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Mania   Listen
noun
Mania  n.  
1.
Violent derangement of mind; madness; insanity. Cf. Delirium.
2.
Excessive or unreasonable desire; insane passion affecting one or many people; as, the tulip mania.
Mania a potu, madness from drinking; delirium tremens.
Synonyms: Insanity; derangement; madness; lunacy; alienation; aberration; delirium; frenzy. See Insanity.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books



... wiped out. In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed, humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... broke out, and a little time before the siege of Delhi, a regiment of Native Irregular Horse was stationed at Peshawur on the frontier of India. That regiment caught what John Lawrence called at the time "the prevalent mania," and would have thrown in its lot with the mutineers, had it been allowed to do so. The chance never came, for, as the regiment swept off down south, it was headed off by a remnant of an English corps into the hills of Afghanistan, and there the newly ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... result of the nineteenth century's absurd exaltation of rude untrammelled nature. It really amounts to anarchy, because it is always accompanied by a certain feeling of hostility towards law and culture. Hence the love of wild rugged moors and mountains which is a modern mania." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... over there. She is, by the way, one of our most interesting cases. Came here for hip disease. She is an orphan,—nothing known about her parents,—probably alcoholic from the mental symptoms. She has hysteria and undeveloped suicidal mania." ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... the poems nor the plays of Dennis are of any account, although one of his tragedies, a violent attack on the French in harmony with popular prejudice, entitled Liberty Asserted, was produced with great success at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1704. His sense of his own importance approached mania, and he is said to have desired the duke of Marlborough to have a special clause inserted in the treaty of Utrecht to secure him from French vengeance. Marlborough pointed out that although he had been a still greater enemy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... declared to be as fine as Porto's, and who shared the applause of Baroski's school with Mr. Bulger, the dentist of Sackville Street, who neglected his ivory and gold plates for his voice, as every unfortunate individual will do who is bitten by the music mania. Then among the ladies there were a half-score of dubious pale governesses and professionals with turned frocks and lank damp bandeaux of hair under shabby little bonnets; luckless creatures these, who were parting with their poor little store of half-guineas to be enabled ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... smiling with his lips, he would sit while Jean spoiled whole sheets of perfectly good story-paper, just figuring and estimating and building castles with the dollar sign. If Robert Grant Burns persisted in his mania for "feature-stuff" and "punches" in his pictures, Jean believed that she would have a fair start toward buying back the Lazy A long before her book was published and had brought her the thousands and thousands of ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... violent fevers, for instance from typhoid fever, is very similar to that arising from the excessive use of intoxicants and narcotics; similar in these respects; that the mania is only temporary, and that the exciting cause ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens

... sense of importance, gave life fulness and variety; and this far outweighed the trifling inconveniences such welldoing implied. Indeed, he throve on them. For, in his mild way, Dove had a touch of Caesarean mania—of a lust for power. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... what may be called the endogenous or ingrowing toenail, stringhalt and mania. Copenhagen induces a melancholy, and the game of bean bag is unduly exciting. Horse racing is too brief and transitory as an outdoor game, requiring weeks and months for preparation and lasting only long enough for a quick person to ejaculate "Scat!" ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various

... hurt you," she began. "He's perfectly kind and harmless, aside from his mania for dimples. He still smells the piece under the Teacup." Then, all at once, she grew rigid, and her golden eyes began to leap up and down like ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker

... Revolution, they might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud, of lowest birth and basest morals. If their revolutionary mania were not incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and preserve them from ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... rising sun shone upon Stratford-on-Avon; and here revived in some degree my Shakspearian mania, to the still higher exaltation of my English stilts, and the deeper debasement of all "rough Irish kernes." At Shrewsbury we parted with a kind old lady, who had shown me some good-natured attentions, and I was left with only an elderly gentleman, bound also for Dublin, who told ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... Roland, whose nautical mania was humored by the old mariner, laughed heartily, his face flushed already and his eye watery from the absinthe. He had a burly shopkeeping stomach—nothing but stomach—in which the rest of his body seemed to have got stowed away; the flabby paunch of men who spend their lives sitting, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... is apt to occasion unnecessary alarm. This symptom of delirium is always a manifestation of an excitable temperament. I remember being called to see a young woman who was thought to be suffering from acute mania. Examination showed that she was suffering from pneumonia in the early stages. It was only later that we discovered that she had always been of an unstable nervous temperament, and had been in an asylum some years before. Those of us who are fortunate in possessing a placid ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... — N. disordered reason, disordered intellect; diseased mind, unsound mind, abnormal mind; derangement, unsoundness; psychosis; neurosis; cognitive disorder; affective disorder[obs3]. insanity, lunacy; madness &c. adj.; mania, rabies, furor, mental alienation, aberration; paranoia, schizophrenia; dementation[obs3], dementia, demency[obs3]; phrenitis[obs3], phrensy[obs3], frenzy, raving, incoherence, wandering, delirium, calenture of the brain[obs3]; delusion, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... ill-luck, my passion for gambling grew into a veritable mania, and I no longer felt any inclination for those things which at one time had lured me to student life. I became absolutely indifferent to the opinion of my former companions and avoided them entirely; I now lost myself ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... of insanity must always be a matter of the degree of the primary structural weakness and the energy and persistence of the operative forces; on these must depend the mere gentle, persistent illusion, or that fury of mania which transforms man, the "image of the Creator," into a wild beast. That insanity, no matter what its form or degree, is an evolution from an ancestral structural legacy, not essentially different from the structural conditions evolved from those of any other chronic disease, I ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey

... which can prove nothing of any man, that might not be safely taken for granted of all men. In the present age—emphatically the age of personality—there are more than ordinary motives for withholding all encouragement from the mania of busying ourselves with the names of others, which is still more alarming as a symptom, than it is troublesome as a disease. The reader must be still less acquainted with contemporary literature than myself, if he needs me to inform him that there are men who, trading ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... hesitation. Yet this navigation passed through a difficult country, necessarily involving very costly works; and as the district was but thinly inhabited, it did not present a very inviting prospect of dividends.*[1] But the mania had fairly set in, and it was determined that the canal should be made. And whether the investment repaid the immediate proprietors or not, it unquestionably proved of immense advantage to the population of the districts through which it passed, and contributed to enhance the value ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... by Karshish the Arabian physician results not in a rapturous prophecy like that of David, but in a stupendous conjecture of the heart which all the scepticism of the brain of a man of science cannot banish or reduce to insignificance. The unaccountable fascination of this case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy, is not to be resisted; Karshish would write, if he could, of more important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... others had inquired as curiously as himself the world could never have come so far at all—that the fact of its having come so far was itself a weighty exception to his hypothesis. His odd devotion, soaring or sinking into fanaticism, into a kind of religious mania, with what was really a vehement assertion of his individual will, he had formulated duty as the principle to hinder as little as possible what he called the restoration of equilibrium, the restoration ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater

... with all its connections. In some constitutions this is connected with pleasurable ideas without the exertion of much muscular action, in others it produces violent muscular action to gain or avoid the object of it, in others it is attended with despair and inaction. Mania is the general word for the two former of these, and melancholia for the latter; but the species of them are as numerous as the desires and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... realm had flatly refused to receive into the R-y-l Household a nobleman whose character was so notoriously bad, and whose example (so the August Objector was pleased to say) would ruin and corrupt any respectable family. I heard of the Castlewoods during our travels in Europe, and that the mania for play had again seized upon his lordship. His impaired fortunes having been retrieved by the prudence of his wife and father-in-law, he had again begun to dissipate his income at hombre and lansquenet. There were tales of malpractices in which he had been discovered, and even of chastisement ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... convinced that the whole spirit of modern culture would receive its deadliest blow if the tacit support which these natures give it could in any way be cancelled. Among scholars, only those would remain loyal to the old order of things who had been infected with the political mania or who were literary hacks in any form whatever. The repulsive organisation which derives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which it relies—that is to say, from the State and Society—and which sees its advantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous,—this ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... same in character as when Coelius Aurelianus gave it description. The cancer of to-day is the cancer known to Paulus Eginaeta. The Black Death, though its name is gone, lingers in malignant typhus. The great plague of Athens is the modern great plague of England, scarlet fever. The dancing mania of the Middle Ages and the convulsionary epidemic of Montmartre, subdued in their violence, are still to be seen in some American communities, and even at this hour in the New Forest of England. Small-pox, when the blessed protection of vaccination is withdrawn, is the same virulent destroyer ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson

... substantially perfected, and publication was effected with comparative rapidity and cheapness; bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's shop a usual meeting-place of men of culture. Reading had become a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library. The superior officer ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... forgotten till Lord Macaulay revived the memory of it. But, in fact, in the South Sea Bubble, which has always been remembered, the form was the same, only a little more extravagant; the companies in that mania were for objects such as these:—' "Wrecks to be fished for on the Irish Coast—Insurance of Horses and other Cattle (two millions)—Insurance of Losses by Servants—To make Salt Water Fresh—For building of Hospitals for Bastard Children—For building of Ships against Pirates—For ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot

... give Peter a little start. As the mulatto stood looking about among the cedars for the person who had called his name, it amazed him that Jim Pink could be so utterly insane; that he performed some buffoonery instantly, by reflex action as it were, upon the slightest provocation. It was almost a mania with Jim Pink; ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... idea of killing those innocent Germans, mere machines, as they were, in the hands of a Master, who with his entire entourage had become sick with a mania which took the form of militarism, imperialism, and pan-Germanism. But after the death of his two fellow-countrymen—for at heart he was still true to the land of his birth, although to save her he had just renounced the flag—he felt that he was justified in what ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney

... his arms, "formerly the supreme authority could take refuge in an appeal. Nowadays our mania for equality"—he dared not say for Legality, as a poetic orator in the Chamber courageously admitted a short while since—"is ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... was seized with a building-fever. If Paris is a monster, it is certainly a most mania-ridden monster. It becomes enamored of a thousand fancies: sometimes it has a mania for building, like a great seigneur who loves a trowel; soon it abandons the trowel and becomes all military; it arrays itself from head to foot as a national guard, and drills ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... earnestness and no little pleasure his transformed brother-in-law. Hope for the future now filled his heart. If this crack-brained sugar-planter had really recovered from his mania for piracy and had a fancy for legitimate business, his new station might be better for him than any he had yet known. Sugar-planting was all well enough and suitable to any gentleman, provided Madam Bonnet were not taken with it. She would drive any man from the paths ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton

... concerning them. And sometimes he symbolically announces their ineffable idioms, but at other times he recurs to them from images, and discovers in them the primary causes of wholes. For in the Phaedrus being evidently inspired, and having exchanged human intelligence for a better possession, divine mania, he unfolds many arcane dogmas concerning the intellectual, liberated, and mundane gods. But in the Sophista dialectically contending about being, and the subsistence of the one above beings, and doubting against philosophers ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... obedient and submissive as a faithful friend, but with a sarcastic reproach in his eyes. All that for the "Bella Fregolina"! The master was cracked; he was in his second childhood! If only this visit would cure him of his mania, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... blackamoors to follow them about, set off their white complexions, and hold up their cloaks or their trains. Thus it came that Mignard, Le Bourdon, and other painters of the aristocracy, used to introduce negro boys into all their large portraits. It was a mode, a mania; but so absurd a fashion soon had to disappear after the mishap of which ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... brought into fashion, humbug. He could not cast his keen eyes over any considerable circle of society in this country, without perceiving the melancholy fact, that the British nation labours under a universal mania for gentility—all the world hurrying and bustling in the same idle chase—good honest squires and baronets, with pedigrees of a thousand years, and estates of ten thousand acres—ay, and even noble lords—yea, the noblest of the noble ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various

... one could remain in such a bath for hours without harm. It has a quieting effect upon the nerves and reference has been made to it in the chapter on Sleep as a means of overcoming excitement or nervousness. In attacks of mania it is especially valuable, and is now extensively used in all insane asylums because of its wonderful effect in quieting the nerves. This bath at 98 degrees is also especially commended in the case of severe burns covering a large surface. It is about the only ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... prey to emotion and agitation, when unawares sorrowful accents also struck her ear, from the direction of the mound. "Every one," she cogitated, "laughs at me for labouring under a foolish mania, but is there likely another fool besides myself?" She then raised her head, and, casting a glance about her, she discovered that it was Pao-y. "Ts'ui!" eagerly cried Tai-y, "I was wondering who it was; but is it truly this ruthless-hearted ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... safe criteria for measuring the efficiency of, or even for classification of Negro colleges and universities. This condition is not peculiar to Negro colleges. Those for whites, in the South especially, present the same condition of variety. It seems that there has been a special mania, in our South Land especially, for setting up a laudable ideal in the classification of educational institutions, and then working up to it during subsequent ages. They believe there is much in a name or title. This keen sense of potentiality being in the classification, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... brother John is seized with a poetic mania, and is now rhyming away at the rate of three lines per hour—so much for ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero

... man of blood is upon me. The hindrance is gone from my life, but a horror has entered it beyond the conception of any soul that has not yielded itself to the unimaginable influences emanating from an accomplished crime. I can not be content with having pressed that spring once. A mania is upon me which, after thirty years of useless resistance and superhuman struggle, still draws me from bed and sleep to rehearse in ghastly fashion that deed of my early manhood. I can not resist it. To tear out the deadly mechanism, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green

... were as smooth as a girl's, too!" the Colonel's voice dropped to the softness of reminiscence, growing harsh again as he added: "If I temporarily forget the rules of honorable warfare, it's because my memory has been corrupted by the vileness of those Outcasts who, in their ego-mania, blaspheme the Almighty God by claiming kinship with Him. I wish you and I could go over there and clean up that pestilential Prussian herd! By gad, sir, they've the hoof and mouth disease, each confounded one of them! Whenever I think of them I get ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... of symptoms. Queer how you fellows always slide up to the very ears into the particular things that you've long ago rejected theoretically—like yourself into marriage. As long as I've known you, you've struggled with this unhappy mania for marriage. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... with you entirely, in condemning the mania of giving names to objects of any kind after persons still living. Death alone can seal the title of any man to this honor, by putting it out of his power to forfeit it. There is one other mode of recording merit, which I have often thought might be introduced, so as to gratify ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... will be very pleasant—not worrying and fidgeting—so calm and kind. I refused at first, Cecil. People always want what they can't get, and if it's any satisfaction to you, I don't mind confessing that I have had, for years, a perfect mania for somebody else. A hopeless case for at least three reasons: he's married, he's in love with someone else (not even counting his wife, who counts a great deal) and, if he hadn't either of these preoccupations, he would never look at me. So I've given it up. I've made up my mind ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... happened, we met at the door, and I was obliged to let him in. I saw, at once, that he was frightfully changed even from what you remember him. I should have said there was no danger at all to be feared from his attempts to trace you, if I had not perceived that it had become a kind of mania with him, and that his senses, which seem to be completely dulled on other subjects, are still alive on that. He asked me many questions; and although I told him plainly that I would answer none whatever which concerned you, he persisted for a long time, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill

... conversation ensued for days as to the approaching Mayfly carnival. The girls demanded the water to themselves during its period, and as Lamia had landed a small trout that had hooked itself down stream on a submerged olive dun, she was soon as much bitten with the fishing mania as Blind herself. It was comforting to the vicar and cousin to be informed by the girls that they would henceforth accept no services from "hangers-on"—meaning that they would do their own landing and basketing. "We ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... as to the "mania" part, and we think the "corruption" must be that of the modern representatives of the ancient Orientals, whose education consisted in riding, shooting—and telling ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914 • Various

... riding across country in your America, you know." In the cities of the Continent that have large English and American colonies they attend the English church in preference to their own. I believe it is considered more exclusive to do so, and better form. In this mania for all things English we are not alone. John Bull happens to be the fashion of the day quite as much on the continent of Europe as in America, and has quite as many devoted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... He becomes a perfect madman, setting every thing upon a single cast. And the yearly loss of five hundred to a thousand lives, sacrificed in these desperate races, does not appear to cure him in any degree of his mania. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... minutes late a train would be; the pints of milk a cow would give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes. I was out against the universe. But it wasn't serious at all—just a boy's mania—till one day my father met me in London when I came down from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street. There was the thing that finished me. I was twenty-one, and restless-minded, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... New South Wales gave way in a horrible manner to drunkenness and its attendant sins, the upper classes, in general, either set them a bad example, or made a plunder of them by pandering to their favourite vice. The passion for liquor, it is stated by Collins,[104] operated like a mania, there being nothing which the people would not risk to obtain it: and while spirits were to be had, those who did any extra labour refused to be paid in money, or in any other article than spirits, which were then so scarce as to ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... resulted, which did not improve till the stirring events of the summer of 1887 brought men to their senses again. The number of members sent to Parliament was something so enormous, that it seems as if the people must have had a perfect mania for being represented. Nowadays we get along splendidly with only fifteen members (one for each Province) and a speaker. Formerly several hundred was not thought too many, and before the constitution was revised in 1935, there ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius

... little about Africa, and I know something about Durnovo. That man has got a mania, and it is called Simiacine. He is quite straight upon that point, whatever he may be upon others. He knows this country, and he is not making any mistake about ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... stared at Jimmy wondering whether he was seated with an insane man or not, and if so whether the latter might develop homicidal mania. ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton

... share that the rules prescribed. Before even a survey had been made, the possession of stock in any quantity was regarded as a provision for old age; and great was the scramble to obtain it. The excitement in Baltimore roused public attention elsewhere; and a railroad mania began ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond

... North," said the elder gentleman, a little portentously, to conceal an evident embarrassment. "It may be that your conduct might suggest to minds more practical than your own the existence of some aberration of the intellect—some temporary mania—that might force your best friends into ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... smiling, knowing well that he would say something about Souris and ready to flatter her new husband's inoffensive mania. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... a new leaf in the province, and seems to have been a model wife and parent, she yet retained a sore heart against the mother country. The feeling of these two was early inculcated into the minds of their children, and their eldest son, in whom it amounted almost to a mania, transmitted it on to his own successor, our Mr. ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... gardeners are feverishly addicted to early rising. Men with gardens are like those hard drinkers whose susceptibilities are hopelessly blunted. Who but a man diverted from the paths of honest feeling and natural enjoyment, possessed of a demoniac mania, lost to the peace and serenity of the virtuous and the blessed, could find pleasure amid the damps, and dews, and chills, and raw-edgedness of a garden in the early morning, absolutely find pleasure in saturated trousers, in shoes swathed in moisture, in skies that are gray ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... creation ranking among the fine creations of womanhood of the finest writers. I doubt not but that it was inspired by some actual memory of Borrow—the memory of some early love affair in which the distractions of his mania for word-learning—the Armenian and other languages—led him to pass by some opportunity of his life, losing the substance for the shadow. But whether there were ever a real Isopel we shall never know. We do know that ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter

... was looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster—poor, silly, and unattractive—whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret's heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! "I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, but the young fellow who brings the midday ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... he is a lunatic, prince?" whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch in his ear. "Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends to pass the examinations. I am expecting ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... tolerantly. Most of us have hobbies; I knew a man once who carried his handkerchief up his sleeve and had a mania for old colored prints cut out of Godey's ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici; there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... it is not satisfied with the dissipation of mere fancies and dreams; but, being itself a most real thing, it carries with it many a stately structure, which the toil, the economy, the self-denial of years had hardly raised. Extraneous causes,—a short crop,—a reduced tariff,—a peculiar mania of enterprise,—may hasten or retard the various steps of the process which has been described; but its cause and its course are almost always the same, and the discerning eye may easily detect them, from the beginning to the end of our modern commercial experience. In ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... to have a mania for buying, is to possess a revenue." Many are carried away by the habit of bargain-buying. "Here's something wonderfully cheap; let's buy it." "Have you any use for it?" "No, not at present; but it is sure to come ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... of his time around the several railroad depots. He seemed to have quite a mania for such places. Oscar and Alfred often accompanied him to these favorite old haunts of theirs. One morning, as the three were loitering around a depot, having nothing in particular to amuse themselves with, ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell

... pointed though it was, went unanswered. The main speaker—shrieker, rather—was plainly a person with a mania for details, and even in this emergency she intended, as now developed, to present all the principal facts in the case, and likewise all the incidental facts so far as these fell ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... the date of Mrs. Pratt's pamphlet the tide was turning—had turned. The nine days' wonder was over. The mania was dying of exhaustion. Incidentally, the lady relates that 'having suffered all the indignities and contumely that man could suffer,' the inspired physician had for a time retired from practice into the country. 'I have ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... at this, for only the day before Eva had announced in melancholy tones that she had spent her last penny, and could buy no more pictures, for which she had developed a mania. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin

... it and—as far as human fraility will allow—conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor and his schoolmaster, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... kleptomaniac. With every luxury, with her fine home on the Lake Shore Drive, with all her father's wealth, with no want money can gratify, she takes things. In her circumstances it is out of the question to call it stealing. It is a mania, a form of insanity. When she is doing it, she seems to be in the grasp of some other mind, to be another person, and her actions are involuntary, unconscious. Then she seems to come to herself, when her ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... anxiety for Mrs. Rossiter arose over the German spy mania. She had been to one of Lady Towcester's afternoon parties "to keep up our spirits." Lady Towcester collected for at least six different charities and funds, and Mrs. Rossiter was a generous subscriber to all six. Touching the wood of the central tea-table, she had remarked ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... are talking like a reasonable woman, and I will plead guilty to some severity. Let me own that I distrusted you, Miss Garston. I have a horror of gush, and what I call the working mania of young ladies, and you had not proved to me then that you could work. At the present day, if a girl is restless and bad-tempered, and cannot get on with her own people, she takes up hospital-nursing, and a rare muddle she makes of it sometimes. I own hospital work is better than the convent ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... campaign, in every battle, the fruits of twenty years of triumph; because his government was so modelled that with him every thing must be swept away, and that a re-action proportioned to the violence of the action must burst forth at once both within and without. The mania of conquest had reversed the state of things in Europe; we, the eldest born of liberty and independence, were spilling our blood in the service of royal passions against the cause of nations, and outraged nations were turning round upon us, more terrible from being armed with ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various

... earliest youth to his dying day. Loved it for itself. For among all the drawings of his which I have ever seen, I do not remember one which can be identified as any particular place. In the eighteenth century there was a perfect mania among the smaller fry for making topographical drawings, in pencil or water-colour, views of some town or mountain or castle. But with Gainsborough the place was nothing—it was the spirit of it that charmed him. A cottage in a wood, a glade, a country ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... fingers and bore down upon her. Screaming wildly, she fled up the lane, pursued by the avenging glass of form. A quarter of a mile and they returned, she full of apology to the victorious "dude." The rustic mania ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... under which lycanthropists suffered may have arisen from various causes. The older writers, as Forestus and Burton, regard the were-wolf mania as a species of melancholy madness, and some do not deem it necessary for the patient to believe in his transformation for them to ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... due to nerve stimulation is of the nature of mania. In proportion to its intensity is the certainty that it will be followed by its subjective reaction, the "Nuit Blanche," the "dark brown taste," by the experience of "the difference in the morning." The only melancholy drugs can drive away is that which they themselves produce. It is folly ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan

... recollecting something that had occurred in the past before his brain gave way. His face was always preoccupied and moody, and scarcely any sound would catch his ear and make him lift up his head. There must be mania somewhere, but it could not ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... are kept back upon every pretext; that QrMasters and Govt Agents or persons calling themselves such have detailed them to drive teams hauling cotton to Mexico, and employed them about the Gov't agencies. This cotton speculating mania is thus doing us great injury besides taking away all the transportation in the country...." Public feeling in Texas was on the side of deserters to a very great extent and in one instance, at least, Steele was forced ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... period, in the height of the ten per cent. mania, a school of railway economists sprang up which advocated placing the construction and the profits of railways in the hands of government, and they supported their theories by ex post facto criticism on the blunders of railway companies,—on the astonishing dividends of Mr. George Hudson's lines,—and ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... choose, use him just as I please.' And I turned my eyes toward the choir where Chichester sat in the last stall, hanging on my words. At that instant I can only suppose that what people sometimes call the maladie de grandeur—the mania for power—took hold upon me, and combined with my furtive longing after research in those mysterious regions where perhaps all we desire is hidden. Anyhow, at that instant I resolved to try to push my influence over Chichester to its utmost ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens

... organizations for the protection of property in Johannesburg, told so severely upon one of the prisoners that his mind became unhinged, and in the course of the following period he developed marked signs of homicidal and suicidal mania. His condition was so serious that strong representations were made to all the officials connected with the gaol—the gaoler himself, the district surgeon, the commissioner of police, and the landdrost of Pretoria. The prisoners themselves organized a system ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... thinking of Dr. Black and the epitaph she had made him, and wondering at his strange fancy that he had been robbed. I take it that he had very little to fear on that score, poor fellow; but I suppose that he was really mad, and died in a sudden access of his mania. His landlady said that once or twice when she had had occasion to go into his room (to dun the poor wretch for his rent, most likely), he would keep her at the door for about a minute, and that when ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... usual, busy with some piece of soft embroidery (the mania for Berlin wools had not yet commenced), while her sister was seated at the chimney-corner, with the cat on her knee, mending a ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... adventure.... Incidentally, there is a marvellous revelation of the inner affairs and methods of the stamp-collecting world; but the main interest of the book, to our mind, is its remarkable story, and it can and will be read with pleasure by many who care nothing whatever about the philatelic mania.... It would be spoiling a very good thing to tell the rest of the story of the adventures of these two, ... and we shall be much mistaken if this book, in popular form, does not meet with ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell

... sugar is not destroyed in any appreciable quantity, during its passage through the tissues," she learned from the third. "Oh, how nasty!" she ejaculated, alluding to the dust on the cover. "And what a state you are in yourself! You seem to have a perfect mania for grubbing up old books. What do you want with them? You cannot possibly understand them. Why, I can't! It is all vanity, you know. Here, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... that he accuses his wife, as he accuses his life, for marriage is but a life within a life. Yet people whose habit it is to take their opinions from newspapers would perhaps despise a book in which they see the mania of eclecticism pushed too far; for then they absolutely demand something in the shape of a peroration, it is not hard to find one for them. And since the words of Napoleon served to start this book, why should it not end as it began? Before ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... Cork was one year ahead of New York. Then came Dublin in '53, Munich in '54, Paris in '55, Manchester in '57 (of art exclusively, and very brilliant), Florence in '61, London again in '62, Amsterdam in '64; and in '65 the mania had overspread the globe, that year witnessing exhibitions dubbed "international" in Dublin, New Zealand, Oporto, Cologne and Stettin, with perhaps some outliers we have missed. Then ensued a lull or a mitigation till the moribund empire of France and the remodeled empire of Austro-Hungary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... Most of our professional Hun-haters have found it a good stunt, or are merely weak sentimentalists; they can drop it easily enough when it ceases to be a good stunt, or a parrot's war-cry. You can't; with you it's mania, religion. When the tide ebbs and ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that, in handing on the vital lampada, as Plato and "le bon poete Lucrece" express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion, absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions which are concerned with the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... a perfect mania pervading the country on the subject of railroads. Hardly a paper comes to hand but contains accounts of meetings held for the purpose of projecting one ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty

... to have been encouraged by the lenity of the sentences pronounced on such of their confederates as had been apprehended and tried; and, shortly after, the mania broke out afresh, and rapidly extended over the northern and midland manufacturing districts. The organization became more secret; an oath was administered to the members binding them to obedience to the orders issued by the heads ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... embarrassment to the government: rather would he be a martyr. O beloved religion! is it necessary that a bourgeoisie which stands in such need of you should disown you? . . . Into what terrible struggles of pride and misery does this mania for universal instruction plunge us! Of what use is professional education, of what good are agricultural and commercial schools, if your students have neither employment nor capital? And what need to cram one's self till the age of twenty with all sorts of knowledge, then to fasten the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... and writing materials in those times. As may be supposed, the monkish librarians often became great bibliophiles, for being in constant communication with choice manuscripts, they soon acquired a great mania for them. Posterity are also particularly indebted to the pens of these book conservators of the middle ages; for some of the best chroniclers and writers of those times were humble librarians to ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... the one strength of the argument for Mattioli's claims to the Mask. M. Lair replies, "Saint-Mars had a mania for burying prisoners under fancy names," and gives examples. One is only a gardener, Francois Eliard (1701), concerning whom it is expressly said that, as he is a prisoner, his real name is not to be given, so he is registered as Pierre Maret (others read Navet, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne

... origin of this Love-mania, and with what royal splendor it waxes, and rises. Let no one ask us to unfold the glories of its dominant state; much less the horrors of its almost instantaneous dissolution. How from such inorganic masses, henceforth ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... Our experiences in Bonn were not wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight, pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... while we were yet a long way from Ashikura, with an uncertain cliff path between us and it: for the path, like a true mountain trail, had the passion for climbing developed into a mania, and could never rest content with the river's bed whenever it spied a chance to rise. It had just managed an ascent up a zigzag stairway of its own invention, and had stepped out in the dark upon a patch of tall ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell

... fiend ruined hundreds. Shall I tell you the fate of two of the most successful of these gold-hunters? From poor men, they found themselves, at the end of a few weeks, absolutely rich. Elated with their good fortune, seized with a mania for monte, in less than a year these unfortunates, so lately respectable and intelligent, became a pair of drunken gamblers. One of them, at this present writing, works for five dollars a day, and boards himself out of that; ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... waiter, call the port-hole a window, call the promenade deck the front porch, but call oh, call the transatlantic bully down! Be ready for him the instant he bawls that he's a member of the Travellers' Club. For the rest, be the ingenuous traveller, if you like. Be the man who has a mania for sitting at the captain's table, the man who goes abroad to get a lot of labels on his suit-case, the man who buys a set on Broadway (for two dollars) and sticks them on at home, the man who howls when bands play "Dixie," the man who ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street

... "and yet," he says, "there is hardly a mule on board that has not performed this seemingly miraculous feat over and over again, and a good many of them, make a practice of doing it every night." This jumping mania makes him feel uneasy every night, the mate goes on to explain, for fear some of the reckless and "light-heeled cusses" should make a mistake and jump over the bulwarks into the sea; the bulwarks are no higher than the plank, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... unhistorical, the jealous, and lawless mania for sovereignty of the German Princes the bosom child of the Conservative party in Prussia, we are enthusiastic for the petty sovereignties which were created by Napoleon and protected by Metternich, and are blind to the dangers which threaten ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... later Annie's religiosity, which had been increasing in violence, unmistakably took the form of mania. She became very violent, and for her own sake as much as for her family's she was removed to a doctor's establishment for such cases in Devonshire. The whole affair left the three at home very untouched—John-James because he was of a stolid habit, Vassie because she was never in sympathy ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... he never took the slightest interest; and when he became a judge, he shocked a Liverpool audience by asking in all simplicity, 'What is the "Grand National"?' That, I understand, is like asking a lawyer, What is a Habeas Corpus? He was never seized with the athletic or sporting mania, much as he enjoyed a long pound through pleasant scenery. In this as in some other things he came to think that his early contempt for what appeared to be childish amusements had ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... said Rowell to Mellish, "and I for one don't feel proud of the episode, so we'll say nothing more about it. The gambling mania was in his blood. Gambling is not a vice; it is a disease, latent in all ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... and then, then suddenly it comes whacking into one's head, 'But this—this is utterly mad!' This going to and fro and to and fro and to and fro; this monotony which breaks ever and again into violence—violence that never gets anywhere—is exactly the life that a lunatic leads. Melancholia and mania.... It's just a collective obsession—by war. The world is really quite mad. I happen to be having just one gleam of sanity, that won't last after I have finished this letter. I suppose when an individual man goes mad and gets out of the window because he ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... and a short halt, but the lynching mania was raged again through the past three months with ...
— Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All Its Phases • Ida B. Wells-Barnett

... perfect aloofness with which the other spoke, and was wondering what his dear old father, living his quiet, saintly life among the Derbyshire dales, would have thought of such cold-blooded heresy. "I have always looked upon that sort of brutal intolerance as a form of religious mania—sincere, but still mania, and the story of it is the most awful chapter in ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith

... cause the failure of his own scheme? Why should he on such a supposition send energetic messages to Johannesburg forbidding the British to co-operate with the raiders? The whole accusation is so absurd that it is only the mania of party spite or of national hatred which could induce anyone ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle

... liberty, with the hope of ultimate acquittal. At this juncture of affairs, a certain nobleman, Paolo Santa Croce, killed his mother as the result of a family quarrel; and the pope, newly angered against the Cenci family because he considered it to have set the example for this parricidal mania, ordered them all to be executed according to the terms of the original judgment, with the exception of the youngest son, Bernardo, who was given a free pardon. The sentence was executed on the following day, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... astonished eyes, the haggard soul of a haggard generation, whose eagerly-sought refinements had been after all little more than a theatrical make-believe—an age of wild people, of insane impulse, of homicidal mania. The sweet-souled songster had no more than others attained real calm in it. Even in youth nervous distress had been the chief facial characteristic. Triumphant, nevertheless, in his battle for Greek beauty—for the naturalisation of Greek beauty in the brown cloud-lands of the North- ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... had a perfect mania for collecting cannon; after having placed in battery the mitrailleuses and pieces of seven, the produce of patriotic subscriptions, they also seized upon others belonging to the State, and carried them off to the Buttes Montmartre, where they had about a hundred pieces. The retaking ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... has grown superfluous just as his patron, the state, which at present serves by means of its taxes and revenues, his anti-humanitarian purposes and hinders the reasonable consumption of goods. From the governing mania the foundation will be withdrawn; for those strata in society will be lacking which therefore had grown rich and fat by monopolizing the earth and its production. They alone needed legislatures to make laws against the disinherited. They ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... struggle in England than on the Continent, is the unequal and capricious distribution of family property.... Country gentlemen and professional men,—nay, men without the pretension of being gentlemen,—are scarcely less smitten with the mania of creating 'an eldest son' to the exclusion and degradation of their younger children; and by the individuals thus defrauded by their nearest and dearest, is the idolatry of Mammon pursued without the least regard to self-respect, or the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... foreign to the genuine German character. He impressed young Hecker as a sedate man, wise and firm. The friendship then begun was maintained until Father Rumpler was deprived of his reason by an attack of acute mania several years later. But more than the friendship of Rumpler, as far as immediate results were concerned, was the providential circumstance of two other young Americans having applied to join the Redemptorists. ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... the features of the shah-mania that British journalism was overrun and surfeited with Persian topics, Persian allusions and fragments of the Persian language and literature. Every pedant of the press displayed an unexpected and astonishing acquaintance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... gloomy edges of the forest of Machecoul. The hostess, indeed, was unweariedly kind and brought forth from her store many dainties for their delectation. She talked with touching affection of her poor husband, afflicted with these strange fits of wolfish mania, in the paroxysms of which he was wont to tear himself and grovel in the dust like ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... at the bedclothes. It is not necessarily attended by fever or by muscular tremors. The patient may show hysterical symptoms. This condition is probably to be regarded as a form of insanity, as it is liable to merge into mania or melancholia. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... yourself, Hebblethwaite, but at any rate I know you have a different outlook from theirs. Old Carew was frantically polite. He even declared the list to be most interesting! He rambled on for about a quarter of an hour on the general subject of the spy mania. German espionage, he told me, was one of the shadowy evils from which England had suffered for generations. So far as regards London and the provincial towns, he went on, whether for good or evil, we have a large German population, and if they choose to ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... distinguish it from the rest of the world. The old-fashioned autocratic farmer of the old school is there of course, and a rare good specimen he is of a race that has almost disappeared. Then we have the village lunatic, whose mania is "religious enthusiasm." If you go to call on him, he will ask you "if you are saved," and explain to you how his own salvation was brought about. Unfortunately one of his hobbies is to keep fowls and pigs in his house so that fleas are ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... look and found that they all bore dates from several weeks before, down to within a few days. The tale they told was eloquent. Forbes, his own fortune gone, had gambled until rescued by his friend. Even that had not been sufficient to curb his mania. He had kept right on, hoping insanely to recoup. And the gamblers had been willing to take a chance with him, knowing that they already had so much of his money that they could not ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve

... to be suffering from acute mania, alternating with periods of intense melancholia in which he invariably attempts to take his own life. His language when excited exceeds in obscenity anything ever heard. During the intervals of quiet he is constantly practicing ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown

... like fast riding. If I remember correctly, all of my guests were a little afflicted with the speed mania. It is a common disease with New-Yorkers. I hope, Stevens, that you will not give them reason to think we are altogether steeped in the slow, dreamy manana ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... you set up above all other kings, Master Jacobi?" for the second time asked Petrea, who this evening had a sort of question mania. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... the gang-plank out than we all made a rush for the trading stores in search of curios. The faculty of acquisitiveness grows with what it feeds on; and before the Alaskan tour is over, it almost amounts to a mania among the excursionists. You should have seen us—men, women and children—hurrying along the beach toward the heart of Juneau, where we saw flags flying from the staves that stood by the trading-stores. It was no easy task to distance a ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... twinkled, for Mademoiselle Therese had a mania for speaking English whenever possible, and at first always used that language when with her pupil, until Barbara had asked her if she had got so accustomed to speaking English that it was more familiar to her than French! Since then, ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie

... Josie's peace, one baffled wish filled her with a longing which became a mania, and kept her as restless and watchful as a detective with a case to 'work up'. Miss Cameron, the great actress, had hired one of the villas and retired thither to rest and 'create' a new part for next season. She saw no one ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... wooden home. The various phases and phenomena of the weather, the aspects of the sky, and the wonders of the deep, claimed his earnest attention. To know the reason of everything was with him a species of mania, and in pursuit of this knowledge he stuck at nothing. "Never venture never win," became with him as favourite a motto as it had been with his father, and he acted on it more vigorously than ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne

... People have the mania, nowadays, to invite all Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs: their gowns were horribly smashed, and ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac

... door for her to pass out; she gave him a charming nod as he stood there, and he turned back to Gordon with the reflection of her smile in his face. Gordon was watching him; Gordon was dying to know what he thought of her. It was a curious mania of Gordon's, this wanting to know what one thought of the women he loved; but Bernard just now felt abundantly able to humor it. He was so pleased ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... day I saw an elderly gentleman walking in Dale Street, apparently in a state of mania; for as he limped along (being afflicted with lameness) he kept talking to himself, and sometimes breaking out into a threat against some casual passenger. He was a very respectable-looking man; and I remember to have seen him last summer, in the steamer, returning from the Isle of Man, where ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... dementia, alienation of mind, madness, lunacy, craziness, derangement, frenzy, delirium, mania, hallucination, aberration of mind, bedlamism; paranoia, monomania. Antonyms: sanity, rationality, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... examples of new genius being hailed by the critics as folly and charlatanry. Only the other day a biographer of Lord Lister was reminding us how, at the British Association in 1869, Lister's antiseptic treatment was attacked as a "return to the dark ages of surgery," the "carbolic mania," and "a professional criminality." The history of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the wrecks of such hostile criticisms. It is an appalling spectacle for anyone interested in asserting the intelligence of the human race. So appalling is it, indeed, that most of us nowadays ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... you, to start with, that Felipe was a crazy old fool: and I dare say you have gathered by this time what shape his craziness took. He had a mania for imagining himself a great man. For days together he might be as sane as you or I; and then, all of a sudden—a chance word would set him off—he had mounted his horse and put on all the airs of the King of ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... the post-card mania. This is the most pernicious disease that has ever seized humanity since the days of the Garden of Eden, and in no better place can it be seen at its worst than on a steamer calling at foreign ports: once it gets ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... gladly consented to leave Holland, being anxious to visit other parts. He intended to proceed to Paris and pursue his studies there, and was furnished by his friend with money for the journey. Unluckily, he rambled into the garden of a florist just before quitting Leyden. The tulip mania was still prevalent in Holland, and some species of that splendid flower brought immense prices. In wandering through the garden Goldsmith recollected that his uncle Contarine was a tulip fancier. The thought suddenly struck him that here was an opportunity ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... hostility to the Yankees to the highest pitch, was an attempt made by that all-pervading race to get possession of Communipaw itself. Yes, Sir; during the late mania for land speculation, a daring company of Yankee projectors landed before the village; stopped the honest burghers on the public highway, and endeavored to bargain them out of their hereditary acres; displayed ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... whip the Witler? Walker! We're the PENN-holders. For their man That One-Six-Nine-Three nicked him, Witlers warmed up "Old Warmingpan;" PENN gave him odds, and licked him. "Villadom" did its duty—game; Rads jeered it; that's their mania. Lewisham? No, we'll change the name, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various

... aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning. He dreamed night and day over these symbols, he copied and recopied the manuscript nine times before he wrote it out fairly in a little book which he made himself of a skin of creamy vellum. In his mania for acquirements that should be entirely useless he had gained some skill in illumination, or limning as he preferred to call it, always choosing the obscurer word as the obscurer arts. First he set himself to the sever practice of the text; ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... Friday last the inhabitants of —— were thrown into a state of excitement which may better be imagened than described by the appearance of a lunatic in puris naturalibus whose mania was evidently homicidal. During the earlier portion of the night the unfortunate man was seen from time to time by quite a number of people in places many miles apart. Some of the pleasure-seekers returning ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... had gradually gained Adrienne's friendship. From an ostentatious desire to be able to tell of what happened at the ministry; to be on the first list of guests, when the minister received or gave a ball, Sabine Marsy, who had suffered from the mania of aspiring to become an artist, patronized the intransigeant painters and exhibited at the salon, now set her mind on playing the role of a political figure in Paris. Madame Gerson, Blanche, as Sabine called ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... muddles and undesigned evils produced by other legislation of a much less admirable nature.[5] But I may perhaps be allowed to mention that it has seemed to some observers that there is a connection between the Feminism of America and the American mania for hasty laws which will not, and often cannot, be carried out in practice. Certainly there is no reason to suppose that women are firmly antagonistic to such legislation. Nice, pretty, virtuous little laws, complete in every detail, seem to appeal irresistibly ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... and talent for theological controversy. I was surprised to find she had not marked his diary and journals at all; I hardly knew how to leave them unmarked at all. Those Italian journals of his made me almost sick with longing. It is odd that this southern mania should return upon me so strongly after so many years of freedom from it, merely because there seemed to arise just now a possibility of this long-relinquished hope being fulfilled. I know that I could not live in Italy, and I suppose ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... much juster were thy Muse's hap, If to thy bells thou would'st but add a cap! [xxviii] 340 Delightful BOWLES! still blessing and still blest, All love thy strain, but children like it best. 'Tis thine, with gentle LITTLE'S moral song, To soothe the mania of the amorous throng! With thee our nursery damsels shed their tears, Ere Miss as yet completes her infant years: But in her teens thy whining powers are vain; She quits poor BOWLES for LITTLE'S purer strain. Now to soft themes thou scornest to confine [xxix] The lofty numbers of ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... itself to this. To listen to him, you would have believed him an especial object of divine as well as human benevolence—all things working for his good. The doctor used to say, that No. 12 had 'a mania for happiness;' but it was a mania that in creating esteem for its victim, infused fresh courage into all that came within ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various

... for, and proved not to have been into her mistress's room. The charade mania was not strong enough to make them venture upon disturbing Mrs. Frederick Langford, and to their great vexation, Martin departed bearing no commission for ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge

... deliberately roll in the creek, head under. Once he explained that the medium he worked in caused a kind of uncontrollable longing for water; something having none of the qualities of burning or thirst, but an irresistible temporary mania. It worried him a good deal; he didn't understand it. That, then, was what ailed Pulz. When he opened the chest there was, as I surmise, a trifling quantity of this stuff lying in the inner lid. It wasn't the celestium itself, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... two lectures on this pestilent heresy, delivered by the author before the Kennington Branch of the Church of England Young Men's Society, and is worth the attention of those who wish to know something of this now wide-spread mania. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various

... his arrest marked the end of his trouble; you might say that his brain simply snapped back into health and began to function normally again, after a period of temporary mania from shell-shock. It is true that his memory was left blank, but there doesn't seem to be any organic reason for it to be blank—other than lack of incentive to remember. Catch me up, if you don't follow me. In other ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... while reason fought with his mania. "Whose goin' to save 'em? He needs killin'. I'm ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... THE EPIDEMICS OF "POSSESSION." Survival of the belief in diabolic activity as the cause of such epidemics Epidemics of hysteria in classical times In the Middle Ages The dancing mania Inability of science during the fifteenth century to cope with such diseases Cases of possession brought within the scope of medical research during the sixteenth century Dying-out of this form of mental disease in northern Europe In Italy Epidemics of hysteria ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... in his sleeve at the strange idea of the pacha, was nevertheless not a little alarmed. He perceived that the mania had such complete possession, that, unless appeased, the results might prove unpleasant even to himself. It occurred to him, that a course might be pursued to gratify the pacha's wishes, without proceeding to such violent measures. Waiting a little ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... little German on a back street here, who owns a bar-room with a hotel attached. He has a mania to run for office; in fact, there's several candidates announced already. Now, the convention don't meet until May, which is in our favor. If my game succeeds, we will be back at work before that time. That will let ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams

... for her courage and humanity. Portraits of her were sold in the print-shops all over the land; and the enthusiasm, which at first was the natural impulse of admiration for one who had performed a noble and heroic deed, at last rose to a species of mania, in the heat of which not a few absurdities ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne

... classes, and all for the worse. I said that I used to have a very bleeding of the heart for the half-clothed and quarter-fed hangers-on to civilisation; I think far less of them now than of another class in appearance much better off. It is a class created by the mania of education, and it consists of those unhappy men and women whom unspeakable cruelty endows with intellectual needs whilst refusing them the sustenance they are taught to crave. Another generation, and this class will be terribly extended, its existence blighting ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... sinister-looking room. We pulled the furniture across against the doors, and I did not undress, for I could not venture on those sheets. I was accustomed to fine sheets perfumed with iris, for my pretty little mother, like all Dutch women, had a mania for linen and cleanliness, and she had inculcated me with this ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... too many Leagues and Associations the town of Seesen, in the Harz, has established an "Association for Combating the Mania for the Formation of Leagues and Associations"—not realising until too late that they have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various



Words linked to "Mania" :   craze, dipsomania, emotional disturbance, egomania, phaneromania, fury, pyromania, kleptomania, irrational motive, monomania, necrophilia, logorrhea, delirium, manic, emotional disorder, agromania, cacoethes, trichotillomania, hysteria, major affective disorder, logomania, necromania, potomania, affective disorder, passion, necrophilism, manic disorder



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