"Sanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand we may acknowledge the greatness of Homer and Milton without trying to force them upon unwilling and incompetent readers. After all it is not so much a question of Milton versus George Ade, as it is of sanity and wholesomeness against vulgarity and morbidity. And if I were to walk through one city and behold collections of this latter sort predominating and then through another, where my eyes were gladdened with evidences of ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... had a fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her long hands from about her knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning. This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the movement of a soul's resolution to be, to possess, to ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... sight of this awful end, felt an uncontrollable terror sweep over his drunk and maddened senses. Though all his blood was leaping in his arteries, and his breath coming so fast it choked him, yet a moment's seeming sanity possessed ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... is not merely a fact in the case, it is the whole case. Let me reinforce my weaker appeal by a passage from the wisest pen in contemporary English letters, that of Mr Chesterton. There is in his mere sanity a touch of magic so potent that, although incapable of dullness, he has achieved authority, and although convinced that faith is more romantic than doubt, or even sin, he has got himself published and read. Summarising the "drift" of ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... absence of physical restraint, as used formerly under male superintendents, and, I may say, as still used in other hospitals than that of Norristown. Her skill in providing amusement, instruction and employment of various kinds, for the comfort and restoration of her patients to sanity and physical health, I feel sure has never been equaled in any hospital for the treatment of insane women. It is exceedingly interesting to see the school which she has established, and in which a large number of the insane are ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... friendship and of working together. We delight in seeing him bring to further fruition the admirable work he did at Willard, and later for all the State hospitals; and that which we see him do at all times for sanity in the progress of practical psychiatry, and now especially in the guidance of this institution. We delight in seeing his master mind given more and more of a master's chance for the practical expression of his ideals and ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification. For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree. An observation of yours about its great weight suggested the ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... should have been. The German trenches, for the most part, lay inside the encircling lines of batteries. In shape they rather suggested a U turned upside down; yet it was hard to ascribe to them any real shape, since they zigzagged so crazily. I could tell, though, there was sanity in this seeming madness, for nearly every trench was joined at an acute angle with its neighbor; so that a man, or a body of men, starting at the rear, out of danger, might move to the very front of the fighting zone and all the time be well sheltered. So far as I could make out there ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... and wild reactions of self-contempt, made her feel the need he had of her, the place she had taken in his life. But for her, what ear would have been open to his cries? And what hand but hers could drag him up again to a footing of sanity and self-respect? All through the stress of the struggle with him, she had been conscious of something faintly maternal in her efforts to guide and uplift him. But for the present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged up, but to feel some one floundering in the depths ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... easily could she pass over the error. There was a degree of pleasure in giving momentary case to him, while he could not recognise the hand that bestowed it. She dreaded, however, for the sake of both, an hour of sanity. If he slept for a short interval, she feared to hear him speak coherently on his waking; and the more because little or no chance of his recovery remained. The thought of his carrying forward into the hour of death ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... that might be well explained by the circumstances, and I have not the same absolute conviction in his sanity that I had before. I suppose you will not care to honor the wedding ceremony by ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... about the room like an irate porcupine, greatly to the terror of Alice, who had never witnessed such a scene before. But neither the brilliant son nor jewel daughters seemed in the least alarmed, and in a few moments the mother regained possession of her chair and senses, when her first act of sanity was to hurl the bottle Thisbe had applied to her nostrils at the poor woman's head with such force, that, had she not dodged the missile, it must have inflicted ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... flickering upon the sheet. I wanted to ask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that absurd business, I did not even know her name, and the whole story would have sounded a little mad. Just now, it suited me that Fox should have a moderate idea of my sanity. Besides, the thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. One wouldn't talk about her in a smoking-room full of men telling stories, and one wouldn't talk about ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... "Sanity went, too, Johnny," said the man softly. "You could not stand that fear and remain sane, so something cut off. That was what ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... joint title to Lord Castlemallard's estates. This pursuit was a bond of close sympathy between the rector and the student, and they spent more time than appeared to his parishioners quite consistent with sanity in the paddock by the river, pacing up and down, and across, poking sticks into the earth and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... he whispered. He voiced other expletives, too, even more forcefully indicative of surprise. He was not an imaginative man; it did not occur to him to doubt his sanity or to wonder if he were awake, nevertheless he opened one of the pokes and incredulously examined its contents. "I'm dam' if it ain't!" he said, finally. "I should reckon they was ready to quit. Argentine! Why, Jack'll bust the bottom out of a boat if ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... came home modestly and made a splendid speech. We need a man of great administrative ability and of supreme sanity who can lead us into quiet waters, if ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... over him, instead of months, while I had been absent from England. Remembering the medical report which Mr. Playmore had given me to read—recalling the doctor's positively declared opinion that the preservation of Dexter's sanity depended on the healthy condition of his nerves—I could not but feel that I had done wisely (if I might still hope for success) in hastening my return from Spain. Knowing what I knew, fearing what I feared, I believed that his time was near. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... in his madness,' said Lord Hartfield. 'He talked very much like sanity just now. Has your husband had ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Mito baron, having found such articles useful in the cold season, availed himself of this opportunity to submit his experience together with a parcel of dressed hides to the shogun through Yoshiyasu. It is said that the recipient of this sarcastic gift conceived a suspicion of the Mito baron's sanity and sent a special ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to prison reform—that no permanent good could result from social legislation until society recognised and dealt with the root of the social evil, the land question. "In a lunatic asylum," he said, "it is the custom to test the sanity of patients by giving them a ladle with which to empty a tub of water standing under a running tap. 'How do you decide?' the warder was asked. 'Why, them as isn't idiots stops the tap.'" It was the Rev. J. Day Thompson who first called me the "Grand Old Woman" of South Australia. ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... same goods as ourselves. Our customers naturally seek to get the most and [211] the best in exchange for their produce. If our goods are inferior to those of our competitors, there is no ground, compatible with the sanity of the buyers, which can be alleged, why they should not prefer the latter. And, if that result should ever take place on a large and general scale, five or six millions of us would soon have nothing to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... asylum, you see two or three different patients buttonhole a fourth and pour their grievances into a listening ear, you may safely suspect No. 4 of—sanity. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... promise," I said, but Robertson made no answer, for by this time that thundering dose of bromide and laudanum had taken effect on him and he had fallen asleep, of which I was glad, for I thought that this sleep would save his sanity, as I believe it did for ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity. ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... chiefly concern Naseby, which might do for an Episode, or separate Item, in your Book, though not for Froude's; I should also think the Letters about that Squire business would be well to clear somewhat up: but that can scarcely be done unless by vindicating Squire's honesty at the expense of his sanity: and, as I have no reason to suppose but he is yet alive, I know not how this can be decently done. Froude says he cannot see his way into the truth further than Carlyle's printed Article on the subject goes: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... going at the same time—the antic madness, the sanity, the sense of the theater. The last was to all that he imagined and thought, what charity is said by St. Paul to be to all ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... a particularly level-headed and practical man. Therefore I instantly arrived at the conclusion that the clean-shaven fellow who looked so much like a London barrister had some distinct and ulterior purpose in arousing within my mind suspicion of his host's sanity. ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... in the name of sanity where are such officials to be found? Here and there, perhaps, one sees in the world of to-day in the stern virtue of an honorable public servant some approximation to such a civic ideal. But how much, too, has been seen of the rule of "cliques" and "interests" and "bosses;" of ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... doubts, for instance, on his sanity, and one heard that the "Wall Street magnates" employed the best alienists in the country to analyze everything the President did and said, in the hope of accumulating evidence to show that he was too unbalanced to be President. Not content with stealing away his reputation for mental competence, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... to study the manners and customs of the dealer, and enjoy their amazement when, after causing them so much loss of time, I would hand over five kopeks and walk off. Some of them, I verily believe, will long entertain serious doubts as to the sanity of the Californian public; for Dominico, my guide, always took particular pride in announcing that I was from that great country, and was the richest man in it, being, to the best of his knowledge, the only one who had money enough to spare to travel all the way to Moscow, merely ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... J. Hotchkiss and giving a Brooklyn address, was picked up in a dazed condition by patrolman Cohen who had found him attempting to direct the operations of a gang of workmen engaged in repairing a crosstown-car track. He had been sent to the detention ward of Bellevue to await examination as to his sanity, though insisting that he was the victim of a gang of footpads who had plied him with liquor and robbed him of his watch. I showed the piece to Ben Sutton and Ben sent him up a pillow of forget-me-nots with "Rest" spelled on ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of blows brought Freund back to sanity, to the extent of changing his craven terror into Fear's secondary phase—the impulse to strike back at the thing that had caused the fright. Rolling over and over on the ground, under the impact of his superior's fist blows and kicks, ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... advantage. In some fashion, therefore, we have to substitute for endless competition the principle of co-operation, national welfare being construed at the same time not in terms of overwhelming wealth, but of thorough sanity and ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... contradiction is nothing in comparison with the contradiction which confronts us when we turn to international questions, and which demands a solution, under pain of the loss of the sanity and even the existence of the human race. That is the contradiction between the Christian conscience ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... and sanity, little children are pretty much the same all the world over, dwelling in the noble democracy of mumps, measles, and whooping-cough. Little newsboys, tiny grandees, infinitesimal sons of coachmen, picayune archdukes, honorableines, ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... feeling between them, as it were, the bared sword of his ascetic will—no less than her own terrors and hesitations. But she set herself to lift him from the depths; and as they walked about the mountains and the forests, in a glory of summer sunshine, the sanity and sweetness of her nature made for him a spiritual atmosphere akin in its healing power to the influence of pine and glacier upon his ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... or not," returned the other man, coolly. "Since I know nothing whatever about them, they are beyond my province. Unless you wish to bring ruin upon yourself, and unwelcome notoriety and possibly an official inquiry into her sanity upon Miss Lawton, you will not repeat this incredible accusation. Only my very real sympathy for her has enabled me to listen with what patience I have to the unparalleled insolence of this charge, but you are going too far. I see no necessity ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... misery and despair, his powers remained unbroken, his genius unimpaired; and even there he composed some pieces, both in prose and verse, which were triumphantly appealed to by his friends in proof of his sanity. To this period we may probably refer the "Veglie," or "Watches" of Tasso, the manuscript of which was discovered in the Ambrosian Library, at Milan, toward the end of the last century. They are written in prose, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... submerge her. In the welter of the present, she clutched at the high dignities and distinctions of the past as at a lifebelt. Not vulgarly, in a spirit of self-aggrandizement; but in the simple interests of self-preservation, as a means of keeping endangered sanity afloat. For the distinctions and dignities of that period were real too, just as uncontrovertible a contribution to her knowledge of men and of things, just as vital an element in her experience, as chaos let loose on her now. The one in no degree invalidated the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... cause in the long run, and have hurt their own Christian life more than their enemies' bodies. Guilelessness and harmlessness are their weapons. But 'be ye wise as serpents' is equally imperative with 'guileless as doves.' Mark the fine sanity of that injunction, which not only permits but enjoins prudent self-preservation, so long as it does not stoop to crooked policy, and is saved from that by dove-like guilelessness. A difficult combination, but a possible one, and when ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... he arose, stumblingly, there was a different expression on his face, a horror-stricken realization of Tomlin's treachery. Venner lay, still unable to disentangle himself, but slightly hurt, and he, too, regarded Tomlin with a look of sorrow and reawakening sanity. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... the development of life and society in the past, must be the guidepost of the sociologist. Human social evolution, we repeat, rests upon and is conditioned by biological evolution at every point. There is, therefore, scarcely any sanity in sociology without ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... British public; and, when the explosion which they have provoked occurs, they will endeavour to delude the British public as to where the responsibility lies. I write in the hope that, despite war-fever, there may be enough sanity and common sense left to restrain the militarists while there is ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... both in this world and the next, teased by importunate and perplexing thoughts, harassed by morbid infirmities, vexed by idle yet constantly recurring scruples, with an inherited melancholy and a threatened sanity, is a gloomy and even a terrible picture, and forms a striking contrast to the social hero, the triumphant dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame D'Arblay. Yet it is relieved by its inherent humanity, its ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... thinker. His opinions were bold, independent, and sound, his insight was very penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant in his sympathy with the misfortunes ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... unmercifully, the former, as the Old Man of the Sea, riding on the latter's neck. The laugh tittered and rippled through clubs and social circles, was restrainedly merry in the editorial columns, and broke out in loud guffaws in the comic weeklies. There was a serious side as well, and Bassett's sanity was gravely questioned by many, and especially by ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the rest of what happened in the dungeons. In passing I shall merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the same again. Luigi Polazzo never recovered his reason. Long Bill Hodge slowly lost his sanity, so that a year later, he, too, went to live in Bughouse Alley. Oh, and others followed Hodge and Polazzo; and others, whose physical stamina had been impaired, fell victims to prison-tuberculosis. Fully 25 per cent. of the forty have died in the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... a girl." And he had looked to her for the sanity of mature age. A mere girl, sheltered always by father and mother, spoiled to the nth degree, given no opportunity to develop her own character, to grow up to life's responsibilities. Her mother had not even told her of her grandparents, being ashamed of ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... then, is rest. Either our highest view is the truth, or the truth is higher and better than that. For to think that his thought is superior to the purpose of God, thus making himself the real God, is too much for the extremist human egotist within the limits of sanity. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... recent loss and shaken nerves made such business especially trying to him. Letters of this period remain, in which Carlyle begs Ruskin to "be diligent, I bid you!"—and so on, adding, "I must absolutely shut up in that direction, to save my sanity." And so it fell to the younger man to work through piles of pamphlets and newspaper correspondence, to interview politicians and men of business, and—what was so very foreign to his habits—to take a leading share ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... of sanity, or of only partial aberration, Otis's wit and humor, rendered more quaint and striking by the peculiarities of his mental condition, made him the delight of a small circle of friends. The following anecdote, admirably told by President Adams, presents ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... phrase-making. After the first shudder had passed, the magnetism, a hideous magnetism, drew you to the walls, the lunatic patterns began to yield up vague meanings; arabesques that threatened one's sanity became almost intelligible. The yelling walls seemed to sing more in tune, the flaring tones softened a trifle, there was method in all this madness and presently you discovered that there was more method than madness, and that way critical madness lay. You are not in the least converted ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... take an Englishman's ship from under him—homeward bound and close to port—and drag him to sea again on a diet of salt codfish without impinging on his sanity. When day broke they looked and saw the hawsers slipping over the schooner's rail, and afterward a fountain of fish arising from her hatches to follow the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... named Martin Harris, who lived a little north of Palmyra. Harris was a religious enthusiast, who had been a Quaker (as his wife was still), a Universalist, a Baptist, and a Presbyterian, and whose sanity it would have been difficult to establish in a surrogate's court. The Rev. Dr. Clark, who knew him intimately, says, "He had always been a firm believer in dreams, visions, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... tell what unknown graciousnesses may be happening, that our manvantaric livelinesses and commercialism quite forbid. . . . Believe me, if we understood the laws of history, we should waste a deal less time and sanity in yelling condemnations. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Reports from confidential investigators in Munich confirmed this. It had, of course, been impossible to interview the two thousand men and women who had turned the Opera House into a pyre for their own immolation, but none of the tiny minority who had kept their sanity and saved ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... he was preoccupied with a new thought that was taking shape in his mind—what a scientist would have called an hypothesis; a detective, a theory. It might throw an added light, albeit a lurid one, upon such doubt of her sanity as her own assertion ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... be trusted, Charles broke down on the second day of the massacre. Since Saturday he had been in a state of extraordinary excitement, more like madness than sanity, and at last his mind gave way under the pressure. To his surgeon, Ambrose Pare, who kept at his side all through these dreadful hours, he said: "I do not know what ails me. For these two or three days past, both mind and body have been ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the thoroughgoing scrutiny into every detail of his history practised by later writers; but, setting that consideration aside, the sympathy, intelligence, good taste, fairness, and above all, the sanity of the work, to say nothing of its admirable literary quality, have given it a position by itself, which it is not likely to lose. This memoir is not an over-large book, but the Life of Theodore Hook—a reprint of a Quarterly Review article written in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... country that the white Christian people of Paris, Texas and the communities thereabout had deliberately determined to lay aside all forms of law and inaugurate an entirely new form of punishment for the murder. They absolutely refused to make any inquiry as to the sanity or insanity of their prisoner, but set the day and hour when in the presence of assembled thousands they put their helpless victim to the stake, tortured him, and then burned him to death for the delectation ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... overloaded; safety valves were plugged; boilers carried several times as much steam as they had any right to do, and many lives had been sacrificed before the government stepped in and put a stop to this strife for fame and money. Since then the traffic on the Hudson has dropped to a plane of sanity and is now carried on by fine lines of boats that conform to the rules ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... burned itself out. As sanity returned he checked his rush, glanced once more watchfully about him, and at length stepped furtively into the thick of the jungle. Now more than ever was his coolest craft demanded, that A-ya might be ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... speak to Crispin, he scowled; did Crispin answer her, he grit his teeth at the covert meaning wherewith his fancy invested Crispin's tones; whilst did they chance to laugh together—a contingency that fortunately for his sanity was rare—he writhed in fury. He was a man transformed, and at times there was murder in his heart. Had he been a swordsman of more than moderate skill and dared to pit himself against the Tavern Knight, blood would have been shed in Marleigh ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... we meet: Pure spirits these; the world no purer knows, For none my heart with more affection glows: How oft did we embrace, our joys how great! For sure no blessing in the power of fate Can be compared, in sanity of mind, To ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... extraordinary man before him. For a moment, as the strange story of his miraculous escape and his still more wonderful indifference to it all recurred to his mind, he felt a doubt of the narrator's truthfulness or his sanity. But another glance at the sailor's frank eyes dispelled that momentary suspicion. He held out his hand as frankly, and grasping Captain Dornton's, said, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... motive. What was it? This reserved, somewhat contemptuous rival had also snatched Helen from his company many times. He had undoubtedly rendered some service in coming to the Forno hut; but Bower's own lapse from sanity on that occasion did not escape his notice. Finally, this cool mannered, alert youngster from the New World did not seem to care a fig for any prior claim on Helen's affections. His whole attitude might be explained by the fact ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... she glanced at him often during that day. He continued to busy himself with those activities which make a Med Ship man's life consistent with retained sanity. ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." And whilst, on the one hand mental specialists have been extending the boundaries of insanity to the point of justifying the popular adage that everyone is a bit mad, they have, on the other hand, tended to narrow down the difference between sanity and its reverse until it has become almost entirely a question of mental ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... hibernene and keep them alive. We hope, someday, to figure out a method of restoring their sanity. Until ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... mountain summer-seat. Ottilia was now her darling and her comfort. Whether we English youth sucked our thumbs, or sighed furiously, she had evidently ceased to care. Mr. Peterborough assured me at night that he had still a difficulty in persuading himself of my father's absolute sanity, so urgent was the fire of his eye in seconding his preposterous proposal; and, as my father invariably treated with the utmost reserve a farce played out, they never arrived at an understanding about it, beyond a sententious agreement once, in the extreme heat of an Austrian highland valley, that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it was all clear to me as day. Then I laughed aloud at myself in returning sanity. I was in the twentieth century, not the eighteenth. An imagination so vivid that it read all this from a scrap of paper picked from the gutter needed curbing. I repocketed the ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... reformers, however ardent, have freed the world from those who live by violence, kill by violence, and are themselves killed by violence. If crime is a disease, then to treat criminals as wrongdoers is absurd. If every murderer is insane, then hanging is nonsense; if a murderer is sane, then sanity is capable of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... would have flown to her rescue,—they, who for her would have chanced all accidents, ay, even life itself, were sleeping, and knew not of the loved one's danger. She was alone, and far enough from the house, to be driven to that tottering verge where sanity ends, and the dream of madness, with ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... was undergoing strange alterations; the more I came to appreciate the actual conditions he was living under, the more apparent it seemed to me that he must have a cast-iron mental stamina to maintain sanity at all. But he not only did that; he began to recover normal strength, and to be irked unbearably by his constant confinement. So it came about that he began to venture a little at a time from his room, wandering about on the ceiling of the rest of the house. ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... which it is necessary to exercise reserve is in the degree to which any story can be acted. In the justifiable desire to bring a large number of children into the action one must not lose sight of the sanity and propriety of the presentation. For example, one must not make a ridiculous caricature, where a picture, however crude, is the intention. Personally represent only such things as are definitely and dramatically personified in the story. If a natural ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... a third brain-wave. He ordered George on guard, and descended with Colin in search of the concrete proof of our sanity. And Madame's voice, faint yet pursuing, followed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... Sanity came back to Cochrane with the effect of something snapping. He got up. He nodded to Babs and she picked up the gun ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... defects I may oppose the following excellences. First, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short, a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Secondly, a correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won not from books, but from the poet's own meditative observation. They are fresh, and have the dew upon them. Third, the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... shall achieve the end; But they who wander or to left or right Are sinners in his sight. Take to thy heart this one, this soothfast word— Of wantonness impiety is sire; Only from calm control and sanity unstirred Cometh true weal, the goal ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... that he was ambitious, worldly, greedy of power, and a prey to carnal lusts. All these he was. But for very sanity's sake do not let it be said that he was wanting either in energy or in will, for he was ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child. Indeed I am in a mood of so much sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, that I should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a sense of proportion return to extinguish them. I fear the day is breaking, and the broad daylight of tradition and ancient truth is coming to end all this delightful nightmare of New York at night. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... not so this moment, Edwards! Do not leave him there to meet with such a death, cried Elizabeth, fixing a look on the countenance of her conductor that seemed to distrust his sanity. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... her? Haven't I been raving about her for days? Haven't you vowed she belonged to the type abhorrent to you? Haven't I had to endure your reflections on my sanity because of the adjectives I've employed to describe her attractions? Haven't you been laughing at your own mother and myself ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... behoves all thinking people to gather their forces together and seriously apply themselves to consider how they can better this condition of things. In their daily life they can do so by setting up a high standard of sanity and right behaviour, by the encouragement of fine aims and high ends, by the firm avoidance of hypocrisy and hysterical altruism, and by intelligent explanation to those under their care of the reason why individual ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... she but knew the pipes, get into her beloved lake again. Edwin jumped at the idea, and, leaving Tom to look after the auto, hastened down the ravine to Jones' Falls, and moved up and down the Falls, calling for the vanished damsel with a fervor that might have caused doubts as to his sanity had anyone heard it. ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... has hitherto been able, and probably it is impossible, to define madness, or to give a clearly marked indication of the boundary line between sanity and insanity. Mental soundness is merged in unsoundness by degrees of decadence which are so small as to be practically inappreciable. It is with the mind-state which precedes the development of recognized form of insanity the therapeutist ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... be more emphatically my sister.... C——, the most excellent, the most Pantisocratic of aristocrats, has been laughing at me. Up I arose, terrible is reasoning. He fled from me, because "he would not answer for his own sanity, sitting so near a madman of genius." He told me that the strength of my imagination had intoxicated my reason, and that the acuteness of my reason had given a directing influ-* *ence to my imagination. Four months ago the remark ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... one at all acquainted with its cunningly contrived 'system' will hesitate to characterise it as 'wickedly political,' productive of nothing but mischief—a system through whose accursed instrumentality millions are cheated of their sanity as well as substance, and trained like the dog to lick the hand that smites them. So perfect is their degradation that literally they 'take no thought for to-morrow,' it being their practice to wait 'till starvation ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... the Queen said, "and, unpleasant as it may be, we must learn to face the truth. That's the path of sanity." Lady Barbara made a strangled noise but Her Majesty continued, unruffled. "Nearly everybody suffers from the silly delusion that he's possibly equal to, but very probably superior to, everybody else ... my goodness, where would we be if ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... Her father would never consent to see her after the marriage. Such unforgiving selfishness is difficult to understand unless as a perverse sort of refinement. There were also doubts as to Carleon Anthony's complete sanity for some considerable ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... the weasel and the ptarmigan turn white to match the whiteness of our northern winter. Yet I was able to wring pure joy out of Rachmaninoff's playing at Carnegie Hall, with a great man making music for music's sake. I loved the beauty and balance and splendid sanity of that playing, without keyboard fire-works and dazzle and glare. But Rachmaninoff was the exception. Even Central Park seemed smaller than of old, and I couldn't remember which drives Dinky-Dunk and I had taken in the historic old hansom-cab after ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... of the Greek tragedians may seem rather greater and more complete than another, their work as a whole has a single pervading quality. It is marked by grandeur, excellence, sanity, complete humanity, a high philosophy of life, a lofty way of thinking, a powerful intuition (Anschauung). We find these qualities in their surviving lyric and epic poetry as well as in their drama: we find them in their philosophers, orators, and historians and, to an equally ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... he will answer "Health." After that probably he may say "Beauty." In addition the reader of Mr. Galton's Hereditary Genius will probably say, "ability," "capacity," "genius," and "energy." The reader of Doctor Nordau will add "sanity." And the reader of Mr. Archdall Reid will round up the list with "immunity" from dipsomania and all contagious diseases. "Let us mark our human beings," the reader of that way of thinking will suggest, "let us give ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... entirely. She did not forward it. Consulting no one, since there was no one at hand to consult, she sent a swift messenger to her husband with word to break camp and move forward at once—"he could not have the reason for haste, but there was reason enough." And he, knowing well and well trusting the sanity and breadth of that girl-brain, hastened forward, unquestioning, while she promptly informed the officer whose order she had vetoed, what she had done, and why. So far as human wit may penetrate, obedience to that ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... any rate to colour Lombroso's theory of the inherent madness of men of genius. One of the testimonies that we have as to Borrow's later life at Oulton is to the effect that he got bewildered at times and fancied himself Wodin; but the substratum of sanity is strongly exhibited in the remedy which he himself applied. "What do you think I do when I get bewildered after this fashion? I go out to the sty and listen to the grunting of the pigs until I ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... when that approach was taken. Here tonight is one of those community policemen, a brave, young detective, Kevin Jett, whose beat is eight square blocks in one of the toughest neighborhoods in New York. Every day he restores some sanity and safety, and a sense of values and connection to the people whose lives he protects. I'd like to ask him to stand up and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that terrible self-possession of hers that gave the last turn to the screw. She could not be dealt with as one frantic, beside herself, to be wooed and quieted back into a state of sanity. She was at this moment as sane as he. She was not to be held back, either, by a mere assurance of his love for her. She had never, it appeared, lacked that assurance. But her life, warmed even as it was by their love, presented itself to her somehow as something that ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... their minds made up. The trouble was that these latter classes, though delightful company to one of Andrew's sympathetic disposition, were considerably less remunerative than the irritating inquirers; and so long as there seemed any possibility of his father's return to sanity and his office, he felt that he could never regard his position as wholly satisfactory; on the other hand, though a sick lion may possibly be compared with a live dog, a defunct lion is ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... he could do to restore his sanity. He would walk over to Lavender Hill, and accompany his wife on her return home. Indeed, the mere difficulty of getting through the afternoon advised this project. He could not employ himself, and knew that his imagination, once inflamed, would leave him not ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... understand the meaning of faith to Paul by the meaning of religion to Jesus. They respond to the appeal of service; they do not take interest in matters of doctrine. To such the Church is a function, not an interpreter of dogma. What represents religious sanity in such a movement it is for time to reveal, but the current now flows toward service and away from a ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... had given much annoyance by getting drunk, and to some extent demoralizing his men. To say that I was astonished at his statement would be a mild way of putting it, and had I not known him to be a most upright man and of sound sense, I should have doubted not only his veracity, but his sanity. Inquiring who they were and for further details, I was informed that there certainly were in the command two females, that in some mysterious manner had attached themselves to the service as soldiers; that one, an East ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... after I landed at Liverpool I was perfectly well," I wrote to my mother. "The touch of solid earth under my feet instantly restored my sanity. My desire to live returned. In an hour I was aboard one of the quaint little coaches of the Midland Express and on my ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... therefore, was in itself a loss of control and a dangerous one, for nothing is more perilous to sanity than the certainty that most other people in the world are wrong. Such conviction leads to a Jesuitical contempt of means; in cases where the Puritan shell has grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal ferment which sometimes ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... only safe way—obedience. We need to be on our guard, not so much lest we go to extremes at either extreme, but that we obey our Lord Jesus. That, and that only, leads to the wise, well-balanced judgment and action. Obedience to Him means true sanity. ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... this wretched and seemingly transparent humbug could have deluded anybody, must now seem past belief; but I must with shame confess the fact that I for one was deluded by it. And that fact would put me in doubt of my own sanity at the time if I did not know that high statesmen, presidents of colleges, able editors, and that most undoubted of firm philanthropists, Gerritt Smith, shared the same delusion. Bible and missionary societies fellowshipped ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... represent an absurdity too monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind. But why are such notions absurd, and why should sanity reject them? The law of Relativity, of which we have previously spoken, may find its application here. These Evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter which ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... an epode. In its construction, and grandiloquence are thrown about with the careless disregard for innocent passers-by which characterizes that poet's freedom of style. Most probably no sane English-speaking person has read it through and preserved his sanity. The poet's idea in writing it was to get the French engaged in trying to understand it, and the Germans to engage in translating it, and thus stop the war by pure exhaustion of the combatants. The idea was ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... poet; but whether the wit be great or little, the "thin partition" separating madness from sanity is equally mysterious. It is true that the excitability attendant upon genius approximates so closely to madness, that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them; but, without the attendant "genius" to hold up the train of madness, and call for our special permission and respect ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... "I shall raise the question of his sanity. It won't be a difficult matter to prove him insane. It only needs a certificate from a couple of doctors. I think I can find two parties who will ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... if you were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarians' fancy about the feelings concealed inside the bloater, and the vivisectionists' fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog, are unhealthy fancies, because they upset a human sanity that is certain for the sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. The vivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not be useful, does something that certainly is horrible. The anti-Christmas humanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... entered into our existence here. Something threatens me. I hear the echo of a menace against my sanity and my life. It is as if the garment which enwraps me has grown too hot, too heavy for me. A notable drowsiness has settled on my brain—a drowsiness in which thought, though slow, is a thousandfold more fiery-vivid than ever. Oh, fair goddess of Reason, desert ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... create it, he may draw without hesitation for the repeated demands of the story; the protracted havoc wrought by the man's infatuation is represented, step by step, as the visible scene is denuded and destroyed. His spirit is worn away and his sanity breaks down, and the successive strokes that fall on it, instead of losing force (for the onlooker) by repetition, are renewed and increased by the sight of the spreading devastation around him, as his precious ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... It did not matter if he were overheard. That any of the prisoners were agents of the Bureau of Health and Sanity didn't seem likely. Anyway, he didn't care. They wouldn't do anything to him they ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... of view is a bit warped," Bernard returned carelessly to sanity. "It shocks you, does it? But the fact is Laura has the whip hand of me and I can't forgive her for it. She's the saint and I'm the sinner. She's a bit too good. If Hyde broke her in and sent her home on her knees, ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... ourselves, who favour the extension of civil rights to women. But, amid all the evidences of frivolity and extravagance which pain the judicious, we need never relinquish the hope that, once the pendulum swings backwards into the direction of sanity, its retrogression will probably be beneficial, even though we cannot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... wish to render harmless they first afflict with sanity," said Yeovil bitterly. "You may be content to wait for a hundred years or so, for this national revival to creep and crawl us back into a semblance of independence and world-importance. I'm afraid I haven't the patience or the philosophy to sit down comfortably and wait for a change of fortune ...
— When William Came • Saki
... dismissed him with a warning against challenging his own happiness—that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was galled the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of self- preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favour? ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to bring its dim light full upon his companion's face, gazing at him hard as if in doubt of his sanity. For the words were spoken as calmly and coolly as if he had been proposing some ordinary jump into clear water at ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn |
