"Lunacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lunacy committed to the asylum Mr. James R. Colston, a writer of some local reputation, connected with the Messenger. It will be remembered that on the evening of the 15th inst. Mr. Colston was given into custody by one of his fellow-lodgers in the Baine House, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... of their peers" been pronounced against women exercising their right to vote. No disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror—and none but disfranchised persons can be women's peers; nor has the Legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny, or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers whatever stand to-day between women and the exercise ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... within approachable distance of lunacy if I believed a word that Peter Chatfield said," she answered calmly. "Of course, he is playing a game of his own all through. He shall have his pension—if I have the power to give ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... from the cross of suffering to the throne of Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and within me there ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... inmate of a naval hospital, where he had been sent to be watched on a suspicion of lunacy. A few days ago he escaped. We'll take him off your hands and see he is sent back ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... hell I proue, With all his torments and infernall terror? Myne eyes want teares thus to bewayle my woe, My brayne is dry with weeping all too long; My sighes be spent with griefe and sighing so, And I want words for to expresse my wrong. But still, distracted in loues lunacy, And Bedlam like thus rauing in my griefe, Now rayle vpon her hayre, now on her eye, Now call her Goddesse, then I call her thiefe; Now I deny her, then I doe confesse her, Now I doe curse her, then againe ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... shufflin' the envelopes when the auld man had gone ashore: 'We're to creep round a' the south coast, standin' in for orders his weather, too. There's no question o' his lunacy now.' ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... wrath of Andrew, previously in a crescent state, actually dilated to a plenilunar orb. The Westmoreland people (for at the lakes it was we knew him) expounded his condition to us by saying that he was "maffled;" which word means "perplexed in the extreme." His wrath did not pass into lunacy; it produced simple distraction; an uneasy fumbling with the idea; like that of an old superannuated dog who longs to worry, but cannot for want of teeth. In this condition you will judge that he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... so pulled about by different alarms that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the brick ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... questioner. This famous litigant has reached a stage where things simply are as he wants them to be. Whether this poor derelict will be permitted by his deluded or unscrupulous attorneys to end his days in peace at the Hospital, time alone will tell. Thus far his lunacy case has been carried by them to ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... could have gone to the world's end. I would have helped him. I made him, didn't I, Polly? Didn't I create that man? Doesn't he owe everything to me? And to reward me, just when everything was nicely arranged, by this lunacy that spoilt everything!' ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... doubtful cause. It was no part of his plan to follow you to England. He set his face against it so strongly that he very nearly ended his mortal career for good and all in so doing. As it was, he suffered for his lunacy pretty heavily. You know what happened. He was forced to come in the end, and he paid the ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed, and at last ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the good old soul went on to say, "if Simon's wentured out without his hat to cool a head-ache: his grand-father—peace be with him! died, poor man, in a Lunacy 'Sylum: alack, Si, I wish you mayn't be going the same road. No, no, I hope not—he's always so prudent-like, and wise, and good; so kind, too, to a poor old fool like me:" and the poor old fool began to ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to a height of three hundred feet. But the first glider of whom we have any full knowledge is Otto Lilienthal of Berlin. He devoted his whole life to the study of aviation at a time when in Germany people looked upon such a pursuit as little better than lunacy. The principal professor of mathematics at the Berlin Gewerbe Academie, on hearing that Lilienthal was experimenting with aeronautics, advised him to spend no money on such things—a piece of advice which, Lilienthal remarks, was unhappily quite superfluous. In 1889 ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... word; he was mad, of course, or he would not have devised so outrageous a revenge for a fancied injury, but he was cunning enough to be my match. I knew too well that if I took any legal measures, he would contrive to shift the whole burden of lunacy upon me. I dared not court an inquiry for many reasons, and so I was compelled to pass over this ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... was in his hands,—had these things been so much as dreamed of by his judges, they would have formed the most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace. They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, have no right to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... cap, is worth nothing to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for 100,000 gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and 50,000 more borrowed since, by ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... their wives and sisters. They said truly that he was only a madman. But as prophets have always been taken for madmen, so madmen often pass for prophets; and even Stumpin' Steenie, the town-constable, had too much respect either to his prophetic claims, or his lunacy, perhaps both, to take him into custody. So through the streets of Glamerton he went on his bare feet, with tattered garments, proclaiming aloud the coming destruction, He walked in the middle of the street, and turned aside ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... your own doing, and it will simply be the most criminal act of this generation. Germany has nothing but friendship for England. I ask you, what British interests are threatened by this inevitable clash between the Slav and the Teuton? It is miserable enough for France to be dragged in. It would be lunacy for England. Therefore, though it is true that serious matters are pending, though, alas! I must return at once to see what help I can afford my country, never for a moment believe, any of you, that there exists the slightest chance of war between ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of intense low speech, crowded with gestures: and suddenly the Captain's face, till now haggard, reddened; out went his shaken fist; with eyes blazing like lunacy, up he flew to the bridge; and now he is bending down with howling throat: ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... severed. I sit up here, and write, and read Renan's Origines, which is certainly devilish interesting; I read his Nero yesterday, it is very good, O, very good! But he is quite a Michelet; the general views, and such a piece of character painting, excellent; but his method sheer lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; the conspectus is always good, and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... despair. The first has already been quoted at length. The second is the even more famous soliloquy, the terror-stricken outcry rather, of Faustus in his last hour of life. With frightful realism it confirms the fiend's scornful prophecy of a scene of 'desperate lunacy', when his labouring brain will beget 'a world of idle fantasies to overreach the devil, but all ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... of foolscap with a bare—he called it a detached—statement of the facts about Irish lunacy. He had just begun to recount his own experience when there was a knock at the door. The housekeeper, a legacy from Dr. Farelly, came in to tell him that Constable Malone wished to speak to him. ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... emotion. If there exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with the general health of the mind,—a sane type of madness, one might say. Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the same nature ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History A Second Home A Prince of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... public measures shall prevail in the commonwealth. Now, this lady was intrusted for years with one of the most important public functions ever exercised by any human being in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. We have a board, called the board of lunacy and charity, which controls the large charities for which Massachusetts is famous and in many of which she was the first among civilized communities, for the care of the pauper and the insane and the criminal woman, and the friendless and ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... entered in government suits against combinations. That idea has got to be killed! And the regulation of security issues of railroads—preposterous! Why, the President's crazy! If Mall and Gossitch and Wells don't oppose that in the Senate, I'll see that they are up before the lunacy commission—and I have ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of malarial fever, which, the doctor-book assures me, is due to some outside infection as well. Having pulled him through his fever, I am now at my wit's end, for he has lost his wits altogether. I am rather recent in practice to take up the cure of insanity. This makes the second lunacy case on this ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the one high goal of human endeavour on that day of long ago when she named her first-born Samuel? Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the self-willed peasant-mind? Was it whim or fancy?—the one streak of lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind? Or, reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... in the world? . . . Ah, there he goes!—and Brother Bonaday with him. They are off to the river, for Brother Copas carries his rod. What a strange fascination has that dry-fly fishing! And I can remember old anglers discussing it as a craze, a lunacy." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lunacy, but partially subdued, had resumed its former mastery over the unfortunate gentleman. But what an extraordinary delusion! I took a candle, and examined the picture with renewed curiosity. It certainly bore a strong resemblance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... thought and to all learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... I tell a million a day! And so does every doctor. And so does everybody—including you —for that matter. And THAT was the important thing that authorized you to venture to disobey my orders and imperil that woman's life! Look here, Hester Gray, this is pure lunacy; that girl COULDN'T tell a lie that was intended to injure a person. The thing is impossible —absolutely impossible. You know it yourselves—both of you; you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... falsehood. If he had been a citizen of the Southern States, he might have suborned witnesses to prove that there was black blood in the veins of Valentine Hawkehurst. If he had not been opposed to so strong an opponent as Dr. Jedd, he might have tried to get a commission of lunacy to declare Charlotte Halliday a madwoman, and thus invalidate her marriage. As it was, he knew that he could do nothing. He had failed. All was said ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... which of the long theological list is to be selected as the God? A God, like everything else from the heights to the depths, can be known only by his attributes; and what the Atheist does is not to argue against the existence of any God, which would be sheer lunacy, but to take the attributes affirmed by Theism as composing its Deity and inquire whether they are compatible with each other and with the facts of life. Finding that they are not, the Atheist simply sets Theism aside as not proven, and goes on his way without further afflicting himself ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... old thing. But it's pretty obvious, isn't it, that she wants us to believe she knows what we're after. She's vindictive. She imagines she owes me a grudge on my brother's account. It might soothe her to think she had made me nervous. And by gad—it sounds like lunacy, and mind you I'm not propounding it for fact!—there's just one chance that she really does know where ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... as a mild form of lunacy, and have no disposition to debate with men who indulge in such delusions, which have prevailed to some extent, at different times, in all countries, but whose life has been brief, and which have ever shared the fate of other popular delusions. Congress ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... child!" cried he, interrupting her and pushing back her hands, "what lunacy are you uttering? Do you imagine that I go about fiddling for pence at ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... deliberate orders in German for murder, murdering for their lives; and they, too, were like himself, and ate and drank and either laced their boots or had them laced daily. And the staggering apprehension of the miraculous lunacy of ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... feel sure that, however others may have referred it to stupidity, ignorance, or lunacy, you took it as the sign of a modest, simple, unspoiled, unsophisticated soul. Absolute confidence in such matters comes dangerously near audacity and impudence. My first wish would be to make no such blunder; ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... like the Tara he knew. "Very well. Why accuse me of incipient lunacy? I care, too. Always have done. Think how topping it would be, you and I together, exploring all the wonderland of our Game and Mummy's tales—Udaipur, Amber, Chitor, perhaps the shrine ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... been well illustrated during the past forty years in the flourishing county of Glamorgan in Wales, as is shown by Dr. R.S. Stewart ("The Relationship of Wages, Lunacy, and Crime in South Wales," Journal of Mental Science, January, 1904). The staple industry here is coal, 17 per cent of the population being directly employed in coal-mining, and wages are determined by the sliding ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of this session the lord-chancellor gave notice of bills respecting bankruptcy, lunacy, and county courts. Adverting first to the subject of bankruptcies, he commenced by paying a compliment to Lord Brougham, upon the improvements in that department of the law which he had introduced. His lordship continued:—"That system, however, excellent as it was, comprised within its jurisdiction ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and hunters, uneducated and unpoetical past all degree, never leave it except to get drunk. Their money gone, back they go to get fresh strength and more pelf for another orgie; but if by chance they abandon the wild, free life, they soon drink themselves to lunacy or death, and their last babblings are of the glorious wilderness they all love." [Footnote: "The Great Deserts and Forests of North America," p. 22.] This is the too exuberant expression of one who had ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... if you saw it. In truth, Merimee was the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred, and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of maliciously ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... dethrone a king and to elect his successor, was a practice quite unknown to the constitution, and had a tendency to render kingly power entirely dependent and precarious: that where the sovereign, from his tender years, from lunacy, or from other natural infirmity, was incapacitated to hold the reins of government, both the laws and former practice agreed in appointing a regent, who, during the interval, was invested with the whole power of the administration: that the inveterate and dangerous prejudices ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... must have shed upon him a ray just strong enough to make him a visible object; for, suddenly, ping! something hit him violently on the leg and bowled him over like a rabbit into a providential shell-hole. And there he lay quaking for a long time, while the lunacy of his adventure coarsely and ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... door to collapse. I tried to cry, but could only raise a squeak like a bat. A wheel started to run round in my head, and, when I looked at the moon, I saw that it was rotating in time. Things were very bad with me. It was 'Mwanga who saved me from lunacy. He had been appointed my keeper, and the first I knew of it was a violent kick in the ribs. I rolled over on the grass down a short slope. The brute squatted beside me, and prodded me with ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... attention from this topic to his own affairs, on which, for the next half-hour, he was quite loquacious; giving me to understand, among other pieces of information, that he was then at the Gray's Inn Coffee-house to lay his professional evidence before a Commission of Lunacy, touching the state of mind of a patient who had become deranged from excessive drinking. 'And I assure you, sir,' he said, 'I am extremely nervous on such occasions. I could not support being what is called Bullied, sir. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... judges not unnaturally were shocked, for the conclusion was forced upon them that if Gille's confession were true they were not trying a man who had been perverted by outward influence but one who had been born perverted. Who then was responsible for his crimes? Lunacy sometimes in these modern days serves as a scapegoat, but the knowledge of lunacy in the fifteenth century was not so complete as it is now and the judges preferred to believe that Gille was lying. And about ten years ago London found itself in the same moral ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Does not lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner table ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has these fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... William was not a form of romantic idealism bordering on lunacy; it was instead a token of his blundering stupidity; also in a sense his four-square frankness in owning that Prussia was playing second fiddle to Austria, at this interesting moment. And, in truth, all that William thought was logical; the stream was tending that way; few ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... and the great soul, with all its capacities, its solemn attributes, and sounding claims, is, while on earth, but a jest to this mountebank,—the body,—from the dream which toys with it for an hour, to the lunacy which shivers it into a driveller, laughing as it plays with its own fragments, and reeling benighted ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... move the omission of the item for his nephew's pay.' [Footnote: Mr. Ralph Charlton Palmer was Lord Selborne's second cousin, and secretary to Lord Selborne in the Lord Chancellor's Office. He was afterwards a Commissioner in Lunacy.] ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... which twenty years previously could not have entered into the wildest dreams. Indeed, had a prophet stood in Hanover square at that epoch, and portrayed the future, he would have been met with the charge of lunacy. $30,000 rent for a store was not more absurd than the idea that trade would ever wing its way to a neighborhood chiefly known through the police reports, and only visited by respectable people in the work of philanthropy. The enterprise of New York houses, in either ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... should be more unfading than flowers. What a strange destiny was his! The victim of untoward accidents, persecuted by some evil spirit, and leading an aimless, desultory life, which he yet feared would lead on to lunacy. What should he do in the present instance? Be patient? Yes, he would be calm, forgiving, philosophical as ever. Footsteps are approaching; the door of his cell opens; perhaps it is already the token of his release. Yes, one ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... woman has not as much right to see the world as a man, if she can pay her own expenses, and bear her own burthen, without being a trouble to any one. It is certainly no business of his how I spend my money, or where and how I pass my life. Not long ago I heard that he was going to issue a writ of lunacy against me, in order to get me and my property into his possession. This is mean; for he very well knows that I am not mad; and he is very rich, so that there is no excuse for his avarice. Fortunately, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... Father Goriot The Thirteen Eugenie Grandet Cesar Birotteau Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon The Firm of Nucingen Another Study of Woman A Daughter of ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... door to freedom. And, after all, if we have to choose our masters, it is less disgrace to put up with Roman emperors than with German priestesses.' Thus the common people: the chieftains used more violent language. 'It was Civilis' lunacy that had driven them to war. He wanted to remedy his private troubles[555] by ruining his country. The Batavians had incurred the wrath of heaven by blockading Roman legions, murdering Roman officers, and plunging into a ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... a toy, an absurd and pitiful toy. Real genius and lunacy had many an over-lapping line, Jerry reflected as he approached to look inside. But he found Winslow in a room surrounded by a network of curving, latticed struts. The machine was no makeshift of a demented builder: it was a beautiful bit of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... seventy-five thousand people in this town, and there'll be seventy-five thousand bankrupts if this lunacy goes on. And there's seventy-five thousand maggots in your brain, and seventy-five thousand in John Pintard's; and if you two live to see nineteen hundred, you'll have twice five million two hundred and fifty-seven thousand ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... insanity are heredity and stress or strain. Lunacy is not infrequent in children of epileptic, alcoholic, or insane parents, and those born of parents suffering from nervous disease frequently are in such condition that shock, intense emotion, dissipation, or exhausting diseases render them insane. Drinking alcoholic beverages is the most ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... none of it. This freedom is possessed only by him who is afflicted over much with himself because he has been crazed by others and made mad by his escape from them. I suppose I am mad, for to believe myself perfectly sane in a greatly mad world is surely a subtle species of lunacy. And yet I am compelled to act towards others as if they were more sane than I. To feel as if one were eternally in a court-room trial, with lean lunatics for lawyers and fat philistines ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... well as a beautifier, and the old fancy of partial madness when the moon was at the full (from which the word "lunacy") was not altogether unwarranted by reality. At sea, in the tropics, a night on deck under the broad full moon stiffens and entirely maddens, if it does not kill; here the madness is only partial and it has a general reference to mischief and the opposite sex; but the influence is the same, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... speech. This friend in need spent a bad hour, a hard hour with Waring. Calmness was ineffective, clear reasoning impossible. The accusation of drug-using was vehemently denied, and it was only the doctor's courageous threat to have him arrested and tried on a lunacy charge that broke ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... vanish? She draws near. She approaches the jasmine; she raises her arms, the sleeves falling like a vapor down to the shoulders; rises upon tiptoe, and plucks a spray. O Memory! Can it be? Can it be? Is this his quest, or is it lunacy? The ground seems to Monsieur Vignevielle the unsteady sea, and he to stand once more on a deck. And she? As she is now, if she but turn toward the orange, the whole glory of the moon will shine upon her face. His heart stands still; he is waiting for her ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... seven hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and always we said no. Yet there was nothing I should have liked better: I was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That day we had advanced 11/2 miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay work. This was quite a good march—and Cape Crozier is 67 ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... one; the accused had ample means to indulge every wish, and nothing short of lunacy (of which she never showed the slightest sign) could have induced her to commit so petty a theft. Her high character and the absence of motive combined to render it incredible, and, had she been capable ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... the brother intended to excuse himself thereby. How, indeed, should he excuse himself? Louie's character was a fixed quantity to be reckoned on by all who had dealings with her. One might as well excuse oneself for letting a lunatic escape by the pretext of his lunacy. Dora perfectly understood his tone. Yet in her heart of hearts she forgave him—for she knew not what!—became his champion. There was a dry sharpness of self-judgment, a settled conviction of coming ill in all he said which wrung ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grumble. It seemed just as if Long Tom Lane was making game of an old man in trouble. 'Twas either that or lunacy. And there was no time for nonsense off the Gingerbread coast in ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... that the whole affair was stark lunacy. Here were we three simpletons sitting in a London flat and projecting a mission into the enemy's citadel without an idea what we were to do or how we were to do it. And one of the three was looking at the ceiling, and whistling softly through ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... it is that men who can command attention need no testimonial from a commission in lunacy. People who have lived and are living are the only ones who have a message for living men ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... themselves. Never been to a school before, except that wretched little dame's school, and he goes practically straight to the top of the third form—at nine years of age!" They discussed his future. There could be no sign of lunacy in discussing his future up to a certain point, but each felt that to discuss the ultimate career of a child nine years old would not be the act of a sensible parent; only foolish parents would be so fond. Yet each was dying to discuss his ultimate career. Constance yielded first ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... magic which desires power for the sake of power alone than to any transcendental type. Thus it included the power to render the magician invisible, to change his bodily shape, to produce an enchanted sleep, to induce lunacy, and to inflict death ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... intelligence." To educate the intelligence is to save it from its peculiar perils of disease and death; it is to "purge it of its offenses." We shall not educate the intelligence if we weary it by making it learn things. This is patent in these days of ours, when the victims of nervous disorders and lunacy abound, and when, even among those who are considered healthy, the material consequences of madness may explode, threatening the whole of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... they be not shifted anew once in a few months grow too sour for their husbands.... He that makes coats for the moon had need take measure every noon, and he that makes for women, as often to keep them from lunacy." ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... chilled by a lowering of the temperature of the atmosphere, will tell on the most genial temper, relax the strongest intellect, and dim the brightest imagination; while other physical causes, quite as mysterious, can make reason reel and lunacy become ascendant. The very infirmities of old age; the constant toil required to satisfy our cravings for food and raiment; the wounds and bruises the body receives, and which agonise it, and the deformity which so often disfigures it, cramping ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... disdaining complaint, he franticly snatched up a pitch-fork, drove it at me, and, I luckily avoiding it, struck the prongs into the barn-door; with the exclamation, 'Damn your soul! I'll make you feel me!' The moment after he was seized with a sense of his own lunacy, turned as pale as death, and stood aghast with horror! My supposed crime was that I had eaten some milk, the last of which I myself had seen the dog lap. Perceiving the terror of his mind, I took courage and told him, 'Jowler eat the milk: I saw him, just as he had done. I would ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... gave indications of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad in ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... for you to try to prevent your ruining your life by a single piece of lunacy," he told her as he sought to steady her with the directness of his gaze. "You don't have to go on with Holbury if you choose to leave him, but this is the one place of all others for you to avoid." He cast a hasty ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... and illusion is sought in the over-excitement of the cerebro-spinal system. As this stimulation may be very various in its intensity and significance, from the momentary rush of blood to complete lunacy, so hallucinations and illusions may be insignificant or signs of very serious mental disturbances. When we seek the form of these phenomena, we find that all those psychical events belong to it which ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... The lieutenant of the Britomart and the Superintendent of Enlistments were in a state of incipient lunacy. Oh, the fool! They would break him if they could. They would write to the Secretary. They would—but as they growled and cursed behind him, Eben McClure suddenly remembered that Julian Wemyss and my ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... great deal of licence in consequence of their weak-mindedness. Accordingly, the impostors above mentioned, who used generally to eke out the gifts of the charitable by stealing, when detected in their theft, would plead, as a rule, lunacy as an excuse ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... may, no doubt, still be met with who think it a serious matter to buy a book if it cost more than 3s. 9d. It was recently alleged in an affidavit made by a doctor in lunacy that for a well-to-do bachelor to go into the Strand, and in the course of the same morning spend L5 in the purchase of 'old books,' was a ground for belief in his insanity and for locking him up. These, however, are but vagaries, for it is certain that the number of people who will read ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... nor disposed to issue a Commission of Lunacy against you. It may be all true, for anything I know to the contrary, but really I cannot get up any interest in the subject. I never cared for gossip in my life, and disembodied gossip, such as these worthy ghosts supply their friends with, is not more interesting ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... pamphleteer, but to posterity he is the creator of public conscience in Ireland. He was the father of patriotic journalism, and the first to defend Ireland's rights through literature. Though his popularity was quenched in lunacy, his impress upon Irish politics remains as powerful and lasting ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... landing on the sand-spit in the Sea of Timor. I often found this deafness a very serious drawback, especially when hunting. I was sometimes at a loss to hear the "coo-ee" or call of my natives. Fortunate men! they did not even understand what deafness meant. Lunacy also was unknown among them, and such a thing as suicide no native can possibly grasp or understand. In all my wanderings I only met one idiot or demented person. He had been struck by a falling tree, and was ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... irrational. He becomes the puppet of passions which the sane man cannot so much as picture to his fancy, the victim of desire, ever recurring and ever destined to remain unsatisfied; nor is any hallucination more akin to lunacy than the mirage of a joy that leaves the soul thirstier than it was before, the paroxysm of unnatural pleasure which wearies the nerves that crave ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... language and dancing new corroboree steps, clad only in her black skin, came up. Matah told her to go away, but she only corroboreed round him and said she wanted to see me. I have the most morbid horror of lunacy in any form. I was once induced to go over a lunatic asylum—the horror of it haunts me still. However, I thought it would never do to show the coward I was, so though I felt as if I had been scooped out and filled up with ice, I went ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... unnatural tendencies, we apply, in the general way, the term "Insane Diathesis." This diathesis may be inherited or acquired. Those who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents or from an ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in the blood. But they do receive from their progenitors oftentimes certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as upon their physical being, which impressions, like iron molds, fix and shape their ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Throw him to th' earth, like a dead dog despis'd. Lameness and leprosy, blindness and lunacy, Poverty, shame, pride, and the name of villain, Light on me, ...
— The Orphan - or, The Unhappy Marriage • Thomas Otway
... the trees of that name, and other resinous plants, curing ulcerated lungs, &c. Sardinia, melancholy and madness, replanted with true Anticyran hellebore, was famous; whilst Thusus (especially in Summer) brought almost all the inhabitants to lunacy and distraction for want of it. And what the effects and benefit of such plantations have produc'd, is conspicuous in one of the most celebrated cities of the East, the famous Ispahan, clear'd of the pestilence, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... mankind into a pit of lunacy. "They call it war," cried the speaker; "but I call it murder." And he went on to picture to them what was happening in Europe at that hour—he brought the awful nightmare before their eyes, he showed them homes blown to pieces, cities given to the flames, the ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... "What an ass! I'm allowing myself to get personally interested in this case; or to imagine that I'm personally interested. Folly. The girl is nothing to me. I'll never see her again. I care about her as I would about anybody in trouble. And—that's all. This lunacy of restlessness over the situation has got—to—stop." He was firm with himself. He sat down at his table and wrote a business note before he touched the letter again; but he saw the letter out of the tail of his eye all the time and he knew his pulse was going harder as, finally, he lifted the ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... and supported by them at an annual cost of $16,000. In it nothing European, either in the way of drugs or treatment, is tried. There is a dispensary connected with it, where advice is daily given to about a hundred and twenty people; and, though lunacy is rare in China, they are building a lunatic asylum at the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... but that was not Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... and battalions to their very doors. But now they were fugitives every one from the city of their pride, which they had surrendered without striking a solitary blow for its defence; while the actual building in which their lunacy took final shape, and launched itself on an astonished Christendom, I beheld full to overflowing with the deadly fruit of their doing. In the very presence of the president's chair of state, here a Boer, there a Briton, it may be of New Zealand birth or Canadian born, moaned out his ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... was how Hamlet got his opportunity before Shakespear touched him. The originality of Shakespear's version lay in his taking the lunatic sympathetically and seriously, and thereby making an advance towards the eastern consciousness of the fact that lunacy may be inspiration in disguise, since a man who has more brains than his fellows necessarily appears as mad to them as one who has less. But Shakespear did not do for Pistol and Parolles what he did for ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... a Thursday; and on the following day an inquest was held on the mother's body, and a verdict of Mary's lunacy was immediately found by the jury. The Lambs had a few friends. Mr. Norris—the friend of Charles's father and of his own childhood—"was very kind to us;" and Sam. Le Grice "then in town" (Charles writes) "was as a brother to me, and gave up every hour of his time in constant ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavored to soothe his three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy (or delirium tremens) rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes it expressed itself in extravagant shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... sight. Now, as Bigot explained it to me, this was to signify that she was not of the nature of other women; for they have all the moon at their heads, and consequently their brains are always troubled with a lunacy. This makes me willing to believe what you said, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... whose dried remains, in a mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums. But the Australian species, instead of merely mimicking the knight on a chess-board, looks rather like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage of lunacy, with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines flattened out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly indistinguishable in hue and shape from the fucus round which the creature clings for ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... and keen edges of swords, and warlike borders of broad shields, the hero Suibhne was filled and intoxicated with horror, panic, and imbecility; his feet trembled as if incessantly shaken by the force of a stream; the inlets of his hearing were expanded and quickened by the horrors of lunacy; his speech became faltering from the giddiness of imbecility; his very soul fluttered with hallucinations, and with many and various phantasms. He might be compared to a salmon in a weir, or to a bird after being caught in the strait prison of a crib," &c. "When he was seized with this ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Stuff! lunacy! There is a rascal in our midst, a libertine, a villain worse than a murderer; and we are not to learn who he is! In our ignorance we are to shake him by the hand; to introduce him into our homes; to trust ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... former self, the wreck of what he was, and a picture of fallen and shattered genius. To drive away the hideous phantasmagorias that tortured him, as with the stings of demons, he had recourse to gin, and soon became a confirmed drunkard: the next stage was lunacy; and he was confined for fourteen months in Saint Luke's Hospital for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... grossly as the few? And faultless kings run down by common cry, For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790 If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead's images, But government itself at length must fall To nature's state, where all have right to all. Yet, grant ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... A Bachelor's Establishment A Start in Life A Woman of Thirty The Commission in Lunacy The Government Clerks A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Firm of Nucingen A Man ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... vegetation, life are not these things either, and yet life, vegetation, movement, gravitation, are given to matter. To say that God cannot make matter think is to say the most insolently absurd thing that anyone has ever dared utter in the privileged schools of lunacy. We are not certain that God has treated matter like this; we are only certain that He can. But what matters all that has been said and all that will be said about the soul? what does it matter that it has been called entelechy, quintessence, flame, ether? that it has been thought universal, uncreated, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... spoke, as did still Prof. Pomme at the end of the eighteenth century, "of the shrivelling up of the nerves."[14] But above all, one preserved the conviction that these queer disorders were very different to the mental disorders of lunacy. These peculiar individuals had, it was said, all their reason; they remained capable of understanding their fellow creatures and of being understood by them; they were not to be expelled from society like the poor lunatics; therefore their ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... said to Dale, finding his retainer's eye bent inquiringly on him when he reached the street. The word had a curiously detached sound in his ears. "Home!" It savored of rank lunacy to think that within a few short hours he would be standing on foreign soil, striving desperately with naked steel to defend his ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... dog—a queen! Ah Tiny, dear departing pug! She lives, but she is past sixteen And scarce can crawl across the rug. I loved her beautiful and kind; Delighted in her pert Bow-wow: But now she snaps if you don't mind; 'Twere lunacy to love ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... called Teampull Ronain and its burial ground Cladh Ronain. St. Ronan is said to have been Abbot of Kingarth, Bute, where he died in 737. Holy wells bear his name at Strowan (Perthshire), Chapelton in Strathdon (Aberdeenshire), and the Butt of Lewis; the latter is famed for the cure of lunacy. ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... countenances when they try to frown: but such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversion,—of irreconcilable alienation. It may be said he puts on the madman; but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will give him leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of his art, or as Dame Quickly would say, "like one of ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and particularly in a man that might ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of lunacy, an everlasting opium dream without the opium; but I am grateful to him for living such a life, since it has bequeathed us some exquisite poetry,' said Lesbia, who had been too carefully cultured to fleer or ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the minister's camel, so as to prevent him from falling. The friendly ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... to resist a legalised process, I gave in, and thus was I, a perfectly sane man, incarcerated in a lunatic asylum! There I had to remain while Sir Lockesley saw my solicitors, communicated with the Commissioners in Lunacy and others, and after much correspondence and innumerable interviews, at last secured my release; but not until I had endured more than a week's confinement in that ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... anything like anybody else. There was always some diverting bit of individual lunacy to make his proceedings interesting. This morning Riverton discovered that Emma Campbell was going away, too. Emma appeared in a black cashmere dress, a blue-and-white checked gingham apron on which a basket of flowers was embroidered in red cross-stitch, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... to give each of the officers a drop of whiskey from my flask, and I never saw men drink so thirstily. Their hands and lips trembled as they took it, and their eyes shone like lunacy, as the hot drops sank to the cold vitals, and pricked the frozen blood. Mingling with the privates, I stirred up some native specimens of patriotism, that appeared to be in great doubt as to the causes and ends of the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Sams. Agon. 600, "humours black That mingle with thy fancy"; and Nash's Terrors of the Night (1594): "(Melancholy) sinketh down to the bottom like the lees of the wine, corrupteth the blood, and is the cause of lunacy." ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Lama the priest of Such-zen looking for a River, address care of Tirthankars' Temple, Benares. P. M.—Please note boy is apple of eye, and rupees shall be sent per hoondi three hundred per annum. For God Almighty's sake." Now, is that ravin' lunacy or a business proposition? I ask you, because I'm fairly at my ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... at least in that. Garry drew a long breath. If Kenny tramped his way, another inexplicable factor in his lunacy, by the time he reached the farmhouse Brian would be well on ahead. And Garry was bitterly familiar with Kenny's incapacity for steadiness of any kind. Kenny, it developed, was thinking in ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... condition of mind must be of frequent occurrence, both in the medical and in the legal professions, is apparent from the large and rapidly increasing amount of lunacy in our modern civilization. Wharton and Stille's "Medical Jurisprudence" states (sec. 770, note) that in 1850 there was in Great Britain one lunatic to about one thousand persons; only thirty years later ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... many intermediate operations. Many that presume to laugh at projectors, would consider a flight through the air in a winged chariot, and the movement of a mighty engine by the steam of water as equally the dreams of mechanick lunacy; and would hear, with equal negligence, of the union of the Thames and Severn by a canal, and the scheme of Albuquerque, the viceroy of the Indies, who in the rage of hostility had contrived to make Egypt a barren desert, by turning the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... to be indigestion, that we're rather too skeptical. Well, Mr. Cathcart believes both in indigestion, so to speak, and the devil. He believes that those evil spirits are at us all the time, trying to get in at any crack they can find—that in one person they produce lunacy—I must say it seems to me rather odd the way in which lunatics so very often become horribly blasphemous and things like that—and in another just shattered nerves, and so on. They take advantage, he says, of any weak ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... carries to the point of lunacy that casuistical rhetoric, introduced by Ariosto and refined upon by Tasso, with which luckless heroines or heroes announce their doubts and difficulties to the world in long soliloquies. The ten stanzas which set forth Falserina's ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... topic of legal proceedings, let us add a word upon the substantial improvements effected in the administration of justice during the late session, and of which the last volume of the statute-book affords abundant evidence, principally under the heads of bankruptcy, insolvency, and lunacy. Great and salutary alterations have been effected in these departments, as well as various others; the leading statutory changes being most ably carried into effect by the Lord Chancellor, who continues ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead in me. A moment later ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... go through the whole roster of the plagues. Suffice it to say that whatever now torments poor mortals, from tooth-ache to cold in the head, and from rheumatism to lunacy, was known to our ancestors in aggravated forms. Deleterious was the use of alcohol, the evils of which were so little understood that it was actually prescribed for many disorders of which it is a ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of medicine who dwelt in 1828 at number 22, rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve—the residence of the Marquis d'Espard. [The Commission in Lunacy.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... mislead and deceived by the evil spirit, who is often permitted, as the instrument of God, to punish guilty men. When resorted to, as a means of relieving fools of their earnings, it is sacrilegious; and those who support such impious humbugs can be excused from deadly sin only on the grounds of lunacy. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... first. Who can stop him?" On the eve of the battle of Copenhagen he wrote to her, "Before you receive this, all will be over with Denmark. Either your Nelson will be safe, and Sir Hyde Parker victor, or your own Nelson will be laid low." What deep and genuine love-lunacy to be found in a terrific warrior, whose very name terrified those who had the honour to fight against him! The incongruity of it baffles one's belief, and seems to reverse the very order of human construction. In matters concerning his profession and highly technical State ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... sane, and whether the uncertainty of the issue of our search may not drive her mad again. She will probably spoil everything by chattering at all the embassies. By the by, since we are on the subject of death, lunacy, and other similar annoyances, I may as well tell you that Laleli is very ill, and it is not expected that she can live. I heard it this ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... lunacy," said Gwenlyn pleasantly. "Just like it would have seemed stark-raving lunacy, once upon a time, to think of people talking to each other when they were a thousand miles apart. Like it seemed insane to talk about flying machines. And again when they said there could be a space-drive ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... two boys among these men who, in spite of their lunacy, had an eye to business, and begged pathetically for coppers, though of what use they could be to them in that place I cannot imagine. I saw no girls under twelve years of age. There were several boys who appeared scarcely in ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... grasped in my hand, I dashed out—along, down, opening wrong doors, stumbling over steps, cursing the day I was born, still more the day on which I took a notion to travel, and arrived finally at the bar of the Inn, in a state of excitement bordering on lunacy. The barmaids looked at me 'with wonder and amazement.' 'Is the coach gone?' I gasped out. 'The coach? Yes!' 'Oh! and you have let it away without me! Oh! stop it, cannot you stop it?' and out I rushed into the street, with streaming hair and streaming towel, and almost ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury |
