"Suicide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ill-fortune of the next day, to which he had condemned himself by promising Mercedes to spare her son, the count at last exclaimed, "Folly, folly, folly!—to carry generosity so far as to put myself up as a mark for that young man to aim at. He will never believe that my death was suicide; and yet it is important for the honor of my memory,—and this surely is not vanity, but a justifiable pride,—it is important the world should know that I have consented, by my free will, to stop my arm, already raised to strike, and ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... movement, action, sacrificing classic composition and repose to reality. This was heresy from the Davidian point of view, and David eventually convinced him of it. Gros returned to the classic theme and treatment, but soon after was so reviled by the changing criticism of the time that he committed suicide in the Seine. His art, however, was ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... based partly upon fact; its epoch is one of the most interesting in the history of this province, and probably the turning point in the affairs of the whole northern continent. The suicide was an officer high in rank, the Duke d'Anville, who in 1746, after the first capture of Louisburgh, sailed from Brest with the most formidable fleet that had ever crossed the Atlantic, to re-take this famous fortress; ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... informed of the loss of the giraffes, their remorse seemed as if it would tempt them to suicide, and one of them, while tearing his wool-covered head, kept repeating ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... knotty problem, isn't it?" he continued after a moment. "I might want you to flirt with me in order to avert my suicide in the pond ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... unfortunate passers-by, often for no cause whatever. The spirits of persons who have been wronged are especially dreaded by those who have done the wrong. A man who has been defrauded of money will commit suicide, usually by poison, at the door of the wrongdoer, who will thereby first fall into the hands of the authorities, and if he escapes in that quarter, will still have to count with the injured ghost of his victim. A daughter-in-law will drown or hang herself to get free from, and also to avenge, the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... dressing-case which stood on a table near him: the officer heard the sharp clicking of a pistol-lock, and turned swiftly round. Too late! A loud report rang through the house; the room was filled with smoke; and the wretched assassin and suicide lay extended on the floor a ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... thought of in Jarviston as either young adults of the most resourceful kind—for whom the country should do much more in order to insure its future in space—or as just another crowd of delinquents, more bent on suicide and trouble-making than any hot rod group had ever been. Paul Hendricks was either a fine, helpful citizen—among so many who were disinterested and preoccupied—or a corrupting Socrates who deserved to ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... The heroic examples of Greek and Roman invective paled before the inexhaustible resources of learned billingsgate stored in the minds of the humanists and theologians. To accuse an enemy of atheism and heresy was a matter of course; to add charges of unnatural vice or, if he were dead, stories of suicide and of the devils hovering greedily over his deathbed, was extremely common. Even crowned heads ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... in which, from instinct, he made a desperate fight, on the 1st of January, 1892, he felt he was hopelessly vanquished, and in a moment of supreme clearness of intellect, like Gerard de Nerval, he attempted suicide. Less fortunate than the author of Sylvia, he was unsuccessful. But his mind, henceforth "indifferent to all unhappiness," ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... his attack; for Carbo, perhaps realising the animosity of his judges and the weakness or coldness of his friends, is said to have put an end to his life by poison.[765] Voluntary exile always lay open to the Roman who dared not face the final verdict; and the suicide of Carbo cannot be held to have been the sole refuge of despair; it is rather a sign of the bitterness greater than that of death, which may fall on the soul of a man who can appeal for sympathy to none, who knows that he has been abandoned and believes that he ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... had fled in terror, and left me with the dead body of my husband. His blood ran from the wound, and formed in little pools, which the thirsty black earth drank, and left no stain. Now was I strong with frenzy; the method of madness was on me; I seized the tools, which the suicide had left, and commenced to dig what must now be a grave—wider, and deeper, and longer I dug it; then settled the body into it; and covering it up, heaped and rounded it. I did not mind the work; it ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... griefs of childhood may be, in proportion to the child's powers of bearing them, as overwhelming as those which break the strong man down. Every now and then we are shocked by the tale that some young child has committed suicide, and for reasons which to our judgment seem most trivial—from fear of punishment, or even from mere dread of reproof. These facts deserve special attention, they show how much more the susceptibility and sensitiveness of children need to be taken ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... made you champion. Because Fanchette wouldn't a'stepped into the ring with Jimmy Montague, or Jigger Holliday; no, nor even old Kid Fall. I know, believe me I know, because I tried him with all of 'em. Not for the purse that was offered. He wasn't looking to commit suicide at ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... you together was to see Antigone in the clutches of Clytemnestra. There is some satisfaction in knowing that the miserable man is quite distracted and is haunted by the idea that Karen may have committed suicide. Betty Jardine says that in that case you and he would have to appear at the inquest.—Oh, my poor Mercedes!—But I feel sure that this is impossible. Temper, not tragedy, drove Karen from you and it was on her part a dastardly action. I am seeing everybody that ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... she was crazy and you followed her down cellar to prevent her from committing suicide. At least that is the way the matter has been represented to the landlady ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... blows so unexpectedly inflicted by the barbarians, whom she despised and thought herself able to exterminate, made no resistance to the demands made for extraterritoriality. As a Chinaman does not hesitate to commit suicide when excited and alarmed, so Taukwang quietly acquiesced in terms which were fatal to the independence of his empire. When, subsequently, the English demanded from the Siamese similar conditions, those ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... M. de Camors, the elder, returned to his home bent on suicide, his son, passing up the Avenue Maillot, was stopped by Lescande on the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... said in Fontainebleau, that M. Nibor made an autopsy, and found that serious disorders had been produced by desiccation. Some people are nevertheless satisfied that Fougas committed suicide. It is certain that Master Bonnivet received, by the penny post, a sort of a ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... filled with surprise, and lit the candle on the table. Lifting Hazlet on the sofa, he carefully looked at him to see if he was correct in his first surmise, that the unhappy man had swallowed poison, or committed suicide in some other way. But there was no trace of anything of the kind, and Hazlet merely appeared to have ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... suicide rate is much higher in the cities than in other districts. In general the suicide rate in the United States seems to be two or three times as high in our large cities as in ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... secret vow of self-destruction handed down through ages from father to son. But he must have aid: in these days it is difficult for a man to commit the suicidal act without detection—and if madness is a disgrace to the race, equally so is suicide. Besides, the family is to be enriched by the insurances on his life, and is thereby to be allied with royal blood; but the money will be lost if the suicide be detected. Randolph therefore returns and blossoms into a ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Suzanne, "to Madame Granson, the treasurer of the Maternity Society, who, to my knowledge, has saved many a poor girl in my condition from suicide." ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... Weight, 9 lbs., Calibre, .32. This rifle was used by a resident of Eldorado, Pa., for the purpose of ending his earthly woes. After the suicide, it was left uncleaned for about three years, with the result that the barrel is somewhat pitted. Otherwise in ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... law-courts and the Press, and you figure on the general run. You prefer people like the Lincolnshire vicar you hounded into an asylum the year before last. You cherish the memory of the seven poor devils that you drove to suicide between 1890 and 1894; that sort pay the uttermost farthing before the debt to nature! You set great store by the impoverished gentry and nobility who have you to stay with them when the worst comes to the worst, and secure a respite in ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... of infants has prevailed on the largest scale throughout the world, and has been met with no reproach; but infanticide, especially of females, has been thought to be good for the tribe, or at least not injurious. Suicide during former times was not generally considered as a crime, but rather, from the courage displayed, as an honorable act; and it is still practised by some semi-civilized and savage nations without reproach, for it does ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... affairs, and became so disheartened that he ceased to attempt to improve his invention, and finally committed suicide by drowning himself in the Alleghany River ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... invent to cover his disgrace? And his clothes! All his things were at the club;—or he thought that they were, not being quite certain whether he had not made some attempt to carry them off to the Railway Station. He had heard of suicide. If ever it could be well that a man should cut his own throat, surely the time had come for him now. But as this idea presented itself to him he simply gathered the clothes around him and tried to sleep. The death of Cato would hardly have for him ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... an avenue so much beyond my foresight, at the possession of wealth. The evil which impelled me to the brink of suicide, and which was the source, though not of all, yet of the larger portion, of my anguish, was now removed. What claims to honour or to ease were consequent on riches were, by an extraordinary ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... story, and no better or more absorbing one has appeared in a long time. The book opens with the violent death of a young heiress—apparently a suicide. But a shrewd young physician waxes suspicious, and finally convinces the wooden-headed coroner that the girl has been murdered. The finger of suspicion points at various people in turn, but each of them proves his innocence. Finally Fleming Stone, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... now," said he with boldness. "But don't waste any pity on Endicott. He is dead, and I look at him across these five years as at a stranger. Suffer? The poor devil went mad with suffering. He raved for days in the wilderness, after he discovered his shame, dreaming dreams of murder for the guilty, of suicide for himself——" ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... present form is necessarily but of recent origin. Morphia itself was only discovered in the year 1816. The cure of it is very rare. It is found that both the use and the deprivation of the drug lead the victims almost inevitably to suicide, and at Bellevue there are cushioned rooms for some of the patients and a constant watch kept on all. One is not surprised to hear that the chief sufferers are women. After women come doctors. Very many Parisian women carry about with them a small ivory ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... walked, and merely by getting a young lady in Oriental costume to stand alongside me I might qualify at a Sunday-school entertainment for the entire supporting cast of the familiar tableau entitled Rebecca at the Well. He intimated that just so I stopped short of committing suicide as an inside job all would be fine and dandy. I do not claim that these were his words; this is the free interpretation of his meaning. Sink the knife in the butter to the very hilt—there will be no ill ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... purely personal business, no doubt, but he seemed to do so in a genuinely kindly rather than in a fussy interfering spirit. At any rate he didn't begin by talking to her that horrid cant about the attempt to commit suicide being so extremely wicked! If he had done that, Selah would have felt it was not only an unwarrantable intrusion upon her liberty of action, but a grotesque insult to her natural ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... had swiftly become human. She allowed her eyes to meet those of Mr. Evans' with an easy gladness but little known to him of late. "Of course I do, Betty. The idea of a candidate for office in this enlightened age breaking loose in that manner! It's suicide. He could be arrested for the attempt in this State. Is that strong enough for you? You surely know how I feel now, don't you? Come on, Betty dear! Let's not spar in that foolish way any longer. Remember all I said yesterday. It goes ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... had depended on a single word, Madame d'Argeles could not have uttered it. She knew what mental agony had urged the baron to a sort of moral suicide, and led him to contract the vice in which he wasted his life and squandered, or, ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... but it is also terrible," cried the abbe, in a broken voice. "It is almost a resolve to commit suicide, Edmee." ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... a person of high rank, living much alone. A darkly meditative mind left in solitude can conceive without being startled the most awful designs. The same imagination in Lady Macbeth which brooded over the plot against Duncan's life drove her to delirium and suicide. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... not hear him, but waved her hand, and gave him a bright smile that was brimming with unshed tears. It seemed like instant, daring suicide in him to stand on that swaying, clattering house as it moved off irresponsibly down the plane of vision. She watched him till he was out of sight, a mere speck on the horizon of the prairie; and then she turned her horse ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... hundred thousand men. Lee had less than ninety thousand, even after Jackson had joined him. To attack McClellan's strongly fortified front, with its almost impregnable flanks, would have been suicide. But McClellan's farther right, commanded by that excellent officer, FitzJohn Porter, lay north of the Chickahominy, with its own right open for junction with McDowell. So Lee, knowing McClellan and the state of this Federal ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... have patted me on the head approvingly. Oh, no, I forget. There's one little matter over which I should have got lectured and that is my rejection of so eligible a bachelor as Mr. Ingram, on the mere ground that I couldn't overlook his past life. Anyhow, he hasn't committed suicide, though I fancy ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... from that place; you will hunt him down and drive him again; and yet again, and again, and again, persistently, relentlessly, poisoning his life, filling it with mysterious terrors, loading it with weariness and misery, making him wish for death, and that he had a suicide's courage; you will make of him another Wandering Jew; he shall know no rest any more, no peace of mind, no placid sleep; you shall shadow him, cling to him, persecute him, till you break his heart, as he broke ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... stones. Some fossil skeletons found in caves, and of an alleged age of fifty thousand years, denote an ancient race of large, strong people. There are other skeletons of Siboneyes, Chinese, and negroes in the caves,—victims of herding, slavery, fever, cruelty, and suicide. There is little doubt that of the aboriginal stock not a man remains. Yet there are stories of strange people who were seen by hunters and explorers among the mountains, or who peered out of the jungle at the villagers and planters and were gone again, without track or sound,—people with swarthy ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... burial adopted seems clearly intended to guard against the return of the dead, whether in the form of ghosts or of children born again into the world. Such, for instance, was obviously the intention of the old English custom of burying a suicide at a cross-road with a stake driven through his body. And if some burial customs are plainly intended to pin down the dead in the earth, or at least to disable him from revisiting the survivors, so others appear ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... at the shaded lamp, round which four or five moths and a big beetle were wildly circling in a frantic desire to commit suicide, but kept from a fiery end by gauze wire over ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... I'd 'a' hated to been that poor kanaka! But Doctor Cassiou, the coroner, said it was suicide all right. Llewellyn's ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... measured for my own? And why should not the same consideration apply to my mental outfit? It is the same desperate fear of originality and initiative, coupled with a certain unwillingness to take individual responsibility: it is the "ditto" idea again, and yet a writer has said "imitation is suicide." Let music be studied historically and in its development, by all means, this indeed is necessary: but to spend hours and hours learning to play or sing something just because "everybody does it" is the sheerest waste of time, unless the music ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... with which we might have turned the tables on those scurrilous followers of the great man, but did not. Suddenly we run up against a gentleman, who, raising his cloak over his head, is on the point of jumping into the Tiber. We seize him by his mantle, and discover in the intended suicide an old acquaintance, equally well known to the Jews and the bric-a-brac shops, whose tastes for speculation and articles of vertu have first brought him to the money-lenders, next to the dogs, and finally to the brink of the yellow Tiber. We give him all the sesterces ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... himself was pessimistic. To him Hamlet's state of mind was pathological. One might as well say that he was a murderer because he wrote Macbeth, a misogynist because he created characters like Isabella and Ophelia, a wife murderer because he wrote Othello, or a suicide because he wrote Timon of Athens as to say that he was a pessimist because he wrote Hamlet—the tragedy of an irresolute avenger. This interpretation is contradicted by the very play itself. "At Hamlet's side is the thoroughly healthy Horatio, almost a standard ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... but that her face was bent low over the newspaper, Harvey must have observed that the possibility of his friend's suicide seemed rather to calm her agitation than to ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... a poet can read, first Andre de Chenier's Idyll Neere, then Le Malade, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide, another elegy in the classic taste, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... still stand, the thresholds over which he passed are there, the pavements ring beneath your tread as they once rang beneath his. Three generations and more have come and gone since Napoleon trod the streets of Toulon contemplating suicide. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Boyd said. "Nothing at all. Everything's fine and dandy. I think I'm going to commit suicide, but don't ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... is for no meanly ambitious or unworthy purpose. It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the preservation of our national existence. The first direct movement towards it was a civil request on the part of certain Southern persons, that the Nation would commit suicide, without making any unnecessary trouble about it. It was answered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, that there were constitutional and other objections to the Nation's laying violent hands upon itself. It was then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone, that the Nation would be ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... widow[FN110] before becoming a wife. From that hour Shobhani was kept as a pearl in its casket by her father, who had vowed never to survive her, and had even fixed upon the place and style of his suicide. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... "Oh, it was suicide right enough," the steward answered, "and he must have been hanging there some hours—by a rope. Seems he must have brought the rope with him, as it don't belong to the boat. He must have come aboard intending to do it. My mate—he found him not half an hour ago, and it so scared him ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... her unhappy nephew had committed suicide, and that she had been the cause of it. This conviction she impressed incessantly on her two sisters as they waited upon her, or sat talking by her bedside during that long Saturday, when there was nothing else to ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... knocked about in the unhappy beast's attempt to get at water kept there in a little cask. No reconcilement between them and man was effected, and one by one they dropped overboard, the victims of accident or suicide, noted or unnoted, to their deliverance and our relief. While they lasted it was pathetic to watch their furtive movements and unrelaxed vigilance, jealously guarding the freedom which was held under such hopeless surroundings and must cost them so ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... surely not be backward in striving to uproot this hell upon earth—existing solely for the inhuman greed of a few selfish individuals; this plague-spot threatening deadly contagion to soul and body, and causing misery, madness, and suicide ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... streams, where the quantity of bank food is far smaller, this rule will perhaps not hold good; though who knows not that his best fish are generally taken under some tree from which the little caterpillars, having determined on slow and deliberate suicide are letting themselves down gently by a silken thread into the mouth of the spotted monarch, who has but to sail about and about, and pick them up one by one as they touch the stream?—A sight which makes one think—as does a herd of swine crunching acorns, each one of which might have become a ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... love!—and then to a wise withdrawal from danger. Sometimes it is needful to fling away life for Jesus; but if it can be preserved without shirking duty, it is better to flee than to die. An unnecessary martyr is a suicide. The Christian readiness to be offered has nothing in common with fanatical carelessness of life, and still less with the morbid longing for martyrdom which disfigures some of the most pathetic pages of the Church's history. Paul ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... youngsters from giving it best, and going under altogether.... Boake knew this cursed country well.... I wonder if he ever 'owned' a station—one with a raging drought, a thundering mortgage, and a worrying and greedy bank sooling him on to commit suicide, or else provide rain as side issues.... I don't suppose he had a wife and children to leave to the mercy of the Australian Pastoralists' Bank. D——n and curse the Australian Pastoralists' Bank, and the ...
— In The Far North - 1901 • Louis Becke
... greatness, in the very constancy of the absorbing sentiment. He retired from all intercourse with his race, abstaining wholly from drink, for which he had a propensity, and, as if under a vow, he went naked for nearly two years. He also meditated suicide, and was probably only prevented from committing it by the influence of a white friend. He sought honourable death in desperate encounters with all the enemies he could find, and in this period acquired his name, or title, from a very destructive attack he made upon a ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... hands just missing their trains. The next best thing to doing nothing yourself is to observe everybody else trying to do something, like catching trains, and not succeeding. My uncle once missed eight trains in one day, and then tried to commit suicide. But next day he caught nine trains and a motor 'bus, which reconciled him to living, which he is ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... romantic fashion from passion to repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in perpetual alternation." Guy de Maupassant again is a naturalist of the second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, who died a suicide, crying out to his valet from his hacked throat "Encore l'homme au ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a thousand others have taken it, and don't come to blows. You wield a good blade, but to attack Navarrete is suicide. I'll take him the letter. Be wise, Zorrillo, and look ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... another bad bargain by the man who had bought him, and again he was returned, to be sold for tobacco with the same result. Nobody wanted the poor, miserable slave-boy, who was on the point of committing suicide when he was bought by a Portuguese trader and carried away in a slave ship. How little that wretched boy knew what the future had in store for him as he lay chained in the hold of the crowded slave-ship! But ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... to bring back my horse and the vehicle after we had embarked in the boats. There was nothing more to say—time pressed—yet I lingered dumb and irresolute. At the moment I seemed to be exchanging everything for nothing—committing domestic suicide. I looked at them both, the girl and the old man, with the gloomy thought that I might never lay eyes on them again. I dare say I wore my grief upon my face, for Mr. Stewart tried cheerily to hearten me with, "Courage, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... cattle to be kept. This, he argued, would cut off the beef and milk supply from the city. He therefore decided to do his part toward husbanding the present supply of food by refusing to eat; an act which necessitated feeding him through a rubber tube for many weeks. He also attempted suicide by drowning, throwing himself face downward in a shallow swamp, whence he was rescued. This young man was an expert chess player even during ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... The suicide of . . . . on account of his wife's seduction by the Duke of Cumberland, will drive the Duke of Cumberland ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... return, the latter was defending the right of man to commit suicide; which Turl denied; not on the false and untenable ground of superstition, but from the only true argument, the immoral tendency of the act. He was delicate though decisive in his opposition; and only requested Mr. Wilmot to consider, whether to effect the good of the whole be not the ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... at sea without chart or compass. When a man or woman loses their self-respect, they are moral wrecks. "WANDERING STARS." There is nothing left to build upon. It is from this cause that thousands commit suicide, both men, women, and girls. It is the continual gnawings of the conscience over the secret sins and crimes they have not the moral courage to confess. Like the hidden spark of fire in a bale of cotton, ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... his men, worn out with hunger and exposure, would drop lifeless on their barren paths; at times he had to sleep under his shield, as his only protection from the falling snow; but his heart kept stout through it all, and he chided those who talked of ending their misfortunes by suicide. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... am to a government truly republican," answered Philaemon, "it is indeed difficult to forgive the man who seduces a democracy to the commission of suicide, for his own advancement. His great abilities would receive my admiration, if they were not employed in the service of ambition. As for this new edict, it will prove a rebounding arrow, striking him who sent it. He will find ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... upset your ideals," said Isbister with a sense of devil-may-careish brilliance. "But a suicide over that cliff (or any cliff for the matter of that), really, as an artist—" He laughed. "It's so ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... and before night 120 fugitives were killed and as many more made prisoners. The remainder found no welcome among the hill tribes, and eventually became wanderers over the country until they died or were killed. Poor Spottiswoode, the Colonel, committed suicide shortly before the Peshawar ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... but Parliament you cannot extinguish,—it is enthroned in the hearts of the people,—it is enshrined in the sanctuary of the Constitution,—it is immortal as the island which it protects. As well might the frantic suicide hope that the act which destroys his miserable body should extinguish his eternal soul. Again I therefore warn you, do not dare to lay your hands on the Constitution; it is above your power. Sir, I do not say that the Parliament and the people, by mutual consent ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... he can endeavor to do so in things concerning Him, e.g. by destroying faith, by outraging holy things, which are most grievous sins. Again, a man sometimes knowingly and freely inflicts harm on himself, as in the case of suicide, though this be referred finally to some apparent good, for example, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... disease I suppose is irremediable; when a lover has previously been much encouraged, and at length meets with neglect or disdain; the maniacal idea is so painful as not to be for a moment relievable by the exertions of reverie, but is instantly followed by furious or melancholy insanity; and suicide, or revenge, have frequently been the consequence. As was lately exemplified in Mr. Hackman, who shot Miss Ray in the lobby of the playhouse. So the poet describes the passion ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... back and became lost in the crowd, but while he stood well out of Kansas Shorty's view, he never took his eyes off the form of the new recruit of that immense army of human wrecks which the Salvationists have dragged out of saloons, gutters, penal institutions and back from suicide to convert and transform them ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... short tales Mr Stevenson also deals with the seamy side of life, and The New Arabian Nights published in 1882, and which contains the reprint of such stories as The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, The Sire de Maletroit's Door, and The Pavilion on the Links, is quite as gruesome and by no means less ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... sleeping in woods and barns, and living principally upon milk. The condition of his pulse and other physical functions was scrupulously set down, with an occasional remark of "good" or "bad." The conclusion was at last forced upon me that he had been endeavoring to commit suicide by a slow course of starvation and exposure. Either as the cause or the result of this attempt, I read, in the final notes, signs of an aberration of mind. This also explained the singular demeanor of the man when found, and his refusal to take medicine ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the younger of two sisters, breaks one girl's engagement, drives one man to suicide, causes the murder of another, leads another to lose his fortune, and in the end marries a stupid and unpromising suitor, leaving the really worthy one to marry ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... in digging out the guano. We were not surprised at seeing them look very miserable and unhappy, for the oppressive odour arising from the fresh-dug guano was intolerable, to us even for a short time. We were told that many of them in their wretchedness commit suicide, flying, through their ignorance, from present evils to those they know not of, instead of endeavouring manfully to support their lot, if inevitable, or to seek proper means to escape from it if they have the power—not that I thought this at the time, by-the-by. I only remarked to Jerry ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... had been found in the river, which he thought answered to her description. I thought so too when he told me what she was like, and at once concluded she had tumbled in by accident and been drowned—for, you see, my Edie was good and pure and true. She could not have committed suicide unless her mind had become deranged, and there was nothing that I knew of to bring about that. They got me with much trouble into a cab, and drove me to the place. Ah! the poor thing—she was fair and sweet to look upon, with ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... Pessimism, 33. How reconcile with life one bent on suicide? 38. Religious melancholy and its cure, 39. Decay of Natural Theology, 43. Instinctive antidotes to pessimism, 46. Religion involves belief in an unseen extension of the world, 51. Scientific positivism, 52. Doubt actuates conduct as ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the very essence of all the best qualities of this writer. It is written with fine reserve; the story holds; the characters are unusually well observed, felt, and expressed. Irony shines through the pages and the final cadence includes a murder and a suicide. For the former, bromide of potassium and gas are utilized in combination; for the latter laudanum, taken hypodermically, suffices. There are scenes in Biarritz and Northern Spain which include a thrilling picture of a bull-fight. There is an interesting glimpse of the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... his voice, mad with rage, was heard above the rest, shouting frenziedly a curse which was a horribly grotesque blasphemy upon the name of God. Men who had used that oath in their insane anger had been known to commit suicide out of remorse afterwards. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a perfectly benevolent detachment deriving from hers. And as he spoke he thought of a man whom he had once known and who had committed suicide, and of all that he had read about suicides and what he had thought of them. Suicides had been incomprehensible to him, and either despicable or pitiable. And he said to himself: "Here is one of them! (Or is it an illusion?) But she has ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... interior. Admiral Lord John Hay, who was present on active service, gives a graphic account of the finding of these little dogs in a part of the garden frequented by an aunt of the Emperor, who had committed suicide on the approach of the Allied Forces. Lord John and another naval officer, a cousin of the late Duchess of Richmond's, each secured two dogs; the fifth was taken by General Dunne, who presented it to Queen Victoria. Lord John took pains ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... an irrational contempt of danger, which approaches nearly to the folly, if not the guilt of suicide; there is a ridiculous perseverance in impracticable schemes, which is justly punished with ignominy and reproach. But in the wide regions of probability, which are the proper province of prudence and election, there is always room to deviate ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... that his real duty lay, not in renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of action, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, a sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself. But Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had passed ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... mysterious midnight visit, the prophecy of death so shortly to be fulfilled, the solemn oath that I had taken, and which Vincey had called on me to answer to in another world than this. Had the man committed suicide? It looked like it. And what was the quest of which he spoke? The circumstances were uncanny, so much so that, though I am by no means nervous, or apt to be alarmed at anything that may seem to cross the bounds of the natural, I grew afraid, and began ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... and appeared to be prosperous. He was at length persuaded by his friends to go to Buenos Ayres to consult a doctor, and went alone and stayed in the house of an Anglo-Argentine family who were also friends of ours. By-and-by the dreadful news came that he had committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor. His wife and daughters then left the Casa Antigua, and not long afterwards Dona Mercedes wrote to my mother that they were left penniless; that their flocks and other possessions at the estancia ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... different ways. He was powerful over the girl equally by love, by fear, and by written bond. The Countess had repelled her daughter from her house by turning her out into the street by night, and had threatened both murder and suicide. Half the fortune had been offered to the tailor, in vain. The romance of the story had increased greatly during the last few days preceding the trial,—but it was admitted by all that the trial as a trial would be nothing. There would probably ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... him of several abortive attempts at suicide. He remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club a well known sportsman, after ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... studied the matter say that the tendency to commit suicide is greatest among those who have passed their fifty-fifth year, and that the rate is twice as great for unoccupied males as for occupied males. Unhappy Mr Meggs, accordingly, got it, so to speak, with both barrels. He was fifty-six, and he was perhaps the most unoccupied ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... when they're swearing mad," the barkeeper said. "I guess his girl has given him the mitten. You ladies are always making trouble for us, Mrs. Maloney. You drive us to suicide for love of you!" Mrs. Maloney simperingly admitted her baleful influence. "As for you," he jeered at the clerk, "you're fresh, I guess. That little affair in 18 got on ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... said — I have unfortunately never read this celebrated work — that a murder had been committed in this train, and a lively discussion arose as to who had committed it. I believe the general verdict was one of suicide. I have always supposed that subjects of conversation must be very difficult to find on expeditions like these, where the same people mix day after day for years; but there was certainly no sign of any such difficulty here. No sooner had the express vanished in the distance than in steamed — the ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... suicide, the maiming of any one, or making any one an eunuch, were all prohibited by the King of Oude, on the 15th of May, 1833, as reported to Government by the Resident on the 6th November, 1834. These prohibitions were reported to the Resident, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... think he is," Kitwater replied slowly. "It put me to a lot of inconvenience, and came just at the time when I was most anxious to leave. Besides it might have meant trouble." He paused for a moment. "As a matter of fact they brought it in 'suicide during temporary insanity, brought on by excessive drinking,' and that got me over the difficulty. It must have been insanity, I think, for he had no reason for doing away with himself. It was proved that he had plenty of money left. What was more, Coddy gave evidence that, only the day before, ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... have maintained his position for another month was doubtful. Suicide, though hinted at, was proved to have been impossible. It seemed as though with his amazing audacity he had tricked even ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... revolt. And can any of us wonder that when even this tragic seeding of the martyrs proved unfruitful, many of the Russian youth, brooding over the irremediable wrongs of their people, were driven to insanity and suicide? And, if all that was possible, would it be surprising if it also happened that at least one flaming rebel should have developed a philosophy of warfare no less terrible than that of the Russian bureaucracy itself? I do not know, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... of rings that Jemmy M'Quade can make for those dirty, grubbing bastes of pigs. The Lord knows I don't wondher that the Jews hated the thieves, for sure they are the only blackguard animals that ever committed suicide, and set the other bastes of the earth such an unchristian example. Not that a slice of ham is so bad a thing in itself, especially when it is followed by a single ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... requirements, and who, after twenty years' further experience and knowledge of public affairs and parties, advises them to pursue the same course for which he is now termed "servile," and ranked with cowards and men of "grovelling aims," advising the colony to commit political "suicide." The result showed who were the real authors of the "suicide," and Dr. Palfrey forcibly states the result of their doings in the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... mind, but is much like saying, "Jump off the Brooklyn bridge, "slowly." ... I am not resigned, of course. Because I cannot see the end. Definiteness is so imperative to some natures. However, I think that I have done all that an exacting Deity would demand, and cannot be accused of suicide, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... lordly stream, that moved mightily down the wide valley, became merged for a space in Lough Kieraun, and thence flowed onwards, broad and brimming, bearded with rushes, passing like a king, cloaked in the splendours of the sunset, to its suicide in the far-away Atlantic. The demesne of Mount Music lay along its banks; in woods often, more often in pastures; with boggy places ringed with willows, lovely, in their seasons, with yellow flags, and meadowsweet, kingcups, ragwort and loosestrife. Its western boundary was the Ownashee, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... international scene could not be suffered to upset the accepted state of things during the stress of a life-and-death war. Under existing circumstances the British could not possibly give up their long-established Right of Search without committing national suicide. Neither could they relax their own blockade so long as Napoleon maintained his. The Right of Search and the double blockade of Europe thus became two vexed questions which ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... start to-day. I hurt too much, and my mits is froze. If you want to wait till I'm healed up so I can die in comfort, why, go ahead and buy that fool-killer boat, and we'll all commit suicide together." He stumped indignantly out of the room, his friends too greatly dumfounded even ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... action at Arcis-sur-Aube I fought with desperation, and asked nothing but to die for my country. My clothes were torn to pieces by musket balls—but alas! not one could touch my person! A death which I should owe to an act of despair would be cowardly; suicide does not suit my principles nor the rank I have holden in the world. I am a man condemned to live." He sighed almost to sobbing;—then, after several minutes' silence, he said with a bitter smile—"After ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... the agonized carriage, after several groans that would have moved the heart of a highway commissioner, gave a rush downward, and committed suicide in the most determined manner, by dashing its axle on the ground—the wheels endeavouring in vain to fathom the profundity of the ruts, and the horses totally unable to move the stranded equipage. The sudden jerk knocked Reginald's hat over his eyes against the roof of the carriage, and Jane ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... remark is not a just one. How often have we seen unhappy creatures disgusted with life because of some dreadful and incurable malady? It is true that suicide, being an act of madness, is more frequently caused by those troubles which imagination delights itself in magnifying up to the point ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... suicide! We couldn't swim, and just a bit farther on, I tell you, the place must be full to the roof. Why, there must be eight or ten foot o' water ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... never more forcibly displayed than in the character of Dorax. When once induced to take the fatal step which degraded him in his own eyes, all his good affections seem to be converted into poison. The religion, which displays itself in the fifth act in his arguments against suicide, had, in his efforts to justify his apostacy, or at least to render it a matter of no moment, been exchanged for sentiments approaching, perhaps to atheism, certainly to total scepticism. His passion for Violante is changed ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... of mine have at last got a Werther without illustrations. I want you to like Charlotte. Werther himself has every feebleness and vice that could tend to make his suicide a most virtuous and commendable action; and yet I like Werther too—I don't know why, except that he has written the most delightful letters in the world. Note, by the way, the passage under date June 21st not far from the beginning; it finds ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to stanch his blood, Venus drops a magic herb into the water used for bathing his wounds and thus miraculously cures him. Plunging back into the fray, which becomes so horrible that Amata brings Lavinia home and commits suicide, Turnus and Aeneas finally meet in duel, but, although Juno would fain interfere once more in behalf of her protege, Jupiter refuses to allow it. But he grants instead his wife's petition that the Trojan name and language ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... and mortifying occurrences had taken place in forty-eight hours that Vanslyperken's brain was in a whirl. He felt goaded to do something, but he did not know what. Perhaps it would have been suicide had he not been a coward. He left his mother without speaking another word, and walked down to the boat, revolving first one and then another incident in his mind. At last, his ideas appeared to concentrate themselves into one point, which was a firm and raging ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... common enemy rarely goes by without being immediately followed by a conflict among the surviving Kakekikokuans in order to put to final proof their respective theories about their remarkable fruit. Thus a promising people is committing race-suicide; for this sort of thing goes on not only in connection with this particular problem, but over such questions as the number of beads to wear round one's neck when visiting the medicine-man, whether the national custom ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... of William Pitt Ferrars, on whom nature, opportunity, and culture appeared to have showered every advantage. His abilities were considerable, his ambition greater. Though intensely worldly, he was not devoid of affections. He found refuge in suicide, as many do, from want of imagination. The present was too hard for him, and his future was only a ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the while he suffered much from erysipelas and dyspepsia, and was occasionally moved with violent despair to the edge of suicide, for he was exiled from his Fatherland, and he was an outlaw from the world of music, which he longed to enlarge and beautify. He ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... thousands of years to inspire their people with a national consciousness, but this was not necessary in Japan, for there patriotism is inborn in the people, among whom an act of treason against the fatherland would be impossible because it is looked upon as spiritual suicide. The inner solidarity of the national character, the positive assurance of the fulfillment of all national duties, and the absolute silence of the people towards strangers—these are the weapons with which Japan ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... of friends and representatives of the press, met the travelers and escorted them to the city, where thousands of people lined the bank to extend a welcome. One man, who probably intended to commit suicide, threw off his coat and shouting that he could swim as well as that fellow, jumped in and was drowned. Boyton had great difficulty in getting through the crowd to a carriage which conveyed him to ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... afraid of death, but afraid of the unknown. Men like him commit suicide rather than face reality. He wants security. He's afraid of uncertainty. He lives in an unreal, imaginary world and when uncertainty, which is reality, intrudes, he is ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... tell me it was half-past seven, and the breakfast was on the table, I remembered that I had not shaved. It vexes Ethelbertha my shaving quickly. She fears that to outsiders it may suggest a poor- spirited attempt at suicide, and that in consequence it may get about the neighbourhood that we are not happy together. As a further argument, she has also hinted that my appearance is not of the kind that can ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... the dim and silent aisles of the store, he surveyed them again with mixed emotions. Here he might, apparently, have been king. But he had no very poignant regret. Another of his numerous selves, he reflected, had committed suicide. That was the right idea: to keep sloughing them off, throwing overboard the unreal and factitious Gissings, paring them down until he discovered ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... ranch and bring back enough men to get the cattle to a sheltered spot, so they wouldn't die. I knew we couldn't move them alone, and where they were grazin' it was all open. So Joe started. He knew the general direction, an' what would be sure suicide for anyone else was just a chance for Joe, havin' lived for twenty years right ...
— The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River - or Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers • Willard F. Baker
... Paris was full of adventure. He was hampered by poverty, and frequently in the depths of despair. At one time he is said to have attempted suicide by drowning in the Seine. There is also a story told to the effect that the notorious detective, Vidocq, who lived in the same house with him, and knew something of his circumstances, prevailed upon him to risk five francs in a gambling ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... the promptings of men who were hoping to follow him up the civic ladder. He joined with those who murmured against the obstinacy of old Mr. Welwyn-Baker. To support such a candidate would be party suicide. Even Welwyn-Baker junior was preferable; but why not recognize that the old name had lost its prestige, and select a representative of enlightened Conservatism, who could really make a stand against Quarrier and his rampant Radicals? ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... feel quite well," this strange priest went on after a pause, "you must tell me the reasons which prompted you to commit this last crime, this attempted suicide." ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... The suicide complex has never been a part of my psyche, but there are times when you have to place yourself in jeopardy; it's occupational, and I've got the gray hair, worry lines, ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... would be sheer suicide for him to attempt to escape at this particular juncture. The mere appearance of his head through the hole would be enough to attract the entire fire of the rebels, since they would naturally take him for one of the garrison; ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... many highly interested relatives, and, as a natural consequence, there is some talk of getting him certified. They're afraid he may do something involving the estate or develop homicidal tendencies, and they talk of possible suicide—you remember his father's death—but I say that's all bunkum. The fellow is just a ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... the Romans and the virtue of the Barbarians. Remove all ill-planted customs[291], and impress upon all your subordinates that we would rather that our Treasury lost a suit than that it gained one wrongfully, rather that we lost money than the taxpayer was driven to suicide.' ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... excellent Colonel Bunnion (long since departed from Mustapha Superieur) armed me against the banditti of Algiers, and which I forgot to return to him. I could empty one or more of the six chambers into my person and that would be the end. But I don't think history records the suicide of any humorist, however dismal. He knows too well the tricks of the Arch-Jester's game. Very likely I should merely blow away half my head, and Destiny would give my good doctor another chance of achieving ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... that game were of higher rank and longer purse, but I can allege no reason justifying my notion. All that I can say is that the tables devoted to it commanded the seaward views, and the tops of the gardens where the players withdrew when they wished to commit suicide. The rooms are decorated by several French painters of note, and the whole interior is designed by the famous architect Gamier, to as little effect of beauty as could well be. It is as if these French artists ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... hunger, the violent words, and the threats of future punishment. Once or twice she had looked down into the cool depths of the well, and wondered how quickly she could die. Only the terror of punishment after death kept this baby widow from suicide. ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... reached the capital which spread with the rapidity of a conflagration. Baron Robert von Linden had died suddenly at Ischia. This was the version which reached the newspapers and the public. But, in the court circle, it was known that the unfortunate man had committed suicide. Frau von der Lehde had instantly suspected it, she obtained certainty from the lips of the princess, to whom Kaethe had telegraphed the terrible tidings at the same time she sent the message to her brother. She hastened ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... those are the conditions of revelation my chances of seeing are extremely limited. To purify one's mind of all desire is to commit emotional suicide. Of course I desire, all the while I desire. And equally, of course, you desire. Every one who is human and in their sober senses must do that. Absence of desire means ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... easier to make money than to keep or to enjoy it. Keeping it is dull and anxious drudgery. The dread of loss may hang like a dark cloud over life. Apicius, when he squandered most of his patrimony, but had still 250,000 crowns left, committed suicide, as Seneca tells us, for fear he ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... machine with a thousand wheels in revolt. Sensations pricked at ideas, and immediately left them to account for their existence as they best could. The ideas committed suicide without a second's consideration. He felt the great gurgling sea in which they were drowned heave and throb. Then came a fresh set, that poised better on the slack-rope of his understanding. By degrees, a buried dread in his brain threw off its ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
