"Insane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believed Hebrew the vernacular of the devil, and regarded the Passover with malevolent eyes. Confound such a creature, there was no hope for him! Who could expect to free him from his prejudices? He hated Moses for his fate, and Rebekkah for her forms of worship. He was insane on Judaism. He was a monomaniacal Gentile. Who could make out a mental diagnosis, or anticipate the conduct of a mule afflicted with religious lunacy? Well for your correspondent had he discovered beforehand the bias of the brute, or suspected he was a quadruped zealot! Much might have ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... that the argument is weak just where it seeks to generalize. We are compelled to put the insane under restraint for social reasons apart from their own benefit. But their own benefit would be a fully sufficient reason if no other existed. To them, by their misfortune, liberty, as we understand the term, has no application, because they are incapable of rational choice and therefore of the ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... Charles resisted an insane impulse to shout with laughter. Didn't go in for racing! He was going in for racing with a vengeance—a race against time and the police. What ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... nothing about the explosion you speak of, yet I was certain it had occurred somewhere along that line which I drew on the map. I had hoped it was not serious, and begun to believe it was not. The anxiety of the last month has nearly driven me insane, and, as you say quite truly, my actions have been childish." The old man in his excitement had risen from his chair and was now pacing up and down the room, running his fingers distractedly through his long white hair, and ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... chief officer of the Russia (a capital fellow) was at the Reading last night, and Dolby specially charged him with the care of you and yours. We shall be on the borders of Wales, and probably about Hereford, when you arrive. Dolby has insane projects of getting over here to meet you; so amiably hopeful and obviously impracticable, that I encourage him to the utmost. The regular little captain of the Russia, Cook, is just now changed into the Cuba, whence arise disputes of seniority, etc. I wish he had ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... more and more and ever greater and wider inventions for economic purposes, coupled with apparent complete indifference as to whether mankind derived any ultimate benefit from them or not, can only be understood by regarding it as one of those strange epidemics of insane excitement which have been known to affect whole populations at certain periods, especially of the middle ages. Rational explanation ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... from the other's stiff, open lips, and insane with rage, head down, he threw himself forward. Roger met the rush with a straight left, which cut through an eyebrow like a knife, and went home with a crack on a high cheek bone; but no blow could stop the rush ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... milliner. She was a very nice person, and after Bellingham's execution the ladies of Liverpool raised a subscription for, and greatly patronized her. Bellingham was born at St. Neot's, in Huntingdonshire, about 1771. His father was a land-surveyor and miniature-painter. Becoming insane, he was for some time confined in St. Luke's Hospital, London; but being found incurable he was taken home, where he died soon afterwards. Bellingham, at the age of fourteen, was apprenticed to a jeweller in Whitechapel, named Love, from whom, after giving much ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... gloomy, with a drizzling rain. At ten o'clock one of our men became suddenly insane, jumped out of the trench, danced wildly and divested himself of every stitch of clothing while doing so. Strange to say, the Russians must have realized that the man was insane, for they never fired at him, neither did they ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... love of country which is not blind to its faults and protests against a blatant militarism, was scoffed at as 'unpatriotic,' 'playing into the hands of the enemy,' 'seeking peace at any price,' whilst an insane eagerness to rush to arms without regard to resources or righteousness was called a 'spirited foreign policy.' So Jeremiah had plenty ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... because mercy had no legitimate place upon the new soil. The logic of events was with the evil majority, which was obliged at last to maintain its atrocious consistency in self-defence. He might as well have preached the benefits of Lenten diet to shipwrecked men upon a raft, insane with thirst and the taste of comrade's flesh. It was a Devil's problem, which is the kind that cannot hold back from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... won by science for humanity, few have been farther-reaching in good effects than the modern treatment of the insane. But this is the result of a struggle long and severe between two great forces. On one side have stood the survivals of various superstitions, the metaphysics of various philosophies, the dogmatism of various theologies, the literal interpretation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... driven almost insane. He had a mistress whom he adored. This woman fleeced him. Having become rich enough she said to him: "Our position is an immoral one and an end must be put to it. An honest man has offered me his name and I am going to get married." Arnal was disconsolate. "I give you the preference," said the belle, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... when Tolstoy responded to an inquirer that, if he saw a child being attacked by a brutal ruffian, he would not use force to intervene and protect the child: that, too, is non-resistance fit for the insane asylum. One of these is just as far from sane, balanced human ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... she appeared diminutive beside her giant husband. One day he returned from a long absence on the sea. When his wife, in her joy, ran into his arms, he gave her such a tremendous hug that he crushed her chest, and she died. In his grief the young husband went insane and did not ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... to be met by men like these. The pilot might be own brother to his fellow-craftsman who took us down the Channel, and his crew are just the same kind of brawny, bearded, amphibious-looking men that are to be seen any day in an English seaport. We had nourished an insane kind of hope that we should have been boarded by a canoe full of Maoris, in all the savage splendour of tattooing and paint and feathers; but here, instead of all that romantic fancy, are three or four ordinary "long-shore" boatmen, with a pilot ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Fitton was the passion of Shakespeare's whole life. The adoration of her, and the insane desire of her, can be seen in every play he wrote from 1597 to 1608. After he lost her, he went back to her; but the wound of her frailty cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and to madness. When ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... at the simple faces of those poor girls, at the bewildered look in the countenances of the young men, and thought of how ignorant and helpless these people were, he could understand the almost insane anguish of their parents as they saw them embark on an ocean so dark and tempestuous and remote as the crowded cities of America, and Mat could penetrate down into the minds of his people and see with the lightning flash of sympathy ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... the world into a dream absurd, fantastic, dreadful, into an uproarious hunt composed of unnatural expressions, bad verses, groans, tears, and blood; but meanwhile the cloud in the west was increasing and thickening every day. The measure was exceeded; the insane comedy was ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... hands clutched with insane fury, hacked and harried. It was "the raw-ribbed Wild that abhors all life, the Wild that ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... of death. Solon, grieved at this dishonour, and observing that many of the younger men were eager for an excuse to fight, but dared not propose to do so because of this law, pretended to have lost his reason. His family gave out that he was insane, but he meanwhile composed a poem, and when he had learned it by heart, rushed out into the market-place wearing a small felt cap, and having assembled a crowd, mounted the herald's stone and recited the poem which ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... session, in consequence of an attempt upon the queen's life, by an insane person of the name of Bean, Sir Robert Peel brought in a bill on the subject, which met with the unanimous approbation of the house. In introducing this bill, after adverting to the act passed in the reign of George III., for the protection ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... limits of subsistence throughout Oceanica has occasioned a low valuation of human life. Among natural peoples the helpless suffer first. The native Hawaiians, though a good-natured folk, were relentless towards the aged, weak, sick, and insane. These were frequently stoned to death or allowed to perish of hunger.[1017] In Fiji, the aged are treated with such contempt, that when decrepitude or illness threatens them, they beg their children to strangle them, unless the children ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of moral nature than has a tiger or a kite. He was founded upon no integrity, would keep faith with no one save himself. Storri was not a moral lunatic, for that would suppose some original morality and its subversion to insane aims; rather he was the moral idiot. At that, his imbecility paused with his morals; in what a world calls business he was notably ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... a student of psychology might have found an analysis of her feelings interesting. She had reached the border-line of monomania, yet he would have been a daring man who would have called her absolutely insane. Except to Foyle she had said nothing of the feeling ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... but yet had the intensity of a blessing, Mr. Thornton continued his walk. All his business plans had received a check, a sudden pull-up, from this approaching turn-out. The forethought of many anxious hours was thrown away, utterly wasted by their insane folly, which would injure themselves even more than him, though no one could set any limit to the mischief they were doing. And these were the men who thought themselves fitted to direct the masters in the disposal of their capital! Hamper had said, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... one of the three great men of his century, but tries to deprive him of credit (?) for the doctrine that bears his name by saying that Hegel made an earlier announcement of it. Nietzsche died hopelessly insane, but his philosophy has wrought the moral ruin of a multitude, if it is not actually responsible for bringing upon the ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... are examined you can score a possible hundred. That means perfection, and in, the brief history of Stillwater, which is a very, new college, only one man has attained it. After graduating he "accepted a position" in an asylum for the insane, from which he was, promoted later to the poor-house, where he died. Many Stillwater undergraduates studied his career and, lest they also should attain perfection, were afraid to study anything else. Among these Peter was by far ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... intervale land which Harmon Garrett and others of the first proprietors had fenced in to serve as a "night pasture" for their cattle. Ball had left his children and their mother in Watertown; she being at times insane. Prescott's first lot embraced part of the grounds upon which the public buildings in Lancaster now stand, but this he soon parted with, and took up his abode a mile to the south west, on the sunny slope of George Hill, where, beside a little brooklet of ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... would give fifty dollars for the first salmon or the first dish of peaches of the season for his table. He was as full of contradictions as he was of oddities, and no one knew how to take him. One moment he seemed to be hoarding his money like a miser, and the next scattering it with insane prodigality. ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... aimless Colorado River aqueduct to the site nor to erect thousands of prefabricated houses. The climate was declared to be unequalled, salubrious, equable, pleasant and bracing. Factories were erected, airports laid out, hospitals, prisons, and insane asylums built. The Imperial and Coachella valleys shipped their products in at low cost, and as a gesture to those who might suffer from homesickness it ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... denounced as fanatics, or "fan-a-tics," according to the pronunciation of some of their detractors. They were treated as if partially insane. The writer when a boy attended the trial of a cause between two neighbors in a court of low grade. It was what was called a "cow case," and involved property worth, perhaps, as much as twenty dollars. One of the ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... fact, and a very singular one, that, however at random the fancies of unhealthy intellects may appear on ordinary subjects, those fancies obtain a greater or less credit when they touch upon supernatural things. Instances of monomaniacs (persons insane on a single subject) who have imagined things quite as marvellous as the most superstitious, but whose illusions have been treated with the greatest ridicule, might ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... made to rob him, or at least to annoy him, by some young men; and he shot one of his assailants. For this offence he was, after trial, sent to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... in the air, catching them again, and then running on beside the cantering horses of their young masters, while their father ran beside Mr Rogers' big bay. Above all, the dogs showed their delight by barking, yelping, and making insane charges here and there, Rough'un's great delight being to run his head into one or other of the holes made by the burrowing animals of the plains, and then worrying and snapping at nothing ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... at seeing him bareheaded and without an umbrella, and reflecting that if he were not a Saint, one would think him insane. On entering the square where the church stands, she saw a door on the right open a little way; a tall, thin priest looked out. She believed the priest would invite Benedetto to come in, but, to Noemi's great vexation, when Benedetto ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... weakness, not to say a disease. According to this theory, a person whose nervous system is perfectly healthy could not be hypnotized. So many people can be hypnotized because nearly all the world is more or less insane, as a certain ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... de Vega's, I think, was scarcely a wise one for beginners. He refers to this venture of ours in a letter to Sidney Colvin as "the play which the sister and I are just beating our way through with two bad dictionaries and an insane grammar." Nevertheless, we made some headway, and I remember that he marvelled greatly at the far-fetched, high-flown similes and figures of speech indulged in by the writers of the "Golden Age" of Spain. In spite of his confessed dislike for the cold-blooded ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... of these preparations an insane desire came into my mind to know something of Saul's ancestors, and there was but one way to know, namely, by asking, which I would not do of human soul. Thus it came to pass that I was driven out, between this would of my mind and wouldn't of my soul, to search for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... indiscretions that the German Government suppressed it at great cost by buying up the entire issue of the New York magazine in which the explosion was about to take place. Enough of the contents of the interview subsequently leaked out to indicate that its main feature was the German Emperor's insane animosity to Great Britain and Japan and his determination to ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... there was to it," said the Hatter. "It was printed in one of our Magazines and within forty-eight hours the ambulance from the Insane Asylum was called out 737 times by people who had gone crazy trying to find out what it meant. It capped the climax. I called a special meeting of the Common Council to take the matter up purely as a matter of public health, and before I went to bed that night they ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... spread the propaganda of ruin! My agents crashed your Wall Street and broke your banks! I! I! I! Mad Algy Fraser!" He stopped, gasping for breath. His face was scarlet. His eyes glowed like red coals. Suddenly he burst into a cascade of maniacal laughter, high, insane, terrible. ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... I will have to make a clean breast of it. Toglet is more or less insane. His folks do not care to place him in an asylum, and so I offered to take care of him for a while. It was his sudden fit of insanity that ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield
... he found himself strong enough to think of pursuing his journey, he called his "son" into the room and explained to him that he, Doctor Pierre St. Jean, was the proprietor of a private insane asylum, very exclusive, very quiet, very aristocratic, indeed, receiving none but patients of the highest rank; that this retreat was situated on the wooded banks of a charming lake in one of the most healthy and beautiful neighborhoods of East ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Was she insane? At least I felt that she was sincere. Still, I wondered what sort of hallucination Craig had to deal with, as Veda Blair repeated the incoherent ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... infallible symptom of death. The inmates were crowded into rooms with merciless disregard of their relative characters or antecedents. Madame Roland was first associated with the duchess of Grammont, with a female pick-pocket, with a nun, with an insane woman, and with a street-walker. She finally procured a cell to herself, which she made bloom with flowers. The prison was populous with the most degraded of her sex. Yet she asserted here the same marvelous ascendancy which she had always ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... and mother were both insane I inherited the terrible stain. My grandfather, grandmother, aunts and uncles Were lunatics all, ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... a struggle between social interests. Philosophy had boasted that it would regulate political economy, and that institutions, laws, and public authorities should only exist as the creatures and servants of instructed reason,—- an insane pride, but a startling homage to all that is most elevated in man, to his intellectual and moral attributes! Reverses and errors were not slow in impressing on the Revolution their rough lessons; but even up to 1815 ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of insanity which sees in outward manifestation the fantasies of the mind is an affection incident at times to every one. An artist sees beauties in a landscape, an artisan in pulleys and levers, and either may be so far insane in the eyes of the other. Nature discovers grandeur, beauty, or truth according as the quality abides in the seer. In this view Balder or Don Quixote was no more insane than other people. Their eyes bore true witness to what was in their minds, and the sanest eyes can do no more. Their minds ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the grace to detect one of the foremost perils of a busy man in this day of insane hurry. He saw that if we are to feed others we must be fed; and that even public and united exercises of praise and prayer can never supply that food which is dealt out to the believer only in the closet—the shut-in place with its closed door ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... He had stumbled suddenly against a soft body, he had a momentary impression of a white, vicious face, of eyes blazing with insane fury. Quick to act, he struck—but before his hand descended, he had felt the tearing of his shirt, the sharp, keen pain in his chest, the swimming of his senses. Yet even then he struck again with passionate anger, and his assailant ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... all sorts of nonsense about me—probably told you that I was the greatest villain unhung, eh? and all that sort of thing? Poor fellow! He was a fine sort before his mind became unhinged. One of his fancies used to be that everybody else was insane, or just about to become insane. Is he still ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... telekis, and more carriages, or rather hacks, and men galloping along on raw-boned horses in a kind of imitation "Rotten-Row" style. The men wear the European dress, often surmounted by the red fez: the women dress in an insane imitation of French fashions, and glitter with jewelry—a passion with Eastern women of all races and creeds. Frequently a woman carries her whole fortune and her husband's in these ornaments, which, in a country where the difference between meum and tuum ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the death of her mother she had made the best of her circumstances. There had been many days when life had been unpleasant, and in the last year, as his miserliness had grown upon him, his ill-temper at any fancied extravagance had been almost that of an insane man, but Maggie knew very little of the affairs of other men and it seemed to her that every one had some disadvantage with which to grapple. She did not pretend to care for her father, she was very lonely because the villagers hated him, but she had always made the best of everything because ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... vacant churches and prebends belongs to us by Royal Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the collations made and to be made by us are valid in the past and in the future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors toward and against all. Those who think otherwise we take to be fools and insane." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... out his arms to imaginary assailants, tearing his beard and his hair by handfuls, he ran to and fro, a raving madman. Then in an insane frenzy he turned his back on his companion for one instant as if about to flee to the woods, when Gibbs, snatching his revolver from his belt, aimed it at the man's back ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... in his body was leaping and quivering. A great shout split the air. Gentleman Jack, apparently insane, was giving tongue at the top of ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... upon his sleeve. "I will not let you go until I know what you mean to do with yourself; it's no use brandishing that staff." For indeed at that moment Archie had made a sudden - perhaps a warlike - movement. "This has been the most insane affair; you know it has. You know very well that I'm playing the good Samaritan. All I wish ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guilty, and condemned, to be broken alive on the wheel. The noble relatives of the Count d'Horn absolutely blocked tip the ante-chambers of the regent, praying for mercy on the misguided youth, and alleging that he was insane. The regent avoided them as long as possible, being determined that, in a case so atrocious, justice should take its course. But the importunity of these influential suitors was not to be overcome so silently; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... prove the mass of humankind Have judgments just as jaundiced, just as blind. That Damasippus shows himself insane By buying ancient statues, all think plain: But he that lends him money, is he free From the same charge? 'O, surely.' Let us see. I bid you take a sum you won't return: You take it: is this madness, I would ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... witness, Professor Weber, his testimony agrees more decidedly with that of Professor Zoellner. He was present at eight seances, declares the occurrences to have been as represented by Professor Zoellner, and denies that Zoellner was in any sense insane. But Professor Weber is from Goettingen, and was at the time of the investigation in Leipsic on a visit; it is not improbable that those of Professor Zoellner's colleagues, who lived and worked at the same University with him, may have had better opportunities for judging ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... on the subject of panics; and there's a mysterious, awful contagion about them impossible to comprehend. These men were Americans; they had been fighting bravely; what the devil got into them that they had to destroy themselves and everything in an insane rush ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... the Anti-Christ Nietzsche must lead to the ruthless assertion of power. The belief in race predestination can therefore only result in megalomania, and in Germany it has certainly resulted in the most acute, the most insane, inflation of nationalism and imperialism recorded in modern history. Of that megalomania the Kaiser has been, in innumerable speeches, the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... you told me this," I said gently. "Do not reproach yourself for having done so, I beg. Your uncle has been misled by what he has heard of my family, who are all more or less insane. Far from being mad, I am actually the only rational man named Legge in the three kingdoms. I will prove this to you, and at the same time keep your indiscretion in countenance, by telling you something I ought not to tell you. It is this. I am not here as an invalid or a chance tourist. I ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... poor creature in her arms and held her, shivering a little as she sought her lips; for Mrs. Josselin, albeit scrupulously clean, had a trace of that strange wild smell that haunts the insane. Ruth had lived with it aforetime and ceased to notice it. Now she ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the scene, and the infectious example of the maddened Africans, inspired Groot Willem and his companions with a savage, blood-seeking intoxication of mind that urged them forward with nearly as much insane earnestness as the most ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... England seemed balanced by a similar English conquest of France. But the chances of fate are many. Both Henry and his insane father-in-law died in the same year, and while Henry left only a tiny babe to succeed to his claims, the French King left a full-grown though rather worthless son. This young man, Charles VII, continued to deny the English authority, from a safe distance in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... rapid review before his mind while his lips uttered the words which had so delighted Richard, and when he saw the shadow on Edith's face, his poor, aching heart throbbed with a joy as wild and intense as it was hopeless and insane. This was Arthur St. Claire with Edith present, but with Edith gone, he was quite another man. Eagerly he watched her till she disappeared from view, then returning to the library he sat down where she had sat—laid his head upon the table where her hands had ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... but it means also all sorts of insanity, and apparently all affections of the mind or spirit, sane or insane. On the one hand he heaps up, in page after page and chapter after chapter, all the horrid ills to which flesh is heir, or which it cultivates for itself, and paints the world as a very pandemonium of evil and outrage. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... eagle that Hervey Willetts thought of now was the eagle which he had driven off—the bird of prey. To have killed little Skinny's hope and dispelled his almost insane joy would have made Hervey Willetts feel just like that eagle which had aroused his wrath and reckless courage. "Not for mine," he muttered to himself. "Slady was right when he said he wasn't so stuck on eagles. He's a queer kind of a duck, Slady is; a kind of a mind ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... insane, but, you know my stepfather thought you—you wanted to marry me. You didn't ever, ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... strewed with thy victims? Do not their ghastly faces of agony and fear—the blood-stained suicide, the raving maniac—rise before thee, and warn what is yet left to thee of human sympathy from thy insane ambition?" ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... then—he's insane. I don't care to read any more such twaddle and I won't pay for the services of such a man out of the funds of ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... outcome of the disastrous purpose of his old friend the Marchese. Truly he had felt that nought but evil—evils manifold and wide-spreading—could arise from so insane a line of conduct. But he had been far from anticipating so overwhelming a calamity as the first result ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... sister, took them both by the hand and for a minute or two gazed from one to the other without speaking. His mother was alarmed by his expression. It revealed an emotion agonisingly poignant, and at the same time something immovable, almost insane. Pulcheria Alexandrovna began ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to the coarsest and most callous senses; and the historian, even, who caters professedly for the taste which feeds upon the monstrous and the hyperbolical, is glad at length to escape from the long evolution of his insane atrocities, to the striking and truly scenical catastrophe of retribution which overtook them, and avenged the wrongs of an insulted world. Perhaps history contains no more impressive scenes than ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... his nomination, like an irritable child; but a fly kicking against a stone wall, was as likely to move it, as Brammel to break down the resolution of such a personage as Mr Bellamy. After an hour's insane remonstrance, he gave in to his own alarm, rather than to the persuasion of his partner. He was fearfully in debt; his only hope of getting out of it rested in the speedy decease of his unfortunate parent, whom he had not seen for months, and who, he had reason to believe, had vowed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... there had been changes, but Japan had received the gifts of science in a far different spirit. With her, science had been made to serve the more ultimate needs of the race, rather than the insane demand ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... dislocation.... Then a volcanic explosion, a gigantic hatchet of smoke and flames, a yellowish cloud in which were flying dark objects:—fragments of metal and of wood, human bodies blown to bits.... The eyes of the narrator gleamed with an insane light as ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... think that this kindly heard had to bear the buffetings of ill fortune. Two of his dearly loved children died, then he was parted from his wife by worse than death, for she became insane and remained so until she died. Eight years later Robert Southey was laid beside her in the churchyard under the shadow of Skiddaw. "I hope his life will not be forgotten," says Macaulay, "for it is sublime ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... an office of great ease. But, said Orlando, "Saracen insane! I come to kill you, if it shall so please God, not to serve as footboy in your train; You with his monks so oft have broke the peace— Vile dog! 'tis past his patience to sustain." The Giant ran to fetch his arms, quite furious, When he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... this time that Southwick sought him. "He was insanely anxious to be governor," says Weed, "and all the more insane because of its impossibility. He had been editing with great industry and ability the Ploughboy and the Christian Visitant, and beguiled himself with a confident belief that farmers and Christians, irrespective of party, would sustain him. He provided ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... though the title of this lecture is taken from one of his books; the ideas about which I am going to tell you, you will not find in his books. It is most extraordinary, to my thinking, that these ideas never occurred to him, for he was an eminent man of science before writing his probably insane books. I have not the slightest sympathy with most of his ideas; they seem to me misinterpretations of evolutional teachings; and if not misinterpretations, they are simply undeveloped and ill-balanced thinking. But the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... citizens of this country, and we can well afford to insist upon adequate scrutiny of the character of those who are thus proposed for future citizenship. There should be an increase in the stringency of the laws to keep out insane, idiotic, epileptic, and pauper immigrants. But this is by no means enough. Not merely the Anarchist, but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Winter Redstrake, on his cheeks, which made a man long for a slice of his ham? Why, the only joke he had made for the last three months was a terrible one at his own expense. He had rushed down the street about ten o'clock one morning, at a pace quite insane for a middle-aged man, with no hat on his head and no coat on his back, but the strings of his apron dashed wild on the breeze, and his biggest ham-carver making flashes in his hand. It was thought that some boy must have run off with a ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... arriving a few minutes later, verified the statement. It was evident that the old gardener, for years insane, had been so influenced by Miss Merrick's death that he had wandered into the stables where he received his death blow. When he regained consciousness the mania had vanished, and in a shadowy way he could remember and repeat that last scene of the tragedy that had ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... best to stop me," Tommy said hastily; "but I suppose I had some insane fit on me, for do it I would. ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... which greatly resembles the long drawn out melancholy airs of Brittany, is one of those poems which vibrate in the heart long after the ear has heard them. As he listened, Godefroid looked at Vanda, but he could not endure the ecstatic glance of that fragment of a woman, partially insane, and his eyes wandered to two cords which hung one on each side of the canopy of ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... an hour later that the ambulance, with three white-uniformed attendants, pulled out, carrying all those appurtenances necessary for the care of the insane, including the strait-jacket which Balcom had so ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... Charity, and control of vice. The public relief of the defective classes, insane, feeble-minded, and paupers, is a part of the social protective policy. The public interest undoubtedly is served by having these suffering classes systematically relieved, but the extent and nature ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... mind, for it is only in a dim, uncertain way that I remember being taken on a voyage of several weeks' duration, and then finding myself in a strange-looking hospital. There I remained for two months, and was then transferred to an insane asylum." ...
— Young Captain Jack - The Son of a Soldier • Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield
... individuals elevated to a sublime self-devotion, and in others degraded to mere excitability. The vivacity, gesticulation, and grimace, which characterize most of them, are the external signs of this nature; the calm heroism of the seventeenth century, and the insane devotion of the nineteenth, were alike its fruits. The voyageur possessed it, in common with all his countrymen. But in him it was not noisy, turbulent, or egotistical; military glory had "neither part nor lot" in his schemes; the conquests he desired to make ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... that nation was governor of Shiraz. A poet composed a panegyric on his wisdom, his valour, and his virtues. As he was taking it to the palace he was met by a friend at the outer gate, who inquired where he was going, and he informed him of his purpose. His friend asked him if he was insane, to offer an ode to a barbarian who hardly understood a word of the Persian language. "All that you say may be very true," said the poor poet, "but I am starving, and have no means of livelihood but by making ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... consider the murders, the suicides, the divorces, the adulteries, the prostitutions, the brawls, the drunkenness, the dishonesties, the political and official corruptions, of which our life is full, it is difficult to have complacent thoughts of ourselves. Consider, too, our prisons, our insane asylums, our poor-houses; the multitudes of old men and women, who having worn out strength and health in toil which barely gave them food and raiment, are thrust aside, no longer now fit to be bought and sold; the countless young people, who have, as we say, been educated, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the involuntary deportation to the United States of foreign convicts, paupers, idiots, insane persons, etc., and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... facts equally notorious on the other side. It is not denied that it is found necessary to exclude tobacco, as a general rule, from insane asylums, or that it produces, in extreme cases, among perfectly sober persons, effects akin to delirium tremens. Nor is it denied that terrible local diseases follow it,—as, for instance, cancer of the mouth, which has become, according ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... as the pit. He was in an immensity of darkness, a darkness that packed close up to him, and hugged him, and enfolded him like a blanket. And in the black void winds were raging with an insane fury, whirling aloft mountains of snow and hurling them along plain and valley. The forests shrieked in fear; the creatures of the Wild cowered in their lairs, but the solitary man stumbled on and on. As if by magic barriers of snow piled up before him, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... tobacco or cigarettes. In a few cases where such were sent to them for distribution they were handed over to the doctors for the badly wounded in the hospitals or the very sick men accustomed to their use, who were almost insane with their nerves. They also procured them from the Red Cross for wounded men, sometimes, who were fretting for them, but they never were a part of their supplies and far from the policy of the Salyation Army. Furthermore, the Salvation Army sent no men to France to work for them who smoked ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... breaking seasonably in upon the conversation of the lovers; "on that hill to the left, what once was an abbey is now an asylum for the insane. Does it not seem a quiet and serene abode for the unstrung and erring minds that tenant it? What a mystery is there in our conformation!—those strange and bewildered fancies which replace our solid reason, what a moral of our human ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... us the crown adorning your own victorious head! Sovereigns ought to respect each other, that their people may never lose the respect due to them; sovereigns ought to support and strengthen each other, to enable them to meet their enemies now carried away by the insane ideas of a so-called new era—ideas that brought the heads of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette to the scaffold. Sire, princes are not always safe, and harmony among them is indispensable; but it is not strengthening one's own power to weaken that ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... I have talked this matter over, and if you persist, we will take out a writ of lunacy. There is not a man in this territory who would not say on oath, that you are insane to think of going where the bears would eat you if the Indians did not kill you. The troops are ordered away from the forts; you'll get frontier life enough with us, for we are going to have music ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... You know, if no one else does, to what pitch my jealousy can go, and all this would only have been useless torture to me. I was determined to carry out, on my own responsibility, what you, Renee, will call my insane project, and I would take counsel only with my own head and heart, for all the world like a schoolgirl giving the ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac |
