayed out so ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. One finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great house, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the Comtes of my line ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... hundred dollars in his possession. The glee which he tried to hide, the crafty suspicion that this was not all of it the returning conviction that Bud was actually almost penniless, and the cunning assumption of senility, was pictured on his face. Pop's poor, miserly soul was for a minute shamelessly revealed. Distraught though he was, Bud stared and shuddered a little at ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... articles attacking the rival Democratic candidates in very flashy rhetoric. These were stigmatized as "old fogies," who must give ground to a nominee of "Young America." They were reminded that the party expects a "new man." "Age is to be honored, but senility is pitiable"; "statesmen of a previous generation must get out of the way"; the Democratic party was owned by a set of "old clothes-horses"; "they couldn't pay their political promises in four Democratic administrations"; and the names of Cass and Marcy, Buchanan and Butler, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... youth; with maturity of years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else separate from the very ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Glowing with its own splendour, that mountain looks resplendent as the morning sun. And no creature with his natural eyes made of flesh, can ever ascertain its shape or configuration, and neither heat nor cold prevails there, nor doth the sun shine nor do the winds blow. And, O king, neither doth senility nor hunger, nor thirst, nor death, nor fear afflict any one at that place. And, O foremost of conquerors, on all sides of that mountain, there exist mines of gold, resplendent as the rays of the sun. And O king, the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... clothes hanging on the wall were unnaturally stretched, and one end was skilfully fastened by the back of the cot. Assuming an air that I was tired and that I wanted to walk about in the cell, I staggered as from a quiver of senility in my legs, and pushed the clothes aside. The entire wall ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... many shocking misfits lately, until I have looked like a scarecrow in a cornfield; even now you are smelling like a distillery. And tell me, you ruffian, what right had you to say at Mrs. Haley's public house that I was 'thauto—thauto—gogical' in my preaching? If I, with all the privileges of senility, chose to repeat myself, to drive the truths of Christianity into the numskulls of this pre-Adamite village, what is that to you,—you ninth part of a man? Was it not the immortal Homer ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... cradle on page two. The process is known as a psychological study. A publisher's note on page five hundred and seventy-three assures us that the author is now at work on Volume Two, dealing with the hero's adult life. A third volume will present his pleasing senility. The whole is known as a trilogy. If the chief character is of the other sex we are dragged through her dreamy girlhood, or hoydenish. We see her in her graduation white, in her bridal finery. By the time she is twenty we know her better than her ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... and fro, and give up the battle. The tears came like a gush of blood from a deep wound; they poured through the lean fingers she pressed against her gaunt cheeks, and she shook with the dry, weak weeping of senility and utter desolation. Then her old arms yearned for him as ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... for a long time without speaking. Once or twice he moistened his lips, and cleared his throat, and frowned, as one who would broach unpleasant news. It was not like him to hesitate. But the old man, encased in senility, was ill to disturb; he was intent on nothing but the work before him; it was mechanical and soothing, and occupied his whole mind. Gourlay, so often the trampling brute without knowing it, felt it brutal to wound the faithful old creature dreaming at his toil. He would have ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... very much that year. He showed marked signs of senility by a tendency to fall asleep, forgetfulness of quite recent events, remembrance of remote ones, and the childish vanity with which he accepted the role of head of the Moscow opposition. In spite of this the old man inspired in all his visitors alike a feeling of respectful veneration—especially ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... into an almost complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring pavements, and the reeking odours of the cuisine of Fleeter's Rents, might choose to wander thither. Philip, with ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the sixth keeps two days, while at other times it requires to be eaten quite fresh. This pursuit of a legal object destroys the story and obscures its original meaning, as no one can help seeing. Nor is it any sign of originality, rather of senility, that in the Priestly Code the manna is not eaten raw, but ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the pipe, found that it was out, and passed it over to Zilla, who took the sneer at the white man off her lips in order to pucker them about the pipe-stem. Ebbits seemed sinking back into his senility with the ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... describes Socrates' state of mind at his trial and execution, and especially his view that it was better to die before senility set in than to escape execution by humbling himself be- fore an unjust persecution. Xenophon was away at the time, involved in the events of the march of ...
— The Apology • Xenophon
... began, history is but the narrative of kingdoms and states progressing to maturity or decay. Man himself is but an epitome of the nations of men. In youth, all energy; in prime of life, all enterprise and vigour; in senility, all weakness and second childhood. Then, England, learn thy fate from the unerring page of time. Sooner or later, it shall arrive that thou shalt be tributary to some nation, hitherto, I trust, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... are individualities instead of individuals. They do not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fictitious character must be at once generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it must be an individualized representation ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... them of lethargy, relieve them of all sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope and ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... us not dwell on that. That portraits were woven at the Gobelins (portraits as such, not the resemblance of one figure out of a mass to some great personage) brings ever a sigh of regret. It is like the evidence of senility in some grand statesman who has outlived his vigour. It is like the portrait of your friend done in butter, or the White House at Washington done in a paste of destroyed banknotes. In other words, there is no excuse for it ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... the Earl seated near the fireplace, and wrapped in furs. He got up to receive his guest, and Phineas saw at once that during the two years of his exile from England Lord Brentford had passed from manhood to senility. He almost tottered as he came forward, and he wrapped his coat around him with that air of studious self-preservation which belongs ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... there, sitting by the fire and grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock Holmes. He made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided into a doddering, loose-lipped senility. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... distraction and sympathy and many other factors have to enter into the plan. Incomparably small, on the other hand, is the aid which psychotherapy can offer in cases of real destructions in the brain, as in the case of tumors, hemorrhage, paresis or the degeneration by senility. More effective may be its work in concussion of the brain and especially with traumatic neuroses, as in the case when a railroad accident has put the mind-brain system ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... this John Jones lived, there lived also a man, a so-called scientist called Metchnikoff. We know, from a study of our vast collection of Egyptian Papyri and Carnegie Library books, that this Metchnikoff promulgated the theory that old age—or rather senility—was caused by colon-bacillus. This fact was later verified. But while he was correct in the etiology of senility, he was crudely primeval in the ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... different. Had they held aloof from world-conquering schemes Rome might have remained a republic, enduring even down to our day. The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood, leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... princely property at the play-table, and by a piece of good fortune of rare occurrence to gamesters, and unparalleled generosity, the proprietors of the salon allowed him a pension to support him in his miserable senility, just sufficient to supply him with a wretched lodging—bread, and a change of raiment once in every three or four years! In addition to this he was allowed a supper—which was, in fact, his dinner—at the gaming house, whither he went every night at about eleven o'clock. Till supper-time ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... death where life has its source, I have, I the judge, fallen in my latter days into this snare, and have lost my senses, while acquitting myself traitorously of the functions committed with great confidence by the Chapter to my cold senility. Hear how subtle the demon is, and stand firm against her artifices. While listening to the first response of the aforesaid Succubus, I saw with horror that the irons placed upon her feet and hands ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... it is very humiliating to have to beg for money which really belongs to one—for it does belong to us, to you and me, I mean—as much as to him, doesn't it? It's maddening to think that the law allows a man to ruin his relations because senility has weakened ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... and the sturdy materialism of the late sixteenth lies the Classical Renaissance. Whatever happened, happened between those dates. And all that did happen was nothing more than a change from late manhood to early senility complicated by a house-moving, bringing with it new hobbies and occupations. The decline from the eleventh to the seventeenth century is continuous and to be foreseen; the change from the world of Aurelian to the world of Gregory the ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... jokes and catch-words, burned through perorations with the joy of an improvisatore in happiest mood. The Examiner could not report him for lack of space; the Mercury complained of a headache caused by this "blatant youthfulness striving to emulate garrulous senility"—a phrase which moved Denzil to outrageous laughter. And on the whole he kept well within such limits of opinion as Polterham approved. Now and then Mr. Chown felt moved by the spirit to interrogate him as to the "scope and bearing and significance" of an over-bold ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... Feudal-Catholic world, just as this has only distant analogies with the Revolutionary world. The great phases of human civilisation are contrasted rather than compared; they differ as infancy, childhood, manhood, and senility differ in the individual" (Harrison on "Freeman's Method of History," in the 'Nineteenth Century' ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... in black, expounding his views, or narrating his autobiography to the first comer, can expect no such warmth of response as greets the dying speech of the baffled patriot; yet he too may take account of the reasons that prompt speech, may display sympathy and tact, and avoid the faults of senility. The only character that can lend strength to his words is his own, and he sketches it while he states his opinions; the only attitude that can ennoble his sayings is implied in the very arguments he uses. Who does not know the curious blank effect of eloquence overstrained ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... enough already to have given us the portraits of infants who are now growing into adolescence. By-and-by it will show every aspect of life in the same individual, from the earliest week to the last year of senility. We are beginning to see what it will reveal. Children grow into beauty and out of it. The first line in the forehead, the first streak in the hair are chronicled without malice, but without extenuation. The footprints ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... certain peoples, the Massagetae and others, used to kill their aged folk in order to spare them the miseries of senility. The fatal blow on the hoary skull was in their eyes an act of filial piety. The Necrophori have their share of these ancient barbarities. Full of days and henceforth useless, dragging out a weary existence, they mutually exterminate one another. Why ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... advised to dissolve the United Kingdom into a confederacy because Germany, through a clumsy form of confederacy, is growing into a united empire. This counsel confuses the stages of imperfect development with the stage of incipient decay; it ascribes to the childishness of approaching senility the hopes which are proper to the childishness of early youth. The point is worth pressing. The considerations which govern a confederacy as it is developing into a nation are very different from the considerations ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... thankful." At the date of her decease she was not an old woman, though any one marking her white hair and much-furrowed features might have supposed her one. The hair, however, was ample in quantity, the wrinkles rather so many under-scores of energy than evidences of senility; and until the blinds were down over her soul, she had looked into and across the world with a pair of eyes that seemed to reflect the very blue and white of a June sky. No doubt she had thought to breast ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the time for looking back on the pleasures and achievements of the past—when success or failure may seem matters of comparative unimportance. Successful middle-age stands between the two. Its calm is not the result either of senility or failure. It represents that solid success which enables a man to adventure into fresh spheres without any perturbation. New fields call to him—Art, or Letters, or Public Service. Success is already his, and it will ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... exercise of reason beneath the love of a Father who sees with equal eye as God of all. Its isolation nourished a sectarian tendency. Tradition, having no creative power like revelation, had taken the place of it; and it could not ward off the senility of Judaism; for its creations are but feeble echoes of prophetic utterances, weak imitations of poetic inspiration or of fresh wisdom. They are of the understanding rather than the reason. The tradition which Geiger describes as the life-giving soul of Judaism—the ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... non-accidental disease in which life is saved by the surgeon's knife," and he instances particularly, strangulated hernia and ovarian cyst. And he also calls attention to apoplectic breakdown and premature senility. All these are suggestions of great value for individual conduct, but none of them have that quality of certainty that justifies collective action.] Until great advances are made in anthropology—and at present there are neither men nor endowments to justify the hope that any such advances will ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... I regard that as the highest compliment I have ever received. To you youngsters my advanced age of fifty-two represents senility. Nevertheless, you men need not 'Doctor' me. Either 'Adams' or 'Andy' will do very nicely. As ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... marked. Cancer is emphatically a disease of senility, of age; but, as Roger Williams has pointed out in his admirable monograph, not of ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... "surrender themselves heedlessly to the ways of self- seeking." But the phraseology here seems to savour of extreme youth, or else senility. ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... all these sciences at once it is not possible for the moralist to be an adept. The mass of the material they furnish is so vast that the ethical writer who starts out to master it in all its details may well dread that he may be overcome by senility before he is ready to undertake the formulation of ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... was now very old, and it is one of the concomitants of a bicycle's senility that its free wheel should one day obstinately cease to be free. It corresponds to that epoch in human decay when an old gentleman loses an incisor tooth. It happened just as Mr. Polly was approaching Mr. Rusper's shop, and the untoward chance ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... doubtless when he dwelt in Devon the use was gloriously maintained; but an adult generation in the years of this narrative had certainly refused it much support. It was left to their grandfathers and their sons; and thus senility and youth preponderated in the present company. For the boys, this midnight fun with lantern and fowling-piece was good Christmas sport, and they came readily enough; to the old men their ceremonial possessed solid value, and from the musty storehouse of his memory every venerable soul amongst ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... of advancing years. His ideas were becoming more fixed. It was plain that the notion of Lattimore's continued and uninterrupted progress was one to which he would cling with the mild and unreasoning stubbornness of gentlemanly senility. But Cornish welcomed the discussion with ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... fellows who are so easily tossed about. The moss of senility is covering the bloom of youth and ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... unusual; ordinarily he never hesitated in the exact expression of his vigorously held opinions and prejudices; he seldom relaxed the critical elevation of his standards. He was, he thought contemptuously, growing soft; senility was diluting his fibre, blurring his ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... been of a much higher order. Abraham had made a very good bargain out of the widow's son. Adam knew well that he could not be spared, and pitied the old man's helpless rage. He took his frantic insults as part of his senility, and felt it no unmanliness to appease it by giving his promise that he would speak no more of love to Emmy while he was taking her father's wages. But Emmy did not indorse this promise fully. To her it looked like weakness, and implied a sort of patience which did not become a lover ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... the greater part of the day in an easy-chair on the verandah, taking no interest in anything; just gazing vacantly in front of him for hours at a time. Mental and bodily strength seemed to have deserted him. From vigour he had passed suddenly into senility. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... liberated from the suffocating folds and sensual ties of prosperity. And this is why we find almost everywhere in the world a growing dissatisfaction with the prevalent system of teaching, which betrays the encroachment of senility and worldly prudence over ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way of original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in the women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get at present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they pass from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body. The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably more self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often more of a man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately this precocity is disabled by poverty, ignorance, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... sire, I've been on pilgrimage, By vow expressly made, Your royal health to aid, And, on my way, met doctors sage, In skill the wonder of the age, Whom carefully I did consult About that great debility Term'd in the books senility, Of which you fear, with reason, the result. You lack, they say, the vital heat, By age extreme become effete. Drawn from a living wolf, the hide Should warm and smoking be applied. The secret's good, beyond a doubt, For nature's weak, and wearing out. Sir Wolf, here, won't refuse to ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... antlered headland, that seemed a moose at bay—ere long, we launched upon blue lake-like waters, serene as Windermere, or Horicon. Thus, from the boisterous storms of youth, we glide upon senility. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... ice-cream barrow. Suddenly she recognized this old man. His name was Shushions; he was a familiar figure of the streets of Turnhill, and he had the reputation of being the oldest Sunday School teacher in the Five Towns. He was indeed exceedingly old, foolish, and undignified in senility; and the louts were odiously jeering at his defenceless dotage, and a young policeman was obviously with the louts and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the portal, swaying drunkenly. They shuddered at the sight of its face as it crossed toward the fire. It did not walk; it shuffled, haltingly, with flexed knees and hanging shoulders, the strides measuring inches only—a grisly burlesque upon senility. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That's as far as her story went; she told him the rest herself, but ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... still mumbling inarticulately and I sat there saddened that a man once alert and vigorous as the general should have come at last to senility ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... your face. I submit that the situation is quite as plain as that nose, if you look at it in the broad light of understanding. If you think that I am marrying Anne because I love her, or because I am in my dotage and afflicted with senility, you are very much mistaken. If you think I am giving her two million dollars as a wedding gift because I expect it to purchase her love and esteem, you do my intelligence an injustice. If you think that I relish the prospect of ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... old, which came in and put on its slippers, and grumped: "Can't those kids keep quiet?" if it heard the voice of the children of love, and which hid itself behind a hedge of daily paper, or flung out again from home, in the ill-tempered senility of its ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... modulated sounds; it is not in definite words, and hence, is not capable of translation; it is but the expression of feeling through the voice, as is the wail of the infant, the rippling laughter of youth, the crooning of senility, the ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... considered extremely unlikely that the Nipe civilization—if such it can be called—has any geriatric problem. No, indeed. No old-age pensions, no old folks' homes, no senility. No, nor any specialists in geriatrics, either. When a Nipe becomes a burden because of age, he is ritually murdered and eaten with ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth. Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending counter-currents of hoboes to ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... accounts of him. I have gone to the Police Office in the vain attempt of identifying him as a lost child. But I never saw him or heard of him since. Strange fears have sometimes crossed my mind that his venerable appearance may have been actually the result of senility, and that he may have been gathered peacefully to his fathers in a green old age. I have even had doubts of his existence, and have sometimes thought that he was providentially and mysteriously offered to fill the void I have before ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various |
