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More "Madness" Quotes from Famous Books



... blasphemies. No bible was there with its consolations for the sick of heart. Faint and fevered, scarred and smarting from the effects of her cruel punishment, she lay upon her pallet of moss—dreading the coming of her relentless persecutor,—who, in the madness of one of his periodical fits of drunkenness, was now swearing and cursing through ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... him, and, as a spear lodged in his trunk, he turned with almost a shriek of pain and dashed into the grove again. Close at his heels bounded the hundred men, yelling like demons and forgetting all danger in the madness of the chase. Right through the grove the great beast crashed and then half turned as he came to the open slope beyond. Running beside him was a daring youth trying in vain to pierce him in the belly with his flint-headed spear, and, as the mammoth came for the moment to a half ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... lost my self-command. My heart leapt up at the sight of you, and, fool that I was, I permitted you to see this; but base no hopes on my weakness. I said to you, Let us be friends. It was a mere act of madness. We can never be friends, and had better, therefore, treat each other as strangers. Do you forget that lying tongues at Bevron accused me of being your mistress? Do you think that this falsehood has ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau

... re-echoed the sheikh, "it might cost us many lives. A few men, leading spare camels with water-bags, might get through in safety, but it would be madness to attempt it with a big caravan. By the Prophet's beard, I did not like the prospect of this present march, though I knew there was water and food in plenty at Suleiman's Well. What, then, would happen if we found every well on the eastern ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... told; but better wisdom guided him, to his subsequent content. He had not played a scurvy trick on his son for his own personal advantage. Indeed, when his meetings were all over, he was thankful for the disappearance of Luzanne. At heart he was not all bad. A madness had been on him. He, therefore, slept heavily from midnight till morning on the eve of the election, and began the day with the smile of one who abides the result ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... madness, Ashton took up the hammer and crept around back of Blake's head. He straightened on his knees, and peered down at the calm, powerful face ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... "No political madness could be greater than to put the legislative machinery of an integral and essential portion of the Empire into the hands of men who are largely or mainly disaffected with that Empire, and who, in times of difficulty, danger and disaster ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous

... coronets? This morning they all rose from their couches peers of Parliament, individual pillars of the realm, indispensable parties to every law that could pass. Tomorrow they will be nobody—men of straw—terrae filii. What madness has persuaded them to part with their birthright, and to cashier themselves and their children forever into mere titular lords? As to the commoners at the bar, their case was different: they had no life ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... unclothed and brown; of vegetation burned up and extinguished; of villages depopulated and in ruins; of temples unroofed and perishing; of reservoirs broken down and dry, this stranger should ask, "what has thus laid waste this beautiful and opulent land; what monstrous madness has ravaged with wide-spread war; what desolating foreign foe; what civil discords; what disputed succession; what religious zeal; what fabled monster has stalked abroad, and, with malice and mortal enmity ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... deities of crime abhorred; The Marius to come. A voice proclaimed Mysterious, 'Hold! the fates permit thee not That neck to sever. Many a death he owes To time's predestined laws ere his shall come; Cease from thy madness. If ye seek revenge For all the blood shed by your slaughtered tribes to Let this man, Cimbrians, live out all his days.' Not as their darling did the gods protect The man of blood, but for his ruthless hand Fit to prepare that sacrifice of gore Which fate demanded. By the sea's despite ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... that the phrenologists call "inhabitiveness" is very prominent; he is not naturally migratory—"content to bear the ills he has, than fly to those he knows not of." Hence there appeared reason, if not entire "method in his madness." ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... the Count vehemently: 'let me perish first! But forgive my violence! the thought of losing you is madness. You cannot be ignorant of Montoni's character, you may be ignorant of his schemes—nay, you must be so, or you would not hesitate between my love ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... fact of God permitting such a thing as possession, there is no more real difficulty than is involved in His permitting such a thing as madness. The symptoms of possession seem generally to have resembled mania, and ascribing certain sorts of mania to evil spirits is only assigning one cause rather than another to a disease of whose nature we ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler

... huge tracks, running side by side, silent evidence of a dreadful journey in which terror or madness had urged to impossible results, was profoundly moving. It shocked him in the secret depths of his soul. It was the most horrible thing his eyes had ever looked upon. He began to follow them mechanically, absentmindedly almost, ever peering over his shoulder to see if he, too, were ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood

... consequences, there is nothing left out of which sectional parties can be organized. When the people of the North shall all be rallied under one banner, and the whole South marshalled under another banner, and each section excited to frenzy and madness by hostility to the institutions of the other, then the patriot may well tremble for the perpetuity of the Union. Withdraw the slavery question from the political arena and remove it to the States and Territories, each to decide for itself, and ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... here the awful judgment of an ever-righteous God, "who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," fell upon this stone-hearted and perfidious woman; for no sooner was the injured husband captured by her wicked contriving, than she also was suddenly seized with madness, and exhibited an awful and awakening instance of God's power to punish the evil doer. This dreadful circumstance had some effect upon the hearts of the ungodly hunters who had eagerly grasped their prey; but, in a relenting moment, they ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... to pieces at any moment? I had heard of such things being made of paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all buoyancy. And I could not swim a stroke. And I was alone, floating, apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness. I confess that a madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked, and beat the water with ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... creature!" he said. "If I had been young enough not to understand the position in which her madness placed me, or base enough to profit by it, what a pretty little preface to a great folly she was about to commit this evening! Well! this attack of morality will perhaps count in my ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... story the lady told her of her husband's madness must be true, when he reproached her for shutting him out of his own house; and remembering how he had protested all dinner-time that he was not her husband, and had never been in Ephesus till that day, she had no doubt that he was mad; she therefore paid the jailor ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... shall hear all. You remember that in my last letter—written, alas! in my beloved garden, which I may never see more—I spoke with a certain restraint, even an approach to mystery. It was thus. At first, when that woman proposed to take me to the convent, I was a creature distracted. The fire of madness burned in my veins, and I could think of nothing save death or revenge. But with time came reflection; came wisdom, Marguerite, and inflexible resolve. To those she loves, Margarita Montfort is wax, silk, down, anything the most soft ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards

... good?" asked Mrs. Marshall, yawning, and reaching out of bed to kiss Sylvia sleepily. She laughed a little at their faces. "Oh, music is a madness! To spend a cheerful evening listening to death-music, and then come back looking like Moses before the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... their victims. They are of three kinds—one adjoining the place of trial, where the prisoners destined to immediate execution were kept. I could not descend into them, because the day on which I visited it was festa. Another under the leads of the palace, where the sufferers were roasted to death or madness by the ardours of an Italian sun: and others called the Pozzi—or wells, deep underneath, and communicating with those on the roof by secret passages—where the prisoners were confined sometimes half-up to their middles in stinking ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... hitherto had seemed congealed in its source, rushed with impetuosity down its wonted channels, and the blue veins through which the little rivulet of life had gently flowed, now became dark and turbid as the mountain stream. Her eyes shot the lurid flashes of madness; a wild laugh broke the harmony of the purest voice; and a malignant curl usurped the place where ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... existence. He confided the matter to his favorite minister; but Wolsey was thunderstruck at the disclosure, and remained with him four hours on his knees, to dissuade him from a step which he justly regarded as madness. Here Wolsey appears as an honest man and a true friend; but royal infatuation knows neither wisdom, justice, nor humanity. Wolsey, as a man of the world, here made a blunder, and departed from the policy he had hitherto pursued—that of flattering the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... her vanity and her love, that she might one day be Mrs. Weir of Hermiston; swift, also, to recognise in his stumbling or throttled utterance the death-knell of these expectations, and constant, poor girl! in her large-minded madness, to go on and to reck nothing of the future. But these unfinished references, these blinks in which his heart spoke, and his memory and reason rose up to silence it before the words were well uttered, gave her unqualifiable agony. She was raised up and dashed down again bleeding. The recurrence ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was only what might have been expected. Strong in our love for and trust in each other, we went to a neighboring village, and, going to a little country parsonage, were married, without one thought of the madness, the folly of what we were doing. We found the minister and his family seated outside the house under a sort of arbor of flowering shrubs, and I remember it was her wish that the ceremony be performed there. Never can I forget her as she stood there, her hand ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... poverty and an awakened conscience. My mind was distracted. Holding up my hands to heaven, I vowed vengeance, and cursed and swore in such a manner that people on the road turned and looked at me, and thought me mad. I was mad; but it was the madness of passion that burned in my brain, and the stings of conscience that pierced my heart. I paused several times in my pursuit. I was told by one traveller that the woman I sought was not a mile from me, that she was sitting by the road-side drinking ardent spirits alone, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton

... parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... is madness," said the sage of old; And 'tis with nations as it is with man, Their storms of passion scatter ills untold— Thus 'tis, and has been, since the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various

... 'Lear.' There must have been a first conception greater even than his accomplishment. Did he look from his windows at a winter tempest and see miserable old men and women running hard for shelter? Did a flash of lightning bare his soul to the misery, the betrayal and the madness of the world? His supreme moment was not when he flung the completed manuscript aside, or when he heard the actors mouth his lines, but in the flash and throb of creation—in the moment when he knew that he had the power in him to write 'Lear.' What we read ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... been akin to snow-madness, for I remember that Thomas who never attempted a line of poetry before, nor since, led off with the ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... it be amiss to remark, that as a lively imagination very often degenerates into madness or folly, and bears it a great resemblance in its operations; so they influence the judgment after the same manner, and produce belief from the very same principles. When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... rags, and that is why his head was always bent as if incessantly looking on the ground. When he went about shaking his head, and minus a walking-stick in his hand, and a bag on his back—the signs of his profession— he seemed to be thinking almost to madness, and, at such times, Kuvalda spoke thus, pointing to ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... before, arms and legs, with a mercenary soldier between each pair, fore and aft. All this was repeated and repeated, till the dull monotony of tyranny began to wear through the long Teutonic patience to the under-quick of Wendish madness. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... off his haversack, and was about to leap when Dick yelled: 'No, no, Chippy! It's mere madness to jump into the race. This ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore

... following morning by the roaring of the wind, for another poorga had swooped down during the night, which kept us prisoners here for the three following days. It was madness to think of starting in such weather, and there was nothing for it but to wait for a lull, alternately smoking, sleeping, and cursing Mikouline, the cause of the delay. Fortunately the hut was weather-proof, and but for perpetual anxiety I could almost have enjoyed the rest and warmth out of reach ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... have said, a gray day. But the fires of a century's sunsets flamed and flashed in that library! Ruby, sapphire, diamond, emerald, pearl—how they glowed and glimmered! How they shone and sparkled! For the moment there fell upon me that madness that jewels bring upon women, a sort of wild delight in their hard, bright beauty, an ecstasy, an intoxication. I poured them from one hand to the other, I held the greatest to my cheek. The loveliness of them went to my head. "I ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... the spot where it was known the girl was buried. They were like starving wolves tearing at the carcass of an animal. They yelled encouragement and fought through the chaos—and still the stranger whipped them into madness with ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... or three Months, sometimes two or three dayes. Now their Friends reckoning it to proceed from the Devil, do go to him and promise him a reward if he will cure them. Sometimes they are cured, and sometimes die. The People do impute this madness to some breach of promise that the Party affected had made to the Devil, or else for eating some fruit or Betel-leaves dedicated to him: For they do dedicate some fruit-trees to the Devil; and this they do, ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... off duty and the men could mutiny at their ease; but this plan had for the moment been frustrated. The military view might have carried the day, but for the determination shown by Candido dos Reis, who pointed out that it would be madness to give the Government time to order the ships out of the Tagus. Finally, he turned to the military group, saying, "If you will not go out, I will go out alone with the sailors. I shall have the honor of getting myself shot by my comrades of the army." His insistence carried ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... to demand in this way, in the present situation of our affairs I should think it madness not to grant it. Whatever they may demand, our manufacturers, unless the leading and principal men among them are properly dealt with beforehand, will probably oppose it. That they may be so dealt with I know from experience, and that it may be done at little expense ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... not—I must not—I cannot—I dare not,—at least not at present. When the present stress is over. I may feel better. The fact is, at present I am scarcely fit to take care of my parish, and it would be madness to take upon myself any new [177] burden. See there a fine fellow I should be to have charge of the "Examiner," who have written present three times in as many lines! However, I am writing now in ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... dearly to see it going forward. And love, considered as a spectacle, must have attractions for many who are not of the confraternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy. For nature commends itself to people with a most insinuating art; the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as pacific or as cold-blooded ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to get assistance from France. Mr. O'Connor and Lord Edward FitzGerald proceeded thither for that purpose; but their mission was not productive of any great result. The people were goaded to madness by the cruelties which were committed on them every day; and it was in vain that persons above all suspicion of countenancing either rebels or Papists, protested against these enormities in the name of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... thick and fast, the wind driving it in eddying clouds, and amid it could be seen at times the white caps of the increasing surges as they broke on the edge of the floe. It was evident that it would be madness to attempt to leave their present position; yet all stood silent a moment, as if unwilling to be the first to confess the ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... soothed and yielded, and so won her back to reason. As a man, I ought to possess a cooler and more rationally balanced mind. She is a being of feeling and impulse,—loving, ardent, proud, sensitive and strong-willed. Knowing this, it was madness in me to chafe instead of soothing her; to oppose, when gentle concession would have torn from her eyes an illusive veil. Oh that I could learn wisdom in time! I was in no ignorance as to her peculiar character. I knew her faults and her weaknesses, ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur

... whispered something in her ear about the baby, and the madness of risking a bad cold. Whatever was the exact import of his communication, it had the effect of producing immediate obedience to his wishes, and Flora reluctantly quitted the social group, and ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... man's belief, that we are all mad on one subject or another. If this be so, every race is mad on some point, for have we not often heard that what is true of the individual is true of the race? Anglo-Saxon madness is book morality. Madness has been defined as a lack of consequence in ideas, and can anything be less consequent than—we need look no further back than Ibsen? The great genius who died in May last was decried by the English people ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... army, well appointed in every arm, was advancing upon the Torgau under the command of General Traubenberg. This officer was to be joined on his route by ten thousand Bashkirs, and pretty nearly the 5 same amount of Kirghises—both hereditary enemies of the Kalmucks—both exasperated to a point of madness by the bloody trophies which Oubacha and Momotbacha had, in late years, won from such of their compatriots as served under the Sultan. The Czarina's yoke these wild 10 nations bore with submissive patience, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... regretted that I should leave so promising a field of research as that which offered itself within the limits of New South Wales, and in which they considered I had laboured with some success during the last two years. Others considered the undertaking exceedingly dangerous, and even the conception of it madness on my part; and the consequence of a blind enthusiasm, nourished either by a deep devotion to science, or by an unreasonable craving for fame: whilst others did not feel themselves justified in ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... sand some glittering particles were found, and the whole settlement was in a state of excitement. Fourteen weeks of the precious springtime, which ought to have been given to plowing and planting, were consumed in this stupid nonsense. Even the Indians ridiculed the madness of the men who, for imaginary grains of gold, were wasting their chances for a ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... city, which it would be no great matter to take, if any one would press the siege, and the general is leading us to fight with Mithridates in the wilds of the Tibareni and Chaldaeans."[367] Now, if Lucullus had supposed that these notions would have led the soldiers to such madness as they afterwards showed he would not have overlooked or neglected these matters, nor have apologised instead to those men who were blaming his tardiness for thus lingering in the neighbourhood of insignificant villages for a long time, and allowing Mithridates to increase ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... the moonlight, her searching, unseeing eyes meeting and dwelling upon his own, the look of disappointment and defeat crossing her sweetly serious countenance, wrought upon him begetting a dangerous madness in his blood. That it was dangerous and a madness, and therefore promptly to be mastered and ejected, he would not permit himself an instant's doubt. Yet it very shrewdly plagued him, daring even to advance specious ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... made clear by my father, who, sending for me one day into his chamber, let me into a secret which was as little wished for as expected. He began with the surprising effects of youth and beauty, and the madness of letting go those advantages they might procure us till it was too late, when we might wish in vain to bring them back again. I stood amazed at this beginning; he saw my confusion, and bid me sit down and attend to what he was going to tell me, which was of ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding

... moreover, can perform the process without taking on airs which rouse his victim to madness, because he assumes a position not only of grammatical, but, as we have said, of social superiority. He says plainly enough, no matter how polite or scientific he may try to seem, "I was better born and bred than you, and acquired these correct ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin

... reposed on any base of fact, if, indeed, by some abhorrent miracle, he should discard his age, death were my only refuge from that most unnatural, that most ungodly union. If, on the other hand, these dreams were merely lunatic, the madness of a life waxed suddenly acute, my pity would become a load almost as heavy to bear as my revolt against the marriage. So passed the night, in alternations of rebellion and despair, of hate and pity; and with the next morning I was only to comprehend more fully my enslaved ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... demeanour and language, he rapidly dropped into childish helplessness, and finally into a deep uncontrollable slumber. This was a state of things which, at first, threatened more danger than his open madness; but then it was the horse's turn to show his quality. He saw that a responsibility devolved upon him, and he was quite equal to the occasion. He seemed to know his way as well without as with his master. We guessed this; and, taking the reins from ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie

... they, and much more mobile. Wherefore, seeing how prone we are thereto by nature, and considering also our gentleness and tenderness, how soothing and consolatory they are to the men with whom we consort, and that thus this madness of wrath is fraught with grievous annoy and peril; therefore, that with stouter heart we may defend ourselves against it, I purpose by my story to shew you, how the loves of three young men, and as many ladies, as I said before, were by ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... hand, Beauregard's defenders replied that the army was so reduced by the terrible struggle of twelve hours—and more by straggling after the rich spoils of the captured camp—as to render further advance madness. And in addition to this, it was claimed that he relied on the information of a most trusty scout—none other than Colonel John Morgan—that Buell's advance could not possibly reach the river within twenty-four hours. Of course, in that event, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... in command of fifteen ships only, out of all his former force. The rest of the fleet went through a period of hysterical madness. In some ships it lasted for minutes only. In others it went on for half an hour or more. Then they hung overhead, but did not ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster

... and was introduced into the tomb. So strong was this conviction that the belief has lived on through two changes of religion until the present day. The double still haunts the statues with which he was associated in the past. As in former times, he yet strikes with madness or death any who dare to disturb is repose; and one can only be protected from him by breaking, at the moment of discovery, the perfect statues which the vault contains. The double is weakened or killed by the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... reinforcements, arms, provisions and munitions of war that had been so liberally promised, had failed to reach them, and weakened as they were by such wholesale desertions to the rear, it was deemed by old soldiers to be nothing but madness to remain where they were, as they would be wholly unable with such a small force to make even a decent show of a fight, should they happen to be attacked, and it was at once determined to give up the intended invasion, leave Canada, and head ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald

... had no thought ever to let you know. I was the King's man-at-arms, as I am now;" and he burst into a harsh laugh. "Here's madness! The King's man-at-arms dumps him down in the King's chair! I had a thought to live to you, if you understand, as a man writes a poem to his mistress, to make my life the poem, an unsigned poem that you would never read, and yet unsigned, unread, would make its creator glad and ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason

... we know to have some noble impulses. How eagerly, yet sorrowingly we watch his movements! The dice rattle, they are thrown, and again thrown; thousands after thousands he wins and lays aside; and at last, in the madness of the game, stakes the whole sum, with his house, estate, all on the hazard of one cast. With beating heart we listen to the rattling of the dice, and with strained gaze watch the blow. The box is lifted—all is lost. Now we ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... and I believe it was a dispensation of Providence that those arrogant officers of the guard, who thought it was only necessary to show themselves in order to drive away the French, and who went so far in their madness as to whet their swords on the doorsteps of the house of our ambassadors, should now be duly humiliated and chastised. For the guards of Potsdam and Berlin are among the captured of the corps of the Prince von Hohenlohe, and they will soon arrive in Berlin. A royal prince also, the brother ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... thought was madness, and, little as we had met, I counted her already a dear friend; but my protestations seemed only to make her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... parrot-scream; she could not talk. It was one of her black days when the world was turned to madness. Abdullah retired from the vain attempt to get some sense from her with ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... rising sun, when I was startled by the words, "Thank God," faintly uttered behind me. Suddenly she had awoke from her torpor, and with a heart overflowing I went to her bedside. Her eyes were full of madness! She spoke; but the brain ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... is it prompts the roving mania—is it love Of wild adventure fanciful, unique, and odd? Is it to be in fashion, and to others prove One's social standing, that impels the madness of The tramp abroad? ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... and besides, during the night it would have been folly to venture beyond the walls. We arrived, therefore, at the exit of the passage without meeting with any obstacle. But at the last moment I was seized with a fit of madness. I threw down my torch, and leaned ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... pursuit on horseback was impossible. Knowing that it would have been equally fruitless to continue the chase on foot, they returned to the point where Van Dyk and Considine had entered the jungle, fully expecting to find them there, as it would have been madness, they thought, for two unsupported men to follow up the flying band. To their surprise ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne

... the wife at him, and even the mother at her little child; as if, in every creature that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an accuser. Never, never again, whether in this or any other shape, may Universal Madness ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... clamour from my lips, sending crinkles of cold through my inmost blood. For with the words which I read were all mixed up visions of crawling hearses, wails, and lugubrious crapes, and piercing shrieks of madness in strange earthy vaults, and all the mournfulness of the black Vale of Death, and the tragedy of corruption. Twice during the ghostly hours of that night the absolute and undeniable certainty that ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... Surely, surely, No: The fear of the punishment would make thee forbear; yea, would make thee tremble, even then when thy lusts were powerfull, to think what a punishment thou wast sure to sustain, so soon as the pleasure was over. But Oh! the folly, the madness, the desperate madness that is in the hearts of Mr. Badmans friends, who in despite of the threatnings of an holy and sin revenging God, and of the outcries and warnings of all good men; yea, that will in despite of the groans and torments ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan

... Lydia. She had already suggested that madness was the real reason of the seclusion of the tenants at the Warren. Cashel saw the glance, and intercepted it by turning to her and saying, with ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... Lord! what madness rules in brainsick men When, for so slight and frivolous a cause, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... drama!—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot; And much of Madness, and more of Sin And Horror, the soul ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... But always to throw, without distinction, the blame of all disorders upon the sovereign would introduce a fatal error in politics, and serve as a perpetual apology for treason and rebellion: as if the turbulence of the great, and madness of the people, were not, equally with the tyranny of princes, evils incident to human society, and no less carefully to be guarded ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... top of the bank, now, and the man, still holding her in his arms, stood upon a mat of jungle grass beneath a great tree. Slowly he lowered her to her feet. The madness of desire still gripped him; but now there was another force at work combating the evil ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... preparations to date, asserted that it was universally agreed no restoration of the Union was possible and answered British fears by declaring it was impossible to believe that even the American madness could contemplate a servile insurrection. The friendly Spectator also discussed the matter and repeatedly. It was a mistaken idea, said this journal, that there could be no enfranchisement without a slave rising, but should this occur, "the right of the slave to regain his freedom, even if ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... withdrawal of the Bill was remarkable. A delirium of triumph appeared to have seized the entire country, and more particularly the populations of the large cities; but singularly true was Lord Castlereagh's prophecy, that in six months the King would be the most popular person in his dominions. The madness of the multitude necessarily brought about a reaction. "When the struggle was over and the victory gained," observes an historian of these events, "the King and his Ministers defeated, and the Queen secured in her rank and fortune, they began to reflect ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... instant, then made a rush at me; I fired, but missed. I had a vision of a poised decanter; a second later, the missile caught me in the chest and hurled me back against the wall. As I fell I dropped my weapon, and they were upon me. I thought it was all over; but as they surged round, in the madness of drink and anger, I, looking through their ranks, saw the door open and a crowd of men rush in. Who was at their head? Thank God! it was the colonel, and his voice rose high ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope

... hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... trembling no longer, but steady—firm as a rock. She must find Guy. Wherever he was, she must find him. That money—her own sacred charge—must be returned before she faced Burke again. Guy was mad. She must save him from his madness. This fight for Guy's soul—she had seen it coming. She realized it as a hand to hand fight with Kieff. But she would win. She was bound to win. So she told herself. No power of evil could possibly triumph ultimately, and she knew that deep in his inmost heart Guy acknowledged this. ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... which she had learned that he was staying at the Grand Babylon on his own account, as a wealthy visitor. She thought it bizarre, but she certainly had not taken it for a sign of lunacy. And yet it had been a sign of madness. And the worst of harmless lunacy was that it might develop at any moment into ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... For as the Laplander grew frenzied, and foamed at the mouth, so it has been with all false prophets from the beginning. Even the blind heathen called prophesying mania, or the wisdom of madness. The secret of producing this madness was known to them; sometimes it was by the use of roots or aromatic herbs, or by exhalations, as in the case of the Pythoness, whose incoherent utterances were written by the priests of Apollo, for when the fit was over, all remembrance of ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... feeling his way and found things not at all to his liking. To attempt, alone and with an empty pocket, to drive a favorite monarch from the throne, seemed the act of madness. But the ambitious youth had dreamed his dream of royal state and had no fancy for returning to a humble ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... she laid her hand on the hilt of a dagger passed through her girdle. At the same time she suddenly threw back her veil, and displayed features in which all the signs of rage and madness could be traced. No longer having a doubt as to the person I had to deal with, my first movement was to rise and stand on my guard; but this first feeling overcome, I repented the thought of a struggle with the unhappy woman, and determined on employing a method ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne

... of Anahuac—"by the waters"—was built, still remains; but the picturesque lake which beautified it, traversed by causeways and covered with floating gardens laden with trees and flowers, has disappeared. Though the conquered natives, roused at last to a spirit of madness by the unequaled cruelty and extortion of the victors, rose in a body and expelled them from their capital, still the ruthless valor of Cortez and his followers, aided by artful alliance with disaffected native tribes, together ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... (1601-1680), gives an account, in his "Musurgia," of the cure of this madness by certain airs, by which the patient is stimulated to dance violently. The perspiration thus produced was said to effect a cure. In his "Phonurgia nova" (1673) Kircher actually gives the notes of the tune by which one ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor

... of neutrality were maintained, and a mitigated Episcopacy only seemed to be insisted on, it was far from the intention of the ministry always to preserve like regard to the Presbyterians. The madness of the Fifth Monarchy men afforded them a pretence for departing from it. Venner, a desperate enthusiast, who had often conspired against Cromwell, having, by his zealous lectures inflamed his own imagination and that of his followers, issued forth at their head into the streets of London. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... admiration, and declares that any nation might be proud to claim their genius. Longfellow and Lowell, Emerson and Motley, to whom we could add almost all the well-known thinkers of the country, men after his own heart in most things, belong to this 'ignorant' or 'false' sect. Is it their one madness? That is a strange madness which besets our greatest men and women; a marvelous anomaly surely. Yet there must be something sympathetic in abolitionism to Mr. Trollope, for he prefers Boston, the centre of this ignorance, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... fierce and monstrous gladness Spread through the multitudinous streets, fast flying Upon the wings of fear:—From his dull madness The starveling waked, and died in joy: the dying, Among the corpses in stark agony lying, Just heard the happy tidings, and in hope Closed their faint eyes: from house to house replying With loud acclaim ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... with his bare feet to quicken her pace. But Frank bade him stop. Despite the man's optimism he could not believe it wise to allow tiny tots like that to play with such a huge, clumsy animal. He was sure that their mother would be horrified if she knew it. He loved children, and felt that it was madness to allow these babies to ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... the madness of Mrs. Smithers, however, for she had once seen the departed Mr. Judson going out to the orchard with a tin box under his arm and her own spade but partially concealed under his long overcoat. When he came back, he was smiling, which was so unusual that she forgot all about ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... for what he did at a fixed rate; and that by his being bewitched by a passion for gaming, whereby he lost vast sums of money; and even what he got in his state of servitude by day, he commonly lost at night: nor could he ever be cured of this cursed madness. Those of his works, therefore, which he did in this unhappy part of his life may easily be conceived to be in a different style to what he did before, which in some things, that is, in the airs of his heads (in ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... Wherefore this madness? What will these gentlemen think? They will say, and rightly, that you have no education, and that our family has not known how to bring you up. Now, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... could she confide it? How stab the father's heart so cruelly! To tell him that Berta had lost her reason would be to kill him. The good man watched over his daughter with the eyes of love, but love itself made him blind and he did not perceive her madness. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various

... nation of singularities. I doubt not that it is true, he has hidden the truth from you. True or false, I care not. They are mad. For this I care not. My faith, I have not married an Englishman. Why, then, should I care for the madness of this nation ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty

... force their way through the loose bed of the torrent no longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it on their heads, screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain; repeated all these persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when they stopped again; got them on, once more; forced and goaded them to an abrupter point of the descent; and when their writhing and smarting, and the weight behind them, bore ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... is close upon you when the madness of the season Having howled itself to silence, like a Minnesota 'clone, Will at last be superseded by the still, small voice of reason, When the whelpage of your folly ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... no reply. He was placed in a very disagreeable and painful position. He knew that it was madness to send a boat off while the squall was impending. Mr. Hamblin was wrathy. The long billows were black and smooth, and the sails hung idly on the gaffs. There was no danger then, and the learned gentleman had been so fortunate as never to see ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... and thus I used to speak to myself; goaded almost to madness at one moment, and at the next reconciling myself to my ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... upon them, and making the Sign of the Cross with his Hand at them, he said, Be gone, ye cursed Fiends to a Place that's fitter for you. You have Work enough to do among Mortals, your Madness has no Power over me, that am now lifted in the Roll of Immortality. The Words were no sooner out of his Mouth, says the Franciscan, but these filthy Birds took their Flight, but left such a Stink behind them, that a House ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... Boer aspirations meant, or the progress already achieved in the direction of their realisation. But this ignorance made the demands of the ultimatum seem the more insolent. To Mr. Balfour it was as though President Krueger had gone mad. But madness or insolence, the effect was the same. With the mass of the nation all hesitation, all balancing of arguments, were at an end. The one thing that was perceived was that any further attempt to treat with a people so minded would be an admission to the world that British supremacy had disappeared ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... back the estate into the mire. I even took the liberty to plead with him; and when he still opposed me with a shake of the head and a bitter dogged smile, my zeal quite carried me beyond my place. "This is midsummer madness," cried I; "and I for one will be no ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the Sisters meddling for? Do they find me in their way? I'm flattered! I wish I was. Well!—is drunkenness the worst thing in the world?" she asked herself deliberately. "Of course, if it goes beyond a certain point it is like madness—you must keep out of its way, for your own sake. But papa used to say there were many things a great deal worse. So there are!—meanness, and shuffling with truth for the sake of your soul. As for the other ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... whole thing seems to me to be so mad, that I partly trusted that she would see the madness of it. I am not sure whether you know anything of my nephew George?" ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... de Chateauroux persisted, "yet it is a madness too powerful and sweet to be withstood. Listen, Victoria,"—and he waved his hand toward the palace, whence music, softened by the distance, came from the lighted windows,—"do you not remember? They used to play that air ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... to which they may bring their talents;[2] but how the Miltons, Tavistocks, Althorps, and all who have a great stake in the country can run the same course is more than I can conceive or comprehend. Party is indeed, as Swift says, 'the madness of many,' when carried to its present pitch. In the meantime the Conservative party are as usual committing blunders, which will be fatal to them. Lord Harrowby was to have moved yesterday or the day before, in the House of Lords, a resolution pledging ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... extricate him from his dangerous dilemma, and thus relieved his breast of a mountain of anxiety and distress. But the laugh with which he greeted his approach found no response from Nathan himself, who, having looked with amazement upon Edith and Telie, as if marvelling what madness had brought females at that hour into that wild desert, turned at last to the soldier, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... But granted that Timea gets it, what would be the result? She would be a rich lady, who would not cast a look at you from her height; and you would remain a miserable supercargo, in whom it would be madness even to dream of her. Now, however, things are the other way—you will be a rich man and she a poor girl. Is not that exactly what you desired of fate? Well, that is what has happened. Did you put that log in the way of the ship which stove her in? Do you mean badly ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... you told us that Hamlet was one of your favourite parts? Is it not the fact that the chief character in the play drives his fiancee to madness and suicide by his cruelty, slays her father and brother, together with his own step-father, and procures the death of two ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... dispassionate reader almost incredible that the English people, who shed his father's blood, who rallied round the Parliament, and were fulsome in their praises of the Protector, should thus suddenly change; but, allowing for "the madness of the people," we look for strength and consistency to the men of learning and letters. We feel sure that he who sang his eulogy of Cromwell dead, can have now no lyric burst for the returning Stuart. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... but she could not forgive his having seen her in so humiliating a position, and she flung him a look that was full of hatred, feeling in her heart the birth of an unutterable desire for vengeance. With death beside her, the sense of impotence almost strangled her. A whirlwind of passion and madness rose in her head; the blood which boiled in her veins made everything about her seem like a conflagration. Instead of killing herself, she seized the sword and thrust it though the marquis. But the weapon slipped between his arm and side; he caught her by the ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... have been upset, and has gone down in the squall," said Mynheer Barentz. "I thought as much, carrying such a press of sail. There never was a ship that could carry more than the Vrow Katerina. It was madness on the part of the captain of that vessel; but I suppose he wished to keep up with us. Heh, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat

... ivories and we all held our breath as we read his four-three. A mad joy flamed in Andrew's face and he turned his cup with a steady wrist—and rolled threes. We none of us looked at Brown, a man who had led another man in whose veins ran a madness, where in his ran ice, on to his ruin. We followed Andrew to the street to see him ride away in a gray drizzle to a gambled home—and a ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... chair than he fell asleep and dreamed. It is not improbable. The power of dreams is great on children's minds, as all of you may know. But in the face of these developments I can hardly bring myself to accept this theory. There is too much method in the child's madness. It looks more like the outcome of some desperate move on the part of this defence to win the game which they have seen slipping from their control. It looks like a deep-laid plan to rob my aged ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene

... death and destruction in its course, while the infantry from the Third corps poured into the faces of the desperate foe a terrible hail storm of bullets which almost decimated the heavy column. With the desperation of madness, the rebels rushed against this terrible fire, almost reaching the muzzles of the guns, only to be hurled back again by the fearful tornado in front. The Third corps seemed hardly able to hold its position, but ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... consequently so far as he is master of himself (in his senses) and therefore in a healthy condition of mind. But great crimes are paroxysms, the very sight of which makes the man of healthy mind shudder. The question would therefore be something like this: whether a man in a fit of madness can have more physical strength than if he is in his senses; and we may admit this without on that account ascribing to him more strength of mind, if by mind we understand the vital principle of man in the free use of his powers. For since those crimes have their ground merely in the power ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant

... that meant. The word was used literally; the condemned one was cut off from all communication by having his sensory nerves surgically severed. Madness followed quickly; psychosomatic death followed eventually, as the brain, cut off from any outside stimuli except those which could not be eliminated without death following instantly, finally became incapable of keeping the body alive. ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett

... and when he sought to know its meaning, the Prophet Daniel was inspired to tell him that it portended his removal from the kingly office for the space of seven years, in consequence of a curious and very unusual kind of madness. This malady, which is not unknown to physicians, has been termed "Lycanthropy." It consists in the belief that one is not a man but a beast, in the disuse of language, the rejection of all ordinary human food, and sometimes ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson

... allege for our excuse? To live and not know why is unnatural. To reject the causes for which we live, under the influence of a foolish longing for a respite of some few days, during which we are to live in the world, while separated from God—I know not how to name such infatuation and madness! ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various

... sword with bloudy trembling hand Did brandish round, when straight at her command Hatreds, and strifes appear'd, murder and rage The horrid ruine of the new-borne age, Shee drew along; Tumultuous madness, all The slaughter'd peoples unjust funerall: Each famous kingdome, inexhausted towne In a large streame of bloud by her, o're-throwne. Next followed Her, the plaints, and direfull grones Of sighing parents, rob'd of their little ones, Whole tydes of teares, ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski

... adventure: she suddenly waxed wroth with exceeding wrath, her face flushed red as fire, her eyeballs started out from their sockets and she foamed at the mouth with ungovernable fury. Seeing her in this mood I was terrified and my sense and reason fled by reason of my affright; but presently in the madness of her passion she took up a tasse of water which stood beside her and dipping her fingers in the contents muttered some words which I could not understand; then sprinkling some drops over me, cried, Accursed that thou ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... injured. I remember a quick and clever little girl aged five and a half years who was urged on by her governess to work which she delighted in, till at length the signs of over-taxed brain showed themselves in frequent extreme irritability, and occasional attacks of causeless fury amounting almost to madness. It was fully a year during which almost all mental work was suspended, while the child was sent to have complete change under most judicious management in the country, before her mind quite recovered ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.

... tongue and sober lip No words of folly pass, Nor, are they found to taste and sip The madness of the glass. ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould

... political arena has been that of a shameless and lawless gamester. He succeeded at the time, but the hour of retribution approaches, and he will be obliged to disgorge his winnings, to throw aside his false dice, and to end his days in some retirement where he may curse his madness at his leisure; for repentance is a virtue with which his heart is likely to ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... with Savile? What, the face was masked? I had the heart to see, sir! Face of flesh, But heart of stone—of smooth cold frightful stone! Ay, call them! Shall I call for you? The Scots Goaded to madness? Or the English—Pym— Shall I call Pym, your subject? Oh, you think I'll leave them in the dark about it all? They shall not know ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... his iniquity: the dumb ass speaking with man's voice forbad the madness of the prophet." As Balaam was rebuked by the dumb ass, so these false teachers in their madness for worldly honor, gain and wisdom are rebuked by the humble ignorant Christians, whom they consider ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... a scene were presented on any stage in the world the effect of it would be visible instantaneously on the audience; that had they seen it as I saw it, they would have laughed themselves to hysteria and madness. Finally the Sultan recovered himself, great tears rolling down his cheeks, and his features quivering with laughter, then he slowly uttered the word "kali,"—hot, strong, quick, or ardent medicine. He required no more, but the other ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... disposed to consider the baron subject to fits of temporary derangement; but I was wise enough to do nothing more than nod my head in answer to this appeal, leaving my questioner to interpret the action as he in his madness might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... there must be at least a cord of wood in that bench. Whittling's rather slow work, it's true, but in a place like this it'll be an occupation, and that's something. Prisoners go mad unless they have something to do; and so, just to save myself from madness, I mean to go in for fuel—unless you can think of something else ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille

... so!" answered the Queen hastily; "but it is madness, and must not be repeated. Go—but go not far from hence; and meantime let no one ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... manner, in which there was none of the madness that had marked him at our first meeting, but a strange air of authority, unlike anything I had associated with him before, I signed ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... lovers, we got into the habit of thinking together in a common reverie. His intuitions had already acquired that acuteness which must surely characterize the intellectual perceptiveness of great poets and often bring them to the verge of madness. ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... it madness to keep their words, and there's them that don't, Hurry Harry. You may be one of the first, but I'm one of the last. No red-skin breathing shall have it in his power to say that a Mingo minds his word more ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... Is madness contagious? Or is it that, while the sane can exercise but a very limited power over the insane, there is no limit to the influence which the insane can gain over one another? Living in a world of their own, where delusions pass for palpable facts, where the logical ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... back, with all the effortless grace of youth—a light heart, an easy conscience. He deliberately left his place and walked back to meet her. She waved her hand gayly. There was color in her cheeks now, and her eyes laughed into his. The shadows were gone. He felt that this was madness, and yet he said what he had come ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Gods; and, How may I rest satisfied with the Divine Administration; and, How may I become free? For he is free for whom all things come to pass according to his will, and whom none can hinder. What then, is freedom madness? God forbid. For madness and ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus

... absurdities supposed in maintaining the contrary opinion; because it is certain, that princes have it in their power to keep a majority on their side, by any tolerable administration; till provoked by continual oppressions, no man indeed can then answer where the madness of the people ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... one—consisted in overlooking the beneficial effect of that very superstition, then so pernicious, in a prior age of the world, when violence was universal, crime prevalent alike in high and low places, and government impotent to check either the tyranny of the great or the madness of the people. Then it was that superstition was the greatest blessing which Providence, in mercy, could bestow on mankind; for it effected what the wisdom of the learned or the efforts of the active were alike unable to effect; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... with it, "the little stars high up at the zenith twinkle like silver bees. Those that sit on the edge of the horizon are huge and golden, like desert watch-fires. Oh, do you know, Lord Ernest, if quite a dull, uninteresting man, or—or one that it would be madness even to think of—proposed to me on such a night, I should have to say yes. It would seem so prosaic and such a waste, of moonlight, not to. Wouldn't you feel like that if ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... retorted. "Prying or not, I didn't want it. Staring eyes, condoling words, and mockery in their hearts! 'He got what he deserved for his madness,' they'd ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... Treves were amazed at what they considered his madness; but they gave him no hindrance, nor did they molest him in any way. Indeed, in no long time the fame of his penance was noised abroad, and multitudes came, as they had come at Ancyra, to see with their own eyes what ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton

... de Serizy?" cried the poor man. "Madame de Serizy is gone mad, I tell you, and her madness is my doing, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... trembled for the progress that each party might have made in the affection of the other, even before they were aware of the danger. He believed that the match was in every respect such as to flatter the ambition of Mr. Falkland; and he was stung even to madness by the idea of being deprived of the object dearest to his heart by ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... have been madness. Martin and Gerard followed Margaret's example. The pursuers gained slightly on them; but Martin kept shouting, "Only win the wood! only ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... in a Slavonic Sahara! I say, you are in such a romantic position, that my hair still bristles with amazement. You have often stood by me in my scrapes of former days as my rational guardian angel; now you are yourself in the midst of madness; and, as I at present enjoy the advantage of being in my right mind, my conscience forbids me to leave you ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... been a horrid row of some kind and now he asks me to cut Dr. Bulling!" She glanced at Barney's letter. "Well, he doesn't ask me, but it's all the same—'you will know how to treat him.' He's too proud to ask me, but he expects me to. It would be sheer madness! Wouldn't the Duff Charrington's and Evelyn Redd be delighted! It is preposterous! I must go! I ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... Leagues and Treaties; the power of raising Armes, keeping of Strengths and Forts are Essential parts, and inseparable privileges of the Royal Authoritie and Prerogative of the Kings of this Kingdom: Yet, such hath been the madness and delusion of these times, that even Religion itself, which holds the Right of Kings to be Sacred and Inviolable, hath been pretended unto, for warrand of these injurious Violations and Incroachments, so publickly done and owned, upon and against His Majesties just Power, Authority and ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... first madness which had sent him headlong in pursuit of his wife, a sort of mental evolution set in. That unadaptable focus of his promptly became adaptable. And where it had been incapable of expansion, it slowly began to expand. It grew, and, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... a moment's mutual madness!... The instant past, both knew it. Torn from this momentary dream of bliss, they gazed at each other, embarrassed, greatly moved: for that very reason they wished to part. Ah, this was not the moment to speak of love, to dream of happiness and mutual joy! Dark, dreadful mysteries ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... minds, whom the misfortunes of the kingdom, and the security and ease of a retirement among Gownsmen had drawn thither. Their first purpose was no more than only the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being engaged in the passions and madness of that dismal Age. And from the Institution of that Assembly, it had been enough if no other advantage had come but this: that by this means there was a race of young men provided, against the next Age, whose ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson

... skull-shattering madness closing in on him. This was a joke, of course. No, no joke. A dream then? No, not that either. In only a few split seconds it happened. Tyndall had leapt the rail around the patio, and was streaking through the Grove, ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable

... If misery and madness abound in stage life, so also does an indomitable cheerfulness, always at least a cheerful countenance. Dr. Doran's book abounds, as might be expected, with admirable impromptus and the like; one might collect a large posy of them. ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... impulse to throw my arms around her, and kiss her as I had never kissed her before and bid her forget all that I had said that day. Her faltering eyes told me that they read my longing. I was about to yield when the little devil of a pain inside made itself sharply felt and my madness went from me. I fetched a thing half-way between a sigh and a groan, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... my papers, if you like. So many, you know, have written about Tasso; but they are all wrong. As to the particular nature of his madness, and his feelings for Leonora, and the real cause of his imprisonment, and the character of Leonora, who, in my opinion, was a cold-hearted woman, else she would have married him in spite of her brother—they are all wrong. I ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... precision. Flight after flight fell upon the Scots, who were completely bewildered, and seemed incapable of action. A Scottish knight, Sir John Swinton, implored the leaders to charge, passionately exclaiming, "What madness has seized you, my brave countrymen, that you stand here like deer to be shot down? Follow me, those who will! We will either gain the victory, or die like men ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... be, what duty is, Why day is day, night is night, and time is time. Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief:—your noble son is mad: Mad call I it; for to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad? But let ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... for on second thoughts matters did not seem quite so clear; but a day or two after, when the notion had been steadily simmering in his mind it seemed at last to be quite done, and shutting his eyes to all suggestions regarding impossibility or madness, he ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn

... treated by her as a big boy. "Who would have believed," he adds, "that this childish punishment, received at the age of 8 from the hand of a young woman of 30, would have determined my tastes, my desires, my passions, for the rest of my life?" He remarks that this strange taste drove him almost to madness, but maintained the purity of his morals, and the joys of love existed for him chiefly in imagination. (J.J. Rousseau, Les Confessions, partie i, livre i.) It will be seen how all the favoring conditions of fear, shame, and precocious sexuality were here ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... rushed the knights crying, "Where is the traitor? Where is the archbishop?" "Behold me," replied Thomas, "no traitor, but a priest of God." The assailants strove to lay hands upon him. He struggled and cast forth angry words upon them. In the madness of their wrath they struck him to the ground and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... road to the mill, and stopping beside the motionless wheel, watched the excited swallows fly back and forth overhead. He knew how a man felt who was given a life sentence in prison for an act committed in a moment of madness. Why he had ever asked Judy to marry him—why he had gone on calmly approaching the day of his wedding—he could no more explain than he could explain the motives which impelled him to the absurdities in a nightmare. It was ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... she was, rapidly driven to the railway station, and conveyed to the Hospital for Lunatic Criminals. It was only when she was within this vast and grim abode of madness that she realized the horror of her situation. It was only when she was received by the kind physician and read pity in his eyes, and saw his look of hopeless incredulity when she attempted to tell him that she was not insane; it was ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... of the Bavarian mountains. His start at imaginary sounds, his alarm at a creaking door, his fear at nothing, the grinding teeth and the clenched fist indicative of mental torture, the dishevelled hair, the beating of his breast with his hands, the foaming mouth, the implication, the shriek, the madness, the flying here and there in the one attempt to get rid of himself, the horror increased at his every appearance, whether in company or alone, regarded in contrast with the dagger scene of "Macbeth" makes the latter mere child's play. That day, John Zwink, in the character of Judas, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... firelight from the pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old passion, stirred into spirit life by the very madness of this night. A hundred times I have been sorry that I kept the thing, but never ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... which is very like taking the law into your own hands, ma'am, and then you won't leave to Netta nearly as much as you might if you had taken care of yourself and lived longer, and saved up after a reasonable fashion. It's sheer madness. Why, ma'am, you're starving now, but I'll put a stop to that. Don't you mind, now, whether I'm rude or not. You can't expect anything else from an old gold-digger, who has lived for years where there were no women except such as appeared to be made of mahogany, ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... and afterwards to send them back with a force sufficient to retrieve their affairs. Others were of opinion it was proper to apply to Africa, and to Juba in particular. But Theophanes of Lesbos observed it was madness to leave Egypt, which was distant but three days' sail. Besides, Ptolemy, who was growing towards manhood, had particular obligations to Pompey on his father's account. As so it was determined that they should seek for refuge in Egypt. Being informed that Ptolemy was with his army at ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... attitude. A number of journalists alluded to the adventurer who would like to become Prime Minister or King of the Jews. No mention of the "Jewish State" appeared in the Neue Freie Presse, then or ever. The Algemeine Zeitung of Vienna said that Zionism was a madness born of despair, The Algemeine Zeitung of Munich described it as a fantastic dream of a feuilletonist whose mind had been unhinged ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... her love, that she might one day be Mrs. Weir of Hermiston; swift, also, to recognise in his stumbling or throttled utterance the death-knell of these expectations, and constant, poor girl! in her large-minded madness, to go on and to reck nothing of the future. But these unfinished references, these blinks in which his heart spoke, and his memory and reason rose up to silence it before the words were well uttered, gave her unqualifiable agony. She was raised up and dashed down again bleeding. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Virgin raise the dead Saviour, the Magdalen and S. Catherine weep at his feet; S. Peter and S. Paul at the back express their grief in the manner natural to their characters. S. Peter, in his vehemence, flings up his arms in a madness of sorrow. S. Paul, with more dignity, is half stupefied with ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)

... her to know that such things were believed. From the whole swarm she was protected—shame that it should have to be said!—by pure lack of what is generally regarded as a religious education, such being the mother of more tears and madness in humble souls, and more presumption in the proud and selfish, than perhaps any other influence out of whose darkness God brings light. Neither ascetic nor mystic nor doctrinist of any sort, caring nothing for church or chapel, of observance of any kind as observance, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... amazed at my madness, and, while they consulted what to do with me, I took my chance to grip the first of them by the throat and swing ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... "'Twould be madness to send her forth into this wintery air with a newly broken arm," said the lady—"if you will come with me, little Jennie, we will soon satisfy your parents that you are in comfortable quarters, my carriage ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... that I do not at all understand Nikhil's point of view; that is rather where my danger lies. I was born in India and the poison of its spirituality runs in my blood. However loudly I may proclaim the madness of walking in the path of self- abnegation, I cannot ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... genius can give to its creations the divine power of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to what itself is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away by their demon, While talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of his sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... In this austere solitude, his body was emaciated, his fancy was inflamed; whatever he wished, he believed; whatever he believed, he saw in dreams and revelations. From Jerusalem the pilgrim returned an accomplished fanatic; but as he excelled in the popular madness of the times, Pope Urban the Second received him as a prophet, applauded his glorious design, promised to support it in a general council, and encouraged him to proclaim the deliverance of the Holy Land. Invigorated by the approbation of the pontiff, his zealous missionary traversed. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... of water not easy to describe. Words seem colorless—inadequate to convey the picture it presented or the sense of awe it inspired. Looking at it from among the boulders on the shore it seemed the last degree of madness for human beings to pit their Lilliputian strength against that racing, thundering flood. Certain it was that The Big Mallard was the supreme test ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... who, in the month of March, had become Chief Secretary, proclaimed with equal force that it would be folly and madness to break these solemn contracts.[8] In the Bill, as at first brought in, the Court had, in fact, power to vary contracts by fixing a composition for outstanding debts and determining the period over which ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God—this is madness.[19] ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... complete his madness. He was about to cast himself beside her when a pain, vicious and sharp as the stab of a red hot needle struck him just above his ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... at the ripe age of forty-five, I succeeded in achieving the most sublime folly of my life. I should have taken a degree in madness and been raised to a professor's chair in some college of lunacy! Herbert, at the age of forty-five I fell in love with and married a girl of sixteen out of a log cabin! merely, forsooth, because she had a pearly skin like the leaf of the white japonica, soft gray eyes ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... his fidelity, and took much pains by their praises and their promises to keep him close at their side; and this, too, amused him. He was amused as a tyrant might be at the obvious efforts of those around him to keep him in good-humor, or as a man conscious of incipient madness might find malign delight in the anxiety of his friends to fall in with all his moods and not to cross him in anything he was pleased ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... and he will become aware that Past and Present are so indissoluble as to be incapable of separate interpretation or single study. He will learn that there is no such thing as a distinct Past or a defined Present. "Yesterday this day's madness did prepare," and the affairs of bygone times must be interpreted in the light of recent events. The Past is alive to-day, and all the deeds of man in all the ages are living at this hour in offspring. There is no real death. The earthly grave will not hide, nor the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... when the beast in him rampaged, killed forever the ideal she had had? Was she saved by his madness? Or had she been driven on the rocks? ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... strong. Thy arms hurt me, thy hands make me ache." Then Ootah heard the man's hard voice and Annadoah's repressed murmurs of mingled pain and delight. The day became black about him. He felt that he must get away; a wild madness to run seized him. He felt the impetus of the winds in his feet. Turning on his heel, his face to the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... scents of summer, and Miss Gabriel had not lived all her life in Garland Town without learning the subtle aromas of the wind, to distinguish those that were harmless or beneficent from those that warned, those that threatened, those that were morose, savage, malignant, those that piped a note of madness and meant a hurricane. Nor did the fog in itself appear to her very formidable. To be sure, she had never known a thicker one; but the Lord Proprietor (saving his presence) had probably exaggerated its terror. He was—let this excuse be made for him—a ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... there." The unhappy man sent his ball into its very jaws. And then madness seized him. The merciful laws of golf, framed by kindly men who do not wish to see the asylums of Great Britain overcrowded, enact that in such a case the player may take his ball and throw it over his shoulder. The same ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse

... captain Snipes, when brethren, as we are, fall out, is it policy to go on to exasperate and cut each other's throats, until our enemy comes and takes away a fine country, of which, by such madness, we had rendered ourselves unworthy? Would it not be much better policy to trace back all our wrong steps of passion and revenge, and making hearty friends again, and joining our forces against the common enemy, drive him out of our country; and then by establishing ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... the term, adoration would better express what I felt. She was so pure, so perfect, such a model of female perfection, that I looked up to her with a reverence which almost quelled any feeling of love. I felt that she was above me, and that, with her wealth, it would be madness for one in my present position to aspire to her. Yet with this feeling I would have sacrificed all my hopes and present advantages to have obtained her approving smile. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that I risked Mr. Trevannion's displeasure to gain her approbation; and when I resumed ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat

... otherwise, why should I so keenly regret the near approach of the parting hour? Have I not been battered by successive fevers, prostrate with agony day after day lately? Have I not raved and stormed in madness? Have I not clenched my fists in fury, and fought with the wild strength of despair when in delirium? Yet, I regret to surrender the pleasure I have felt in this man's society, though so dearly purchased.... March 14th.—We had a sad breakfast together. I could not eat, my heart was too ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind. There he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost; and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... he, with impatience, I that such objections could escape me: I reasoned long against my own conviction, and labored against truth with the utmost obstinacy. I sometimes suspected myself of madness, and should not have dared to impart this secret but to a man like you, capable of distinguishing the wonderful from the impossible and the incredible from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... asleep over my beloved books! And how well, too, I understood their amusement—the appeal of the poor man's club!—when in gay carousal we tried to forget what we were. Even in the saloon and dance-hall we told tales of the shop! Oh, the irony of it! Was there no escape from the madness of the mart, no surcease from the frenzy of the factory or the shibboleth of ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... never looked lovingly upon a youth, was moved by the beauty and the generosity of Prince Meleagrus. She would have taken from him the spoil of the chase. But as she held out her arms Meleagrus's uncles struck them with the poles of their spears. Heavy marks were made on the maiden's white arms. Madness then possessed Meleagrus, and he took up his spear and thrust it, first into the body of Plexippus and then into the body of Toxeus. His thrusts were terrible, for he was filled with the fierceness of the hunt, and his ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... Microscopic Life; The Sources of Potable Water; Theory of the Radiometer; Tempered Glass in The Household; The New York Aquarium; The Cruelty of Hunting; The Gorilla in Confinement; Instruction Shops In Boston; Moon Madness; The Argument against Vaccination; The Telephone; Damages by an Insect; The Summer Scientific Schools; An Intelligent Quarantine; The "Grasshopper Commission"; Surveying Plans for the Season; The Causes of ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... dining amidst the strains of a military band, because he could taste the brass in his soup. Charles Lamb, in his chapter on "Ears," remarked, that while a carpenter's hammer, on a warm summer day, caused him to "fret into more than midsummer madness," these unconnected sounds were nothing when compared with the measured malice of music. For while the ear may be passive to the strokes of a hammer, and even endure them with some degree of equanimity, to music it cannot be passive. The noted ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... about the practice of seizing British subjects in American ships: "That we, the people of America, should engage in ruinous warfare to support a rash opinion, that foreign sailors in our merchant ships are to be protected against the power of their sovereign, is downright madness." "Why not," he wrote again in 1813, while the war was raging, "waiving flippant debate, lay down the broad principle of national right, on which Great Britain takes her native seamen from our merchant ships? Let those who deny the right pay, suffer, and fight, to compel ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... already convinced you that the prisoner committed this act in a moment when to all practical intents and purposes he was not responsible for his actions; a moment of such mental and moral vacuity, arising from the violent emotional agitation under which he had been suffering, as to amount to temporary madness. My friend has alluded to the "romantic glamour" with which I have sought to invest this case. Gentlemen, I have done nothing of the kind. I have merely shown you the background of "life"—that palpitating life which, believe me—whatever my ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... that her courage had lain in the knowledge of absolute security, for now, at the menace of discovery, her heart was paralyzed with fright and she could scarcely breathe. Instinct told her to run, but acquired self-control kept her from this madness, and, by a great effort, she continued walking quietly as before. Gradually her nerve returned. She determined, by feint, to discover whether the man were really following her or if his presence were due to accident. Having now arrived at the residential ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in every glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith

... swallowed up in the darkness and misery which were her proper element, seized and mastered her. She staggered to her feet. A young girl approached her with a tray of tempting food. The sight and smell of it goaded the starved creature to madness. She could have fallen upon it like a wolf, but instead she pushed the girl roughly aside and fumbled ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various

... words; but I knew better. After all my study of Mr. Bellairs, one discovery had been reserved for the last moment—that of his latent and essential madness. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... oppressed and fevered with the new thoughts that raged within him, and threw open his casement for air. The ocean lay suffused in the starry light, and the stillness of the heavens never more eloquently preached the morality of repose to the madness of earthly passions. But such was Glyndon's mood that their very hush only served to deepen the wild desires that preyed upon his soul; and the solemn stars, that are mysteries in themselves, seemed, by a kindred sympathy, to agitate ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... gifted writer, Edouard Rod, paints in still more vivid colors the cruelty and madness of the present state of things. He too only aims at presenting its tragic features, without suggesting or forseeing any issue ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... the struggling, aristocratic crowd with a half-contemptuous smile on his lips. "Why, it's hard work. They fight and push for the sake of a few hours spent in a crowded, poisoned room; and there's no prophet to rise up and proclaim it madness." ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... the path down which they had come. They could hear the crackling of the flames at the Hunting Lodge to the southward and the cries of the mob at the Castle, but there was no sign of pursuit. Perhaps they were satisfied to appease their madness with pillage and fire. Half an hour later Boris pointed backward. A new glow had risen, a ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... gratitude to you, sir," said Tom, with great emotion. "Your Tom Bowles would give up all his dreams of wealth or of rising in life, and go through fire and water to serve the friend who first bid him be a new Tom Bowles! Don't despise me as your own work: you said to me that terrible day, when madness was on my brow and crime within my heart, 'I will be to you the truest friend man ever found in man.' So you have been. You commanded me to read; you commanded me to think; you taught me that body should be the ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... brother of Tiberius seemed disposed to come forward in the same career, his own mother wrote to him: "Shall then our house have no end of madness? Where shall be the limit? Have we not yet enough to be ashamed of, in having confused and disorganized the state?" So spoke not the anxious mother, but the daughter of the conqueror of Carthage, who knew ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... dog drank, as he had his suspicions of his being mad; and which were confirmed by the dog's not lapping any water, and by his increased barking and howling, and at length by his endeavouring to bite the heels of the horse. Impressed with the idea of the dog's madness, to prevent further mischief, he discharged his pistol at him, and the dog fell. After riding some distance with feelings that will arise in every generous breast at the destruction of an affectionate animal, he discovered that his money ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse

... used all the means at its disposal to remind them of its existence. It entered their houses and their bodies, terrified them waking and sleeping by its sudden apparitions, struck them down with disease or madness,[**] and would even suck their blood ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... loved, for his sake had fallen into the hands of the relentless Jews. Yes, that she could not hear him cursing and raving in his utter helplessness, till at length the brain gave in his shattered head, and he fell into a fevered madness, that for many weeks was unpierced by any light of reason or of memory. All this, at ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others. But when men whom we know to be wicked impose upon us, we are something worse than dupes. When we know them, their fair pretences become new motives for distrust. There is one case, indeed, in which it would be madness not to give the fullest credit to the most deceitful of men,—that is, when they make declarations of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... Government;—prostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere;—trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness. The trial of fifty years only proves that it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery. Why prolong the experiment? Let every honest man join in the outcry ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... of a chosen band of warriors, Girty[10] advanced with fierceness upon the whites, from the advantageous position which he covertly occupied, and "madness, despair and death succeed, the conflict's gathering wrath." The Indians had greatly the advantage in numbers, as well as position, and the disorderly front of the whites, gave them still greater superiority. The bravery of the troops for a while withstood the onset, and the contest was fierce ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... Oehlenschlager to be considered a greater poet than himself. He then left Denmark for the last time and went back to his beloved Paris, where he lost his second wife and youngest child in 1822, and after the miseries of an imprisonment for debt, fell at last into a state of hopeless melancholy madness. In 1826, having slightly recovered, he wished to see Denmark once more, but died in the freemasons' hospital at Hamburg on his way, on the 3rd of October, and was buried at Kiel. His many-sided talents achieved success in all forms of writing, but his domestic, philosophical and critical works ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... round him. "It were madness, I trow, for the six of us to make the attack alone. Yet did not Jonathan and his armour bearer fall unawares upon a host and put them to flight? Methinks some holy Father has told such a tale to me. Still thou art right, good John. We must not risk losing all because it has been given to godly ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... aristocratic institutions might rest. That they could have rights was as little conceived as that inanimate sticks and stones could have them; to enfranchise them—to surrender to them the reins of government—such an idea the veriest madness would have started from. Philosophy was blind to it; religion was abhorrent to it; the common people themselves were as far from entertaining it as cattle in the fields are to-day. Christ's sayings—Love one another—Do as ye would be done by —struck at the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... asset, but imagination run riot is photoplay madness. It must be intelligently exercised else it will fairly run away with the plot, and the result will be a literary wreck. You must study—and hence realize at least fairly completely—the possibilities of your story before you start ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... Celtic race, especially with regard to its Cymric or Breton branch, is an essentially feminine race. No human family, I believe, has carried so much mystery into love. No other has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of woman, or been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo. Read the strange Mabinogi of Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois; its pages are, as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment. Woman appears therein as a kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the supernatural ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... beyond what the voyage would cost them, and that what they intended to do when they arrived at the Fiji Islands was to be left to chance, the proposed expedition assumed a different complexion. The Judge denounced it as sheer madness, specially for a man to take his wife to such a place. It was true that some missionaries had settlements there, but these are generally safe, as the savages, as a rule, fear and respect the missionaries ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth

... of the unfortunate alderman, who fled to Holland. There, on the sallow leaves over which the poor alderman once groaned, you can read the items of our sale of Dunkirk to the French, the dishonourable surrender of which drove the nation almost to madness, and hastened the downfall of Lord Clarendon, who was supposed to have built a magnificent house (on the site of Albemarle Street, Piccadilly) with some of the very money. Charles II. himself banked here, and drew his thousands with all the careless ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... killing. At one place they organised round the massacre such tragic scenes, and at another displayed such refinements of cruelty, that reason falters in face of their acts, and asks what terrible madness has brought this race to such low depths? Is it possible? Yes, it is. Judge by ...
— Their Crimes • Various

... was lamentable, that her excellent understanding should have yielded, even for a moment, to the reveries of superstition, or rather to those starts of imagination, which deceive the senses into what can be called nothing less than momentary madness. Instances of this temporary failure of mind had more than once occurred since her return home; particularly when, wandering through this lonely mansion in the evening twilight, she had been alarmed by appearances, which would have been unseen in ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... cultural development. Hysteria arises through the conflict between libido and sex-repression. Often sex-wishes may be consciously rejected but unconsciously accepted. So when they are understood every insane utterance has a reason. There is really method in madness. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... threw up her hands and apostrophised heaven. To this day she believes that all the bonnes of Oxford are mad, but mad, and of a madness. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... in Piedmont—in other words, governor of that dominion; and set out on his journey to Paris. He halted at Lyons to lay the first stone of the new Place de Bellecour, erected on the ruins of a great square destroyed by the Jacobins during the revolutionary madness; and reached the Tuileries on the 2nd of July. He had set out for Switzerland on the 6th of May. Two months had not elapsed, and in that brief space what wonders had been accomplished! The enthusiasm of the Parisians exceeded all that has been ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... political unity. Subdue the present rebellion, reinstate the Union, multiply the facilities for social intercourse and the mutual exchange of products, especially railroads, wherever there is sufficient promise of a need; and our country, thus knit together and united, has nothing to fear from the madness of local factions. Permeate the body politic in all its members by the nerves, veins, and arteries of a vital circulation, and it becomes an organized unity which is not susceptible of division into upper or lower, right or ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... captain: he took his pleasure with other men, and was so impressionable a character that he enjoyed a virtuous project as well as any plan for a debauch; in love he was most susceptible, and jealous to the point of madness even about a courtesan, had she once taken his fancy; his prodigality was princely, although he had no income; further, he was most sensitive to slights, as all men are who, because they are placed in an equivocal position, fancy ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... incapability to swim, determined to save her or lose his own life, which latter would have been a dead certainty, had he ventured; but he was prevented by the crowd, who pointed out to him the madness of such ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... enter, and suspend your own Ease and Pleasure to comfort his Weakness, and hear the Impertinencies of a Wretch in Pain? Don't stay to take Coach, but be gone. Your Mistress will bring Sorrow, and your Bottle Madness: Go to neither.—Such Virtues and Diversions as these are mentioned because they occur to all Men. But every Man is sufficiently convinced, that to suspend the use of the present Moment, and resolve better for the future only, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... come partially under the influence of hypnotic suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians of this man have since been puzzled. Then, tired of the puzzle, she fell again to contemplating scraps of his speech, which, having a Scriptural ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... drooped and hung between their legs and they turned back fearfully. Then they began to creep away, slinking in furtive apprehension; then finally they broke into a headlong flight, racing for home in a perfect madness ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... "What madness is this?" Edgar exclaimed. "There are twelve hundred men there, and yet no bow is bent. It ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty

... city, which we fondly believed to be proof against the prevailing madness, a slight epidemic occurred; slight, yet momentarily alarming. Accidents will happen, even in the best regulated political organizations,—and accidents in these days appeared to be the rule. A certain Mr. Edgar Greenhalge, a middle-aged, mild-mannered and inoffensive man who had made a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... remained the idol of the people despite his hatred. He raised Wilkes to be the champion of representative government and of personal liberty. He lost America and it was not his fault that Ireland was retained. The early popularity he received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made him too pathetic for dislike. The real result of his attempt was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature of ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... secular and the sacred, and upon the old cast-iron theology to which the intellect of man was enjoined to conform, there is no escape whatsoever for the rebel. So the play leads on to the sublimely terrific passage at the close, when, with the chiming of the bell, terror grows to madness in the victim's soul, and at last he ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... seemed possessed of a strange madness. He said no word to Jean or Philip. Hour after hour he strode ahead, until it seemed that tendons must snap and legs give way under the strain. Not once did he stop for rest until, hours later, they reached the summit of a ridge, and he pointed far off into the plain below. They could see the ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... direction of Blodgett's two hands,—the right to the northeast and the Chinese shore, the left to the northwest and the dim lowlands of Sumatra that lay along the road to Burma,—anything seemed possible. Moon-madness was upon us, and we were carried away by the mystery of ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... was one of them; and he always regarded the tumultuous outbreak of March, the result of no ripened design, as a fatal error. That is the reason why the gentry hung back at first, and were driven forward by the peasants. It seemed madness to fight the Convention without previous organisation for purposes of war, and without the support of the far larger population of Brittany, which had the command of the coast, and was in touch with the great maritime Power. ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... Englishman could go. To put the heir apparent of the British crown into the hands of Lewis would be nothing less than treason against the monarchy. The nation, already too much alienated from the Sovereign, would be roused to madness. The Prince of Wales would either not return at all, or would return attended by a French army. If His Royal Highness remained in the island, the worst that could be apprehended was that he would be brought up a member of the national Church; and that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... her arm and she was left standing there alone, some instinct of isolation, some realization of the mysterious pit she had dug for herself and possibly for others, in this avowal of her identity, wrought her brain into momentary madness, and flinging up her arms she fell on her knees before Hazen as under the stroke ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... heaps of unburied corpses; but the wounded survivors were dragged from field hospitals and other cavernous shelters to be carried onward with the departing army. They were a sight which in some cases turned melancholy into madness. In order to transport them the wagons were lightened by throwing the spoils of Moscow into the pond at Semlino. On the thirtieth despatches of grave import reached the Emperor informing him that Schwarzenberg had retreated behind the Bug, leaving ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... first edition of this book, and which I myself took from close observation, when, some years ago, accompanied by Dr. White, I was searching in the Grangegorman Lunatic Asylum and in Swift's for a case of madness arising from disappointment in love. I was then writing. "Jane Sinclair," and to the honor of the sex, I have to confess that in neither of those establishments, nor any others either in or about Dublin, could I find such a case. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... round and gave his heart to know mirth, and madness, and folly, and see whether that was good for him, and, "I said of laughter, it is mad: and of mirth, what doeth it?" (Eccles. ii. 2-26). And then he gave himself to wine and revelling, and after that to riches, and pomp, and ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley

... or unconquerable: if he love me, as I thought he did, if he have the energy of character I think he possesses, he will conquer it, if it can be conquered; if it be unconquerable, what misery, what madness, to suffer my affections to be irrevocably engaged! or what base vanity to wish, if it were in my power, to inspire him with an unhappy passion! Then, in every point of view, mother, surely it is best that I should leave this—dangerous place," said Caroline, smiling. "Yet you are both so happy here, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth

... and saying to her, "O old woman of ill-omen, am I not the Commander of the Faithful? Thou hast ensorcelled me!" When the folk heard his words, they said, "This man raveth," and doubted not of his madness. So they came in upon him, and seizing him, pinioned his elbows, and bore him to the Bedlam. Quoth the Superintendent, "What aileth this youth?" and quoth they, "This is a madman, afflicted of the Jinn." "By Allah, cried Abu al- Hasan, "they ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... She felt that she had been within measurable distance of a tragedy. Nor was there any call on her wits to devise fresh means of drawing his mind away from the madness that possessed him a few minutes earlier. As he limped unevenly by her side, his talk was of the mountains. Did she intend to climb? Well, slow and sure was the golden rule. Do little or nothing during four or five days, until ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy

... told that Harcourt was "beside himself," and yet never had madness seemed so rational; and her eyes dwelt on the marks of his frenzy before her with unmixed satisfaction. If he had been cool then, her ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... was, that he would never pass a lamp-post without touching it, and would go back miles upon his way to repair an omission. Surely great wit to madness is near allied. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... busy, bustling time, Suits ill with writers, very ill with rhyme: Unheard we sing, when party-rage runs strong, And mightier madness checks the flowing song: Or, should we force the peaceful Muse to wield Her feeble arms amid the furious field, Where party-pens a wordy war maintain, Poor is her anger, and her friendship vain; And oft the foes who feel her sting, ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe

... without being actually a lunatic, who is what would be called elsewhere a "crank," is said to be locoed. It is a term describing a shade of mental obliquity and queerness something short of irresponsible madness, and something more than temporarily "rattled" or bewildered for the moment. It is a good word, and needed to apply to many people who have gone off into strange ways, and behave as if they had eaten some insane plant—the insane plant being probably a theory in the mazes ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... cracked, the words spaced with uneven catches of breath, as if they had been repeated many, many times to provide an anchor against madness, form a tie to reality. And hearing that note, Shann slowed his pace. This was out of no memory of his; he was ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... also of that wicked and detestable sedition, so unbecoming the elect of God, which a few headstrong and self-willed men have fomented to such a degree of madness, that your venerable and renowned name, so worthy of all men to be ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake

... of the Bengal council, seeing that Bengal was, at the time, threatened with invasion from the north, and menaced with troubles within, considered that it would be an act little short of madness to send troops, at a time when they could be so little spared, to assist a chief, who, even from his own accounts, was only able to raise three thousand irregular followers, Clive thought otherwise. He saw the great value ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty

... laying about our bare shoulders. Our food was such as is given to pigs in England—coarse maize or meal, soaked in cold water, with bread of the blackest and hardest description. The heat burned us to madness; the cold night-winds blew in upon us; the salt-spray dashing through the open ports found the raw places in our wounds and stung us as if with fire. Verily, we were in hell! Ere many days had gone by ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher

... book iv. chap. 77, forbids speculation on four subjects as likely to bring madness and trouble. Two of the four are kamma-vipako and loka-cinta. An attempt to make the chain of causation into a cosmic law would involve ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... fields have filled, From western seed to feed our land's wants tilled, And what new light shines through your window-pane, Longing for truth beneath religion's reign, And what new things but whispering we say,— And what foretells the dawning reckoning-day,— You fail to understand and find but madness In our young nation's fairest ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... is ascribed to sundry poets, including Homer, next describes the madness and death of Ajax, the arrival of Philoctetes with the arrows of Hercules, the death of Paris, the purloining of the Palladium, the stratagem of the wooden horse, and the death ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... distant as it was, excited the Spaniards to the verge of madness; and if it had not been for their officers, they would have seized their weapons and rushed forward again to the attack, to avenge ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty

... courtyard of the factory, always remained closed. She was never seen; and never did he speak of her to anybody. It was said that she was usually like a child, very gentle and very sad, and still beautiful, with regal golden hair. At times, however, attacks of frantic madness came upon her, and he then had to struggle with her, and often hold her for hours in his arms to prevent her from splitting her head against the walls. Fearful shrieks would ring out for a time, and then deathlike silence would ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... 'What are you doing?' I shouted. She looked back with a smile, then he dashed past me too. A hornet might have stung them both: they galloped over fallen trees, under low hanging branches, up hill and down. I had to watch that madness! My horse was not so fast. I rode like a demon; but fell far behind. I am not a man who takes things quietly. When I came up with them at last, I could not speak for rage. They were riding side by side, the reins on the horses' necks, looking in each other's faces. 'You should take care,' I said. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... necessarily a member both of the English and of the Irish Parliaments; and it is inconceivable that as King of Ireland he should have assented to a bill passed by the Irish Houses of Parliament which was strenuously opposed by the English Houses of Parliament. The madness of the King raised a case not provided for by the Constitution, and the accidental difference of opinion between the English and Irish Houses of Parliament, as to the Regency, has been treated as possessing ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... Or made so deep a one? I penetrate you. Think you that on a limed twig the poor bird Can flutter cheerfully, or hop at ease With its wing pinioned? Come, come, in one word Acknowledge to me plainly that you love her, Love her to madness, ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

... of mine. I had forced it on her, or circumstances had forced me to help her in helping myself, as when I cut our way from Marry-me-quick's cottage. The more I was with her, the better I began to understand Brocton's madness. It was the madness of the mere brute in him to be sure, and a man should kick the brute in him into its kennel, though he cannot at times help hearing it whine. Her majestic beauty had dazzled him as a flame dazzles a moth, but at this stage, at any rate, it was not her beauty ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... office. His coat of caribou-skin was in tatters. His feet thrust themselves from the toes of his moccasins. His face was so thin and white that it shone with the pallor of death from its frame of straight dark hair. His eyes gleamed like black diamonds. The madness of hunger was ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... so many had done in other cities—an independent despotism in Venice, seems entirely unproved. It was the prevailing fear; the one suggestion which alarmed everybody and made sentiment unanimous. But one of the special points which are recorded by the chroniclers as working in him to madness, was that he was senza parentado—without any backing of relationship or allies—i.e., sonless, with no one to come after him. How little likely then was an old man to embark on such a desperate venture for self-aggrandizement merely. He had, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring sometimes like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'Twas like Saint Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his favorite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... and Romola set out. To some women it might have seemed an alarming risk to go to a comparatively solitary spot with a man who had some of the outward signs of that madness which Tito attributed to him. But Romola was not given to personal fears, and she was glad of the distance that interposed some delay before another blow fell on her. The afternoon was far advanced, and the ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... on the crest of a knoll and suddenly it was night instead of noon, and Cripp and Peg were leaping about him in a frenzy, their frothing jaws snapping on the empty air in their madness. He faced them with bared fangs,—and it was noon once more, but the two old coyotes stood before him in reality, their own noses wrinkled in snarls which answered his menacing actions and warned him off. The same old baffling wave which flooded Breed ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... an infidel and a madman? The only difference is, that the madness of the infidel is wilful, while the madness of the poor lunatic is entirely involuntary. The one arouses our compassion, while the other excites our contempt ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... clearly indeed he could see himself standing there in the early light, looking out on the shining waters of the river. They say that when you see yourself too vividly—when you imagine that you yourself are standing before yourself—that is one of the signs of madness. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... these violent paroxysms of insanity he related some ridiculous fable of me and the rest of my neighbours. No better specimen can be adduced than the extravagant action of which he now stands accused, and the absurd tale by which he attempts to apologise for the commission of it. That madness may no longer usurp the palace of reason, to revel upon the ruins of his mind, deliver him to the sons of ingenuity, the preservers and restorers of health; let them purify his blood by sparing diet, abridge him of his daily potations, and ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... she declared, laying her hand upon his and smiling into his face, so that the madness came back and burned in his blood. "There is no need for you to be a gambler, there is no need for you to stake everything upon these single coups. You haven't felt the ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... steered northwards, and soon the vessel was set fast in the ice and was lifted satisfactorily on to its surface without the smallest leak. So far everything had gone as Nansen anticipated, and the experienced Polar voyagers who had declared that the whole scheme was madness had to acknowledge that they were not so clever as ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... anarchy. The task imposed by Providence on himself and other kings was no longer to spread knowledge and liberty among mankind, but to defend existing authority, and even authority that was oppressive and un-Christian, against the madness that was ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... think, and thus I used to speak to myself; goaded almost to madness at one moment, and at the next reconciling myself to ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... use. Johnson advises Boswell to keep a diary, and to omit registers of the weather, and like trumpery. I am resolved in future not to register what is yet more futile—my gleams of bright and clouded temper. Boswell—whose nerves were, one half madness, and half affectation—has thrummed upon this topic till it is threadbare. I have at this moment forty things to do, and great inclination to do none of them. I ended by working till two, walking till five, writing letters, and so ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... had the boldness to descend into the arena to part the combatants. "The Romans were provoked by this interruption of their pleasures, and the rash monk was overwhelmed under a shower of stones. But the madness of the people soon subsided; they respected the memory of Telemachus, who had deserved the honors of martyrdom, and they submitted without a murmur to the laws of Honorius, which abolished forever the human sacrifices ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... every man in this extended country had been so fully and fearfully developed; when it was notorious that all classes of this great community had, by means of the power and influence it thus possesses, been infected to madness with a spirit of heedless speculation; when it had been seen that, secure in the support of the combination of influences by which it was surrounded, it could violate its charter and set the laws at defiance ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... its place care, preoccupation and anxiety sat upon every countenance, and all faces were drawn, distressed, and furrowed with the signs of age and trouble, and marked with the still sadder signs of mental decay and incipient madness; that factories were at work night and day in eight cities, and yet to supply the demand for the puzzle was thus far impossible. Hawkins was wild with joy, but Sellers was calm. Small matters could not disturb his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... I went screaming amongst them; and I did not wish to be considered a maniac. Moreover, I knew that I was not a maniac, for I possessed all my reasoning powers, only the horror was upon me—the screaming horror! But how were indifferent people to distinguish between madness and this screaming horror? So I thought and reasoned; and at last I determined not to go amongst my fellow-men whatever the result might be. I went to the mouth of the dingle, and there placing myself on my knees, I again ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow









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