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Insanity   /ɪnsˈænəti/  /ɪnsˈænɪti/   Listen
Insanity

noun
1.
Relatively permanent disorder of the mind.



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"Insanity" Quotes from Famous Books



... insanity, to put it mildly, seems to be sweeping over this country," said the president of the Northeastern. "Men who would paralyze and destroy the initiative of private enterprise, men who themselves are ambitious, and either incapable or unsuccessful, have sprung up; writers ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... tried at London in the spring of 1857 for the murder of their two young children. It was sufficiently proved upon that occasion that Mrs. Bacon (who had already been in a madhouse) committed the crime in a fit of insanity. Bacon, however, had endeavoured to manufacture some evidence in order to give countenance to a theory that the murder had been committed by housebreakers during his absence. He thus incurred suspicion, and was placed upon trial with his wife. It also came ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... remembered there was no one on duty in the Maggie's engine room. With a half sob, he slid down the greasy ladder, tore open the furnace doors and commenced shovelling in coal with a recklessness that bordered on insanity. When the indicator showed eighty pounds of steam he came up on deck and discovered Mr. Gibney walking solemnly round and round the little capstan up forward. It was creaking and groaning dismally. Captain Scraggs thrust his engine room torch above ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... his present mental state would have seemed to him little short of insanity twenty-four hours before; that it might pass again as it had done before; and a kind of mental frenzy seized him lest it would. He did not want to lose this assurance of One guiding through a world that was so full of sorrow as this one had recently revealed itself to him ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... the firm, the convulsion of death ran through the old system. He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel eruptions. Terrible and inhuman were his examinations into every detail; there was no privacy he would spare, no old sentiment but he would turn it over. The old grey managers, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... has been a blank," she proceeded, "an empty dream—a dead, dull level; insanity, vengeance, ambition, all jostling and crossing each other in my unhappy mind; not a serious or reasonable duty of life discharged; no claim on society—no station in the work of life—an impostor to the world, and a dupe to myself; ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... cloudiness of his insanity he saw some antagonism in me, for he at once fell back on the last refuge of such as he, a dogged silence. After a short time I saw that for the present it was useless to speak to him. He was sulky, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... little temper he had yet to lose; he flung the useless purse from him and broke away from them all in a condition little removed from insanity. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... doctor was standing before us. With a gesture he bade Foulet go to him. I watched beneath lowered lids. Thank God he had called Foulet first. Foulet had dabbled in the psychology of insanity. Foulet would know how to act, and I would ape him. Coldly, mechanically Doctor Semple ran him through a few tests. I watched with bated breath. The doctor ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby

... is a citizen until you are practically prepared to deny that he is a man. Men, and only men, can be the judges of whether he is a man. But any private club of prigs can be judges of whether he ought to be a citizen. When once we step down from that tall and splintered peak of pure insanity we step on to a tableland where one man is not so widely different from another. Outside the exception, what we find is the average. And the practical, legal shape of the quarrel is this: that unless the ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... floor of the apartment, stood upright before him, and presented the wild person and hideous features of the maniac so often mentioned. His face, where it was not covered with blood-streaks, was ghastly pale, for the hand of death was on him. He bent upon Claverhouse eyes, in which the grey light of insanity still twinkled, though just about to flit for ever, and exclaimed, with his usual wildness of ejaculation, "Wilt thou trust in thy bow and in thy spear, in thy steed and in thy banner? And shall not God visit thee for innocent blood?—Wilt thou glory in thy wisdom, and in thy courage, and in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... of Mickiewicz's closing years may be passed over very briefly. In 1834 he married; his wife was subject to attacks of insanity, and all his later life was saddened by the struggle with misfortune and poverty. In 1840 he was called to a newly founded professorship of Slavic literature at the College de France. His lectures as holder of this chair are the only literary ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... in Germany in 1347, and spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping, furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, which gave to the individuals affected all the appearance of insanity. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... its own. Tennyson has combined action, proceeding somewhat spasmodically, with a skilful study of character, showing us the exaggerated sensibility of a nature which under the successive influence of misanthropy, hope, love, and tragic disappointment, may easily pass beyond the border-land of insanity. In the scene where love is triumphant, Tennyson touches the highest point of lyrical passion; but there are jarring notes introduced in the satirical descriptions of Maud's brother and of the rival who aspires to her hand. And in the later cantos where, after the fatal quarrel, the hero is ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... rebel against kingly authority, but he would henceforth have nothing to do with the headstrong ruler. He withdrew from him all spiritual guidance, and left him to his follies and madness; for the inextinguishable jealousy of Saul, that now began to appear, was a species of insanity, which poisoned his whole subsequent life. The people continued loyal to a king whom God had selected, but Samuel "came no more to see Saul until the day of his death." To be deserted by such a counsellor as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord

... order to distinguish the hunter from the whipper-in, who wears a baseball cap. The only fox-hunting I have ever done was on board an impetuous, tough-bitted, fore-and-aft horse that had emotional insanity. I was dressed in a swallow-tail coat, waistcoat of Scotch plaid Turkish toweling, and a pair of close-fitting breeches of etiquette tucked into my boot-tops. As I was away from home at the time and could not reach ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... Chatterton in his extreme old age, after a life of remarkable piety, became a maniac and was obliged to be confined. He had suffered peculiar hardships, perhaps on the prison-ships, in the Revolution; and his incoherent expressions, in his insanity, sixty years afterward, and just before his death, were full of ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman

... and venality, his disgust at the 'low venal wretches' to whom he had to give bribes; his creeping and crawling before those from whom he sought to extract bribes; his utter incapacity to explain a great man except on the hypothesis of insanity; or to understand that there is such a thing as political morality, derive double piquancy from the profound conviction that he is an ornament to society, and from the pious aspirations which he utters with the utmost simplicity. Bubb wriggled himself into a peerage, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... as her escort. At first the Harvester ignored this, and said to himself that he was glad she could have enjoyable times and congenial friends, and he was. But as the letters became fewer, paper paragraphs more frequent, and approaching spring worked its old insanity in the blood, gradually an ache crept into his heart again, and there were days when he ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter

... Amongst his orthodox brethren he was reputed a "Methodist;" and not without reason; for some of his Low- Church views he pushed into practical extravagances that looked like fanaticism, or even like insanity. Lady Carbery wished naturally to testify her gratitude for his services by various splendid presents: but nothing would the good doctor accept, unless it assumed a shape that might be available for the service of the paupers amongst his congregation. The Hebrew studies, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... and, on reading them, I was astounded to find one was an order for my removal to a private lunatic asylum, the papers being signed by Josias Googery, J.P., and Dr. Loonem; and others contained statements of the evidences of my insanity, signed by my ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... into consideration, M. le President, and the affidavits subjoined, the petitioner desires that it may please you, inasmuch as the foregoing facts sufficiently prove the insanity and incompetency of the Marquis d'Espard herein described with his titles and residence, to order that, to the end that he may be declared incompetent by law, this petition and the documents in evidence may be laid before the King's public prosecutor; and ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac

... ashen-gray, the lips a mere straight slit, yielding a merciless expression; but the eyes, surveying me coldly, were the noticeable feature. They looked to be black, not large, but deep set, and with a most peculiar gleam, almost that of insanity, in their intense stare. Even as he lounged back amid the chair cushions I could see that he was tall, and a bit angular, his hand, holding a cigar, evidencing unusual strength. He must have stared at me ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... distinguished priest, well known in London, also suddenly waved an umbrella and behaved as if he were angry. But he showed hardly any sign of insanity, and on applying to the proper court for release from supervision, was ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris

... a father and king, and Cecri is a model of a wife and mother. In the representation of that species of mental alienation where the judgment has perished but traces of character still remain, he is peculiarly happy. The insanity of Saul is skilfully managed; and the horrid joy of Orestes in killing Aegisthus rises finely and naturally to madness in finding that, at the same time, he had inadvertently ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... to that field also. He had been a bright, kind-hearted donkey at one time: a donkey whose nose might be tickled, and who would allow one to climb upon his back. But the presence of boys grew disturbing as he grew old, and the practical jokes of which his youth took no heed induced a kind of insanity in his latter age. He took to kicking the cows as they browsed peacefully, and, later, he developed a horrid appetite for fowl, and would stalk and kill and eat hens whenever possible. Later still he directed ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... the operatives. In such places the mind of many a thinking man, worn keen as it were by poor living, sickened by foulness and monotony, makes fantastic efforts to reach beyond its environment, and occasionally hurries its owner to the brink of what some call insanity, and ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... which this attachment may be deemed an evidence. Such is Mr. Y. The other, Mr. S., a very handsome, genteel young man, who never carried a pack. They sat two hours, and Mr. Y. was not only rational, but amusing. The only evidence of insanity which I have heard is that he quarrels with his dear rib; and if this be deemed evidence, I fear our madhouses will soon be filled with married men. I ought to have excepted one incident, which has been ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... able to chat together of Yorkshire scenes and times, we speedily became excellent friends. Still, there were not wanting, from time to time, significant indications, though difficult to place in evidence, that the fire of insanity had not been wholly quenched, but still smouldered and glowed beneath the habit-hardened crust which concealed it from the careless or casual observer. Exciting circumstances, not very long after my arrival in the metropolis, unfortunately kindled those brief wild sparkles into ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various

... others," she begged. "If you knew how weary one gets of this place—a man, too, like my uncle! How can he be content? The monotony here is enough to drive even a dull person like myself mad. To choose such a life, actually to choose it, is insanity!" ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... than I, and when we were boys we went to school together. He was rather a bright lad, and the son of the rich man of a very poor neighborhood. At the age of nineteen he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity. When, as I told you in my other letter, I visited my old home in the fall of 1844, I found him still lingering in this wretched condition. In my poetizing mood, I could not forget the impression his case made upon me. ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... was the embodiment of everything that is tenderest in woman, combined with this a heroism which bore her on for a while through the terrors of insanity. Think of a highly intellectual woman struggling year after year with madness, triumphant over it for a season, and then at last succumbing to it. The saddest lines that ever were written are those descriptive of this brother and sister just before ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... a better judge than I am," said Wayland, "whether she is to be gratified in this humour of appeal to my Lord of Leicester, which seems like an act of insanity; and, therefore, I will turn the matter over on his hands, deliver him the letter, receive what they list to give me by way of guerdon, and then show the Castle of Kenilworth a pair of light heels; for, after the work I have been engaged in, it will ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... been talking of his respect for the privileges of Parliament and the liberties of his people. He began again in the same style on the morrow; but it was too late. To trust him now would have been, not moderation, but insanity. What common security would suffice against a Prince who was evidently watching his season with that cold and patient hatred which, in the long-run, tires out every ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... becomes necessary to explain why Gordon voluntarily, and it may even be admitted, enthusiastically, undertook a mission that, to any man in his senses, must have seemed at the moment at which it was undertaken little short of insanity. Whatever else may be said against the Government and the military authorities who suggested his going, and availed themselves of his readiness to go, to Khartoum, I do not think there is the shadow of a justification for the allegation ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... word Sin, for instance: all those who have studied the subject from nature and not from books know perfectly well that a certain fraction of what is so called is nothing more or less than a symptom of hysteria; that another fraction is the index of a limited degree of insanity; that still another is the result of a congenital tendency which removes the act we sit in judgment upon from the sphere of self-determination, if not entirely, at least to such an extent that the subject of the tendency cannot be judged by any ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... necessity. Had Say been permitted to fall a prey to her momentary excitement, everything would have been lost for Shotaye. Had Say's mind given way permanently, the cause of that calamity would have been attributed to her, and she would have been charged with her friend's insanity in addition to the charge of ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... from what you fear and hate, out of the world we both know is not real, into reality. I shall tell you why I want you, why you must come. You will listen and you will answer. You will say why it's madness and insanity. I shall have to hear all your obvious reasons, but I shall know that you know they are lies—Do you think—do you dream, that they can stand between me and you? You can't stop me. Because I have seen ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray

... have always been good to me. Can't you talk Father over? I am going away to-morrow. If he persists in this insanity I shall chuck my commission, go off to Canada and try to make a ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan

... no more, to give her no hopes that might prove groundless. The future was uncertain: the patient might have convulsions, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, mere imbecility with normal physical functions, or intermittent insanity. It was highly unprofessional to speculate in this loose fashion about the outcome ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... of the Fort women fell into a fit of insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... is a waste pure and simple. We refuse to believe that some purification is not to result from the fire through which mankind is passing, and that some sanity in handling human affairs is not to follow the evident insanity with which we are now confronted. Something a little more stable because a little more reasonable must appear at the end to replace the inconstancy and unrest which have up to now characterized the relations of peoples to each other. And as we hope this for the world at large, we ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... confusion. Finally he gave it up on the advice of George Pelham, who said that A.'s spirit would not be clear for some time yet. This A. had suffered from violent headaches and nervous exhaustion for some years before his death, though the troubles had not amounted to insanity. Now, just at the time when A. was incapable of manifesting clearly, other spirits were manifesting with all desirable lucidity in identical circumstances. Another case quoted by Dr Hodgson is that of a Mr B. who had committed suicide in a fit of insanity. ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage

... into contact daily in the making and gathering of news. There Schenck would discourse on psychiatry and psychology, his two hobbies, talking of "phobias" and "complexes" and maintaining that everyone in the eyes of others has a touch of insanity. ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson

... Philadelphia, U.S.A., developed a curiously unrestrained passion for puzzles. He neglected his business, and soon his position was taken from him. His days and nights were now passed with the subject that fascinated him, and this little maze seems to have driven him into insanity. He had been puzzling over it for some time, and finally it sent him mad and caused him to fire a bullet through his brain. Goodness knows what his difficulties could have been! But there can be little doubt that he had a disordered mind, and that if this little puzzle had ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... me. The only men procurable for escort were the miserable cutthroats of Khartoum, accustomed to murder and pillage. in the White Nile trade, and excited not by the love of adventure but by the desire for plunder: to start with such men appeared mere insanity. There was a still greater difficulty in connection with the White Nile. For years the infernal traffic in slaves and its attendant horrors had existed like a pestilence in the negro countries, and had so exasperated the tribes, that people who in former times were friendly had ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... looking as he went slowly along the short street and around a corner. The mood induced in her by her talk with Melville Stoner had returned. Was it possible that her father also felt as Melville Stoner sometimes did? Did loneliness drive him to the door of insanity and did he also run through the night seeking some lost, some hidden and ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson

... say: "Either she or I will stay on the field!" A passion, passions with her whole head and heart and all her senses at once, and complicated by all the wretched creatures' diseases, consumption which adds frenzy to pleasure, hysteria, the beginning of insanity. She had two children by the milkwoman's son, one of whom lived six months. Some years ago, when she told us that she was going on a visit to her province, it was to lie in. And, with regard to these men, her passion was so extravagant, so unhealthy, so insane, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... serious answer seemed hardly necessary. Yet as silence might be misconstrued, he replied that he wanted no office, and to accept at his age that of secretary of the treasury would "be an act of insanity." He was then in his eighty-third year. The offer of the post was but an ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens

... the Manichean phrase] that he had been drawn into this discussion by his opponent against his own will. But what happened? Contrary to the expectations of his colleagues, Illyricus in the following session continued, as he had begun, to defend this insanity." (Preger 2, 324; Planck 4, 611.) However, it does not appear that after the disputation his friends pressed the matter any further, or that they made any efforts publicly to disavow ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... and believed that the arrows of their enemies could no longer harm them."[153] Among the Alur, a tribe inhabiting the south-western region of the upper Nile, to bury a man in an ant-hill and leave him there for a while is the regular treatment for insanity.[154] ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... that both detectives were cranks of the first order. Furneaux, whose extraordinary insight he actually feared, was obviously an excellent example of the alliance between insanity and genius. In a word, he failed, and not unreasonably, to understand that when the Jersey man was mouthing a strange jargon of knowledge and incoherence, and Winter was inclined to be snappy with his subordinate, and ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... Probe on the sane mind? Have you ever seen it? Once I saw it, only once. It is worse than disaster—it is horrible—it results in a sort of psychic tearing that heals and then tears and then heals in continuous perpetuation. It—is indescribable. It is sub-human. Compared to that, death or even insanity is a blessed relief. Now, gentlemen, listen! I implore you not to be in error! True, it was my opinion that Beardsley acted in fulfillment of the self-destructive impulse, but the man is sane—sane, I tell you, and entitled to a ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse

... as though she had suddenly been shown the real Silas—or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that inhabited ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... to see the little tot in a bluish-grey French uniform, Garibaldi, who—about when the search approached his paillasse—suddenly hurried over to B. (his perspiring forehead more perspiring than usual, his kepi set at an angle of insanity) and hurriedly presented B. with a long-lost German silver folding camp-knife, purchased by B. from a fellow-member of Vingt-et-Un who was known to us as "Lord Algie"—a lanky, effeminate, brittle, spotless creature who was en route to becoming an officer and to whose finicky tastes the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... me out of my doubts for the time—for the time," he repeated, again fixing his eyes on the spot on the carpet. "Bear in mind, Cardo, through every word of this history, that the suspicion and mistrust of my nature amounted almost to insanity. I see it now, and, thank God, have conquered it in some measure. Well, we were married. Lewis was my groomsman, and Ellen Vaughan was the bridesmaid. It was a very quiet wedding, as Mrs. Vaughan was in very bad health—in fact, she died soon after our marriage, and Agnes ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine

... his mere bodily health. Of his mind I say nothing, of course. I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to any person ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... times doubted. I felt, that, unless my idea should be proved true, I could no longer trust my reason, which had at every step beckoned me on to the next. I had studied medicine enough in my father's office long ago to know that either sanity or insanity may come as a reality from a mind's determined verdict on itself. When, therefore, I again sat down to analyze my daguerrotype of the planet, it was with the awe and fear which might beset one standing on a ledge between ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... excitement crept into his blood. Since that thrilling hour in which he had seen Bucky Nome desert from the service he had not felt himself moved as now, and in a moment of mental excitement he found himself asking a question which a few minutes before he would have regarded as a mark of insanity. Was it possible that in the whole of the Northland there could be another woman as beautiful as Colonel Becker's wife—a woman so beautiful that she had turned even Inspector MacGregor's head, as Mrs. Becker had ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... a lot of things I want to tell you about. We had a case of arson to-day. Old Quarryman was away, and I was in the chair. It was that fellow Woodford that we convicted for poaching—a very gross case. And this is what he does when he comes out. They tried to prove insanity. It's the rankest case of revenge that ever came before me. We committed him, of course. He'll get a swinging sentence. Of all dreadful crimes, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... and phrase. Balanced sentences are especially suited to express antithesis, the figure of speech where two ideas are sharply opposed to each other. In the following from Newman, the balancing is admirable: "Inebriated with the cup of insanity, and flung upon the stream of recklessness, she dashes down the cataract of nonsense and whirls amid the pools of confusion." This is not antithesis, however; but the following from Macaulay is: "She seems to have ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... of ours, as to the measures we ought to take to contradict and put a stop to such slanderous charges. This, of course, did not relieve me of my obligations towards the daughter, in whom, very soon after the birth of her child, symptoms of insanity manifested themselves. The child had to be taken from her, and it was given in care to a sister of hers in the neighbouring village, who had just lost her youngest born. Perhaps you would imagine she took it out of sisterly charity; but no, she insisted upon my paying ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint

... her mind during the long 'tete-a-tete'? She had accused this man of imposture, and now, notwithstanding her secret conviction, she was obliged to appear as if she had no suspicion, as if she had been mistaken, to humiliate herself before the impostor, and ask forgiveness for the insanity of her conduct; for, having publicly renounced her accusation by refusing to swear to it, she had no alternative left. In order to sustain her part and to save the honour of her children, she must treat this man as her husband and appear submissive and repentant; she must show him entire confidence, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... to the purpose if Miss Frere had issued a general warning to the people of the Hebrides not to drink tea as black as porter, and, above all, not to boil it. The pale anaemic faces one so often sees in the north and west, the mental prostration and actual insanity so alarmingly on the increase in the Long Island, are unquestionably due, in great measure, to the abominably strong tea that is swilled in such quantities there. A Tarbert doctor told me that the medical profession now talk quite familiarly of the Harris stomach just as drapers talk ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... discover some satisfaction for himself, and the headsman will not keep him from it.—How is it that the vice has this power? Is it inherent strength in the vice, or inherent weakness in human nature? Are there certain tastes that should be regarded as verging on insanity? For myself, I cannot help laughing at the moralists who try to expel such diseases by fine phrases.—Well, it so fell out that the steward refused a demand for money; and the Duke taking fright at this, called for an audit. Sheer imbecility! Nothing ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... that, induced either by the malice of her insanity, or really terrified at the loneliness of her position, the wretched Ellen Halloway had likewise quitted the tent, and now followed close in the rear of the fugitives, still uttering the same piercing cries of anguish. The voice of Wacousta was also ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... back to the night when he had been frightened by thoughts of a giant that might come to rob and plunder him of his possessions, and again as on that night when he had run through the fields crying for a son, he became excited to the edge of insanity. Stopping the horse he got out of the buggy and asked David to get out also. The two climbed over a fence and walked along the bank of the stream. The boy paid no attention to the muttering of his grandfather, but ran ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... naked. She subsequently recovered from this derangement, and seems now just like all the other poor creatures who come to me for help and pity. I suppose her constant child-bearing and hard labour in the fields at the same time may have produced the temporary insanity. ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... difficult to fix. Up to this hour we have never fully satisfied ourselves whether it is a tone and hum of real Humour, which we reckon among the very highest qualities of genius, or some echo of mere Insanity and Inanity, which doubtless ranks below the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... and without any figure of speech, use herself up. Yes, she burns herself for fuel, and goes down a wreck,—not always to death; often it is to a condition made wretched by suffering, sometimes to insanity. ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... sufferings she had endured for him—incessant anxiety of mind, and voluntary starvation of body—had plunged into a career of dissipation and crime. And this was the result; his own death by the hangman's hands, and his mother's shame, and incurable insanity. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... of the insanity without realising its cause. He avoided her touch, and she wondered why. Her voice, heard in another room, drew his heart after her in longing. At the worst moments, to get away from her, he went out of the ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... Thus ended the procedure against Damien and his family, in a manner not very favourable to the avowed clemency of Louis, or the acknowledged humanity of the French nation. It appeared from undoubted evidence, that the attempt on the king's life was the result of insanity, and a disturbed imagination. Several instances of a disordered mind had before been observed in his conduct, and the detestation justly due to the enormity of his crime ought now to have been absorbed in the consideration of his misfortune, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... are our friends," said Dalhousie, pained by the wandering, wild state of her mind, and fearful that it might end in insanity. "We will leave this place as soon as you have eaten some of these figs and melons. I am almost restored by the joy of this moment, dearest; and you must strive to be ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton

... in November and lasted more than two months. The defence was insanity. The assassin maintained that he was inspired to commit the deed, and that it was a political necessity. The "stalwart" Republicans, headed by Senator Conkling, had quarrelled with the President ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... horrible cruelties and injustices of man to man, and because He has permitted evil to rule the world. I cannot reconcile the idea of a tender Heavenly Father with the known horrors of war, slavery, pestilence, and insanity. I cannot discern the hand of a loving Father in the slums, in the earthquake, in the cyclone. I cannot understand the indifference of a loving Father to the law of prey, nor to the terrors and tortures of leprosy, cancer, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... {142d} in his records, mentions one Roger Fullshaw of Waddingworth (near Horncastle), who, in 1596, prayed for protection against the most horrible outrages committed by the Earl, and says that his conduct savoured of insanity. Before he succeeded to the earldom, and consequently when he had not yet so much power to oppress, he committed the following aggressions on the Saviles of Poolham. We must premise that Sir Robert Savile, though a knight of good estate, and though his descendants became ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... under most trying circumstances: he died in the poor-house, a raving maniac. Two of his children had been taken from their mother by her owner, as was usual with slave-holders, which preyed so severely on the poor father's mind that it drove him into a state of hopeless insanity. He was a "free man" in the eye of Delaware laws, yet he was not allowed to exercise the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... to the mundane eye, have been an element of the ridiculous in the spectacle of the rector of St. John's counting his gains, since he had chosen—with every indication of insanity—to bring the pillars of his career crashing down on his own head. By no means the least, however, of the treasures flung into his lap was the tie which now bound him to the Philip Goodriches, which otherwise would never have been possible. And as he made his way thither on this particular ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... Oxford came on during the following month. The question of bullets or no bullets in the pistols was transferred to the jury. Evidence of symptoms of insanity and of confirmed insanity in the prisoner, his father, and grandfather, was shown, and after some difficulty in dealing with the first question the jury found the prisoner guilty, while he was at the same time ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... with a youth of unknown extraction and condition, and especially when this was in lewd carriage and not by way of lawful marriage? So he who deemeth all women alike,[FN475] there is no remedy for the disease of his insanity. And glory be to Him to whom belongeth the empire of the Seen and the Unseen and He is the Living, who dieth not! And among the tales they tell, O auspicious King, is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... Grenville—the proposal of, how received in the colonies, i. 323: opposition of William Pitt to, in the house of commons, i. 324; signed March 22, 1765—letter of Franklin to Charles Thomson in relation to—provisions of (note), i. 325; signed by the king in the incipient stages of insanity, i. 326; excitement in the colonies on the news of its becoming a law—resolutions offered in the Virginia assembly in relation to, i. 327; letter of Washington to Francis Dandridge in London, in relation to, i. 329; ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... miserable school of imported thought which had sent its revolting influences to the very Grandissime hearthstone; he wrote a "Phillipique Generale contre la Conduite du Gouvernement de la Louisiane" and a short but vigorous chapter in English on "The Insanity of Educating the Masses." This accomplished, he had gone to bed in a condition of peaceful elation, eager for the next day to come that he might take these mighty productions to Joseph Frowenfeld, and make him a present of them for insertion ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... question and the cop were impossible, impassable. Corson found the thing too outrageously ridiculous to be handled by sane argument; his insanity in ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... at the time was suffering from one of his terrible fits of insanity, but a great assembly was held, at which princes, councillors, lords, doctors of law, and prominent citizens were present. A monk of the Cordeliers, named John Petit, then spoke for five hours in justification ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty

... as I did. There was nothing else to be done, unless, indeed, I had throttled the old gentleman; in which case I am confident that one of our modern model juries would have brought in the popular verdict of justifiable insanity. But, being a peaceable man, I was averse to extreme measures. So I did the next best thing,—consulted my wife, and retired ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... able for a season to banish the nameless forms that haunt the dim borders of insanity, he would sit in that valley for hours, regarding the wider-spread valley below him, in which he knew every height and hollow, and, with his exceptionally keen sight, he could descry signs of life where another would have beheld but an everyway dead level. Not ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... proof, or even the slightest presumption, that Addison or Addison's friends ever injured Pope, though it is clear that they did not love him. It would have been marvellous if they had. Pope's suspicions are a proof that in this case he was almost subject to the illusion characteristic of actual insanity. The belief that a man is persecuted by hidden conspirators is one of the common symptoms in such cases; and Pope would seem to have been almost in the initial stage of mental disease. His madness, indeed, was not such as would ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... marriage between Lincoln and Miss Todd. But they were interrupted by a painful occurrence—a sudden breaking out of a fit of melancholy, or temporary insanity, such as had afflicted Lincoln on a former occasion. This event has been made the subject of no little gossip, into which it is not now necessary or desirable to go, further than to mention that at about this time Lincoln seems to have formed a ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... incidents just recorded, of course great confusion and excitement existed, during which O'Grady was forced back into the court-house in a state bordering on insanity. Inflamed as his furious passions had been to the top of their bent, and his thirst of revenge still remaining unslaked, foiled in all his movements, and flung back as it were into the seething cauldron of his own hellish temper, he was a pitiable sight, foaming at the ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover

... her money to Mr Samuel Rubb, I tremble as I look back upon her danger. It has been said of women that they have an insane desire for matrimony. I believe that the desire, even if it be as general as is here described, is no insanity. But when I see such a woman as Margaret Mackenzie in danger from such a man as Samuel Rubb, junior, I am driven to fear that there may sometimes be a maniacal tendency. But Samuel Rubb was by no means a bad ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope

... stated with great confidence that a prolific cause for the rapid and extensive increase of insanity in this country is to be found in the unceasing toil and anxiety to which the working-classes are subjected, this cause developing the disease in the existing generation, or, what is quite as frequently the case, transmitting to ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... if Captain Nemo, rash to the point of sheer insanity, wanted his ship to tackle the narrows where Dumont d'Urville's two sloops of war had gone aground, when he changed direction a second time and cut straight to the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... of the nervous system are said to be associated with peculiar odors. Fevre says the odor of the sweat of lunatics resembles that of yellow deer or mice, and Knight remarks that the absence of this symptom would enable him to tell whether insanity was feigned or not. Burrows declares that in the absence of further evidence he would not hesitate to pronounce a person insane if he could perceive certain associate odors. Sir William Gull and others are credited with asserting that they could detect syphilis by smell. Weir Mitchell ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... and his friend Kashkin said that he "never began a quarrel or defended himself when attacked." That is not, I believe, a type to fascinate women for long, and Tschaikovski's moroseness, which bordered on morbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhaps fortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them ended as they did. And so he drifted—not such a bachelor as Beethoven, yet quite as wifeless. Unlike Beethoven, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes

... no symptoms of derangement of mind while I knew him; but he inherited from his grandmother a predisposition to insanity, which I apprehended might become developed by any very strong feelings of excitement; and I urged him to return and settle at Sirdhanah, when he had seen all he wished to ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... to eradicate insanity from a mind once possessed, so difficult it is to erase from the lover's breast the deep impression of a real affection. Coercion may prevail for a short interval, still love will rage again. Not all the ignominy which Agnes experienced in the place where she now was without a ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald

... ended by resigning its functions; compelled to resume them, he succumbed beneath their weight, conceived scruples touching the legitimacy of his royalty, and sunk into a crazy melancholy, which degenerated later into downright insanity.[20] ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... think of death? If I died, it would not be you: It would be simply the same Lack of you. The same want, life or death, Unfulfilment, The same insanity of space You ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence

... have been entirely reorganized, and an attempt is being made to give every child a good dinner at school every day. Furthermore, very remarkable schools have been opened for defective and over-nervous children. On the theory that genius and insanity are closely allied, these children are taught from the first to compose music, paint pictures, sculpt and write poetry, and it is asserted that some very valuable results have been achieved, not only in the way of productions but also ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt

... egregious imp of mischief I can, within limits, offer my congratulations to Mr. BOOTH TARKINGTON. The triumph of Penrod lies in the fact that, although he brought woe and tribulation to his relations and exasperated his friends to the point of insanity, it is nevertheless impossible to suppress an affection for him. Ofttimes and hard his father chastised him with rods, but Penrod merely accepted these beatings as the price that had to be paid for leading an adventurous life, and showed not the smallest signs of repentance. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various

... and twice, in the insanity of fear, he fought with his bonds until the blood came, even throwing himself down, until the men, out of patience, pricked him savagely, and drove him, venting choked cries of pain, to his feet again. After the second attempt, if attempt that could ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... violent people, and those who will not respect the property of others, thieves and cheats, they, too, so soon as their nature is confirmed, must pass out of the free life of our ordered world. So soon as there can be no doubt of the disease or baseness of the individual, so soon as the insanity or other disease is assured, or the crime repeated a third time, or the drunkenness or misdemeanour past its seventh occasion (let us say), so soon must he or she pass out of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT. The struggle for the scientific treatment of the insane The primitive ascription of insanity to evil spirits Better Greek and Roman theories—madness a disease The Christian Church accepts the demoniacal theory of insanity Yet for a time uses mild methods for the insane Growth of the practice of punishing the indwelling demon ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... Jacobs, the writer who above all others has conferred the precious boon of laughter on our wounded—but to whom the intellectual strain of following the significance of consecutive words is far too great. Thousands and thousands of men have lain in our hospitals deprived, by the criminal insanity of party politicians, of the ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... Far from it!" she whispered, complying with his strange order out of fear that his insanity, flaming as it was under the spur of some half-broken memory, might lead ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... bedclothes. A hideous story which he had read about a maniac barber came into his mind with sickening effect. The man's whole appearance, all his actions, his eager grasping of the appendicitis theory, proclaimed insanity. He meant to operate on him, whether or no! There were the surgical instruments in that black bag on the bureau, and he was shut up in the room with the whole crazy outfit! He would have given his soul to be in Pomona with ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field

... frame of mind, with reason tortured to her utmost power of endurance, and insanity peeping into that soul which might so soon become her own, that Medwin, while walking up the Shell-Road, and looking wistfully at the muddy canal, which swam away sluggishly on one hand, while the green and stagnant swamp stretched interminably upon the other, that he was startled ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various

... died shortly after the daughter's marriage to a Boston man, and on a voyage to Manila, Baxter himself suffered from a sunstroke and a subsequent fever, that left him a physical wreck and for a time threatened to unsettle his reason. He recovered a portion of his health and the threatened insanity disappeared, except for a religious fanaticism that caused him to accept the Bible literally and to interpret it accordingly. When his daughter and her husband were drowned in the terrible City of Belfast disaster, it is an Orham tradition that John Baxter, dressed in ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... really necessary. Moreover, Boutan spoke feelingly of the after results of such treatment—comparative health for a few brief years, followed in some cases by a total loss of muscular energy, and in others by insanity of a most violent form; so that the padded cells of the madhouses were filling year by year with the unhappy women who had passed through the hands of Gaude and his colleagues. From a social point of view also the effects were disastrous. They ran counter to all Boutan's ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... good hopes of the recovery of her husband's health. But her inquiries soon became fruitless, for the neighbours were altogether silent concerning Halechalbe, from the moment when he was privately taken to a madhouse in a state of insanity. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various

... not awake, while the chill went to her heart. [Footnote: The Eskimo Shamans and the Indian boo-oin are familiar with many very ingenious and singular ways of producing prolonged illness and death. There is one known to a very few old gypsies, of gradually inducing insanity and death, which I have never seen noted in any work on toxicology. In a work which I lately read, it was positively denied that there was any such thing as ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland

... altogether, and that he is shut up in two rooms at Brockhurst because—it's a terribly distressing thing to mention, but that's the common talk, you know—because he's a little touched here"—the speaker tapped his smooth and very candid forehead—"a little wrong here! Horrible thing insanity," he repeated. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... name of insanity!—could have inspired such a meaningless atrocity? What could its perpetrator have hoped to ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... he resented my staff officer's questions. But Dr. Morrow had appealed to me in behalf of Gray. Said that if compelled to continue a prisoner aboard that transport under Canker's tyrannical rule Gray might be goaded into insanity. He was in a condition bordering on brain fever when Morrow came to see me, and in another day was raving. That settled it. I ordered him taken off and placed in hospital here, and Canker had to go without ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King

... dyspepsia; and through fright,—as in the case of a fire—of rheumatic pains and lameness apparently incurable. But even dysentery has sometimes resolved an internal stoppage, and the itch has been a cure for melancholy madness and insanity: is the itch, for this, less a disease?—is dysentery ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... no reason why we should lose sight of its force. So, then, Paul says, 'In my preaching, Christ was conspicuously set forth. It is like some inexplicable enchantment that, having seen Him, you should turn away to gaze on others.' It is insanity which evokes wonder, as well as sin which deserves rebuke; and the fiery question of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... animalculae it reveals. Very curious that little world; but we take no part in any of its proceedings, violent as they evidently are. And here lies the reason, we apprehend, why dramatic representations of insanity are so generally unsuccessful. We cannot participate in the capricious delusions of the maniac, who becomes, therefore, a mere object of wonder or curiosity. The moment when the lunatic affects us most deeply is, when he approaches nearest to the ordinary current of human thought—it is the moment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... effect upon his kindly nature was terrible. There settled upon him a deep despondency. That fall and winter he wandered alone in the woods along the Sangamon, almost distracted with sorrow. When he seemed on the verge of insanity a friend, Bowling Green, took him to his own home and nursed him back to health, and the grief settled into that temperamental melancholy, which, relieved only by his humor, was part of the deep mystic there was in him, part of the prophet, the sadness that so early baptised him in the tragedy ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers

... much a disorder of your being, as a readjustment, but a readjustment difficult of sane control." He paused again. "You pass out while fully awake—a waking delusion. It is usually labeled—though in my opinion wrongly so—insanity." ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... house; but nothing of him and his remains but his memory and his tomb. She is then driven to dishonesty to supply the cravings of her child—is tried and acquitted. During her imprisonment, the child dies; distress brings on her temporary insanity; but she at length flies to a secluded part of the country, and there seeks a solace for her miseries in making peace with her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various

... to her own interests, and her incessant and stilted talk, were proof to his mind of a certain degree of insanity, and he had heard that people in this condition often united to their unnatural ways a wonderful degree of cunning. Her child was almost as uncanny as herself and gave him a shivering sense of discomfort whenever he caught her small, greenish eyes ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... reproduction of these same circumstances, of transcendental importance to the whole estate, nay, to the whole nation? A king of Bavaria singing Wagner's operas among rocks and lakes; a brother of the king of Bavaria resembling Sigismund de Calderon by his epilepsy and insanity; Prince Rudolph showing that the double infirmity inherent in the paternal lineage of Charles the Rash and in the maternal line of Joanna the Mad continues in the Austrians; a recent king of Prussia itself shutting himself up in his room as in a gaol, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... Edmund. To call or to fancy it a loss, a disappointment, would be a presumption for which she had not words strong enough to satisfy her own humility. To think of him as Miss Crawford might be justified in thinking, would in her be insanity. To her he could be nothing under any circumstances; nothing dearer than a friend. Why did such an idea occur to her even enough to be reprobated and forbidden? It ought not to have touched on the confines of her imagination. She would endeavour to be rational, and to deserve the right of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... this would supersede practical training—no theoretical training can do this—but it would give young men, at any rate, a knowledge of the best thoughts of the best thinkers, on such subjects as taxation, representation, pauperism, crime, insanity, and a multitude of similar questions; it would remove the spectacle which so often afflicts us in our National and State legislatures, of really strong men stumbling under loads of absurdity and fallacy, long ago exploded by the best and most earnest thought of the world, and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... for breeders of animals and plants; and the third to discuss and classify the facts that were collected" (loc. cit., page 124).) would have awfully laborious work, and I doubt whether you could ever get efficient workers. As it is, there is much concealment of insanity and wickedness in families; and there would be more if there was a register. But the greatest difficulty, I think, would be in deciding who deserved to be on the register. How few are above mediocrity in health, strength, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... all the vital qualities, the centre of life. She connects the nerves in their passage from the brain and the spinal cord through the body with manifestations of life. She has a series of chapters with regard to psychology normal and morbid. She talks about frenzy, insanity, despair, dread, obsession, anger, idiocy, and innocency. She says very strongly in one place that "when headache and migraine and vertigo attack a patient simultaneously they render a man foolish and upset his reason. This makes many people think that he is possessed of a demon, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... heeding him, and that was the last time he was ever seen alive. Three days afterwards his body was found floating in St. Margaret's Loch, under St. Anthony's Chapel. No one could ever understand it, but of course the verdict brought it in as temporary insanity." ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... wrought out the effects of the all-engrossing passion of the poor "Margaret"—a passion that even in madness, still clings to its object with all woman's tenderness and devotion, investing even insanity with the touching charm of love. How perfect is the part when, endeavouring to pray, the hapless "Margaret" fancies that she hears the gibbering of evil spirits interrupting her supplications, so that even the consolation of addressing the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner

... of rustic life. There is nothing anomalous in this. "Violence and variation," which someone has described as the two essentials of the ideal life, were certainly the distinguishing marks of the New Birth; and the men of that age demanded it in their literature. The drama of horror, the drama of insanity, the drama of blood, all were found on the Elizabethan stage, and all attracted large audiences. People delighted to read accounts of contemporary crime; often these choice morsels were dished up for them by some famous writer, as Kyd did in The ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson

... Welsh rarebit on his chest, and runs many miles at top speed through the crowded marts of trade, is highly spoken of and has medals hung on him. If he flits forth from a hospital somewhat similarly attired, and does the same thing, the case is diagnosed as temporary insanity—and we drape a strait-jacket on him and send for his folks. Such is the narrow margin that divides Marathon and mania; and it helps to prove that sport is ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... Function of the Nerves; How to seep the Nervous system in Health; The Remedy of Diseases; Observance of the Laws of Health Effectual; The Drink of Dyspeptics—its kind, times and quantity; Promotion of Circulation; Consumption—its Prevention and Cure; Preventives of Insanity, etc. ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells

... his office. Perceiving that his shoes have not been polished he stops at a boot-black's and during the operation he reviews his affairs. The problem was to make 300 pages of this!... Lombroso would have added the detail to his long catalogue in "The Man of Genius" as another proof of the insanity of artists. Georges Feydeau would have found therein enough matter for a three-act farce and d'Annunzio for a poetic drama which he might have dedicated to "Isadora of the beautiful feet." Sermons might be preached ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... wars? "Now let him arms most glorious take, who arms "To wear refus'd. Let me unhonor'd go, "Robb'd of my kindred right, who first arriv'd "To face the perils. Would, ye gods! that true, "Or thought so, his insanity had been. "Then, counsellor of cruel deeds, he ne'er "Had join'd our camp before the Phrygian walls. "Then thou, O Paeaen's son! had Lemnos ne'er "Known—to our shame abandon'd on the shore. "Thou now, so fame reports, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... upstairs braiding Jewel's hair," she replied before she realized her own insanity. Then she hastened on, coloring under the odd look in his eyes, "But you mean Jewel, of course. She will be down at once, I'm sure. It's so kind of ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham

... idea that he will permit the policy of his administration to be controlled by the hotheaded zealots who have been so conspicuous in the last canvass. I expect to see him call to his council board, cool, dispassionate, and conservative men; not men who are driven to the verge of insanity upon this question ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... with it to Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that effect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King Lear, or to instance ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... against his son, his general opinion was, that it was a singular case of madness. He hardly believed Donna Tullia would appear at all; and if she did, he expected some extraordinary outburst, some pitiable exhibition of insanity. Corona, on the other hand, maintained a proud indifference, scorning to suppose that anything could possibly injure Giovanni in any way, loving him too entirely to admit that he was vulnerable at all, still less that ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... support is something. Very gingerly I crawled like a fly along the wall, my fingers now clutching at a tiny knob, now clawing at a crack which did little more than hold my nails. It was all hopeless insanity, and yet somehow I did it. The rope and the nearness of the roof gave me confidence and balance. Then the holds ceased altogether a couple of yards from the water. I saw my spike of rock a trifle below me. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's desperate estate. And ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... was The Outline of Sanity. This Chesterton had chosen for a series of articles that became a book. He was asking for a return to the sanity of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and starvation. "We are destroying food because we do not need it. We are starving men because we do ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... rare, so happy, and so unheard-of an imitation; mad I am, and mad I must be until thou returnest with the answer to a letter that I mean to send by thee to my lady Dulcinea; and if it be such as my constancy deserves, my insanity and penance will come to an end; and if it be to the opposite effect, I shall become mad in earnest, and, being so, I shall suffer no more; thus in whatever way she may answer I shall escape from the struggle and affliction in which thou wilt leave me, enjoying in my senses the boon thou ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... insane, and will hold him incompetent to manage his affairs. And yet every Roman Catholic priest professes to believe a more startling dogma,—even that he is the creator of God. And yet, instead of calling that insanity, we must, I suppose, call it religion. Seeing, then, the priests are called every day to do things which their senses must tell them are juggles, and to profess their belief in dogmas which their reason must ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... How it ever came into mortal brains is to me the puzzle. I've often fancied, when I've watched those priests—and very good fellows, too, some of them are—that there must be a devil after all abroad in the world, as you say; for no human insanity could ever have hit upon so complete and 'cute a device for making parsons do the more harm, the more good they try to do. There, I've preached you a ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... think of his case—what you can do for him? I shall not mind the cost—I wish to spare nothing, and I do not wish any one, at least of our friends and acquaintances, to know that he is under treatment for insanity until you pronounce your verdict. He seems sane enough upon all other topics, except now and then he persists in calling himself by some other name, and I know he would be very sensitive, should he recover, to have his condition ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... classify, to people familiar from childhood and its games with "vegetable, animal and mineral," a condition of mind in which no such distinctions are drawn, any more than they are drawn in Greek or Brahmanic myths, must naturally seem like what Mr. Max Muller calls "temporary insanity". The imagination of the savage has been defined by Mr. Tylor as "midway between the conditions of a healthy, prosaic, modern citizen, and of a raving fanatic, or of a patient in a fever-ward". If any relics of such imagination survive in civilised mythology, they will very closely resemble ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... human being, however normal and "good," has somewhere in him a touch of insanity and a vein of anti-social aberration. But no human being, however abnormal or however "criminal," is born into the world without this invisible ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys



Words linked to "Insanity" :   insaneness, mental unsoundness, dementia, psychopathy, flakiness, irrationality, madness, sanity, derangement, mental illness, unbalance, daftness, dementedness, insane, mental disease, lunacy, unreason, craziness



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