"Sanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... English divine fancied that all the world might go mad and nobody know it. The conception suggests a query whether the standard of sanity, as of fashions and prices, be not a purely artificial one, an accident of convention, a law of society, an arbitrary institute, and therefore a possible mistake. A sage and a maniac each thinks the other mad. The decision is a matter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... which he left it, and the character of the society in which it had to be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity. Mahmud, as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a framework. His operations had been almost entirely forcible—of a kind understood by and congenial to the Osmanli character—and ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... restraint, as used formerly under male superintendents, and, I may say, as still used in other hospitals than that of Norristown. Her skill in providing amusement, instruction and employment of various kinds, for the comfort and restoration of her patients to sanity and physical health, I feel sure has never been equaled in any hospital for the treatment of insane women. It is exceedingly interesting to see the school which she has established, and in which a large number of the insane are daily instructed, amused and interested. It ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... time when the political madness of one party was sure to be checked by the sanity, or at any rate the jealousy of the other. At the last election I should have voted for the Conservatives (for the first time in my life) had it not been for Lord Randolph Churchill; but I thought that by thus jumping out of the Gladstonian frying-pan into the Churchillian fire ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... the hoop, but not so rapidly, for here it was that the first faint doubt of his sanity came in. However, she brought ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... are these women doing at Grecourt? To condense their purpose into a phrase, I should say that by their example they are bringing sanity back into the lives of the French peasants. That is what the American Fund for French Wounded is doing at Blerancourt, what all these reconstruction units are doing in the devastated areas, and what the American Red Cross is doing on a much larger scale ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... Byrne describes in detail the skilful manner in which he found his broken head bandaged, informs us that he had lost a great deal of blood, and ascribes the preservation of his sanity to that circumstance. He sets down Gonzales' profuse apologies in full too. For it was Gonzales who, tired of waiting for news from the English, had come down to the inn with half his band, on his way to the ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... which we call humour. It remains a function of criticism, as may be seen from the simple fact that no man was ever a good critic of anything under the sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of humour is a frequent cause of the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... dangling from her arm beneath the loose wrap, which she wore very much askew, a black something, which, as she lifted her arm to pass her hand across her twitching lips, I perceived was an ear-trumpet attached to a long black tube such as is used by the deaf, and my fears for her sanity were increased. ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... I hesitated, and then, inspired by the music and the thought of Lisbeth, I followed suit. It was all very mad, of course, but who cared for sanity on ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... first barrier of American defense. I ask you, gentlemen, to ignore this request as you would ignore the statements of any person ... er, slightly demented. I should like to offer a recommendation that the general's sanity be investigated, and an inquiry be made as to the mental health of anyone else connected with this ...
— Navy Day • Harry Harrison
... are facts or not," returned the other man, coolly. "Since I know nothing whatever about them, they are beyond my province. Unless you wish to bring ruin upon yourself, and unwelcome notoriety and possibly an official inquiry into her sanity upon Miss Lawton, you will not repeat this incredible accusation. Only my very real sympathy for her has enabled me to listen with what patience I have to the unparalleled insolence of this charge, but you are going too far. I see ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... regarded the little caricature with astonishment. Something of sanity came back to Joel Latham. "We?" he said. "I found it. It's mine. I never knew you until ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... of England's feeling about the chaos that reigned beyond the Texan border lines. Monsieur Foret did not fully agree with the Englishman's general attitude, but when Cadiz quoted from one of Enoch's speeches, the ambassadors united in praise of the sanity of Enoch's arguments. The President did not commit himself in any way. But when he said good night to Enoch, he added in the ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... understand now. I couldn't then. I wanted to hurt you—as I was hurt. Your sanity made me desperate. I couldn't understand why you should be so sane while I was not. You were greater than I—and though I loved you for it (O Philidor, how I loved you!) I meant that you should pay for my heart-throbs—that you ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... and other friends of the Neville family, and her looks toward that lady were now so glum and ill-natured that Mr. Powers could not fail to notice them, and was more than ever beset by doubts as to her perfect sanity. They were a queer couple, he thought, to go wandering together through the ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... combating the crude or untenable form of a proposition than inquiring with sympathetic insight into the worth of its substance. But these things are perversions of his excellencies, defects of his virtues. His characteristic qualities are mental integrity, accuracy of statement, sanity of judgment, capacity for sustained intellectual toil. Such men are investigators, scholars; when properly blended with the imaginative type they become inventors and teachers. They make good theologians and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... their spores, attacked the monstrous bodies, grew and entwined within the gray convolutions that were their brain centers. And as the tiny thread-roots probed and tightened, the aliens screamed soundlessly. The intelligences toppled and fell, and at last that few among them who retained sanity gathered their lunatic brethren and fled as ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... gentle sleep while the stomach was still full enough from the last meal to be reasonably comfortable and the throat yet unparched. Would it be the act of an unbalanced mind or one of the most supreme sanity? ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... as a heavenly melody freighted full of beautiful sentiment and holy rapture comes to them as an intolerable agony, a-maddenin' discord, that threatens their sanity, that rouses 'em up from their fitful sleep, that murders sleep—the bells to them seem murderus, strikin' noisily with brazen hands, at ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... here suggests itself whether a person of present sound mind, but who had formerly been deranged, can legally be initiated. The answer to this question turns on the fact of his having perfectly recovered. If the present sanity of the applicant is merely a lucid interval, which physicians know to be sometimes vouched to lunatics, with the absolute certainty, or at best, the strong probability, of an eventual return to a state of mental derangement, he is not, of course, qualified for initiation. But if there has been a ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... month to be exact, the mother, described to me as being in a state of great distress, visited Justice Cannavan, then sitting in chambers at White Plains, and asking for a private interview with him, requested an inquiry into the sanity of the girl Margaret, with a view, as she explained, of protecting her own life. Her daughter, she alleged, had without warning developed a homicidal tendency aimed at ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... cure-alls of the true Galloway man. It is not every Scot who stands through all temptation so square in the right way as morning and night to confine himself to these; but he who does so shall have his reward in a rare sanity of judgment and lightness of spirit, and a capacity for work unknown to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... ... then a shadow looming above him. Hot breath against his cheek, and the swift sweep of an animal tongue on his face. He flung up his hand, gripped thick fur, and held on as if he had found one anchor of sanity in a world gone ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... Her father's suspicions as to Dudley's perfect sanity had, of course, reached her ears, and she felt so much pity for the poor fellow whose confession she was then hearing that she dared not even raise her eyes to his face again. He went on, hurrying his words, as if anxious to get ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... an absurdity too monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind. But why are such notions absurd, and why should sanity reject them? The law of Relativity, of which we have previously spoken, may find its application here. These Evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... me," remarked her father. "After all, there isn't much difference in prisons! But I want to repeat, as emphatically as possible, that I can't keep on loafing here for a month and preserve my sanity. Don't you see how much whiter my hair's getting? I'm willing to do anything in reason to oblige you, and I fully realise the importance of your ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... achieve. We need not subscribe to the Nirvana philosophy. A certain intensity of desire is normal, but modern life tends to a morbid frenzied intensity. Most of us need, in the interest of mental health or sanity, to moderate our desires. A business man who had set his heart on fulfilling a large responsibility nearly wrecked his health from worry over the outcome. His wise physician prescribed that, before sitting down to his desk each day, he should spend five minutes repeating and ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... when in society; others are thrown on to balance; the excitement of company, and the observation of other characters, correct their biases. Margaret always appeared to unexpected advantage in conversation with a large circle. She had more sanity than any other; whilst, in private, her vision was often ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... neither very important nor very extensive; but such as it is, happily for the reputation of the writer's taste, if not for her sanity, I believe it is in my power to show the trifle I thought it decorous to write, in reply to your own letter. Here is a copy," she added, opening what in fact was a draught, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... During short periods of sanity, or of only partial aberration, Otis's wit and humor, rendered more quaint and striking by the peculiarities of his mental condition, made him the delight of a small circle of friends. The following anecdote, admirably told by President Adams, presents in a very graphic manner ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... is devoted to Swedenborg, and a very valuable little sketch it is, and one which goes far to clear up the moral character, and the reputation for sanity also, of that much-calumniated philosopher, whom the world knows only as a dreaming false prophet, forgetting that even if he was that, he was also a sound and severe scientific labourer, to whom our modern physical science is ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... their heads, before it breaks in its desolating fury." In this sentiment there is not a reasonable man in the country, be he abolitionist or not, who will not coincide with him. We rejoice at the evidence we here have, in a gentleman of the influence and intelligence of Mr. Elmore, of the returning sanity of the South. How wildly and mischievously has she been heretofore misled! Whilst the Governors of Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas, have been repelling offers, made in respectful terms, of the fullest and most authentic accounts of our movements; and whilst ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... And the first thing sanity brought was the suggestion that Ann, too, might be like that. Once before Ann had been "scattered" that way—oh she understood it now as she had not been able to do then. And perhaps Ann would have less power ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... for a moment that God's coming in a chariot of fire on New Year's Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn't end it—it ought to end it, but it doesn't. There's more in some people's madness than in other people's sanity, and anyway, even if it's all nonsense it means life or death to your aunt and some of the others, and it means a certain breaking up of all this place. And it probably means the triumph of a charlatan like Thurston and the increase of humbug in the world ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... with, that was inborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differently constituted; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity of his view of life, and the insight with which he recognised the position of money, and thought out for himself the problem of riches and a livelihood. Apart from his eccentricities, he had perceived, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth. Of all the songs of the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have died for love." To one who has always recognized the greatness of this poem and who possibly had known and forgotten ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... aphorisms, both those collected under the heading of Thoughts on Various Subjects, and countless others scattered up and down his pages, are a treasury of sound, if a little sardonic, practical wisdom. His most insistent prejudices foreshadow in their essential sanity and justness those of that great master of life, Dr. Johnson. He could not endure over-politeness, a vice which must have been very oppressive in society of his day. He savagely resented and condemned a display of affection—particularly marital affection—in public. In an age when ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... reminds one constantly of Dostoevski's Raskolnikov, but whose states of mind are even more subtly analysed. No one should read this story unless his nerves are firm, for the outcome of the tale is such as to make almost any reader for a time doubt his own sanity. It is a curious study of the border-line between reason and madness. The physician, who rejoices in his splendid health, bodily vigour, and absolute equilibrium of mind, quietly determines to murder his best friend—to ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... surged up in my heart. How long was this to go on—this massacre of youth, this agony of men? Was there no sanity left in the world that could settle the argument by other means than this? When we had taken that ridge to-morrow there would be another to take, and another. And what then? Had we such endless reserves of men that we could go on gaining ground at such a ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... excellent, my admirable, my inexperienced young friend, that is all you know of lunatics! With more or less violence of assertion, they every one insist upon their sanity, just as criminals protest their innocence. Ah, bah! you shall go into every cell in this ward and find not one lunatic among them," sneered the old doctor, as he led the way into ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and vital issue, it is but a question of time for the will to find the way. But in the life of the United States, the passage from thought to action is more rapid than in any country that I know. Nowhere do we find such a combination of emotionalism with sanity. No better illustration of these national qualities could be desired than that afforded by the inception and early growth ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... at Thirkle as if in doubt about Buckrow's sanity, and Thirkle gave him a look that seemed to me to be a message, and he made a furtive signal which I was not ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... render harmless they first afflict with sanity," said Yeovil bitterly. "You may be content to wait for a hundred years or so, for this national revival to creep and crawl us back into a semblance of independence and world-importance. I'm afraid I haven't the patience or the philosophy to sit down comfortably and wait for a change ...
— When William Came • Saki
... the death of Priam Venus has to remind him of his duty to his father, wife, and son (ii. 594 foll.), reproaching him for his loss of sanity and self-control: ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... conscience, with none to molest nor make him afraid. He has heard once more from his parents. His father's master had returned to the neighborhood where his mother was, and they were again living together. His mother's mind was restored to sanity. She was more "like herself" than she had been before since the early days of their married life. In her later years she was brought to taste of the "liberty wherewith Christ has made us free," and went to her home above to be comforted after all her sufferings, ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... as that may be, but hers, which is infinitely better. Thus he is ever appealing directly to the tribunal of our own inward moral forces, and at the same time speaking health and light into that tribunal. There need be, there can be, no higher proof of the perfect moral sanity of his genius than this. And for right moral effect it is just the best thing we can have, and is worth a thousand times more than all the ethical arguing and voting in the world. If it be a marvel how the Poet can keep his own hand so utterly unmoved by the passion he is ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... somewhat less serious subject. We earnestly desire that women should be highly educated. And yet is there not a type of educated woman which we do not wholly admire? I am not going to caricature a bluestocking, but to point out one or two real dangers. Education is good; but perfect sanity is better still. Sanity is the most excellent of all women's excellences. We forgive eccentricity and one-sidedness—the want of perfect sanity—in men, and especially men of genius; and we rather reluctantly forgive it in women of genius; but in ordinary ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... good art, any more than there is good anything else in the absolute sense. Art that is too good for the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad, as the Bible has driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity had they been allowed to read much lower forms of literature. The practical moral is that we must read whatever stories, see whatever pictures, hear whatever songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays we like. We ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... are scattered, but Rodd suffered a double isolation. Ordinary people regarded him as a cracked fool, because he would not or could not exploit his gifts and personality; while the people who really were cracked dreaded his sanity and the humorous tolerance with which ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... quite awake, she had become aware that she, she herself, was that epileptic shape; that that epileptic shape was lying in her bed and that there was none other in the bed. Nor was this a fancy of madness! She knew that she was not mad, that she was utterly sane; and the conviction of sanity only intensified her awful discovery. She passed a trembling hand over her face, and felt the skin corrupt and green. Gazing into the darkness, she knew that her stare was apelike. She had felt, then, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... tears dried as in a desert wind; her sobs ceased, and in a moment or two the madness was going out of Blizzard's music and out of his face. He rested, preluded, and then began to play Beethoven, quietly, with a pure singing tone, music of a heavenly sanity. ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... was blinded—maddened. Gerald stung me and stung me till I was mad. I left him for reason's sake, for sanity's sake. We should have killed ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... that the difference between sanity and insanity depends only on the power to conceal the emotions. While this definition will hardly pass in law or medicine, it surely offers food for thought. Suppose for a moment that we were dominated by the impulse to externalize all our thoughts and all our emotions, there would ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... clearness of his diction, not because of the supremacy of his imagination, nor because of the variety of his melodious verse,—not even because of the matchless combination of all these charms; but the Bard of Stratford lives and shall live because his sanity enabled him to see the "God of things as they are," and his passion penetrated into the deepest sorrows and rose to the highest aspirations of the human heart,—and throughout all this sympathizing with goodness ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... clung to him, and for a long hour he soothed her as if she had been an hysterical child. He put her into a comfortable chair, mixed her a sedative, and knelt beside her, slowly winning her back to calm and sanity again. It was terrible, of course, but no one but Clarence himself was to blame, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... the national stress. The prevalence of this opinion is difficult to account for, since its logic is so feeble. It is universally recognised that in times like these, some form of relaxation is absolutely indispensable if the poise and sanity of the people are to be preserved. Amusements of a lighter sort are patronised with increased frequency, and have risen to the dignity of essentials in the maintenance of the national morale. If, then, the flimsiest of pleasures be accorded the respect and favour of the public, what may we not ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... condition of the crisis compelled her to rise. She stood before him, her dark eyes downcast, her lips trembling, nervously drawing the fingers of one hand through the clasp of the other. She was tempted to yield to him, for she could imagine no happiness in life without him; but a rare sanity and integrity of mind made her perceive that he had pushed the matter to a false alternative. It was not a question of preaching or not preaching sermons, but of sinful apostasy from an upright life. At last she raised her eyes, which shone like dark jewels in her pale countenance, ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... "Psychology and Industrial Efficiency" I studied the importance of exact psychology for commerce and industry. And I continue this series by the present little volume, which speaks of psychology's possible service to social sanity. I cannot promise that even this will be the last, as I have not yet touched on psychology's relation to religion, to ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... which Goethe possesses in a supreme degree, and by which he is distinguished from his contemporaries—namely, mental sanity and serenity. Most of his fellow-poets reveal some morbid characteristics, are afflicted with some Weltschmerz, with some internal spiritual malady. They live in an atmosphere of strife and discord. The marvellous vitality of Goethe has escaped ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... expression were indicative of merriment, the merriment must be that of a demon. Of this singular being many anecdotes were prevalent among the seafaring men of Nantucket. These anecdotes went to prove his prodigious strength when under excitement, and some of them had given rise to a doubt of his sanity." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... gates and paused before the darkened lodge. The wind had risen and was sweeping the snow into his race. The cold had him in its grasp again, and he stood uncertain. Should he put his sanity to the test and go back? He turned and looked down the dark drive to the house. A single ray shone through the trees, evoking a picture of the lights, the flowers, the faces grouped about that fatal room. He turned and plunged ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... found plenty to do. My unknown friend evidently kept track of my expanding efforts, for he commented and criticized, encouraged and advised freely. There was a humour in his letters that I liked; it leavened them with its sanity and reacted on me most wholesomely, counteracting many of the morbid tendencies and influences of my life. I found myself striving to live up to the writer's ideal of philosophy and ambition, as pictured, often unconsciously, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... came home modestly and made a splendid speech. We need a man of great administrative ability and of supreme sanity who can lead us into quiet waters, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... by the place assigned us, yet, in fact, our legal position is lower than that of either; for the negro can be raised to the dignity of a voter if he possess himself of $250; the lunatic can vote in his moments of sanity, and the idiot, too, if he be a male one, and not more than nine-tenths a fool; but we, who have guided great movements of charity, established missions, edited journals, published works on history, economy, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... views could so run counter to her strongest instincts. And yet, though the universe seemed tumbling about her ears when he told her she must not move a scrap of manuscript, howsoever wildly it lay about the floor or under the bed, she did not for a moment question his sanity. She obeyed him like a dog; uncomprehending, but trustful. But, after all, this was only of a piece with the rest of her life. There was nothing she questioned. Life stood at her bedside every morning in the cold dawn, bearing a day heaped high with duties; ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... Army but was unhappy because the Army did not like him. After only two weeks of basic training his company shunned him, his noncoms hated him and his officers, in order to reduce the wear and tear on their sanity often pretended he did not exist. From time to time they faced reality long enough to attempt to have him transferred but regimental headquarters, suspicious of anything that emanated from the "Jonah" company, ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... first on some of the most simple tests for sanity. It became evident at once, however, that except for his amnesia Ben's mind was perfectly sound: he passed all general intelligence tests with a high score, he conversed easily, he talked frankly of his symptoms. He ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... 'The sanity of true genius' was a happy phrase of Charles Lamb's. Our greatest poets were our sanest men. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth might have defied even a mad doctor ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... nearly suffocated him. Fearful of alarming the house by letting the smoke escape through the door, he opened the window, and when it had partly dispersed, sought refuge himself from the arctic air of his bedroom in the drawing-room. So far the act did not seem inconsistent with his sanity, or even intelligence and consideration for others. But Marie fixed upon him a ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the senseless bray of laughter which, to the sympathetic mind, is not the least impressive feature of that iniquitous trial. His overwrought nerves being temporarily relieved by the cachinnation, he regained for a few minutes some measure of composure and sanity. With the return of reason came a returning sense of injustice and oppression. He made a brief but ineffectual attempt to argue the matter with the Chief Justice, who informed him that the facts had been dealt with by the jury, and that he could be permitted ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... given to recreating—not scholarship merely nor literature merely—but, through them both, something above them both—the soul of Europe. And this may or may not lead you on to reflect that beyond our present passions, and beyond this War, in a common sanity Europe (and America with her) will have to discover ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... or down its essential healthiness and sanity held true. He always came back to the normal. Had he sought purposely to divest himself of hope he could not have done it. The ship was coming. Its coming was as certain as the rolling in of the tide, only one had ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a fool? In what does his foolishness consist? Certainly it does not consist in the fact that he has made a success. He is not a fool simply because he is rich. The Bible is a tremendously reasonable book. It is the very climax of sanity. It is the acme of good common sense. It never rails against rich men simply because they are rich. It no more does that than it lauds poor men because they are poor. It frankly recognizes the danger incident ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... Generalization is dangerous intellectual exercise. Our premise is insufficient, and our conclusion is self-sufficient, like some strutting scion of a decayed house. Trace the origin of this idea of a poet's non-sanity. He was not ordinary, as other men, but was extraordinary, and as such belonged to the upper rather than the lower world; for we must be convinced how wholly the ancients kept the super-earthly in ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... people," he continued with bitter irony, "would take you for a madman also. The people consider madmen those who do not think as they do, so they hold me as such, which I appreciate, because the day in which they think me returned to sanity, they will deprive me of the little liberty that I've purchased at the expense of the reputation of being a sane individual. And who knows but they are right? I do not live according to their rules, my principles and ideals are different. The gobernadorcillo enjoys ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... figure gave me the only clue to her frame of mind. If she went on gyrating in this way indefinitely, she must go mad. No human consciousness could stand it. For sanity she must stop at some point. The only rational halting-place was at the Tomb. If I knew my Auriol, she would drop a flower and a tear on it, and then would start on a bee-line for Central Tartary, or whatever expanse of the world's surface offered a satisfactory ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... to which Colonel Hampton clung, he could no longer doubt Jeb's earnestness nor his sanity. He saw that this son of his dead friend was speaking a horrible truth which he, himself, could not possibly understand. And then he seemed suddenly to have aged, to have grown old in ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... could. Sometimes, having exhausted our supply of wild meat and emptied our casks, we were days without food or drink; then a water-hole or a shallow pool in the bottom of an arroyo so restored our strength and sanity that we were able to shoot some of the wild animals that sought it also. Sometimes it was a bear, sometimes an antelope, a coyote, a cougar— that was as God pleased; ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Miss Alice, and if she is not, it does not signify," and I walked off, leaving the puzzled portress with her mouth wide open, my sketch in her hand, and her intellect evidently employed in balancing the probabilities as to the sanity of mine. ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... his own sanity, and so obsessed with a sense of the unreal that his senses were benumbed, began to take off his collar; he could not feel the contact of his fingers with his neck in the act. Collarless, he entered ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left—sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... painted in red and blue, and a lot of old stores, which he had vainly condemned when mate, thrown overboard. The skipper stood by helplessly while it was done, and then went below of his own accord and turned in, as being the only way to retain his sanity, or, at any rate, the clearness of head which he felt to ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... with my old problem. The change in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater sanity." ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... OMICRON}{GREEK SMALL LETTER NU}. For if the fact be that there is no difference between the appearance that a thing presents to a madman and to a person in his senses, then who can feel quite sure of his own sanity? And to wish to produce such an effect as that is a proof of no ordinary madness. But they follow up in a childish manner the likenesses of twins, or of impressions of rings. For who of us denies that there are such things ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Politeness, Friendship, Love, Hope, Kindness or Philanthropy, Religion, Patience or Serenity, Integrity or Conscientiousness, Patriotism or Love of Country, Cheerfulness, Energy, Fortitude, Heroism, Health, Sanity, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... abode of misery and despair, his powers remained unbroken, his genius unimpaired; and even there he composed some pieces, both in prose and verse, which were triumphantly appealed to by his friends in proof of his sanity. To this period we may probably refer the "Veglie," or "Watches" of Tasso, the manuscript of which was discovered in the Ambrosian Library, at Milan, toward the end of the last century. They are written ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... freshness of the water was grateful to her senses. It was a plunge back into sanity and normal life again, drowning those ghosts of vague foreboding and anxieties which had kept such unpleasant vigil with her, and when the Turkish girl returned with a tray, Arlee was able to sit and eat breakfast with ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... stomach as to be capable of high-pressure brain action for days at a time—until the cumulative mental forces break through all obstacles and conquer success. A great leader represents a kind of essence of common sense, but rugged common sense is sanity of nerve and brain. He who rules and leads must have mind and will, but he must have chest and stomach also. Beecher says the gun carriage must be in proportion to the gun it carries. When health goes the gun is spiked. Ideas are arrows, and the body is the bow that sends them home. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... out of it all right. His behaviour was the crowning proof, if Milly wanted more proof, of his sanity. He went up to London and made all the arrangements for his sister. When he returned he forestalled Milly's specious consolations with the truth. It was better, he told her, that the dear little girl should have died, for there was distinct brain trouble anyway. He took it as a sane ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost ran up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the key and he swore under his breath. He slammed ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... she looked away from him. Then silently he drew his gun from its holster; the thing was madness, but just now there was no sanity in the universe. He could not run; he must not kill Courtot. He dropped the gun behind him and with the heel of his boot thrust it away from him so that it fell into a fissure in the rock. He turned again ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of genius constitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its signal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... to us and has meant to us all through the nearly twenty-five years of our friendship and of working together. We delight in seeing him bring to further fruition the admirable work he did at Willard, and later for all the State hospitals; and that which we see him do at all times for sanity in the progress of practical psychiatry, and now especially in the guidance of this institution. We delight in seeing his master mind given more and more of a master's chance for the practical expression of his ideals and convictions concerning the duties ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour later, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... twists through his Greek roots, and at the first pause, drawing himself erect with the self-complacent air of a man who applies the clincher, ejaculated, with the Western twang: 'What do you think of Hi-awathy?' The professor, giving him one look, to be sure of his sanity, and a second to be sure of his obtusity, answered gravely, above a convulsion of laughter: 'Hi-awathy was ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... smiled broadly to himself in the darkness, and said: "Truly, Graydon, you are giving satisfactory proofs of returning sanity. We may as well conclude with the old saying, 'All's ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... you a heart. God knows I envy the man who wins it! You have been in the college of the Limberlost all your life, and I never met a graduate from any other institution who could begin to compare with you in sanity, clarity, and interesting knowledge. I wouldn't even advise you to read too many books on your lines. You acquire your material first hand, and you know that you are right. What you should do is to begin early to practise self-expression. Don't wait too long to tell us about the woods ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... further than this when he speaks of the soundness and sanity of Burns's nature. 'The attentions he received during his stay in town from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would have turned any head but his own. He retained the same simplicity of manner and appearance which had struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in the ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... episodes and the undeniable grandeur of the trial and death. Moreover, it was full of superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide. He was in his studio after his first perusal, and he turned to an Apollo which he was carving. The god looked at him with such overpowering, balanced sanity, such a contrast to Christian incoherence and the rhapsodies of the letter to the Romans, that he was half ashamed of himself for meddling with it. He opened his Lucretius. Here was order and sequence; he knew where he was; he was at home. Was all this nought, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford |
