"Morbidly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... What's that you say? Cause for cassation? Based on an error or on an oversight on my part, no doubt! Really, you have plenty of imagination! You are attacked by certain doubts, certain scruples—I don't know what—and in order to quiet your morbidly distracted conscience you ask me kindly to make myself the culprit! Convenient, in truth, to foist on others who have done their duty the blunders one may ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... ever what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the most singular way with a treacherous strand of credulity and superstition. Sometimes one is impressed with a sense that the prodigious force by which they subdued the knotty and forest-fettered land, and overcame so many other more dangerous difficulties, was the ecstasy of men made morbidly strong by excessive gloom and indifference to the present life. "When we are in our graves," wrote Higginson, "it will be all one whether we have lived in plenty or penury, whether we have died in a bed of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the giving and receiving of presents. It is occasionally possible to acclimatise a foreign custom. In this instance Vendale felt no hesitation about making the attempt. His one difficulty was to decide what his New Year's gift to Marguerite should be. The defensive pride of the peasant's daughter—morbidly sensitive to the inequality between her social position and his—would be secretly roused against him if he ventured on a rich offering. A gift, which a poor man's purse might purchase, was the one gift that could be ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... this time notwithstanding my correct and even conventional conduct in offering him a cake; it seemed to me symbolic of my final separation from the Fyne household. And I remembered against him how on a certain day he had abandoned poor Flora de Barral—who was morbidly sensitive. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... said he, 'provided your conscience be not too morbidly tender, and your ideas of God not too erroneously severe; but can you suppose it would offend that benevolent Being to make the happiness of one who would die for yours?—to raise a devoted heart from purgatorial ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... conscious effort that I shook myself out of this morbidly reflective mood, on finding that we had crossed the common and were come to the abode of ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... empire. He remained in this shelter for about a year, concealed in the guise of a knight. His chief employment was his translation of the Scriptures into his native language. He composed various treatises besides, and injured his health by sedentary habits and hard study. His imagination became morbidly excited, and he thought he saw and heard the Evil One mocking him while engaged in his literary tasks; the blot from the inkstand that he hurled at him is still shown on the wall of his chamber. The subject of the personality and presence ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... do, almost the first thing we think about is, what will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too. Without it, there would not be a tenth part of the luxury which exists. Pride in every form, point d'honneur and punctilio, however varied ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... brown facade faded in the dusk. She expected Paul back at midnight, and sat up reading. She didn't love him, she told herself, but felt lonely and wished he would come. To be sure, she recalled with her morbidly keen memory that Howells had said: "There is no happy life for woman—the advantage that the world offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice." At two hours past the usual time, she went to bed and slept uneasily ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... one time or another, the object of Warren's amorous attentions. Carroll read each one carefully and filed it away. He had hoped for this, but the results had far exceeded his expectations, and he found himself bewildered rather than assisted by the response from nameless individuals who were morbidly eager ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... gospel of charity. He picks from Mr. Froude's four volumes a number of tid-bits, setting forth Carlyle's querulousness, arrogance, and domestic storms with Mrs. Carlyle. Behold the man! exclaims Mr. Watkinson. Begging his pardon, it is not the man at all. Carlyle was morbidly sensitive by nature, he suffered horribly from dyspepsia, and intense literary labor, still further deranging his nerves, made him terribly irritable. But he had a fine side to his nature, and even a sunny side. Friends like Professor Tyndall, Professor Norton, Sir James Stephen, and Mrs. Gilchrist, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... brooded. He was very hungry and very tired, and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension. Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... and cherished the beautiful cloud, painted by fancy, till it became the goddess of his idolatry, though conscious of the self-delusion, and retained with that tenacity conceivable, perhaps, to the morbidly sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression follows, till one form of mania ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... I am because I'm fat, and they expect me to do things they never dream of asking anybody else to do. I'd like to see 'em even ASK 'Gene Bantry to go and do some of the things they get me to do! A person isn't good-natured just because he's fat," he concluded, morbidly, "but ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... didn't remember the young sycamores growing in one corner of it. Yesterday I could not but notice them, for they seemed to be like children dying of consumption in a hospital ward—girls of twelve or thirteen. You will think the comparison far-fetched and unhealthy, one that could only come out of a morbidly excited imagination. Well, I cannot help that; like you, I must write ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... almost morbidly sensitive about appearances, used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished, and it more than once happened, when the time came for replacing it, that no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... him. She understood the spirit that had moved him to drive the mare that forty miles; nor, in spite of a certain sympathy for the jaded creature, did she condemn him for it. She was too much a child of the prairie to morbidly sentimentalize over the matter. The mare was a savage of the worst type, and she knew that prairie horses in their breaking often require drastic treatment. It was the stubborn, purposeful character of the man that she admired, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... two musicians; the invisible grains of sand sank perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with natures ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... insincerity, and in 1715 an open rupture took place between them. The story of the famous quarrel was first told by Pope, and his version was long accepted in many quarters as final; but later opinion inclines to hold Addison guiltless of the grave accusations brought against him. Pope was morbidly sensitive to slights, morbidly eager for praise, and extremely irritable. To a man of such temper, trifles light as air became significant of malice and hatred. Such trifles unhappily confirmed Pope's suspicions; his self-love was wounded, sensitiveness ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... is," he goes on. "Haven't I pitied the poor victims who had to go through with it? Think of having to run that gauntlet—morbidly curious old women, silly girls, bored men—and trying to keep step to that confounded dirge. Wedding march, indeed! They make it sound more like the march of the condemned. Tum-tum-te-dum! Ugh! I tell you, Marjorie, I'm not going to have it. Nor ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... Man, like other old family servants in Euripides—the extreme case is in the Ion—is absolutely and even morbidly devoted to his masters. Delightful in this first scene, he becomes a little horrible in the next, where they plot the murders; not only ferocious himself, but, what seems worse, inclined to pet and enjoy the bloodthirstiness of his ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... carried to a needless extreme, became celibacy; the virtue of frugality became the vice of a starvation diet, producing the emaciated and weakened saints; the unworldliness which can be in the world but not of it was transformed into the morbidly lonely and futile isolation of the hermits. These are abnormal and undesirable ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... which the eruption is accompanied, gradually disappear with the efflorescence; but the tongue still remains morbidly red and clean. The peeling off of the cuticle (the outer layer of the skin), which begins about the end of the fifth day on the parts on which the eruption first appeared, proceeds; so that about the eighth ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... human state of affairs. And she accomplished her object. Rezanov, at the end of a week was not only infuriated but alarmed. He knew the imagination of woman, and guessed that Concha, in her brooding solitude, distorted all that was unfortunate in the present and dwelt morbidly on the future. He knew that she must resent his part in the long separation, no doubt his lack of impulsiveness in not proposing elopement. There was a priest in his company who, although he ate below the salt and found his associates among ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... week, grown suddenly and morbidly analytical, he watched for Cornelia's letters with increasingly passionate hopefulness, and met each fresh disappointment with increasingly passionate resentment. Except for the Serial-Letter Co.'s ingeniously varied attentions there was practically nothing ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... down late, and was very silent and irresponsive. He too was morbidly conscious of the pictures, though he wished his father wouldn't talk about them. He was conscious of everything that meant money—of his mother's pearls for instance, which she wore every evening without ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... now? Lying on the bed as if dead, with the back of his hands over his eyes? Razumov had a morbidly vivid vision of Haldin on his bed—the white pillow hollowed by the head, the legs in long boots, the upturned feet. And in his abhorrence he said to himself, "I'll kill him when I get home." But he knew very well that that was of no use. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... or physique. It is worth remarking that the only really original and characteristic class of jokes which the slave States originated are strongly marked with that cruelty and vulgarity which naturally attend the morbidly vain and semi-civilized man, who is so unfortunate as to have inferiors by fortune entirely in his power. I would ask the reader in confirmation of this to simply turn over the large collection of 'Georgia Major' and 'Simon Suggs' tales, which, emanating from the South, have contributed so much ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... her with a shade of anxiety; that tragic anxiety of the veteran artist scenting from afar the sneers of the new critics at his life-work, and morbidly conscious ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sat, she did not observe that Mr. Aubrey, who had seen her at a distance, was now bending his way to her; and not till he had entered the arbour, and taken her hand, did she waken from those reveries in which youth, the Dreamer and the Desirer, so morbidly indulges. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... an old man. As much as Hortense loved liberty, her suspicious husband wished to hold firmly the reins of conjugal authority. He was prematurely afflicted with various infirmities, almost always morbidly nervous and impressionable, disposed to take a dark view of everything, and bore no resemblance to the type of hero which Hortense had imagined. Moreover, the unhappy husband endured a hidden anguish which he had to conceal from every one and which tortured his heart; he imagined ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... unsatisfactory, and Avery yearned to know more. But the pain of investigating further held her back. If that growing conviction of hers were indeed the truth, she shrank morbidly from seeming to make any advance. No one seemed to know definitely what had become of Piers. She could not bring herself to apply to outsiders for information, and there was no one to take up her case and make enquiries on her behalf. Lennox Tudor had volunteered for service in the Medical Corps ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... affairs. He had ceased to lose either his temper or his head. Acquiescing with undismayed and cheerful common sense in the fact that life, as we know it, is but a sorry business, and that rough things must of necessity be done and suffered every day, he had developed an active—though far from morbidly sentimental—compassion for the individual, man and beast alike. Not that Colonel Ormiston formulated all that, still less held forth upon it. He was content, as is so many another Englishman, to be a dumb and practical philosopher—for which those who have lived ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the eye itself, the highest authority in England, Mr. Bowman, has been so kind as to give me the following remarks on certain inherited imperfections. First, hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... suffering and out of health in soul and body. Perhaps God has sent him to us and to his childhood's home for healing. Let us, therefore, be very careful, very tender and considerate. He is naturally proud and sensitive, and is morbidly so now." ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... to me to devise a way. Besides, you need not allow him so many opportunities that the strain would become unbearable. You are busy, owing to the certain increase of work brought about by this murder. Your time will be greatly occupied. But, don't render him morbidly suspicious. For instance, no more dinners at The Hollies. No more gadding about by night, if you hear weird noises on the other side of the river. And you must absolutely deny yourself the pleasurable excitement of ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... will return to her people." He sighed deeply. "It was all very foolish to come out here. But it was natural. She was stricken, and sensitive—so morbidly sensitive—to pity, to gossip. Then, too, a romantic notion about the healing power of the mountains was in her thought. She wished to go where no one knew her—where she could live the simple life and regain serenity and health. She said: 'I will not go to a convent. I will make a ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... remember. As he sat staring down on the distant Rock and a troubled sea with an intolerable heaviness in his breast, he recalled that so must his father have looked down on Poor Man's Rock in much the same anguished spirit long ago. And Jack MacRae's mind reacted morbidly to the suggestion, the parallel. His eyes turned with smoldering fire to the stumpy figure on the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... be further occasionally subjected to the inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world—a candid and outspoken elderly relative—he is likely to become, on the one hand, morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame, and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... caused by inhaling the fumes from the carbolic acid used in the wards. Her rich colour had to Rose's dismay grown poor and pale for a time. She had laboured under the still more trying and more dangerous infliction, when the senses morbidly excited become morbidly acute, and she seemed still to smell the peculiar air of the wards wherever she went. Then Mrs. Hull insisted on Annie's leaving for a few days, and bundled her off, without the power of resistance, to a sister of ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... to the spring Yan was daily gaining in strength, and he and his mother came closer together. She tried to take an interest in the pursuits that were his whole nature. But she also strove hard to make him take an interest in her world. She was a morbidly religious woman. Her conversation was bristling with Scripture texts. She had a vast store of them—indeed, she had them all; and she used them on every occasion possible and impossible, with ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... version of the story that Boswell has recorded above. See also ante, i. 405. Lord Macaulay made more of this story of the voice than it could well bear—'Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst.' Macaulay's Writings and Speeches, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... crossed the mielles, while the sea droned its sing-song on his left, was the parson droning his sing-song on the right "In the midst of life we are in death," etc. There were the grumbling drums, and the crowd morbidly enjoying their Roman holiday; and there, looming up before him, were the four stone pillars on the Mont es Pendus from which he was to swing. His disgust deepened. He was not dying like a seafarer who had fairly earned ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stopped short from the time of her intimate association with Menteith; and her spiritual nature had been starved in close contact with him; only her senses had been nourished, and these were now being rendered morbidly active by disease. The shadow of an awful form of insanity already darkened her days. The mental torture was extreme; but she fought for her reason with the fearful malady valiantly; and all the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... foot, and tear out, break in pieces, and cast away those miserable, oversensitive organs, which chained, cramped, and hindered me. I like work, too. And I had a sort of shame of confessing myself incapable. I morbidly derided the sympathising regret likely to be shown by my friends, and I pictured the moribund predictions likely to follow a temporary desertion ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... a morbidly nervous state by this time, and he pictured the trial, and his trying to explain the circumstances to the jury, and nobody believing him, and his being sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude, and his mother dying of a broken heart. So he gave up trying to get breakfast, and wrapped himself ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... were to be conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really avenging irony, "What a light this principle throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and Germany." In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak dreamers, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... He was morbidly afraid of young women, and as fear and hate are one, he hated women, "because they had no ideas," he said. His head was stuffed with facts, and his one amusement was attending the free lectures at the Sorbonne. Here he immersed himself with data about every ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... justice. In that way of writing in which he excelled, it seems to me that he united, in a pre-eminent degree, those qualities which enabled him to interest the largest number of readers. He wrote not for the fastidious, the over-refined, the morbidly delicate; for these find in his genius something too robust for their liking—something by which their sensibilities are too rudely shaken; but he wrote for mankind at large—for men and women in the ordinary healthful state of feeling—and ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... creep along behind the shattered glass and the bent leads of the lofty windows; watching the fire fall together, and the strange shadows move mysteriously on the mouldering walls. The iron hook in the oak beam, that crossed the ceiling midway, fascinated him, not with fear, but morbidly. So, it was from that hook that for twelve years, twelve long years of changing summer and winter, the body of Count Albert, murderer and suicide, hung in its strange casing of mediaeval steel; moving a little at first, and turning gently while the fire died out on the hearth, while the ruins ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... there are few tracts of dreariness that I have not trodden reluctantly. I have had physical health and much seeming prosperity; but to be acutely sensitive to the pleasures of happiness and peace is generally to be morbidly sensitive to the burden of cares. Unhappiness is a subjective thing. As Mrs. Gummidge so truly said, when she was reminded that other people had their troubles, "I feel them more." And if I have upheld the duty of seeking peace, it has ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... training of youth. Judicious letting alone is a precious element in real education, and there are certain chords which, often touched and made to vibrate too early, are apt to lose instead of gaining power; to grow first weakly and morbidly sensitive, and then hard and dull; and finally, when the full harmony of the character depends upon their truth and depth of tone, to have lost some measure of both ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... were most developed, and which was nearly ready to moult, there were, within the filamentary appendages on the prosoma, small irregular balls of calcareous matter, appearing to me as if calcareous matter had been morbidly excreted, and not like ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... and individual influence on the well-being of the human mechanism being closely examined. A forcible exposition is also given of the evil consequences resulting from an ill-regulated imagination (acting through the instrumentality of the passions, morbidly excited by its licentious operation,) to the firmness of the nervous system, and the integrity of the general health. The volume is not addressed to any particular class of readers, and being free from technical expressions, is rendered plain and comprehensive to all. We commend ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... social life; this phase of its influence, however, is felt by only a set of the elite, and its adherents are scattered through every age and every country. Mlle. de Scudery was a perfect representative of that type, but healthy and normal rather than morbidly aesthetic. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... strenuousness knew no lassitude, and needed no repose. In play as in work, in physical exercise as in mental labor, in all his projects, purposes and performances, Dickens seems to have been in a perpetual state of tension that allowed of no reaction. His was a mind not morbidly self-conscious, but ever aglow with the consciousness of power and the ardor of its achievement, in-sensible of waste and undisturbed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... paunch early. They exhibit the feminine tendency to periodicity of function, their moods, activities, efficiency are cyclic, reminding one of the menstrual variations of the female. This rhythmicity saturates their personalities, so that poetry and music almost morbidly appeal to them. A number of the great poets and musicians are to be classified as of the feminine pituitary species. Last, but not least, they are the hen-pecked lovers and husbands. Sex difficulties are frequent in ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... party" had brought on "blind chills;" the importation of a melodeon for Cressy to play on had superinduced an "innerd rash," and a threatened attack of "palsy creeps" had only been warded off by the timely postponement of an evening party suggested by her daughter. The old nomadic instinct, morbidly excited by her discontent, caused her to lay artful plans for a further emigration. She knew she had the germs of "mash fever" caught from the adjacent river; she related mysterious information, gathered in "class meeting," of the superior ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... bitterly; and after all these years so morbidly! God has wiped away all tears from her eyes. She has been a saint in glory these ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... been arranged for cards, so that Madelon, on entering, suddenly found herself in the midst of green-baize- covered tables, lighted candles, packs of cards, and a dozen or so of silent, absorbed gentlemen, intent upon the trumps and honours, points and odd tricks. The girl, already excited, and morbidly susceptible, stopped short at this spectacle, as one struck with a sudden blow. Not for years, not since that evening the memory of which ever came upon her with a sudden sting, when she had met Monsieur Horace at the gambling-tables of Spa, had Madelon ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... trying, with the alternate quickness and inaction of an inexperienced intellect and an imagination morbidly awakened, to grasp the situation before him. The common sense that had hitherto governed his life told him that the deputy would go to-morrow, and that there was nothing in his wife's conduct to show that her coquetry and aberration would not pass as easily. But it recurred to him ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... one of the boys would, on some slight provocation, point at him and call him 'Bellows's nigger,' or make faces and cry 'charity boy,' 'town's poor.' Now, fortunately, Joel had a happy, joyous nature—somewhat fiery and irascible, but still joyous—else he might have become morbidly miserable. As it was, these manifestations only provoked his anger, and led him forthwith into a rough-and-tumble fight, in which, whether victor or not, he always showed unquestionable pluck. If he came off second-best a dozen times, he went confidently into the thirteenth trial, brave as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the religious biography of the generations before our own, knows of the still hours and days set apart for the severe inward scrutiny of motives and "frames" and the grounds of one's hope. However truly the church of to-day may judge that the piety of their fathers was disproportioned and morbidly introspective and unduly concerned about one's own salvation, it is none the less true that the reaction from its excesses is violent, and is providing for itself a new reaction. "The contemplative orders," whether among Catholics or ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... not care. He is neither sad nor happy nor anxious. This contrast is revealed not only by the patients' utterances but by their expressions. The stuporous face is empty, that of the other lined with melancholy. The intellectual defect, too, is different. In retarded depression the patient is morbidly aware of difficulty and slowness, but on urging often performs tests surprisingly well. In the stupor, however, one is faced with an unquestionable defect, a ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... in his heart, thought undevoutly of ministers. "A bruised reed, he will not break," came to his mind, often as he looked at this anguish-stricken woman, watching her only child's suffering, and morbidly believing that it was the direct result of her own sin. But Dr. Eben found little time to spare for his ministrations to Sally, when Hetty was in such distress. He had never seen any thing like it. She paced the house like a wounded lioness. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... to know whether Christ be indeed our Lord or not. Cold hearts are not anxious enough to doubt. Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to say—I must and will know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John appealed to Christ. He did exactly ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... passed without descrying one or more sails at varying distances, but our friends did not hail or approach any. Both Captain Bergen and Mate Storms were in a nervous condition, and were morbidly apprehensive of being anticipated by some one in dredging for the invaluable pearl-oysters. They were afraid their errand would be suspected, or they would be attacked after they should ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... evil influences of the home and the world.[186] Yet to teach children what some of their parents consider as too sacred to be taught, and others as too disgusting, and to begin this teaching at an age when the children, having already imbibed these parental notions, are old enough to be morbidly curious and prurient, is to open the way to a complicated series of social reactions which demand ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... she bent her way to the place of appointment, felt like one gradually emerging out of darkness into light. The scene at dinner had quickened her moral sense, which, as the reader already knows, was previous to that perhaps morbidly acute. Every step, however, towards the idol of her young devotion, removed the memory of what had occurred at home, and collected around her heart all the joys and terrors that in maidenly diffidence characterize the interview she ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... its indolent state, or, in other words, if inflammation be not present in it, it is incapable from its mere bulk, as is commonly but erroneously supposed, of producing this effect." "Nor does the serous discharge always take place into the abdomen, in every case where these organs are morbidly affected, but only where their peritoneal covering participates in the disease; for the chronic inflammation in those cases, where it occasions ascites, does so by extending from the cellular tissue of the internal structure of the organ, to the serous tissue investing in ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... unknown in the days when this drawing was made; but the kindly and helpful influences of what may be called ecclesiastical sentiment, which, in a morbidly exaggerated condition, forms one of the principal elements of "Puseyism,"—I use this word regretfully, no other existing which will serve for it,—had been known and felt in our wild ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Epileptics are morbidly sensitive, and reference to their malady must be avoided. Victims are intensely suspicious, and a pitying look will reveal to them the fact that some outsider knows all about the jealously-guarded skeleton. Resentment, distrust ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... us, more appalling than the terrors of death. The impressions produced by the ravings, and cries, and struggles, of our poor little fellow-sufferer were yet fresh, and they could not be effaced. All in vain I strove to control the workings of my morbidly excited imagination—I could not shut out the fearful thoughts and anticipations which the occurrences of the day so naturally and obviously suggested. The lapse of twenty-four hours might find us all reduced to the same helpless state, deprived of consciousness and ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... you by recalling all the unfolding stages of this miserable story with the minuteness of detail which my own memory morbidly lingers on, I will hurry to the catastrophe. I grew more and more doubtful of the existence in Ottilie's mind of any feeling stronger than friendship for me; and as this doubt strengthened, there arose the flattering ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... in sex matters should be reserved for the diseased mind, for the boy or girl who has already been morbidly instructed. Discussion of immoral sex diseases should be confined to individual talk. This field teachers have already entered. Repeated physical examination of children will detect symptoms of sex abnormality. When detected, the fact ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... in "Pensees," by Pascal, a few notes dotted down by a morbidly exalted Christian, and which certainly, in the perfect work, would not have been allowed to remain ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... side-streets of Millwall? Even as I mark the grimness of the scene, I am conscious of a sort of hyperaesthesia against which one ought to be on guard. The note-taking traveller is very apt to forget that the mere act of note-taking upsets his normal perceptivity. He becomes feverishly observant, morbidly critical. He compares incommensurables, and flies to ideal standpoints. He is so eager to descry differences, that he overlooks similarities—nay, identities. Thus only can I account for many statements about New York, occurring in ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... in his palace, with all his sycophancy of rank, with all his courtly flattering. In like manner, when the grand seigneurs and noble dames of that aristocratic age wept over the sorrows of the "New Heloise," or craved that imaginary state of untutored innocence which Rousseau so morbidly described, or admired those brilliant generalizations of laws which Montesquieu had penned, or laughed at the envenomed ironies of Voltaire, or quoted the atheistic doctrines of D'Alembert and Diderot, or enthusiastically discussed the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... thus a strangely precocious, and a morbidly sensitive child, when it was decided in 1755 to send him to Westminster. The headmaster, Dr. Markham, was a friend of his father's. Westminster, he says, represented 'hell' for him when Browning Hill stood for paradise. The instruction 'was wretched,' The ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... are going to act through the schools we have. We are going to make room in our present over-managed, morbidly organised institutions, with ordered-around teachers, for teachers who cannot be ordered around, who are accustomed to use their imaginations and personalities to teach with, instead of superintendents. We are going ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... there was hardly a letter that did not mention Kendall in some innocent fashion among the other boys and girls who took part in the sleigh-rides, parties, and sociables. But the morbidly acute Bert, if he saw, said nothing, and ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... But her hearing was morbidly alert, and while the golden figures on the book danced a ghostly dance before her eyes, she heard again what she desired to hear. It was like the whispering of the wind against a ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... even more familiar and dramatic. Again it is a group of morbidly curious and spiteful doctors who desire to see whether a human being can be killed by the power of his imagination. A condemned criminal is accordingly turned over to them. He is first allowed to see a dog bled to death, one of the physicians holding ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... to himself: "The doctor's right, she may get to be morbidly exacting, and then what will become of me? Here I am compelled to choose between Caroline's physical extravagance, or ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... a complete stranger, I should not have insisted. One of the best singers I ever knew was so morbidly shy that on the platform she was an absolute failure. Her vocal chords became so contracted that she sang quite out of tune, and yet among friends she ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... recognition of the necessity for propitiating the evil ghosts that the ethically rational character of Shinto reveals itself. Ancient experience and modern knowledge unite in warning us against the deadly error of trying to extirpate or to paralyze certain tendencies in human nature,—tendencies which, if morbidly cultivated or freed from all restraint, lead to folly, to crime, and to countless social evils. The animal passions, the ape-and-tiger impulses, antedate human society, and are the accessories to nearly all crimes committed against it. But they cannot be killed; and they ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... Why won't they study and learn that a "draught" of pure air will injure only those who by draughts of Alcoholic poison or some other evil habit or glaring violation of the laws of life, have rendered themselves morbidly susceptible, and that even a cold is better than the noxiousness of air, already exhausted of its oxygen by inhalation? Nothing physical is so sorely needed by the great majority as a realizing sense of the blessedness, the indispensable necessity ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... which no painter would have asked him to take off. But spectators would be likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai, when he looked at them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas, unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the rabble. But he was too sane and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... not one to morbidly analyze, not even to feel remorse. He put the past behind him easily. Before him small grasshoppers arose in clapping, buzzing clouds. Prairie dogs squeaked and frisked and dived needlessly into their dens. Hawks sailed like kites in the ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the husband waited for the wife to set the example of approaching it, and the wife waited for the husband. The trial of temper produced by this state of hesitation, and by the secret doubts which it encouraged, led insensibly to a certain estrangement—which Linley in particular was morbidly unwilling to acknowledge. If, when the dinner-hour brought them together, he was silent and dull in his wife's presence, he attributed it to anxiety on the subject of his brother—then absent on a critical business errand in London. If he sometimes left ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... To prevent which, we must take a more nutritious diet, and join a portion of wine, and perhaps take some tonic medicines. This however ought to be done gradually, for fear of exhausting the excitability, which in these cases is morbidly accumulated. ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... by her nest a very insipid subject of study. Probably no other man, as active and busy in the world as Neckart, would have wasted so much thought on a chance young girl sitting on a log. But women being forbidden fruit to him, he was morbidly curious about them all. Old Chrysostom, barred into his cave by an impassable line, was much more inquisitive about the princess asleep outside than if he had been a hearty young fellow free to go out and kiss and make ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... looking, too, and the boy saw her eyes travelling him down from head to foot: somehow he was reminded of the way Marjorie had looked at him back in the mountains and somehow he felt that the change that he resented in Mavis went deeper than her clothes. The morbidly sensitive spirit of the mountaineer in him was hurt, the chasm yawned instead of closing, and all he said ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... her aunt seated stiffly in the living-room, her hands folded upon her stomach. So gradual had been the crucial middle-life change in Fanny that no one had noted it. This evening Susan, become morbidly acute, suddenly realized the contrast between the severe, uncertain-tempered aunt of today and the amiable, altogether and always gentle aunt of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... days of its establishment in orbit, the Warlock was manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate; with the psychology of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but ghastly period. On the third day there was a second ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... forgotten that withered token. In deep remorse at his thoughtlessness, he sought his treasure, and, horror of horrors! every leaf had fallen from the stem, the blossom was annihilated for ever. He dwelt upon this episode morbidly, as upon a presentiment: he pictured in his mind the hill-slope cottage deserted, the rose-garden wasted and full of tares, and the bleak wind blowing whither it listed through those avenues of beauty, for desolation possessed them all. He groaned in spirit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... no dreary solitude to an accomplished woman; but alone in that foreign land, alone in those half-furnished, desolate apartments,—few books, no musical instruments, no companions during the day to drop in,—that loneliness was wearying. And that mind so morbidly active! In the old Scottish legend, the spirit that serves the wizard must be kept constantly employed; suspend its work for a moment, and it rends the enchanter. It is so with minds that crave for excitement, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... projecting lines. When we commenced her sketch, our sole design was to describe her influence on the minds of others, and to make her a warning beacon to the mariners of life, that they might avoid the shoals on which the peace of so many morbidly sensitive minds have been wrecked. But we found a fascination in the subject which we could not resist. A heart naturally warm, defrauded of all natural objects on which to expend its living fervor, a mind naturally strong confined within close and narrow ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... these early years, she said: "I was not a happy child, nor a happy woman, until in mature life, I outgrew my early religious faith, and felt free to think and act from my own convictions." Having joined the church in extreme youth, and being morbidly conscientious, she suffered constant torment about her own sins, and those of her neighbors. She was a religious enthusiast, and in time of revivals was one of the bright and shining lights in exhortation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of every series, there will have been introduced new influences of a more or less general character; such as a more vigorous or a more relaxed police; some temporary excitement from political or religious causes; or some incident generally notorious, of a nature to act morbidly on the imagination. That in spite of these unavoidable imperfections in the data, there should be so very trifling a margin of variation in the annual results, is a brilliant continuation ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Salamis which he had arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus of The Suppliants we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning leads me on ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... (Charlotte). A year after the publication of her novel Emily died, unaware of her success in achieving a lasting, if restricted, fame. She was extraordinarily reserved, sensitive, and wayward, and lived in an imagined world of her own, morbidly influenced, no doubt, by the vagaries of her worthless brother Branwell. That she had true genius, allied with fine strength of intellect and character, is the unanimous verdict of competent criticism, while it grieves over ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... order. I can tell you it was hard work to get them in time. I had to put on strong pressure. The authorities are almost morbidly scrupulous when there is any decisive step to be taken. But here they are at last. [Looks through the bundle.] See! here is the formal deed of gift of the parcel of ground known as Solvik in the Manor of Rosenvold, with all the newly constructed buildings, schoolrooms, master's house, and ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... Certainly, Holland is one of the most important allies that England has; and we are doing our utmost to subject it, and Portugal, to French influence, or even dominion! Upon my word, the English people, at this moment, are like a man palsied in every part of his body but one, in which one part he is so morbidly sensitive that he cannot bear to have it so much as breathed upon, whilst you may pinch him with a hot forceps elsewhere without his ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... nature, though it's been distorted, and I quite understand why you have had such an influence on this generous, morbidly ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that he knew Barbara's moods in advance. Lady Knightrider—a curse on her name—had started by setting every nerve on edge; the sight of Agnes Waring—with Jack's eyes, hair and voice—had completed her discomfiture; and Barbara had been morbidly drawing one unhappy picture after another. Jack was incapacitated; and, with his pride, he would never win through pity what he had failed to win on merit. Incapacitated or not, Jack was a pauper; and, with his fantastic honour, he would regard himself as an outcast ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... the title of "Revolt of Islam". It was published in January, 1818. While still resident at Marlow, Shelley began two autobiographical poems—the one "Prince Athanase," which he abandoned as too introspective and morbidly self-analytical, the other, "Rosalind and Helen", which he finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best work. To his biographer its chief interest consists in the character of Lionel, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... times, morbidly, sensitive youth, he had soon forgotten the sting caused by the letter in a return to the dreams which he regarded as not only the chief joy but the chief business of his life; for though he was preparing himself for the profession of a ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... enough without it, and though not morbidly bashful, felt that at present it was more comfortable to be under Miss Charlecote's wing than that of Lucilla, and that the quiet evening was more composing than fresh scenes ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the serpent-folds that were tightening around him; but the fire that had been kindled seemed to be quenchless. An uncontrolled evil passion is hellfire. He writhed in its burnings in an agony that could be understood only by such as knew how almost morbidly sensitive was his nature, and how vital was his conscience. I became a pastor in the town where he lived, and renewed my association with him as far as I could. But there was a constraint unlike the old times. When under the influence of liquor, he would pass ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... qualifications, which were very exceptional; explained that my intelligence and industry were far above the average; that I was morbidly conscientious, and willing to sacrifice all my own interests for the needs of the firm; that the reason for leaving my last position was solely a matter of circumstances over which I had no control, and that at an interview, which I craved, I would explain everything ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... morbidly sensitive as to the strictures of strangers. They hate the whole tribe of Travellers and Tourists, Roamers and Ramblers, Peepers and Proclaimers, and affect to ridicule the idea of men who merely pass through the country, presuming ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... to excite in him strong feelings of revolt, and he had inherited a profligate and passionate nature. His father was a gambler and a spendthrift. His mother was eccentric to a degree. Byron himself, throughout his boyish years, had been morbidly sensitive because of a physical deformity—a lame, misshapen foot. This and the strange treatment which his mother accorded him left him headstrong, wilful, almost from the first an enemy to whatever was established ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of Byron, the most effectual means of success, Mr. Millingen tried, as he himself tells us, all that reasoning and persuasion could suggest towards attaining his object. But his efforts were fruitless:—Lord Byron, who had now become morbidly irritable, replied angrily, but still with all his accustomed acuteness and spirit, to the physician's observations. Of all his prejudices, he declared, the strongest was that against bleeding. His mother had obtained from him a promise never ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... case with highly strung natures, he was morbidly sensitive in his self-respect. Upon one occasion he had invented some boyish nickname or other for an elderly matron who was present in his mother's drawing-room, and when that lady most forcibly urged his parent to chastise him he fled to his room ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... happiness and distinction. "Perhaps," says George Eliot, "some of the most terrible irony of the human lot is to hear a deep truth uttered by lips that have no right to it." Poor Gourlay was conscious of some feeling of this sort when he heard such truths proclaimed from such lips. To his morbidly-sensitive nature, such irony seemed an aggravation of all he had endured. To think that, after such experiences as had fallen to his share, a Family Compact judge should gravely inform him that in Upper Canada the administrators of the law should be no respecters of persons! that justice ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the people of that generation. They were looked upon as fearful demonstrations of diabolical power, and preludes to the coming of Satan, with his infernal confederates, to overwhelm the land. The imaginations of all were excited, and their apprehensions morbidly aroused. The very air was filled with rumors, fancies, and fears. The ministers sounded the alarm from their pulpits. The magistrates sharpened the sword of justice. The deputy-governor of the colony, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the book it was as though he had walked out of an oppressive cellar into the open air." He felt perhaps inward need to redeem Chichikov; in Merejkovsky's opinion he really wanted to save his own soul, but had succeeded only in losing it. His last years were spent morbidly; he suffered torments and ran from place to place like one hunted; but really always running from himself. Rome was his favourite refuge, and he returned to it again and again. In 1848, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but he could find no peace for his soul. Something ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... more and more clearly distinguish an under-current of thought and feeling setting towards the faith which Christianity preaches. He said little or nothing, even when I attempted to draw him out on the matter; for he was almost morbidly careful not to seem to know any thing he did not know, or to appear what he was not. The most I could get out of him was—but I had better give a little talk I had with him on one occasion. It was some time before ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... impression of overwhelming horror which his words produced upon me. It seemed as though a fear which had hitherto stood vague and shadowy in the background, began now to advance towards me, gathering more distinctness as it approached. There was to me something morbidly terrible about the apparition of this man at such a momentous crisis in my brother's life, and I at once recognised that unknown form as being the shadow which was gradually stealing between John and myself. Though I feigned incredulity as ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... where Red King lives. There's plenty of moonshining up that way, and if anybody asks your name and your business—tell 'em quick. They won't bother you. And if I were you I wouldn't criticise these people to anybody. They're morbidly sensitive, and you never know when you are giving mortal offense. And, by the way, most offenses are mortal ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... teaches one the worth and what the worthlessness of money?" said Constance;—"Mamma is morbidly persuaded that I do not understand the first—of the second I have an indefinite idea from never being able to do more than half that ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... regime,—the days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of French domination threw England back upon a sense of her own insular solidity, and made her for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English. Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments in friendship and in love, his unmerited disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Raveloe, with the sole companionship ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... that is impossible," said Sartoris, who had lapsed into his bland manner once more. "I am sensitive of people's remarks and all that kind of thing. I dare say you will think that I am morbidly self-conscious, but then I have not always been a cripple. I was as straight as yourself once. Fancy a little crooked figure like me ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... lowered upon the first act that he remembered the existence of his companion, and seeing that she was still shy he thought with a smile of how he must have scared her with his extravagances. He was not far wrong: the girl whom chance had thrown in his company for a few hours was almost morbidly shy; she must have been in an abnormal state of excitement to have accepted Christophe's invitation. She had hardly accepted it than she had wished at any cost to get out of it, to make some excuse and to escape. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Burnet had long been on terms of friendship. No two men, indeed, could resemble each other less. Burnet was utterly destitute of delicacy and tact. Halifax's taste was fastidious, and his sense of the ludicrous morbidly quick. Burnet viewed every act and every character through a medium distorted and coloured by party spirit. The tendency of Halifax's mind was always to see the faults of his allies more strongly than the faults of his opponents. Burnet was, with all his infirmities, and through all the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with the arts of beauty or delight, not only a certain quantity of its energy calculated for exercise in those arts alone must be entirely wasted, which is bad economy, but also the passions connected with the utilities of property become morbidly strong, and a mean lust of accumulation merely for the sake of accumulation, or even of labour merely for the sake of labour, will banish at last the serenity and the morality of life, as completely, and perhaps more ignobly, than even the lavishness ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... than to be an object of pity? And Tyeglev, on his side, was well-disposed to me; with me he felt at ease, with me he used to talk—in my presence he ventured to leave the strange pedestal on which he had been placed either by his own efforts or by chance. Agonisingly, morbidly vain as he was, yet he was probably aware in the depths of his soul that there was nothing to justify his vanity, and that others might perhaps look down on him ... but I, a boy of nineteen, put no constraint on him; the dread ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... reiterated bulletins that "all is quiet on the Potomac"; and the fact that General McClellan was in full sympathy with the Border State policy of the President aggravated their unfriendly mood. A majority of the members of the committee became morbidly sensitive, and were practically incapable of doing General McClellan justice. They were thoroughly discouraged and disgusted; but when Secretary Cameron left the Cabinet and Stanton took his place, their despondency gave place to hope. He had faith in the usefulness of the committee, and ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... the result, and damages were finally given for false imprisonment. In 1720 Samuel Sabin complained of himself before a justice in Norwich that he visited on Sabbath night some relatives at a neighbor's house. His morbidly tender conscience smote him and made him "fear he had transgressed the law," though he felt sure no harm had been done thereby. In 1659 Sam Clarke, for "Hankering about on men's gates on Sabbath ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... talked of nothing but Enid and her troubles. Even as they rode in the park his mind seemed forever revolving lines and scenes. In the midst of her attempt to amuse him, to divert him, he returned to his theme. He invited her judgments and immediately forgot to listen, so morbidly self-centred ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... which emphasize the oddities of his temperament and the unconventionality of his habits. That this man of distinguished genius was the victim—pitifully the victim—of opium is the lamentable fact; that he was morbidly shy and shunned intercourse with all except a few intimate, congenial friends; that he was comically indifferent to the fashion of his dress; that he was the most unpractical and childlike of men; that he was often betrayed, because of these peculiarities, into many ridiculous ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... tried to speak of the schoolmaster she turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending university. Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as Phillotson's protegee and betrothed; yet she would not ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... to secure it. Fame, nevertheless, reached him; but when found, it was with him a possession much resembling the child's toy. His heart to the last appeared too deeply imbued with the unsuspicious simplicity and carelessness of the boy to have much concern about it. On this point Tannahill was morbidly sensitive; his was an unfortunate cast of temperament, which, deepening more and more, surrounded him with imaginary evils, and rendered life insupportable. Lady Nairn was too modest not to be distrustful ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... taken first to change the course of the nervous power that is expressing itself morbidly, to open for it a healthy outlet, to guide it into that more wholesome channel, and then help the owner to a better control and a clearer understanding, that she may gain a healthy use of her wonderful nervous power. A gallop on horseback, a good ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... world of womanly sweetness and beauty, no modicum of it was for the misshapen dwarf of the Bar X outfit. All his life he had fought furiously to uphold the empty shell of his dignity in the eyes of his comrades, yet always morbidly conscious of the difference in his body. Whisky had been his solace, his sweetheart. It changed him, raised and beatified him into the likeness of other men, and now, as he pondered, he was aware of a consuming thirst engendered by the heat of his earlier emotions. Undoubtedly ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... pale, except when the sea-breeze flushed it. A few freckles became beauty-spots beneath her eyelids. How was it, Susan, that you talked and acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever was right in your own eyes, and never once doing wrong in mine, nor shocked a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whence had you that happiest gift, of brightening every topic with an unsought gayety, quiet but irresistible, so that even loomy spirits felt your sunshine, and did not shrink ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rendered a little ballad to the effect that all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was, for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has liver for breakfast every morning. The waiter was bilious—that was ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... have done it months ago and saved me so much woe if you had not been a dear, modest, morbidly conscientious bat," sighed Christie, pleased and proud to learn her power, yet sorry for the ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... und Haertel. In England and America it still seems to be widely read, and is, more than any other single work, responsible for the false notions that are abroad about Wagner. Sensuality, that is in the morbidly sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner's character, nor could it be of the man who justly claimed that no poet had ever glorified women as he had done. His Sentas, Elsas, Bruennhildes, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... feelings, too, doubtless blended with her own personal regrets. She had no reason to look upon marriage as a state of perfect felicity. Her own had been unhappy. She knew the dark phantom that haunted our wedded hours; and what if the same hereditary curse should cling to Edith,—who might become morbidly sensitive on account ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the main ward of the hut, rows of beds on either hand. She seemed to be morbidly conscious of scores of eyes upon her, and was glad when she found herself in ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Paul's brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely animal in his half-satisfied appetites. Fines and curses were his portion at the factory; curses and beatings—deserved if Justice held a hurried scale at home. Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death. But his dramatic imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen ceiling. He posed cadaverous before a shocked Budge Street, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... every effort of cordiality; but still there was a cobweb-veil of separation between them, to which Mary was morbidly acute; while in Jem's voice, and eyes, and manner, there was every evidence of most passionate, most admiring, and most trusting love. The trust was shown by his respectful silence on that one point of reserve on ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... autumn hills and sought the ridge which runs for miles on the lip of the glen. It was a grey day, with snow waiting in cloud-banks in the north sky and a thin wind whistling through the pines. The scene matched his humour. He was in love for the moment with the stony and stormy in life. He hungered morbidly for ill-fortune, something to stamp out the ease in his soul, and weld him into the form ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... it took full possession of her. But she was alone for the evening and it had free access. She actually believed that she was grown unlovable, and the conviction that her voice was not worth considering haunted her morbidly. ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... person to another, is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the night, the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the winds into doleful voices. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as a sufferer from mental derangement. Don't be communicative, and confine yourself to reassuring generalities, if you come across him. His mind's morbidly fixed on punishing Prescott. I don't think he can be convinced that the man ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... I returned, only half satisfied, yet not caring to allow myself morbidly to scent a mystery where ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... himself. Cash smoked and gave no heed, and Bud retorted by eating in silence and in straightway washing his own cup, plate, knife, and fork and wiping clean the side of the table where he always sat. He did not look at Cash, but he felt morbidly that Cash was regarding him with that hateful sneer hidden under his beard. He knew that it was silly to keep that stony silence, but he kept telling himself that if Cash wanted to talk, he had a tongue, and it was not tied. Besides, Cash had registered ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... lucky creatures! went off en masse to Switzerland for July and August. Darsie morbidly told herself that they were anxious to avoid the depression of her own presence during the chief holiday of the year. She was, as she expressed it, "too proud to say so," but the inward soreness made her so cold and abrupt in manner that her friends had good cause ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... not only instinctively truthful but also almost morbidly honourable. In other words, she was simple-minded. The idea of a community of goods between husband and wife had never established itself in her mind, she took all Sir Isaac's presents in the spirit ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... too, of being ridiculous, and so had a slavish passion for the conventional in everything external. I loved to fall into the common rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind of eccentricity in myself. But how could I live up to it? I was morbidly sensitive as a man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like one another as so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who fancied that I was a coward and a slave, and I fancied ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... lean. He had been baffled and buffeted in the world. He had gone down into the darkness, praying all the way; and now that he had come out of it, and had so little society; now that his young life was all behind him, and so few earthly hopes beckoned him on, he turned with a heart morbidly religious to what seemed to him the only source of comfort open to him. Jim had watched him with pain. He had seen him, from day to day, spending his hours alone, and felt that prayer formed almost the staple of his life. He had seen him willing to work, but knew ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... ease and sleep. Yet thus agonized and half delirious, I notwithstanding left it untouched. I was mostly confined to the house about four weeks. The inflammation gradually subsiding left me as weak as a child—so morbidly sensitive that tears flowed on the slightest occasion, and with my whole frame pervaded by a dull, incessant ache. To these symptoms were added coldness of the extremities, an obstinate determination of blood ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... not even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland. Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... sometimes, of a man who is morbidly suspicious that he may be patronised—is shown in the manner in which he speaks of the grand ladies with whom he came in contact. He calls the Duke of Ormond's daughters "insolent drabs," and talks ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... at Pavia, the king became morbidly pious. By trumpet cry at the crossways of Paris, we learn from the Journal, games—quoits, tennis, contreboulle—were prohibited on Sundays; children were forbidden to sing along the streets, going to and from school; ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey |
