"Idiocy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting the devil. Insanity, he was quite sure, was caused by Satan, and he exorcised sufferers. Against some he appears to have advised stronger remedies; and his horror of idiocy, as resulting from Satanic influence, was so great, that on one occasion he appears to have advised the killing of an idiot child, as being the direct offspring of Satan. Yet Luther was one of the most tender and loving of men; in the whole range of literature there is hardly anything more touching ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... purpose is to throw the light directly into the Body Politic, whether the B.P. requests him to do it or not. Dr. P. confidently expects to make some most extraordinary discoveries of various diseases—of greed, foolish ambition, ossification of the heart, moral leprosy, chronic stupidity, latent idiocy, and that very common and often unsuspected complaint usually known as Humbug. (Humbugna Communis.) His fee in no case will exceed ten cents per week; and patients WILL BE illuminated by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... unhappy man, "if, to please you, I sang that idiocy, which, for fifty years now, ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... presumed to be incompetent; and the party seeking to enforce the contract must prove the other to have been sane. The general rule in the case of idiots is, that if the party is incapable of acting in the ordinary affairs of life, or in the particular contract, his idiocy will annul ...
— The Government Class Book • Andrew W. Young
... that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... refined portion of the community by the name of ITCH. In the words of Hahnemann's "Organon," "This Psora is the sole true and fundamental cause that produces all the other countless forms of disease, which, under the names of nervous debility, hysteria, hypochondriasis, insanity, melancholy, idiocy, madness, epilepsy, and spasms of all kinds, softening of the bones, or rickets, scoliosis and cyphosis, caries, cancer, fungua haematodes, gout,—yellow jaundice ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his staff in a corner and looked at the bed; after which he began to undress. Unfastening his old black girdle, he slowly divested himself of his torn nankeen kaftan, and deposited it carefully on the back of a chair. His face had now lost its usual disquietude and idiocy. On the contrary, it had in it something restful, thoughtful, and even grand, while all his ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... first beautiful thing he had ever possessed. He was the darling of fond and indulgent parents and his nursery was crowded with hideous rag and sawdust dolls, golliwogs, comic penguins, comic lions, comic elephants and comic policemen and every variety of suchlike humorous idiocy and visual beastliness. This figure, solid, delicate and gracious, was a thing of a ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... so strong and intelligent, deliberately refuse various kinds of work she might have done because they did not please her; and borrow money from a man in preference to earning her living. She exposes herself to insult and even danger with an idiocy that even a novel-reared child of sixteen would have scorned. She falls in love, healthfully enough, with a fine strong man; and sees no reason for avoiding him when she learns he is married. She cheerfully elopes with him—quite forgetting the money she had borrowed, and when she remembers ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... big and angry that she felt like a wren or sparrow in his hold. But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy! She eyed him from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt unutterable—a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled with smaller, worn-out prejudices! The way of escape had been set before him, and he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Wedmore, in his driest tones, "the girl is shrewd enough to know that I should cut off a son who was guilty of such a piece of idiocy and leave ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... others, rarely becomes a learned man. A great many confused, dreamy ideas, no doubt, float through the brain of such a man; but he has little exact and reliable knowledge. The truth is, there is a sort of indolent, listless absorption of intellectual food, that tends to idiocy. I knew a person once, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious self-indulgence. He shut himself ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is like thinking ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... affairs of the world. All the more did the affairs of the great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new branch and widened the relations of scandal,—these were topics of which ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... in the forests of Upper Canada. This was the accepted theory, and nothing could exceed the severity with which the editors of the papers politically opposed to the administration censured it for the extravagance and all-round idiocy of the whole "Aluminum Bubble Scheme," as they termed it. Dr. Jones was voted a lunatic, and the balance of the party was commiserated in the "Ahs!" and "Dear me's!" and "Poor things!" of ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... 103:21 is both evil and good; that evil is as real as good and more powerful. This belief has not one qual- ity of Truth. It is either ignorant or malicious. The 103:24 malicious form of hypnotism ultimates in moral idiocy. The truths of immortal Mind sustain man, and they anni- hilate the fables of mortal mind, whose flimsy and gaudy 103:27 pretensions, like silly moths, singe their own wings and fall ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... concerning this battle are established beyond dispute. In the first day's fighting a part of Lee's army defeated a part of Meade's. Intending to continue the contest on that field, a commander not smitten by idiocy would desire to concentrate and push the advantage gained by previous success and its resultant morale. But, instead of attacking at dawn, Lee's attack was postponed until afternoon of the following day, in consequence of the absence of Longstreet's corps. ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... instructions where he speaks of the ascetic as "holding his body, head, and neck even and unmoved, remaining steady, looking at the tip of his own nose," etc. These ridiculous posturings and idiotic attitudes cannot, as has been well said by Barth, but lead to idiocy or to a ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... compelled to remain in bed a long while. I could, indeed, have triumphed over these physical sufferings however cruel they might have been, but in the frightful complications of my position I was reduced to a condition of idiocy; I saw nothing of what was around me; I heard nothing of what was said; and after this statement the reader will surely not expect that I shall have anything to say about the farewell of the Emperor to his old and faithful guard, an account of which, moreover, has been often enough ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... constituted his entire capital, and he needed no more. He found the colonies clamoring for justice; whining about their grievances; upon their knees at the foot of the throne, imploring that mixture of idiocy and insanity, George III., by the grace of God, for a restoration of their ancient privileges. They were not endeavoring to become free men, but were trying to soften the heart of their master. They were perfectly willing to make brick ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... ever stop in the street and talk for a few minutes to some old bachelor? If so, I dare say you have remarked a curious phenomenon. You have found that all of a sudden the mind of the old gentleman, usually reasonable enough, appeared stricken into a state approaching idiocy, and that the sentence which he had begun in a rational and intelligible way was ending in a maze of wandering words, signifying nothing in particular. You had been looking in another direction, but in sudden alarm you look straight at the old gentleman to see what on earth is the matter; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... or since have I met a being of that order and degree of creepiness. He was a nightmare of unmeaning idiocy. But some mention ought to be made of the old man at the entrance to the tennis ground who opened his mouth in parables on the subject of the fee for playing there. He seemed to have been wound up to make only one remark, 'It's sixpence.' ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... rear. The whole gist of his remarks was that "they could not go to war," and when they still argued in the opposite sense, and the interpreter refused to translate the harsh epithets he applied to such august personages, he took the dictionary, looked out the Chinese equivalent for "idiocy," and with his finger on the word, placed it under the eyes of each member of the Council. The end of this scene may be described in Gordon's own words: "I said make peace, and wrote out the terms. They were, in all, five articles; the only one they boggled at was the fifth, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... work," I cried impetuously, as though he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my arrant idiocy in ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... savages that the herbs, which every day they trampled underfoot, were endowed with the most potent virtues; that one would restore to health a brother on the verge of death; that another would paralyze into idiocy their wisest sage; that a third would strike lifeless to the dust their most stalwart champion; that tears and laughter, vigor and disease, madness and reason, wakefulness and sleep, existence and dissolution, ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it, having in mind the old adage that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. There was never any doubt in Stuyvesant's mind that the first business of a ruler is to rule, and popular government seemed to him the merest idiocy. "A valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor"—the adjectives describe him well; a sufficiently imposing figure, with his slashed hose and velvet jacket and tall cane and silver-banded wooden leg, ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... You made it possible. I can't tell you what a help you were. And since I've left the San, I've looked forward to your letters to boost up my spirits. When I felt down in the mouth over my own idiocy, I used to re-read them, and they always were good medicine. I can't tell you how ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... instead of out," said the conqueror triumphantly. "You see, they thought probably they'd got hold of the wrong car, as the accused one had been coming from Lecco. What with that impression, and their despair at my idiocy, they were ready to give us the benefit of the doubt and save their faces. Otherwise, though we were innocent and the driver of the cart merely 'trying it on,' we might have been hung up ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in her power to conceal his condition from the people, and even from the court. It was comparatively easy to do this, for the derangement was not at all violent in its form. It was a sort of lethargy, a total failure of the mental powers and almost of consciousness—more like idiocy than mania. The queen removed him to Windsor, and there kept him closely shut up, admitting that he was sick, but concealing his true situation so far as was in her power, and, in the mean time, carrying on the government in his name, with the aid of Somerset and other great officers of ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... never was a man in Philadelphia who kept school for so short a time and with so few pupils who had among them so many who in after life became more or less celebrated. For he certainly made all of us who were above idiocy think and live in thought above the ordinary range of school- boy life. Thus I can recall these two out ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... altar to Materialism in the temple of the Soul. Each shall have its due, each shall glory in the sacred purity and strength of life; each shall develop and expand, but never at the expense of the other. I will have neither the renunciation which ends in a kind of idiocy dignified with a philosophic or a theologic name, nor the worldliness which ends in bestiality. I am a citizen of two worlds—a citizen of the Universe; I owe allegiance to two kingdoms. In my heart are those stars and that sun, and the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... "It's a kind of idiocy," said Goody Kertarkut. "Poor things! they can't be kept from the water, nor made to take powders, and so they get ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... reviewer will allow. We are told that in this country the mingling of common blood in marriage is more frequent than is generally supposed, and that, of all agencies which have to do with the prevalence of insanity and idiocy, this is probably the most potent. A vigorous body is of course an important condition to high mental health, and what is said upon this head is tersely written and very sensible. We are told that "those much-enduring men and women who encountered the privations of the colonial times have been succeeded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... A slow-witted young animal, not suggesting any great love of work, and rather loutish in his manners. But, he knew his engine, said Charlie. And that was the main thing. The deck-hand proved to be a shackly, rather silly effeminate fellow, suggesting idiocy, but doubtless wiry and good enough for ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... of the Jessica thought he could attain his ends more certainly by diplomacy, and so careful was his demeanour that the couple in the cabin had no idea that they had been observed—the mate listening calmly to a lecture on incipient idiocy which the skipper thought it advisable ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... Mississippi was to be brought into this and the other branch of the legislature, to form our laws, control our rights, and decide our destiny. Sir, can it be pretended that the patriots of that day would for one moment have listened to it? . . . They had not taken degrees at the hospital of idiocy. . . . Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will be, at no great distant time, more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the center of the contemplated ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... size from one human individual to another. In some adults it is twice as large as in others, and the question arises whether greater intelligence goes with a larger brain. Now, it appears that an extremely small cerebrum spells idiocy; not all idiots have small brains, but all men with extremely small brains are idiots. The brain weight of quite a number of highly gifted men has been measured in post-mortem examination, and many ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... motives, events and conclusions. I think that to understand everything is not good for the intellect. A well-stocked intelligence weakens the impulse to action; an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy. But Mrs. Fyne's individualist woman-doctrine, naively unscrupulous, flitted through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these girl-friends' heads! Good innocent creature, worthy wife, excellent mother (of the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... intelligent, and higher faculties, as they call them, get the upper hand; the next they are beaten down and trod upon by something base and profligate: and thus veering to and fro, now toying now scolding, laughter clatters down the steps of idiocy, which crumble with the decay of our bodily strength ... and man grins, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the ground before us acting as a rival entertainment to the house lamps inside for some of the best insect society in Africa, who after the manner of the insect world, insist on regarding us as responsible for their own idiocy in getting singed; and sting us in revenge, while we slap hard, as we howl hymns in the fearful Igalwa and M'pongwe way. Next to an English picnic, the most uncomfortable thing I know is an open-air service in this part of Africa. Service ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... rare. I met only one case, that of a child with an abnormally large head.[31] Idiocy also is very uncommon, only one case having ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... believed it; but finding you here in this strange way, and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange. Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is the home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy, imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I have fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no undistinguished man! ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he said, fumbling nervously all over his clothes, "I've given it to the cabman. Of all the infernal idiocy! I knew I should. I had a presentiment that I should get it muddled up with my other money ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... interest, and in great measure from the respect and attachment which they all feel for the memory of the late Emperor. Esterhazy said it was remarkable, considering the condition of the Imperial House—the Emperor[9] in a state bordering on idiocy, not likely to live above four or five years at the outside, and his uncles all men of talent and energy; the next heir, the brother of the Emperor,[10] is a man of competent sense, but the late Emperor's brothers he describes to ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... thing, and to be squashed out of it with your powers at full, a wretched mistake in Nature's arrangements, a wretched villainy on the part of Man—for his own death, like all those other millions of premature deaths, would have been due to the idiocy and brutality of men! He could smile now, with Gratian looking down at him, but the experience had heaped fuel on a fire which had always smouldered in his doctor's soul against that half emancipated breed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the idiocy till Hardenberg found an excuse for taking him aside and cursing him into ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... I got back to the big room. I moved his boots back from the fire, and trimmed the candle. Then, with sleep gone from me, I lay back on my divan and reflected on many things: on my idiocy in coming; on Alison West, and the fact that only a week before she had been a guest in this very house; on Richey and the constraint that had come between us. From that I drifted back to Alison, and to the barrier my comparative ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... There is patter in which the audience is given to understand that Prepimpin, who glances from time to time over the footlights, with a shake of his leonine mane, is bored to death by his master's idiocy. At last the hat descends on Petit Patou's head, the crook-handled stick falls on his arm, and he looks about in a dazed way for the cigar, and then he sees Prepimpin, who has caught it, swaggering off on his hind legs, the still lighted ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... car back to Los Robles, Billie Threewit, producing director at the border studio of the Lunar Film Manufacturers, indulged in caustic comment on his own idiocy. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... scarcely looked at him. She rose to go; but it seemed to her pitiful to leave Fanny Newt in such utter desolation of soul and body, in which she seemed to her to be gradually sinking into idiocy. She went to Fanny and took her hand. Fanny listlessly rose, and when Hope had done shaking hands Fanny crossed them before her inanely, but in an unconsciously appealing attitude, which Hope saw and felt. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... love had directed his feet to the presence of his father. He stood a little way from him, his face white as his dress, not a word issuing from his mouth, silent, haunted by a smile of intense quiet, as of one who, being comforted, would comfort. There was also in the look a slight something like idiocy, for his soul was not precisely with his body; his thoughts, though concerning his father, were elsewhere; the circumstances of his soul and of his body were not the same; and so, being twinned, that is, divided, twained, he was as one beside himself. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... tell whether he had the stomach-ache or the lumbago. But the jester who expects you to laugh at the tale of the fish that was so large that the water of the lake subsided two feet when it was drawn ashore simply does not know where humour ends and drivelling idiocy begins. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... understand what prudence means. Remember, I believe he is a good Christian all the same. It's very incomprehensible; but the fact is, a man may be a very good Christian, and have the least quality of sense that is compatible with existence. I've seen it over and over again. Gerald's notions are idiocy to me," said the sensible but candid woman, shrugging her shoulders; "but I can't deny that he's a good man, for ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... yourselves, that there are no conditions in your life which can be called normal, and few that are abnormal, where you need the drink, and that to trifle with a thing so unnecessary, and yet so dangerous, is moral idiocy. ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the "burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... destination different, no doubt, from what the good lady had proposed. For I saw it all now. That old villain (pardon my warmth) had stolen my forged cable, and, if need arose, meant to produce it as his own justification. I had been done, done brown—and Jones' idiocy had made the task easy. I had no evidence but my word that the President knew the message was fabricated. Up till now I had thought that if I stood convicted I should have the honor of his Excellency's support in the dock. But now! why ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... would rewrite the capital P again, her arm trembling with fatigue, forcing herself to trace the name to the end; then when she had finished it she would begin over again. At last she could not write it any more. She would muddle everything—form other words, and exhaust herself almost to idiocy. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... Their whole life has been spent on the open veldt (we are always fighting them on somebody's farm, who knows every inch of the ground), and they never risk anything except in the trap sort of manoeuvres. The brave rush of our Tommies is unknown to them, and their slim nature would only see the idiocy of walking into a death-trap, cool as in a play. Were there ever two races less alike?"' wound up the youthful philosopher in his tent. '"I really do not see how they are to live ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... miles from Wawona to Yosemite Valley. The stages leave Wawona at eleven thirty a. m. to make the trip. On June sixteenth we took our places with some other victims of this piece of transportation idiocy, on an open four-horse stage for Yosemite. The going was very slow. It was hot and dusty, and we soon got irritable and uncomfortable. Why the traveling public should be subjected to this outrage is beyond me. We ground our weary way over the dusty road, oblivious to the scenery, ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... sentimental, doddering chunk of imbecility,' it said; 'are there no limits to your insanity? After all I said to you just now, are you deliberately going to start the old idiocy all over again?' ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... probably one of them. However, the incident is valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of the quaint laws of evidence of that remote time—a time so remote, so far back toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference between a bench of judges and a basket of vegetables was as yet so slight that we may say with all confidence that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... every one contained one or more unmistakable lunatics, and it afterwards struck me that in a land where even the natives go mad from sheer despondency of life, it is no wonder that men and women of culture and refinement are driven to suicide from the constant dread of insanity. Idiocy, however, is more frequent amongst the natives, and in one povarnia we found a poor half-witted wretch who had taken up his quarters there driven away from the nearest stancia by the cruelty of its inmates. This poor imbecile ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... it a rule, for the most part, to read all the romances that other people are kind enough to write—and woe to the miserable wight who tells me how the third volume endeth. Have you in you any surviving innocence of this sort? or do you call it idiocy? If you do, I will forgive you, only smiling to myself—I give you notice,—with a smile of superior pleasure! Mr. Chorley made me quite laugh the other day by recommending Mary Hewitt's 'Improvisatore,' with a sort of deprecating reference to the descriptions ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... knows who of the rest of them, who were so tactful and sympathetic about my 'disgrace'—now that you've won your fight without any help from me ... Without any help! In spite of every hindrance that my idiocy could put in your way! Now, after all—I come and tell you that you've earned the thing you've ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... civil war, and Anathoth took on proportions which made it as real as New York and far more important. The desperate efforts I had made to keep myself from falling into the condition of so many I had seen drooping to idiocy and death were, I felt, successful, and any occupation which kept alive the intellect could not but be beneficial. I was hungry, starving for mental food. Never had books appeared so attractive, never was ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... at one another for a long time; and in the back of Billy's brain lines of his old verses sang themselves to a sad little tune—the verses that reproved the idiocy of all other poets, who had very foolishly written their sonnets to other women: and yet, as the ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... won't go down, anyway," he said to himself—for the wages of the "firemen," whose work is of the nature of superintendence, hardly vary with the state of trade. "And what suspicious idiocy about the accounts!" ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... war's cosmic idiocy continued, and Carl crawled along the edge of a business precipice, looking down. He became so accustomed to it that he began to enjoy the view. The old Carl, with the enthusiasm which had served him for that undefined quality called "courage," began to come to life again, laughing, "Let ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Sterne, representing chiefly the perils of such endeavor and the bathos of the failure. Wieland includes in the letter some "specimen passages from a novel in the style of Tristram Shandy," which he asserts were sent him by the author. The quotations are almost flat burlesque in their impossible idiocy, and one can easily appreciate Wieland's despairing cry with ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Claude, ferociously. 'They have all the crimes of the middle classes stamped on their faces; they reek of scrofula and idiocy. It serves them right. But hallo! our runaway friend is making off with them. What grovellers architects are! Good riddance. He'll have to look for us when ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Republic, the chair has never been filled by a man, for whose life (to say the least,) any American need once to blush. It must, therefore, be some compensation to the Americans for the absence of pure monarchy, that when they look upwards their eyes are not always met by vice, and meannesss, and often idiocy." ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... ranting idiocy of those with whom she has been brought in daily contact," said Robert; but even as he spoke he seemed to see the girl's dear young face, and ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... he could not forget. And with memory, and its redeeming pain of shame, was also the stabbing mortification of knowing that he had made a fool of himself, again! First Eleanor; then—Lily. Sometimes, with this realization of his idiocy, he would feel an almost physical nausea. It was so horrible to him, that when, a month later, the anniversary which marked his first folly came around again, he made an excuse of having to be away on business. It seemed to Maurice that to go out to their field, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... "Of course! You just happened a round. Funny, as you Americans say. And the letter in your pocket—it happens that I lost that letter through the idiocy of one of my servants. You happened to find that also, of course. ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... discouraged. Wise as this precaution certainly was, it has resulted in a very inconvenient state of things; for a remote ancestor—the fifth in line from the beginning—experienced such vicissitudes that he returned from his travels in a state of most abandoned idiocy, and when the time arrived that he should, in turn, communicate to his son, he was only able to repeat over and over again the name of the pious hermit to whom the family was so greatly indebted, coupling it each time with a new and markedly offensive epithet. The essential ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... passage of the hours. Food was left in his cell, and the attendants, who occasionally entered, were prohibited from holding any conversation with the child. This treatment, absolutely infernal, soon reduced the innocent prince to a state almost of idiocy. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... Wagner is the modern artist par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernity. All that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art,—the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy). ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... motionless and silent before that imitation grotto, that childish plaything. Some zealously devout visitors had left their visiting cards in the cracks of the cement-work! For his part, he felt very sad, and followed his companion with bowed head, lamenting the wretched idiocy of the world. Then, on emerging from the wood, on again reaching the parterre, he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... With what right do you come rushing into the four walls of my home? Do you perhaps imagine that your artistic skill invests you with special privileges? I don't give a tinker's damn for your art. The whole rubbish is hardly worth spitting on. Music? Idiocy. Who needs it? Any man with the least vestige of self-respect never has anything to do with music except on holidays and when the day's work is done. No, no, you can't impress me with your music. You're not ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... ceases to receive, and even to remember. There are multitudes of cases in which, when too great a weight has been crowded on the delicate organism through which thoughts move, its balance has been upset, and it has drivelled into idiocy. Against this danger, also, our Lord guarded, for His disciples were already excited and over-strained. Their brains were so exhausted that in a few moments they would be sleeping on the cold ground of Gethsemane. Had He poured the light of the other world in full measure upon them, the tide ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... joking. You are a born queen and you oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice it is to ride with ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... Ibis ibiso. Ice glacio. Ice, an glaciajxo. Iceberg glacierego, glacimonto. Icicle pendglacio. Icelander Islandano. Idea ideo. Ideal idealo. Identical identa. Identify identigi. Idiocy idioteco. Idiom (a peculiar expression) idiotismo. Idiom (general sense) idiomo. Idiot idiotulo. Idle senokupa. Idleness senokupeco. Idol idolo. Idolatry idolservado. Idolize amegi, adori. If se. Ignis fatuus erarlumo. Ignite ekbruligi. Ignoble malnobla. Ignominy ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... famous Jacobin Club of Paris. That American citizens should have so little self-respect as to borrow the political jargon and ape the political manners of Paris was sad enough. To put on red caps, drink confusion to tyrants, sing Ca ira, and call each other "citizen," was foolish to the verge of idiocy, but it was at least harmless. When, however, they began to form "democratic societies" on the model of the Jacobins, for the defense of liberty against a government which the people themselves had made, they ceased to be fatuous and became mischievous. These societies, ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... great, and is, of course, reformatory in its action; it is somewhat similar to that endured by other Egos, who are linked to bodies human in form, but without normal brains—those we call idiots, lunatics, &c. Idiocy and lunacy are the results of vices different in kind from those that bring about the animal servitude above explained, but the Ego in these cases also is attached to a form through which he cannot ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... innocent Warwick, who was sent to the scaffold by Henry VII. to satisfy Catharine's father, Ferdinand of Aragon, so were the wrongs of Catharine to be acknowledged by shedding the innocent blood of Anne Boleyn. The connection, as it were, began with the butchery of a boy, reduced to idiocy by ill-treatment, on Tower Hill, and it ended with the butchery of a woman, who had been reduced almost to imbecility by cruelty, on the Tower Green. Heaven's judgement would seem to have been openly pronounced against that blood-cemented alliance, formed by two of the greatest of those royal ruffians ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... stupidity, stolidity; hebetude^, dull understanding, meanest capacity, shortsightedness; incompetence &c (unskillfulness) 699. one's weak side, not one's strong point; bias &c 481; infatuation &c (insanity) 503. simplicity, puerility, babyhood; dotage, anility^, second childishness, fatuity; idiocy, idiotism^; driveling. folly, frivolity, irrationality, trifling, ineptitude, nugacity^, inconsistency, lip wisdom, conceit; sophistry &c 477; giddiness &c (inattention) 458; eccentricity &c 503; extravagance &c (absurdity) 497; rashness &c 863. act of folly &c 699. V. to be an imbecile &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... questions belong among the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,—the unanswering primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions, and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. They are close to idiocy: both states drop the lower jaw and open the mouth; and assuming the idiotic physique tends, if there be any sympathetic and imitative power, to bring on the idiotic state. If we stare and wonder too long at such questions, we may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... sometimes—that is, I never of it—oh—I forget!" I groaned at my idiocy and hid my face in my hands. She asked if I were still unwell, and I said no; and then she began to talk quite easily about anything, everything, till I felt more at ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... 'feel no shame whatever in the retrospect of their idiocy. To convert a mind is a subject for high rejoicing; to confute a temper isn't ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... animal life, I read with delight all the books of natural history I could get, and I have heard in later years that in all the community of Sabbatarianism I was known as a prodigy. Fortunately I was saved from a probable idiocy in my later life by a severe attack of typhoid fever at seven, out of which attack I came a model of stupidity, and so remained until I was fourteen, my thinking powers being so completely suspended that at the dame's school to which I was sent I was repeatedly flogged ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... well. I am called away by the gods!" and set off at the top of his speed. The young men caught him before he had gone a mile, and bound him. By gentle treatment and watching for a few days he recovered. I have observed several instances of this kind in the country, but very few cases of idiocy, and I believe ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... hundred thousand francs into a holy-water shell, or lending them to a bigot—cast off by her husband, and who knows why? there is always some reason: does any one cast me off, I ask you?—is a piece of idiocy which in our days could only come into the head of a retired perfumer. It reeks of the counter. You would not dare look at yourself in the glass two ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... house had the slightest suspicion of the avocations of the proprietor. Besides, even the humblest agent of police would be expected to possess a degree of acuteness for which no one gave M. Tabaret credit. Indeed, they mistook for incipient idiocy his continual abstraction ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... he wrote: "I thought I should not like it, fancying it a kind of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau and the De Staels, still lingered." But he did like it, and wrote brilliantly of Lake ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... bare barrack of a place, but comparatively clean. During the war and the first part of the revolution it was tenanted chiefly by officers, and owing to the idiocy of a few of these at the time of the first revolution in shooting at a perfectly friendly crowd of soldiers and sailors, who came there at first with no other object than to invite the officers to join them, the place was badly smashed ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... getting on my nerves. I felt as if it were myself who was drifting to idiocy, and tremulous empty sensations began to occur in my stomach. Had I been able to recall the next sentence, I ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... Dominions, be introduced after that of the QUEEN and Royal Family, and could be fitted into Church and State as neatly as possible, that is, where such a toast is a necessity of the entertainment. But the stupidity of the incident has been surpassed by the idiocy of the notice taken of it, and, for the sake of the common sense of the Common Council, it is to be hoped that a large majority will be on the side of Alderman and Sheriff RENALS, and refuse to toast the LORD MAYOR on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... how that was any proof of idiocy; but, to prevent the recurrence of any difficulty between his new assistant and the populace of small boys, he thought it best to take possession of the hall, and lock the door. He therefore signified to Mr. Boolpin that they would at once proceed ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... were executed under a similar charge, and upon the same testimony. All died with religious firmness and composure. The fate of their enemies is notorious; with a single exception, they met deaths violent, loathsome, and terrible. Maude died insane, Bagwell in idiocy, one of the jury committed suicide, another was found dead in a privy, a third was killed by his horse, a fourth was drowned, a fifth shot, and so through the entire list. Toohey was hanged for felony, the prostitute Dunlea ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... man's wanting to do it. Love to Ryder was incomprehensible idiocy. Woman, as far as he was concerned, had never been created. She was still a spectacle, an historical ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... to lose balance, but the professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself, knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did know — what the idiot could hardly do — that his normal condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was unstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep, dream, inconsequence; the simultaneous action of different thought-centres without central control. His artificial balance was acquired habit. He ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... which the Hewish family had run to seed in its latter generations, was very much to the point. Twenty miles from Galway—and Irish miles, at that—it stands at the foot of the mountains on the edge of the tract that is called Joyce's Country, a district famous for inbreeding and idiocy where everyone was called Joyce, excepting, of course, the Hewishes of Roscarna, who were aliens, Elizabethan adventurers from the county of Devon, cousins of the Earls of Halberton, who had planted themselves ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... Warburton and Doctor Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Pinckney, "when you're not maundering over some such idiocy as this, you're the most entertaining good-for-nothing that ever graced a dinner table or spread the joy of life through a dull drawing room. Come home with me for ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... the unceasing toil and anxiety to which the working-classes are subjected, this cause developing the disease in the existing generation, or, what is quite as frequently the case, transmitting to the offspring idiocy, insanity, or some imperfectly developed sensorium or nervous system. The agitated, overworked, and harassed parent is not in a condition to transmit a ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... same reasons popular education will be more widely diffused, talents of every kind will be able to develop and manifest themselves freely; but this will not cause the disappearance of idiocy and imbecility due to hereditary pathological conditions. Nevertheless it will be possible for different causes to have a preventive and mitigating influence on the various forms of congenital degeneration (ordinary diseases, criminality, insanity ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... that he held it only on sufferance, drawing a momentary and precarious income. He owed everything to Brodrick. He depended on Brodrick. He knew what manner of men these Brodricks were. Inexhaustibly kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence, implacable to continuous idiocy. Prothero they regarded as ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... prepares for his introduction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as Caliban;—his wild babblings, and inspired idiocy, articulate and gauge the horrors of ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... more than ordinarily developed. Such advantages are not unmixed with danger; this same arterial blood may exite and feed inflammation, and either convulsions, or water on the brain, or insanity, or, at last, idiocy may follow. How proud a mother is in having a precocious child! How little is she aware that precocity is ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... miserably weak I feel as a musician. I know, in the depth of my heart, that I am an absolute blunderer. You ought to watch me when I am at it; now thinking "it must do after all," then going to the piano to puzzle out some wretched rubbish, and giving it up again in a state of idiocy. Oh, how I feel then! how thoroughly persuaded of my musical wretchedness! And then come you, whose pores are running over as with streams, fountains, cataracts, and tell me such words as those which ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... the Duchesse drily, "but let me at the same time tell you this: I have always known that Englishmen were peculiarly idiotic in certain important matters of life, but I must say that I had no idea idiocy could reach the boundless proportions which it has done in your case. Well!" she added with sudden gentleness, "farewell for the present, mon preux chevalier: it is not too late, remember, to bear in mind certain old ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... by the civil M.P. and the professor. The host, who was of no party, supported his guest as long as possible, and then left him to his fate. The military M.P. fled to the drawing-room to philander with Mrs. Grey; and the man of science and the African had already retired to the intellectual idiocy of a May Fair "At Home." The novelist was silent, for he was studying a scene; and the poet was absent, for ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the idiocy that's been talked to me this forenoon. I've done nothin' for the last hour but say 'No' to folks that come tearin' in to unload lies and ask questions. And some of 'em was people you'd expect to have common sense, ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the green oaks and clustering firs of Hawkins Hill, as if it were part of the natural phenomena. At last it was completed. Then Mr. Hawkins proceeded to furnish it with an expensiveness and extravagance of outlay quite in keeping with his former idiocy. Carpets, sofas, mirrors, and finally a piano,—the only one known in the county, and brought at great expense from Sacramento,—kept curiosity at a fever-heat. More than that, there were articles and ornaments which a few married experts declared only fit for women. When the furnishing of the house ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Paris is preparing to stand siege if the Prussians double up Bazaine and the army of Chalons in the north. But you don't know what a pitiable fright the authorities are in. Why, Scarlett, they are scared almost to the verge of idiocy." ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... that Crossan had started one of those ridiculous industries by means of which Government Boards and philanthropic ladies think they will add to the wealth of the Irish peasants. Besides, even if Crossan had suddenly developed symptoms of kindly idiocy, neither wood-carving or lace-making could possibly have made Rose's freckly faced young man rich enough to buy a gold brooch. The thing puzzled me nearly as much as did the ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... tales, I beg," said Svidrigailov with disgust and annoyance. "If you insist on wanting to know about all that idiocy, I will tell you ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed through me, and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand her and assure her as to my health, I could ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... idiocy and epilepsy. Of five persons the one sane member only has a family. Nine children, ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... modified by the special organisation of each sex. There are, indeed, various laws of heredity which qualify this statement, and notably the tendency whereby extremes of variation are more common in the male sex—so that genius and idiocy are alike more prevalent in men. But, on the whole, there can be no doubt that the qualities of a man or of a woman are a more or less varied mixture of those of both parents; and, even when there is no blending, both parents are almost equally likely to be influential in heredity. The good qualities ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... it is with Us. It acknowledges restraints in a woman—it bursts through everything in a man. It robs him of his intelligence, his honor, his self-respect—it levels him with the brutes—it debases him into idiocy—it lashes him into madness. I tell you I am not accountable for my own actions. The kindest thing you could do for me would be to shut me up in a madhouse. The best thing I could do for myself would be to cut my throat.—Oh, yes! this ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... Alla returned. "That's proper pride. If any one can do a thing as well as you did that dance, it would be idiocy not to ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... own image, Monsieur, I shall turn it against you. Yes, doubtless a head is as necessary to a nation as to an individual; if, however, the head becomes monstrous and deformed, the seat of intelligence will be turned into that of idiocy, and in place of a man of intellect, you have a hydrocephalus. Pray give heed to what Monsieur the Sub-prefect, may say in answer to what I shall ask him. Now, my dear Sub-prefect, be frank. If ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the normal man only in the body, which is the instrument of the soul. Deformity of the body is a limitation of the ego who functions through it. A withered arm, a club foot, a deformed back, in this incarnation are results of unfortunate causes which that soul has generated in past lives. In idiocy the malformation is in the brain. Of course this is not an accident. There is no element of chance which places the limitation in one body where it causes but little trouble and in another where it prevents mental activity and thus produces idiocy. In each ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... idiocy can help the law," shouted Kerry, "the man who did this job is as good as dead!" He turned his fierce gaze in Gray's direction. "Thank you, sir. I need ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Everybody is clamouring arrogantly for "the joy of life," and all theatrical managers are giving orders for farces, as if the joy of life consisted in being silly and picturing all human beings as so many sufferers from St. Vitus' dance or idiocy. I find the joy of life in its violent and cruel struggles, and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learning something. And for this reason I have selected an unusual but instructive case—an exception, in a word—but a great exception, proving the rule, which, ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... merely material phenomena was the mumbling toothless gibber of his shrill protesting; the glassy look of idiocy from his fatigued eyes; and the inane smile and impotent frown that alternated on his features. He was a horrible and offensive old man. He was Time's obscene victim. Edwin was revolted by the spectacle of the younger men ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... soliloquized the young man, "that he advised me to shave off this ridiculous crop of alfalfa. Hang election bets, anyway; if things had gone half right I shouldn't have had to wear this badge of idiocy. And to think that it's got to be for a whole month longer! A year's a mighty long while at best, but a year in company with a full set of ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... on account of the consanguinity or affinity of the parties, or because of impotency, the issue shall be illegitimate, but when on account of non-age, or insanity, or idiocy, the issue is the legitimate issue of the party capable of contracting ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... dudgeon, and, until they were on their way to London again, treated the mate with marked coldness. Then the necessity of talking to somebody about his own troubles and his uncle's idiocy put the two men on their old footing. In the quietness of the cabin, over a satisfying pipe, he planned out in a kindly and generous spirit careers for both the ladies he was not going to marry. The only thing that was wanted to complete their happiness, and his, was that they ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... to sex, color, or race, should stand on the same foundation, and be equal; that every person twenty-one years old, who is a citizen of the United States, should have the ballot, unless disfranchised by crime, idiocy, or insanity. When these three things are granted, all else will follow in due time. But until these things are assured to the citizens of America, our Government presents the anomaly of being professedly founded upon the consent of the governed, and yet shutting out two-thirds of its citizens ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Saul, David was captured in the land of the Philistines by the brothers of Goliath, who carried him before the King of Gath, and it was only by pretending idiocy that he escaped death, the king deeming it impossible that such a man could be the kingly David; as it is written, "And he disguised his reason before their eyes, and played the madman in their hands, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... conversation conventional; but it is the intervals between the meeting that do the real damage. Absence—I do not claim the thought as my own—makes the heart grow fonder. And now, thanks to Ukridge's amazing idiocy, a barrier had been thrust between us. Lord knows, the business of fishing for a girl's heart is sufficiently difficult and delicate without the addition of needless obstacles. To cut out the naval miscreant under equal ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... complete the idiocy, or, as the novelists say, to complete the illusion, one goes to the refreshment-room and tosses off two or three glasses. And then something happens in your head and your heart, finer than you can read of in a fairy ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... stronger in their allegiance to the Party. And there are signs that even in France syndicalism is losing its anti-political tendency. Herve, who demanded at the beginning of 1909 that the "directors of the Socialist Party cure themselves of 'Parliamentary idiocy'" (his New Year's wish), expressed at the beginning of 1910 the wish that "certain of the dignitaries of the Federation of Labor should cure themselves of a syndicalist and laborite idiocy, a form of idiocy not less dangerous ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... service to Marshal Murat but also to go and spend several days with my mother. Marshal Augereau lent me a fine carriage and I set off on the road to Paris. But the heat and insomnia so excited my poor companion that he went from a state of idiocy to one of mania and nearly killed me with a blow from a coach spanner. I have never made a more disagreeable journey. I arrived at last in Paris, and I took Lieutenant N... to Murat, who was staying for the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... you so well, Harry," said Duncan slowly, "I'd be certain you were mad. I'm not at all sure that I'm sane. It's raving idiocy—and it's a pretty damned rank thing to do, to start deliberately out to marry a woman for her money. But I've been through a little hell of my own in my time, and—it's not alluring to contemplate a return to it. There's ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... his feet and held up his glass. "The Firm!" he cried. "And may all the fools who sent Neil to prison live to learn their idiocy!" ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... absurdly proud of this garment. His outer wear was completed by a black cotton shirt, and the inevitable stiff-brimmed hat, without which no brown youth feels himself a man. Xavier's face wore an expression of blankness verging on idiocy; but he was by no means deficient in cunning. His full name was St. Francois ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... fact is not surprising when we consider that until very recent times idiots were looked upon with a kind of superstitious awe, and the affliction was supposed to be a curse of God. For this reason, when idiocy did follow consanguineous marriage as it sometimes would, it was believed to be the fit punishment of some violation of divine law. Insanity also frequently has been attributed to consanguineous marriage, but not so frequently as idiocy, since its occurrence later ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... dwell here on the mere diabolical idiocy that can regard beer or tobacco as in some way evil and unseemly in themselves), there is the most important element in this strange outbreak; at least, the most dangerous and the most important for us. There is that main feature in the degradation of the old ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power, by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists (I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... you, and to despise them would be to blaspheme against continuity, and to blaspheme against continuity would be to deny Eternity. Love you cannot help, and hate you cannot help; but contempt is—for you—the sovereign idiocy, the irreligious fancy!" ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... before stated more than once that my intellect, for some period prior to this, had been in a condition nearly bordering on idiocy. There were, to be sure, momentary intervals of perfect sanity, and, now and then, even of energy; but these were few. It must be remembered that I had been, for many days certainly, inhaling the almost pestilential ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... He was indifferent to literary fame, and never attempted any higher style of composition than that in which he could excel. His last days were miserable, and he lingered a long while in hopeless and melancholy idiocy. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... of colossal exaggeration, both in talent and in idiocy, in virtue and in vice. Men sinned like giants and as giants atoned. Common sense, mediocrity—save upon the throne—were rare. Even the fools in their folly were great. The spectacle was recurrent of men who would smilingly stake a fortune as a wager, who could for hours drench their ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... tried to tell her a little about my trouble she was quite scandalized. She called me a sinful girl, a shameless creature. I assure you it puzzled my head so that, between Therese my sister and Jose the boy, I lived in a state of idiocy almost. But luckily at the end of the two months they sent him away from home for good. Curious story to happen to a goatherd living all her days out under God's eye, as my uncle the Cura might have said. My sister Therese was keeping house in the Presbytery. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do. Take this advice: the first and last I shall offer you; then you will not want me or any one else, happen what may. Neglect it—go on as heretofore, craving, whining, and idling—and suffer the results of your idiocy, however bad and insuperable they may be. I tell you this plainly; and listen: for though I shall no more repeat what I am now about to say, I shall steadily act on it. After my mother's death, I wash my hands of you: from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in Gateshead Church, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Mephistopheles was apparently commissioned to vex my eyes and plague my heart, through the next succession of two or three years: a worm was at the roots of life. Yet, in this, perhaps, there lurked a harsh beneficence. If, because the great vision of love had vanished, idiocy and the torpor of despondency were really creeping stealthily over my faculties, and strangling their energies, what better change for me than the necessity (else how miserable!) of fighting, wrangling, struggling, without pause, or promise of pause, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly it was, this love. Even if Harmony cared—and at the mere thought his heart pounded—what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her to accept the half of—nothing, to give up a career to share his struggle for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty under a bushel that he might wave aloft ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart |
