"Idiocy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so it is. But to all effects and purposes it is your cousin's also. He has rooms here; has had them coming on for thirty years now, and they are filled with a prodigious accumulation of trash—stays, I dare say, and powder-puffs, and such effeminate idiocy—to which none could dispute his title, even suppose any one wanted to. We had a perfect right to bid him go, and he had a perfect right to reply, 'Yes, I will go, but not without my stays and cravats. I must first get together the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... do work," I cried impetuously, as though he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my arrant idiocy in ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... number of their middle-aged people might be cited as another proof. Yet I have been told that the women are apt to suffer in health, particularly at the critical period of life. I must add, however, that I could hear of no cases of insanity or idiocy traceable to the celibate condition. Of course there is no force used to keep members in a commune; and those who are uncomfortable leave and go out into the world. The celibate communes keep very few of the young people whom ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... spent itself upon many of its noblest monuments, but the interference of modern restoration or improvement was unknown. Better the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble of self-complacent idiocy. The facade of the cathedral was as yet unencumbered by the blocks of new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now defaced; the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the last fragments of the niches of its gateway were seen by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to make ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... crack-brained Irishman," says Pinckney, "when you're not maundering over some such idiocy as this, you're the most entertaining good-for-nothing that ever graced a dinner table or spread the joy of life through a dull drawing room. Come home with me ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... I paused. I had not meant to pause; I had intended to take her in my arms, to ask her if what I had just heard was true, to make her answer me. But now, as she stood there before me, so young, so girlish, so beautiful, the hopeless idiocy of the thing struck me with overwhelming force. It WAS idiocy. It ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... apprehend it? and I reflect profoundly in order to find something psychical. Then it seems to me that some one is interposing, interrupting my confab. I answer angrily, "Beg pardon! Your match in idiocy is not to be found; no, sir! Knitting cotton? Ah! go to hell!" Well, really I had to laugh. Might I ask why should I be forced to let it signify knitting cotton, when I had a special dislike to its signifying knitting cotton? I had discovered the word myself, so, for that matter, ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... possession of the modest faculties that nature commonly apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to realize that marriage is a bargain in which he gets the worse of it, even when, in some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He never, I believe, wants all that the thing offers and implies. He wants, at most, no more than ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... there was no danger, or that indifference was anything but the most foolish hardihood. If our burning car had been in mid-ocean, serenity would have been sublimity, but to stay in the midst of peril when two steps would take one out of it is idiocy. And that there was peril is conclusively shown by the fact that the very next day the Eastern Railroad Depot took fire and was burned to the ground. I have in my own mind no doubt that it was a continuation of the same fire, and if we had stayed in the car much longer, we should have shared ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... and that thoroughly. For some time we were in hopes, that he might get off with a violent fit or two; but of late the symptoms are terrible. The phrenzy of the "Poems" was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of "Endymion." We hope, however, that in so young a person, and with a constitution originally so good, even now the disease is not utterly incurable. Time, firm treatment, and rational restraint, do much for many apparently ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... had told the savages that the herbs, which every day they trampled underfoot, were endowed with the most potent virtues; that one would restore to health a brother on the verge of death; that another would paralyze into idiocy their wisest sage; that a third would strike lifeless to the dust their most stalwart champion; that tears and laughter, vigor and disease, madness and reason, wakefulness and sleep, existence and dissolution, ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... must be from two and a half to three years between the successive pregnancies. The results of overproduction on the children are frequently, that they are sickly, short-lived, or suffer from rickets, cerebral paralysis, idiocy, ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... Remember, I believe he is a good Christian all the same. It's very incomprehensible; but the fact is, a man may be a very good Christian, and have the least quality of sense that is compatible with existence. I've seen it over and over again. Gerald's notions are idiocy to me," said the sensible but candid woman, shrugging her shoulders; "but I can't deny that he's a good ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... sheer idiocy. Haven't you heard the things people are saying? They are calling him a fool, and in the clubs they are betting that he will be a pauper within ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... Verkhoyansk. Nearly every one contained one or more unmistakable lunatics, and it afterwards struck me that in a land where even the natives go mad from sheer despondency of life, it is no wonder that men and women of culture and refinement are driven to suicide from the constant dread of insanity. Idiocy, however, is more frequent amongst the natives, and in one povarnia we found a poor half-witted wretch who had taken up his quarters there driven away from the nearest stancia by the cruelty of its inmates. This poor imbecile had laid in a ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... himself interrupted the happiness of perfect innocence, there was never such an act of treachery—never such schemes of happiness destroyed—never such inevitable misery prepared for two wretches who had the idiocy to repose perfect confidence in him!—Had there been passion in his conduct, it had been the act of a man—a wicked man, indeed, but still a human creature, acting under the influence of human feelings—but ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... hast much goods laid up for many days. Eat, drink and be merry." Did ever you hear words that were more stamped with moral idiocy? You can see from them that his soul has not fared well up to this time. You can easily tell from these words that his moral nature has been starved and stunted. We can easily tell that all his gettings have not satisfied him in the past. And yet he is vainly expecting ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... doing and justifying her existence before it was too late, envied these poor women, because they worked. She wondered vaguely now at her folly. "It is much better to be comfortable," she thought, going back to the fire as aimlessly as she had gone to the window, "and it is sheer idiocy quarrelling with a life that other people ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... modern artist par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernity. All that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art,—the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy). ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... gauzy partition divides Clara Morse's brains from idiocy. In my day, all such feeble watery minds as hers were regarded as semi-imbecile, pitied as intellectual cripples, and wisely kept in the background of society; but, bless me! in this generation ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... they are the only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the "burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so evenly ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... schoolmistress put on her bonnet, and full of indignation carried her news of the treatment to which she had been subjected to the Rev. Fergus Duff, who remarked to himself that it was sad to see youth and beauty turn away from genius and influence to wed money and idiocy, gave a sigh, and went to see ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... embroidery meandering over all, the effect was not distressing, but more like that of a gorgeous bird. The figure was tall, lithe, and active, the brown ruddy face had none of the blank stare of vacant idiocy, but was full of twinkling merriment, the black eyes laughed gaily, and perhaps only so clearsighted and shrewd an observer as Tibble would have detected a weakness ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... candidly rollick in them from the first word; and of these latter is Frank Swinnerton. But Frank Swinnerton can be more cruel than Irvin Cobb. Indeed, sometimes when he is telling a story, his face becomes exactly like the face of Mephistopheles in excellent humour with the world's sinfulness and idiocy. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... alone!' exclaimed Claude, ferociously. 'They have all the crimes of the middle classes stamped on their faces; they reek of scrofula and idiocy. It serves them right. But hallo! our runaway friend is making off with them. What grovellers architects are! Good riddance. He'll have to look for us ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the beginning of those parlous times when the Democrats, having come into power upon a wave of impassioned idiocy and jealousy, were beginning to make us poor at home and despised abroad. A schoolmaster president, with three cabinet officers plucked by the hair from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, had put a temporary end to all our best qualities as a nation, with the possible ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... I met only one case, that of a child with an abnormally large head.[31] Idiocy also is very uncommon, only one case having ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... look queer to stop." Thus Willy Cameron speciously to himself, and deliberately ignoring the fact that some twenty-odd officers stood ready to seize those Friday nights. "And then to work hard, so I'll sleep better, and not lie awake making a fool of myself. And when I get a bit of idiocy in the daytime, I'd better just walk it off. Because I've got to live with myself a long time, probably, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the whole tribe is defrauded of a voice, and at least one is an exquisite singer; or accuse the nightingale of the superfluous idiocy of holding his (though they always say her) breast to a thorn as he sings, as if he were so foolish as to imitate some forms of human self-torture,—if they would only be a little more sure of their facts, what a comfort it would ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... would give his due reward. I wonder if that angel knew That Christ these tools had laid down too. O Columbkille! O Columbkille! A saint like you must have his will, But for myself I'd rather be The common sinner that you see Than make a crane ashamed of me, And angels talk such idiocy. ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... at him. She rose to go; but it seemed to her pitiful to leave Fanny Newt in such utter desolation of soul and body, in which she seemed to her to be gradually sinking into idiocy. She went to Fanny and took her hand. Fanny listlessly rose, and when Hope had done shaking hands Fanny crossed them before her inanely, but in an unconsciously appealing attitude, which Hope saw and felt. Alfred still sprawled in ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... idiocy, this unexpectedness and inconsequence, are perhaps the most characteristic qualities of his freest humour elsewhere. Take, for example, the flavour of this singular remark from The Four Men. Grizzlebeard is telling, according to his oath, in a most serious fashion ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... two hundred thousand francs into a holy-water shell, or lending them to a bigot—cast off by her husband, and who knows why? there is always some reason: does any one cast me off, I ask you?—is a piece of idiocy which in our days could only come into the head of a retired perfumer. It reeks of the counter. You would not dare look at yourself in the glass two ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... talented, and hence it becomes more than ordinarily developed. Such advantages are not unmixed with danger; this same arterial blood may exite and feed inflammation, and either convulsions, or water on the brain, or insanity, or, at last, idiocy may follow. How proud a mother is in having a precocious child! How little is she aware that precocity is ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... senior, "sugar-coated pills and idiocy. Nothing will ever be done properly until this Government goes out. And it will," striking the table with his fist, "if I have anything to do with the matter. So Mrs. Krill or Jessop is ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... away, they looked up the word "wrench" in an English-German pocket dictionary; they then marched off to the switch station. Fortunately there was but one occupant, for neither Jock nor his companion could talk German, and the idiocy of not carrying a more serviceable weapon than a pocket dictionary never occurred to the mad Scot until his companion began to make weird gurgling sounds, evidently intended for the language of the Hun, addressed to the ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... Gondreville Mystery.] He was attorney for Colonel Chabert who sought his conjugal rights with Comtesse Ferraud. He became keenly interested in the old officer, aiding him and being greatly grieved when, some years later, he found him plunged into idiocy in the Bicetre hospital. [Colonel Chabert.] Derville was also attorney for Comte de Serizy, Mme. de Nucingen and the Ducs de Grandlieu and de Chaulieu, whose entire confidence he possessed. In ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... objection.... What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for idiocy.... Kant became an idiot.—And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopher—still passes today!... I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans.... Didn't Kant see in the French ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... figure, and he noticed how her expressive features lighted up in the conversation. John could hear something of their conversation, which was somewhat noisy. They were talking in that strain of objectless question and answer which may be stupid to idiocy or clever to the verge of wit, according to the ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... had been very stupid in not discovering that my brother was a genius; but hardly had I made the discovery, and hardly had the fragment which follows this memoir received its present shape, when his overworked brain gave way and he fell into a state little better than idiocy. His originally cheerful spirits left him, and were succeeded by a religious melancholy which nothing could disturb. He became incapable either of mental or physical exertion, and was pronounced by the best physicians to be suffering from some obscure ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... miles from Wawona to Yosemite Valley. The stages leave Wawona at eleven thirty a. m. to make the trip. On June sixteenth we took our places with some other victims of this piece of transportation idiocy, on an open four-horse stage for Yosemite. The going was very slow. It was hot and dusty, and we soon got irritable and uncomfortable. Why the traveling public should be subjected to this outrage is beyond me. We ground our weary way over the dusty road, oblivious to the ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... which every phrase was a distinct thought, would no more serve as pabulum for the mind, than portable soup freed from all the fibrous tissues of meat and vegetable would serve as food for the body. Animals perish from hunger in the presence of pure albumen; and minds would lapse into idiocy in the presence of unadulterated thought. But without invoking extreme cases, let us simply remember the psychological fact that it is as easy for sentences to be too compact as for food to be too concentrated; ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Family, who cling together from a sense of their common interest, and in great measure from the respect and attachment which they all feel for the memory of the late Emperor. Esterhazy said it was remarkable, considering the condition of the Imperial House—the Emperor[9] in a state bordering on idiocy, not likely to live above four or five years at the outside, and his uncles all men of talent and energy; the next heir, the brother of the Emperor,[10] is a man of competent sense, but the late Emperor's brothers he describes to be ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... also may you buy a suit of clothes for ten dollars in any American city, but the reasonably affluent American doesn't buy ten-dollar suits at home. He saves himself up to indulge in that form of idiocy abroad. In Paris or Rome you may get a five-course dinner with wine for forty cents; so you may in certain quarters of New York; but in either place the man who can afford to pay more for his dinner will find it to his ultimate well-being to do so. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... carried it, however, no further than the next inn, where, pledging it for a second shilling and second dram, he left me to relieve it as I passed. Poor Click-Clack, though one of the cleverest of his class, was decidedly half-witted; and I may remark, as at least curious, that though I have known idiocy in its unmixed state united to great honesty, and capable of disinterested attachment, I never yet knew one of the half-witted caste who was not ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... All the more did the affairs of the great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new branch and widened the relations of scandal,—these were topics of which she retained details ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... that? Same with me. It's idiocy, but all war is idiotic, and the most whole-hearted idiot is apt to win. We're to go on this mad trail wherever we think we can hit it. Well, I'm with you. But I don't mind admitting that I'm in a ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... I had been engaged to Jane. I had been idiotically in love with her in those days and still more idiotically believed that she loved me. The trouble was that, although I had been cured of the latter phase of my idiocy, the former had become chronic. I had never been able to get over loving Jane. All through those two years I had hugged the fond hope that sometime I might stumble across her in a mild mood and make matters up. There ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... about court, obtaining a monopoly of such trade, left the business of production and circulation to their inferiors, while, as has already been sufficiently indicated, religious fanaticism and a pride of race, which nearly amounted to idiocy, had generated a scorn for labour even among the lowest orders. As a natural consequence, commerce and the mechanical arts fell almost exclusively into the hands of foreigners—Italians, English, and French—who resorted in yearly increasing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... so comfortable as these cages of wild beasts. In each of these cages was confined a human being, and these poor creatures stricken by the hand of God, were in various stages of insanity, some wildly raving, others more quiet, and others still in a state of helpless idiocy. One poor creature had preached till her voice had sunk to a hoarse whisper, and so she continued to preach, the keeper told them, day and night, till utterly exhausted, when she would fall into a state of insensibility, which could ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... brought-up children, with instructions to be generous to any additions to said children through matrimony or natural causes; Fanny Wood and that poor, white-livered creature she married, thereby proving her own idiocy if it needed proof; Uncle James's cross-eyed third wife and her two silly daughters; Rebecca's sister's scoundrelly second husband, with his foolish wife and their little boy with a face like a pug dog; Uncle Jason, who has needed a bath ever since I knew ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... he wrote: "I thought I should not like it, fancying it a kind of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau and the De Staels, still lingered." But he did like it, and wrote brilliantly of Lake Leman ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... a father's smile—they found an idiot's stare. They cried: was it for their mother's embrace, or did they miss their brother and sisters? Not even the piteous cry of motherless infancy could light one spark of emotion in the widowed husband's breast—all was one awful blank of idiocy. A wife and three children, buried beneath piles of freight, had found a wretched grave; his heart and his reason had fled after them—never, apparently, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... sensations, of habits, with all that comes of your experiences, with all that comes from him-perhaps, from them-how do I know? These things are my delight and they are my torture. There must be a profound sense in the public idiocy which says that love like ours is guilty. Joy is guilty when it is immense. That is the reason ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... whole gist of his remarks was that "they could not go to war," and when they still argued in the opposite sense, and the interpreter refused to translate the harsh epithets he applied to such august personages, he took the dictionary, looked out the Chinese equivalent for "idiocy," and with his finger on the word, placed it under the eyes of each member of the Council. The end of this scene may be described in Gordon's own words: "I said make peace, and wrote out the terms. They were, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... hebetude^, dull understanding, meanest capacity, shortsightedness; incompetence &c (unskillfulness) 699. one's weak side, not one's strong point; bias &c 481; infatuation &c (insanity) 503. simplicity, puerility, babyhood; dotage, anility^, second childishness, fatuity; idiocy, idiotism^; driveling. folly, frivolity, irrationality, trifling, ineptitude, nugacity^, inconsistency, lip wisdom, conceit; sophistry &c 477; giddiness &c (inattention) 458; eccentricity &c 503; extravagance &c (absurdity) 497; rashness &c 863. act of folly &c 699. V. to be an imbecile &c adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... intelligent, deliberately refuse various kinds of work she might have done because they did not please her; and borrow money from a man in preference to earning her living. She exposes herself to insult and even danger with an idiocy that even a novel-reared child of sixteen would have scorned. She falls in love, healthfully enough, with a fine strong man; and sees no reason for avoiding him when she learns he is married. She cheerfully elopes with him—quite ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... temple of Materialism, and an altar to Materialism in the temple of the Soul. Each shall have its due, each shall glory in the sacred purity and strength of life; each shall develop and expand, but never at the expense of the other. I will have neither the renunciation which ends in a kind of idiocy dignified with a philosophic or a theologic name, nor the worldliness which ends in bestiality. I am a citizen of two worlds—a citizen of the Universe; I owe allegiance to two kingdoms. In my heart are those stars and that sun, and the LIGHT of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... that the text he quoted was an authority for his instinctive justice? It was obvious to her that he was only a fool who walked by the light of sundry flashes of genius, but there was still the chance that the sum of idiocy and the genius might prove greater than the intelligence ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... to have made such a fool of myself, sir," he said to Sir Reginald, with a faint, grim smile. "I shall not forget your kindness, though I hope you will forget my idiocy." ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the world, they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational, 'cool', and imaginative as they consider themselves. This bias often contributes to weakness in communication skills. Hackers tend to be especially poor ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... perils of such endeavor and the bathos of the failure. Wieland includes in the letter some "specimen passages from a novel in the style of Tristram Shandy," which he asserts were sent him by the author. The quotations are almost flat burlesque in their impossible idiocy, and one can easily appreciate Wieland's despairing cry with which ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... been seated three thousand miles across the water, where the work of personal comparison was impossible. Left to the repose of himself, mentally and physically, without being placed in the crucible of war, without being made the tool of selfishness, or driven to a state of half idiocy by the use of liquor, the Indian is a man of naturally good feelings and affections, and of a sense of justice, and, although destitute of an inductive mind, is led to appreciate truth and virtue as he apprehends them. But he is subject to be swayed by every breath of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... of idiocy," said Goody Kertarkut. "Poor things! they can't be kept from the water, nor made to take powders, and so ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... harmful, as I told you. For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... was getting on my nerves. I felt as if it were myself who was drifting to idiocy, and tremulous empty sensations began to occur in my stomach. Had I been able to recall the next sentence, I should ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... these blind people were capable of toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... her aunt with an expression of almost idiocy. For the minute, the term Aunt Maria used, especially as applied to her father, had no more meaning for her than a term in a foreign tongue. She was very pale. "Courtin'," she stammered out vaguely, imitating her aunt exactly, even to the dropping ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the individuals in which unfavorable variations, or defects, have occurred have not survived in the struggle for existence. Morphologically men are the more unstable element of society, and this instability expresses itself in the two extremes of genius and idiocy. Genius in general is correlated with an excessive development in brain-growth, stopping dangerously near the line of hypertrophy and insanity; while microcephaly is a variation in the opposite direction, in which idiocy results from ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Party. And there are signs that even in France syndicalism is losing its anti-political tendency. Herve, who demanded at the beginning of 1909 that the "directors of the Socialist Party cure themselves of 'Parliamentary idiocy'" (his New Year's wish), expressed at the beginning of 1910 the wish that "certain of the dignitaries of the Federation of Labor should cure themselves of a syndicalist and laborite idiocy, a form of idiocy not less dangerous or ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... idiocy that's been talked to me this forenoon. I've done nothin' for the last hour but say 'No' to folks that come tearin' in to unload lies and ask questions. And some of 'em was people you'd expect to have common sense, too. My head's kind of wobbly ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... condition, fraught with all that is called self-denial, he could never endure. The musty old duffer, too, looks upon the game in the light of a deadly sin, which can never be associated in his mind with anything short of idiocy and the most virulent fanaticism. To some of his young men he remarks—"And you call that a grand game, running about a field trying to put a ball near a pair of upright posts, and knocking the first lad down who attempts to retard your progress! Do ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... biggest lie. There are times in your life when you have to take your fate in both hands and shut your eyes, and jump in the dark. Maybe you'll land on your feet, and maybe you—won't. But you have got to jump just the same. That's matrimony—common sense, idiocy, or whatever you choose to call it.... I never could tell which. It's the only thing to do; and any man with a backbone and a fist won't hesitate very long. If you marry, I'll see you through; though of course you won't ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... learned nothing,—they told us, nothing; for the instruction of the blind is not thought of in these parts. This seemed piteous to us, and made us reflect how happy are our blinds, to say nothing of our deafs and dumbs. Idiocy is not uncommon here, and is the result of continual intermarriage between near relations; but it will be long before they will provide it with a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of obtaining a livelihood as a beggar in Egypt is to feign idiocy, which, I am told, is frequently done. Idiots are regarded as saints, and are never restricted in their movements, maniacs alone being confined, and they are often met with in the streets. My Swedenborgian friends might account for the absence of sense being held ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... attain his ends more certainly by diplomacy, and so careful was his demeanour that the couple in the cabin had no idea that they had been observed—the mate listening calmly to a lecture on incipient idiocy which the skipper thought ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... in his driest tones, "the girl is shrewd enough to know that I should cut off a son who was guilty of such a piece of idiocy and leave ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... idiocy at time of marriage, in six. Insanity lasting ten years, in Washington; incurable insanity, in North ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the sounder, which it was equally his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced oft from the rest by a frame of ground glass. The counter-clerk would have played into her hands; but the counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented to be obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be always to shove off on him whenever she could the registration ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... and better sources to draw upon. From the country folk it is absolutely impossible to glean any scrap of information. A question immediately shapes their countenances into a look of hopeless simplicity and guilelessness bordering upon idiocy. Persons in quest of information in the remote parts of Ireland put me in mind of the hunter of the Rocky Mountains, who, while he was trying to stalk some antelope, became aware that a grizzly bear was stalking him. The people ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... nose went forward as if smelling its way. And it was only, perhaps, at the hundredth glance that the bright blue eyes, which normally before and after the instant seemed brilliant with intelligence, seemed as it were to be brilliant with idiocy. He was a heavy, healthy-looking man, who looked all the larger because of the loose, light coloured clothes that he wore, and that had in their extreme lightness and looseness, almost a touch of the tropics. But a closer examination ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the big cities has produced the child criminal. He is clearly marked and well defined. He is often subnormal even down to idiocy. In most cases he is the result of heredity. Many times he may have fair intelligence, but this is usually attached to an unstable, defective nervous system that cannot do its proper work, and he has had no expert ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... the peace which flows from auricular confession. I solemnly declare that except in a few cases, in which the confidence of the penitents is bordering on idiocy, or in which they have been transformed into immoral brutes, nine-tenths of the multitudes who go to confess, are obliged to recount some such desolate narrative as that of Miss Richardson, when they are sufficiently honest to ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... person as old Fraser, it were no wonder if the greater part had become either rogues or fools: he was a ruthless tyrant, Belle, over his own people, and by his cruelty and rapaciousness must either have stunned them into an apathy approaching to idiocy, or made them artful knaves in their own defence. The qualities of parents are generally transmitted to their descendants—the progeny of trained pointers are almost sure to point, even without being taught: if, therefore, all Frasers are either rogues or fools, as this person ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... evident all the ultimate idiocy of the present Imperial position. Rhodes and Kitchener are to conquer Moslem bedouins and barbarians, in order to teach them to believe only in inevitable fate. We are to wreck provinces and pour blood like Niagara, all in order to teach a Turk to say "Kismet"; which he has said since his cradle. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... inclination of the head. The acquaintance began with a look. It was after a more than usually exasperating pun from the man in the knickerbockers, and involuntarily their eyes met, after which they exchanged glances each time he came out with a particularly blatant piece of idiocy. They could not long remain in doubt that their opinion on the prevailing conversation was identical, and the unanimity of their tastes was still further demonstrated by the fact that the lady was as silent during ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the entry. Without stopping to speak, he ran up to his own chambers. When he got into his sitting-room, there stood De Fleuri, who simply waved his hand towards the old sofa. On it lay an elderly man, with his eyes half open, and a look almost of idiocy upon his pale, puffed face, which was damp and shining. His breathing was laboured, but there was no further sign of suffering. He lay perfectly still. Falconer saw at once that he was under the influence ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... marriage is annulled on account of the consanguinity or affinity of the parties, or because of impotency, the issue shall be illegitimate, but when on account of non-age, or insanity, or idiocy, the issue is the legitimate issue of the party capable of contracting ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... enable you to sing beautifully, do you confine yourself to singing a colorless 'Tit Willow' because you don't know any better, or because you are attempting to sing on top of an improperly selected meal?" In other words, he put violation of the laws of hygiene by a singer on a par with idiocy. Thus, even from comic opera, in the performance of which most of the rules of vocal art are violated, one yet may gather certain truths—by listening to the words—provided the singers know enough to ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... deal of one another, and that, when we had met, our interview had been brief and our conversation conventional; but it is the intervals between the meeting that do the real damage. Absence—I do not claim the thought as my own—makes the heart grow fonder. And now, thanks to Ukridge's amazing idiocy, a barrier had been thrust between us. Lord knows, the business of fishing for a girl's heart is sufficiently difficult and delicate without the addition of needless obstacles. To cut out the naval miscreant under equal conditions would have been a task ample ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... naturally for fear of being identified. When a man did open his mouth it was only to commit some banal idiocy, for which, during office hours, he would have been haled to the nearest insane asylum and labeled incurable. Added to this was a heat matching Sahara's and the oppressive odor ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... when walking with some friends, he had pointed to an elm-tree, blasted by lightning, and had said, "I shall be like that tree: I shall die first at the top." And thus at last the doom fell. Struck on the brain, he lingered for nine years in that valley of spectral horrors, of whose only gates idiocy and madness are the hideous wardens. From this bondage he was released by death on ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... would have found peace where he found an abundance of perplexing conditions and ample expense closely adhering to every bramble bush into which the tactics of Smith hurled him. Gabrielle could not save him and she did not try. Where the cause of the trouble is idiocy of the Tescheron quality, it has to go through a long course of pulverization, maceration and cure; if you hurry the process, the goods will be sour and hurt the business, if the lot gets out under the trade-mark. ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... M.P. and the professor. The host, who was of no party, supported his guest as long as possible, and then left him to his fate. The military M.P. fled to the drawing-room to philander with Mrs. Grey; and the man of science and the African had already retired to the intellectual idiocy of a May Fair "At Home." The novelist was silent, for he was studying a scene; and the poet was absent, for he ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... longevity, or feebleness, disease, and death. It clearly points out those temperaments which are compatible with each other and harmoniously blend, and also those which, when united in marriage, result in barrenness, or produce in the offspring imbecility, deformity, and idiocy. These matters are freely discussed from original investigations and clinical observations, thus rendering the work a true and scientific ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... almost snarled. "I may laugh at my idiocy, but you haven't any right to. I know I'm ridiculous. I've known it for months. But ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sponge—utterly erased and cancelled; and many others lost their reason; some in a gentle form of pensive melancholy, some in a more restless form of feverish delirium and nervous agitation, and others in the fixed forms of tempestuous mania, raving frenzy, or moping idiocy. Two great commemorative monuments arose in after years to mark the depth and permanence of the awe—the sacred and reverential grief with which all persons looked back upon the dread calamities attached to the year ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... this multitude of lunatics, promiscuously gathered from the poor and the reduced class, comprising all varieties of mental disease, from idiocy to madness, yet all of them held in such admirable order by the law of kindness, that to the casual observer most of them betrayed no symptoms of insanity, and of the rest, many appeared to be only very ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... in front of the place I was going to in Wall Street, but I sat still in the carriage, and at last the driver scrambled down off his seat to see whether his carriage had not turned into a hearse. I couldn't have got out, any more than if I had been a corpse. What was the matter with me? Momentary idiocy, you'll say. What I wanted to get out of was Wall Street. I told the man to drive down to the Brooklyn ferry and to cross over. When we were over, I told him to drive me out into the country. As I had told him originally to drive for dear ...
— The American • Henry James
... a momentary and precarious income. He owed everything to Brodrick. He depended on Brodrick. He knew what manner of men these Brodricks were. Inexhaustibly kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence, implacable to continuous idiocy. Prothero they regarded as ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... so myself once. But Smith's sister taught me to take a higher view of girls. I admit that they have defects—they can't help 'em. There are times when I doubt if even boys are perfect. I freely admit that there is a certain amount of idiocy in the ways and manners of girls in general. Far be it from me to deny that they squeak and squeal when there is no occasion for squeaking and squealing. There is no use in denying that they are afraid ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... by the plate for 1945. The confidently asinine demeanour of this youth is hardly relieved by the absurdity of a watch suspended by a chain from the crown of his hat. That society protested against this aspect of idiocy is evinced by the harmonious costume for 1950, in which a complete revolution is to be noted. We hasten to observe that the latter plate—the one for ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... cell about four feet six inches wide, and nine long, the hideous countenance of a poor, mulatto girl, whose shrunken body, skeleton-like arms, distended and glassy eyes, tell but too forcibly her tale of sorrow. How vivid the picture of wild idiocy is pictured in her sad, sorrowing face. No painter's touch could have added a line more perfect. Now she rushes forward, with a suddenness that makes Madame Montford shrink back, appalled-now she fixes her eyes, hangs down her head, and gives vent ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... he was respectable, and as a writer he was original. He was indifferent to literary fame, and never attempted any higher style of composition than that in which he could excel. His last days were miserable, and he lingered a long while in hopeless and melancholy idiocy. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... how that was any proof of idiocy; but, to prevent the recurrence of any difficulty between his new assistant and the populace of small boys, he thought it best to take possession of the hall, and lock the door. He therefore signified to Mr. Boolpin that they would at once proceed to put up the panorama. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... our readers in the columns of the 'Jay Hawk.' That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to California's greatest bard, is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor." I turned hurriedly to my pile of rejected contributions—the nom de plume of "Yellow Hammer" did NOT appear among them; certainly I had never heard of its existence. Later, when a friend showed me one of that gifted bard's pieces, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... body is a limitation of the ego who functions through it. A withered arm, a club foot, a deformed back, in this incarnation are results of unfortunate causes which that soul has generated in past lives. In idiocy the malformation is in the brain. Of course this is not an accident. There is no element of chance which places the limitation in one body where it causes but little trouble and in another where it prevents ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... I'm fed up with feeling helpless. That socialization of knowledge has got to begin, or I'll—Oh. I don't know! Look at the idiocy of it! Here we are in the twentieth century, and people are dying like flies all over the show. Why, there's no room for houses because there's so much room needed for grave-yards! And—even if they don't die, they're ill, most of them. And I'm not ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... children. There were always girls in the school of varying degrees of intelligence, from absolute stupidity to brilliancy, but the report at the end of the term was so fashioned that the father and mother of the idiot were not offended, and the idiocy was so handled that it appeared to have some advantages. If Miss Carter had been altogether unable to master the French verbs, or to draw the model vase until the teacher had put in nearly the whole of the outline, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... written the real history of the Hohenzollerns, the kind of history not often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common to the realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William, the perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from generation to generation in many things and like many families; some of them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... all perished in the forests of Upper Canada. This was the accepted theory, and nothing could exceed the severity with which the editors of the papers politically opposed to the administration censured it for the extravagance and all-round idiocy of the whole "Aluminum Bubble Scheme," as they termed it. Dr. Jones was voted a lunatic, and the balance of the party was commiserated in the "Ahs!" and "Dear me's!" and "Poor things!" of ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... advocate, greedy of practice, style this laudable economy and patriarchal simplicity—"Avarice and aversion from civilization." As it began to rain we entered a tavern, and ordered a fowl to be roasted, as the soup and stews of yester-even were not to my taste. A booby, with idiocy marked on his countenance, was lounging about the door, and when our mid-day meal was done I ordered the man to give him a glass of slivovitsa, as plum brandy is called. He then came forward, trembling, as if about to receive sentence of death, and ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... genius, constituted his entire capital, and he needed no more. He found the colonies clamoring for justice; whining about their grievances; upon their knees at the foot of the throne, imploring that mixture of idiocy and insanity, George III., by the grace of God, for a restoration of their ancient privileges. They were not endeavoring to become free men, but were trying to soften the heart of their master. They were perfectly willing ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Pierre remained motionless and silent before that imitation grotto, that childish plaything. Some zealously devout visitors had left their visiting cards in the cracks of the cement-work! For his part, he felt very sad, and followed his companion with bowed head, lamenting the wretched idiocy of the world. Then, on emerging from the wood, on again reaching the parterre, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... had the slightest suspicion of the avocations of the proprietor. Besides, even the humblest agent of police would be expected to possess a degree of acuteness for which no one gave M. Tabaret credit. Indeed, they mistook for incipient idiocy ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... panting, and fanning herself audibly. Without the slightest ear for music, she has been plunging round the room with her husband, who is still so far infatuated as to half believe she can dance. She is an extremely pretty woman, so one can condone his idiocy. ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... the columns of the "Star," accompanied Miss Cressy McKinstry on her way home after the first display of attention and hospitality since his accession to wealth and position, he remained for some moments in a state of bewildered and smiling idiocy. It was true that their meeting was chance and accidental; it was true that Cressy had accepted his attention with lazy amusement; it was true that she had suddenly and audaciously left him on the borders of the McKinstry woods in a way that ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... chance to find out. With characteristic idiocy I was keeping out of the picture until the time was ripe. She really ran away to get away from the situation I created and she was quite right too. If I weren't haunted by these continual pictures of our offspring in the bread line, I should be rather glad than otherwise that she's shaken us all ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... evidently fascinated him, he buried himself in the indulgence of the thought of the possibility of some sort of communication with his wife. Singularly and fortunately he did not have recourse to the fruitless idiocy of spiritualism, nor engage in that humiliating intercourse with illiterate humbugs who personate the minds of men and women almost too sacred to be even for an instant associated ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... have to grow up, some day. In my opinion, forcing yourself to give up one of your hardest-held ideals—virginity—merely because of the utter bilge that those idiot head-shrinkers stuffed you with, is sheer, plain idiocy. I suppose that makes you like me even less, but I'm laying it ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... declared it unreasonable, that, since a woman was only allowed one husband, a man should, under any circumstances, be permitted to have two wives; while Raoul, glancing towards her a look of verjuice, pitied the deplorable idiocy of the man who could be fool enough to avail ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or college who has somehow managed to slip past us in the race of life, and revenge ourselves by swearing that he is an idiot still, and that idiocy is a qualification for good fortune? Swift somewhere says that a paper-cutter does its work all the better when it is blunt, and converts the fact into an allegory of human affairs showing that decorous dulness is an over-match for genius. Macaulay was incapable, both ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the suggestion was made by a bright Hawaiian, which was adopted with satisfaction, that it probably referred to that state of dreamy mental exaltation which comes with awa-intoxication. This condition, like that of frenzy, of madness, and of idiocy, the Hawaiian regarded ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... forty-six, but is a little younger. To think that if we could only get that fellow out of prison we could have him to dinner, and he would sing for us this evening! It is maddening to think that he may lose his voice in a damp hole through the idiocy of that thrice-confounded Legate!' ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... a bit excited. It really doesn't concern me at all, personally, whether you go or not. But it does look to me like a terribly silly idea. Any person with fair reasoning faculties would argue against such idiocy, just as ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... men who marry young wives, and who pay the penalty by becoming martyrs to paralysis, softening of the brain, and driveling idiocy." ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... became a secret swollen beyond its proper dimensions. They would look at him now and understand that he was not Erik Dorn, but somebody else huddled up, burning and flopping around inside. Love was a virulent form of idiocy. It meant nothing to people outside. Everything inside. Anna talking about Rachel started a panic in him. She was playing with memories of Rachel. Do you remember this? and that? As if he, of course, had forgotten her. Yes, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... off a mortgage to my grandfather, yes," he answered soberly, quite conscious of what he was doing and of its recklessness and, perhaps, idiocy. ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... real ghost appears,—by which I mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another,—if the supernatural character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on the spectator have always been most terrible,—convulsion, idiocy, madness, or even death on the spot. Consider the awful descriptions in the Old Testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers of the Hebrews; the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of all animal power. But in our common ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... that since that time he has never been of sound mind, his brain never recovering from that shock, a blow which actually broke in a portion of his skull. Since that time he has had recurrent times of violent insanity, with alternating spells of what seems a semi-idiocy. This man's mind never grew. In some ways his animal senses are keen to a remarkable degree, but of reason he has little or none. He can not tell you why he does a thing, or what will happen provided that he does thus or so. This I shall prove ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... gazing at one another for a long time; and in the back of Billy's brain lines of his old verses sang themselves to a sad little tune—the verses that reproved the idiocy of all other poets, who had very foolishly written their sonnets to other women: and yet, as the ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... effect. Explained everything—or, if she didn't explain, looked at me, and I thought she had explained. I forget now whether she did explain or not, rationally and satisfactorily, but it doesn't matter. There is no one like her, and I have reached a stage of idiocy concerning her which I would blush to describe. I see now that the feeling which a very young man, hardly out of boyhood, dignified with the name of love, is merely a kind of foundation that, when fallen ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... to the terms of the bargain, the entire enterprise, the figures on his check. His own amazing imbecility appalled him. What idiocy! What sudden madness had seized him to entangle himself in such unheard-of negotiations! True, he had played bridge until dawn the night before, but, on awaking, he had discovered no perceptible hold-over. It must have been sheer weakness of intellect that permitted him ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... could not forget. And with memory, and its redeeming pain of shame, was also the stabbing mortification of knowing that he had made a fool of himself, again! First Eleanor; then—Lily. Sometimes, with this realization of his idiocy, he would feel an almost physical nausea. It was so horrible to him, that when, a month later, the anniversary which marked his first folly came around again, he made an excuse of having to be away on business. It seemed to Maurice that to go out to their field, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... of Hercules, upon which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two—1st, my physics; he denounced me for effeminacy; 2d, he assumed, and even postulated as a datum, which I myself could never have the face to refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and intellectually, he looked upon me as below notice; but, morally, he assured me that he would give me a written character of the very best description, whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're willing, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... do it or not. Dr. P. confidently expects to make some most extraordinary discoveries of various diseases—of greed, foolish ambition, ossification of the heart, moral leprosy, chronic stupidity, latent idiocy, and that very common and often unsuspected complaint usually known as Humbug. (Humbugna Communis.) His fee in no case will exceed ten cents per week; and patients WILL BE ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... broiled lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well?" I remarked, with the engaging idiocy of ...
— Options • O. Henry
... don't suggest any new horrors," said Senator North, rising. "Besides, the Spaniards are not in the final stages of idiocy. It would be like the New York Journal to blow up the Maine, as it seems to have reached that stage of hysteria which betokens desperation; but the ship is safe as far as the Spaniards ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... that isolation causes either vivid characteristics or idiocy, seldom strong or healthy ones; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... anywhere, on unavoidable business. No, it is not because I loathe the sight of you or for any melodramatic reason of that sort. It is because, I think, I had fancied you to be not completely self-centred, after all, and I cannot bear to face my own idiocy. Why, don't you realize it was only yesterday you borrowed money from Jasper Hardress—some ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... really did question it. She didn't care. She loathed their excited, silly, hurrying suspicion; but she didn't care. It was she who had drawn them and led them on to this display of incomparable idiocy. Like her brother Nicholas she found that adversity was extremely funny; ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... stirred and turned to you, child though you were, and a strange, strange, invincible love for you sprang from the bitter ashes of a dead affection for Agnes Hunt. I wondered at myself; I sneered at my idiocy; I cursed my mad folly, and tried to believe you as unprincipled as I had found others; but the singular fascination strengthened day by day. Finally I determined to tempt you, hoping that your duplicity and deceit would wake ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... one of colossal exaggeration, both in talent and in idiocy, in virtue and in vice. Men sinned like giants and as giants atoned. Common sense, mediocrity—save upon the throne—were rare. Even the fools in their folly were great. The spectacle was recurrent of men who would smilingly stake a fortune ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... always fighting them on somebody's farm, who knows every inch of the ground), and they never risk anything except in the trap sort of manoeuvres. The brave rush of our Tommies is unknown to them, and their slim nature would only see the idiocy of walking into a death-trap, cool as in a play. Were there ever two races less alike?"' wound up the youthful philosopher in his tent. '"I really do not see how they are to ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... United States. As it was, he considered the drawings a hoax on the part of the Russians; if he had been told that they had been sent telepathically, he would probably have gone into fits of acute exasperation over such idiocy. ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... less a case of idiocy than one of possession, maleficent possession," replied Crashaw. He did not see ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... you do not violate it on pain of serious results to your master. I am tired of the charge of him anyhow; for who knows how soon his simple idiocy may turn to dangerous insanity? So the least provocation from you would cause me to send him to a pauper asylum for idiots!" she cried, warningly, as she hurried from the room to make sure that none of the officious servants should dare to harbor ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... Women; Mrs. Stanton on the Jubilee; Electricity; Progress of the Telegraph; The Mystery of the Ages; Progress of the Marvellous; A Grand Aerolite; The Boy Pianist; Centenarians; Educated Monkeys; Causes of Idiocy; A Powerful Temperance Argument; Slow Progress; Community Doctors; The Selfish System of Society; Educated Beetles; Rustless Iron; Weighing the Earth; Head and Heart; The Rectification of Cerebral Science Chapter IX.—Rectification ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... idiocy, or, as the novelists say, to complete the illusion, one goes to the refreshment-room and tosses off two or three glasses. And then something happens in your head and your heart, finer than you can read of in a fairy tale. I am a man of no ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... now and then from Mrs. Tempest, or an occasional wise interjection from Miss McCroke, who in a manner represented the Goddess of Wisdom in this somewhat frivolous family, and came in with a corrective and severely rational observation when the talk was drifting towards idiocy. ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... weight, which a bar of iron will bear and no more, so is there a certain weight of work which the organ by which we act, by which we think, and feel, and will—cannot sustain, blazing up into brief and ruinous madness, or sinking into idiocy. At the time he wrote to me, Mr. Miller and I were strangers, and I don't think I ever spoke to him: but his manner of doing the above act made me feel, that in that formidable and unkempt nature there lay the delicacy, the generosity, the noble trustfulness ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... was a sixteen-year-old Pancha, wasn't she?" asked the colonel in low tone. He had no mercy whatever on Blake, and was outspoken in condemnation of what he called his idiocy. ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... proceeded to do it, having in mind the old adage that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. There was never any doubt in Stuyvesant's mind that the first business of a ruler is to rule, and popular government seemed to him the merest idiocy. "A valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor"—the adjectives describe him well; a sufficiently imposing figure, with his slashed hose and velvet jacket and tall cane and ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... air-shaft kept a parrot. It woke Kedzie early in the morning with hysterical laughter that pierced the ears like steel saws. There was something uncannily real but hideously mirthless in its Ha-ha-ha! It would gurgle with thick-tongued idiocy: "Polly? Polly? Polly wanny ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... facts, motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous, flitted through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these girl-friends' heads! Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent mother (of the strict governess type), she was as guileless of consequences ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of chasing down to the water's edge to see that girl is enough to make you ashamed of yourself for life, Grenfall Lorry," he apostrophized. "It's worse than any lovesick fool ever dreamed of doing. I am blushing, I'll be bound. The idiocy, the rank idiocy of the thing! And suppose she should see me staring at her out there on the pier? What would she think of me? I'll not go another foot! I won't ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... be you; it never can be you:- you, who can do nothing, as your wife said, but trade upon your station - you, who spent the hours in begging money! And in God's name, what for? Why money? What mystery of idiocy ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely—"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"—I wager he ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion," and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiser thing," it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... it was separated from the body. To-day, psychology has become a section of physiology, and mental philosophers busy themselves with searching out in all its details, the close dependence of the mind upon the body. Insanity has become an inflammation of the cortical substance of the brain: idiocy results from a foetal meningitis: genius is a form of scrofula closely allied to mania: in sleep, the brain loses blood, in intellectual excitement, attracts blood; in the illumination of the death-bed, or the delirium of drunkenness, the circulation through ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... palmer's pace to the modern swagger! Stop thy friend's sacrilegious hand. Nothing can be done for B. but to reprint the old cuts in as homely but good a style as possible,—the Vanity Fair and the Pilgrims there; the silly-soothness in his setting-out countenance; the Christian idiocy (in a good sense) of his admiration of the shepherds on the Delectable mountains; the lions so truly allegorical, and remote from any similitude to Pidcock's; the great head (the author's), capacious of dreams and similitudes, dreaming in the ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb |
