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Insanity   Listen
noun
Insanity  n.  
1.
The state of being insane; unsoundness or derangement of mind; madness; lunacy. "All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity." "Without grace The heart's insanity admits no cure."
2.
(Law) Such a mental condition, as, either from the existence of delusions, or from incapacity to distinguish between right and wrong, with regard to any matter under action, does away with individual responsibility.
Synonyms: Insanity, Lunacy, Madness, Derangement, Alienation, Aberration, Mania, Delirium, Frenzy, Monomania, Dementia. Insanity is the generic term for all such diseases; lunacy has now an equal extent of meaning, though once used to denote periodical insanity; madness has the same extent, though originally referring to the rage created by the disease; derangement, alienation, are popular terms for insanity; delirium, mania, and frenzy denote excited states of the disease; dementia denotes the loss of mental power by this means; monomania is insanity upon a single subject.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Insanity" Quotes from Famous Books



... ended at last in the most frightful illness. A violent fever, combined with galloping consumption, seized upon him with such violence, that in three days there remained only a shadow of his former self. To this was added indications of hopeless insanity. Sometimes several men were unable to hold him. The long-forgotten, living eyes of the portrait began to torment him, and then his madness became dreadful. All the people who surrounded his bed seemed to him horrible ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... first port that offered, and deliver her up. The desertion of his party had frustrated Peters' design of going into the Pacific—an adventure which could not be accomplished without a crew, and he depended upon either getting acquitted upon trial, on the score of insanity (which he solemnly avowed had actuated him in lending his aid to the mutiny), or upon obtaining a pardon, if found guilty, through the representations of Augustus and myself. Our deliberations were interrupted for the present by the cry of, "All hands take in sail," and Peters ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... must have been thrashing about—absolutely thrashing about, like a dashed salmon on a dashed hook. He must have had a paroxysm of some kind—some kind of a dashed fit. A doctor could give you the name for it. It's a well-known form of insanity. Paranoia—isn't that what they call it? Rush of blood to the head, followed by a general ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... her moans, which money could give the means of relieving! So I went out into the street one January night—Do you think God will punish me for that?" she asked with wild vehemence, almost amounting to insanity, and shaking Jem's arm in order to force an ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

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

... regard for the good opinion uv mankind in general than he hed for the good opinion uv the accidental incumbent uv any offis; and ez he hed, in a hour uv temporary mental aberrashen, wich hed happily passed, endorsed the Administrashen, wich insanity hed worked evil unto him, he rekested, ez a simple act uv justice, that the President shood cause it to be known that he (Beecher) wuz not considered by the Administrashen ez ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby

... reason been affected by so many successive blows? It seemed likely; for, livid a moment before, her face had now turned scarlet. She trembled nervously from head to foot, and there was a gleam of insanity in her big ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... so unusual that he had already lost the common standards of judging. He let the sliding platform take him where it would, and he flattered himself that he was not fool enough to mistake originality for insanity. The clergyman, dreamer and enthusiast though he might be, was as sane as ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... truth, there were so many anomalies in his character, and, though shrinking with diseased sensibility from public notice, it had been his fatality so often to become the topic of the day by some wild eccentricity of conduct, that people searched his lineage for a hereditary taint of insanity. But there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. If he were mad, it was the consequence, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... woman. To break his engagement was, all things considered, not in any way an unusual or abnormal thing; to brood over the rupture, to blame himself, to feel that he had been dishonorable, was to be expected, after such an act, from one of his temperament. Nothing, however, but temporary insanity or constitutional cowardice could explain such conduct as here described. Mr. Herndon does not pretend to found his story on any personal knowledge of the affair. He was in Springfield at the time, a clerk in Speed's store, but did not have then, nor, indeed, did he ever ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... appearance in the bulk of the correspondence: while as regards the madness this supplies one of the most puzzling and perhaps not the least disquieting of "human documents." A reader may say—by no means in his haste, but after consideration—not merely "Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?" but "How on earth did it happen that the writer of these ever went mad?" even with the assistance of Newton, and Teedon, and, one has ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... senses and undertake to aid you in this stress." To this the lady made reply: "Take care now! For surely, if he does not escape, with God's help I think we can clear his head of all the madness and insanity. But we must be on our way at once! For I recall a certain ointment with which Morgan the Wise presented me, saying there was no delirium of the head which it would not cure." Thereupon, they go off ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... the day Sam Brannan and Editor Kemble looked in on the Stanleys. "It's sheer insanity!" exploded Kemble. "The soldiers have gone—left their wives and their children to starve. Even the church is locked. Governor Mason has threatened martial law in the mining regions, which are filled with cutthroats and robbers. It's ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... his life. In September of the year 1796 Mary Lamb, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needle-work all day and by watching with her mother at night, broke into uncontrollable insanity, and seizing a knife from the table spread for dinner, stabbed her mother to the heart. The coroner's jury brought in a verdict of lunacy." Charles ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... simply that a soldier could do what he liked with impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a Victoria Cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence. Unfortunately the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always manifest itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged with any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. There were ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... an example even for this worst of crimes. The crew of an English whaler, in which much drinking had been permitted, mutinied, and the Captain received a blow on the head, which, though it did not destroy life, produced insanity; nor could all the efforts of our physician wholly restore his reason. He had indeed lucid intervals, during which he became reconciled to his crew, and at length sailed for England; but I have reason to believe the vessel ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

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

... perhaps the irksomeness of his tasks that drove him into something not unlike madness.[Footnote: There is little doubt that Rousseau was at one time really insane, subject to the delusion that he was being persecuted. His insanity did not become very marked until the time of the real persecutions undergone after the publication of Emile. See his Biographies and Le Docteur Chatelain, La folie de J. J. Rousseau, Paris, 1890. He was, of ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... worse than insanity," cried Brandon, as he almost pushed her from him. "We can never belong to each ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... was counsel for a widow who had been put in a lunatic asylum, and sued the two medical men who signed the certificate of her insanity. The plaintiff's case was to prove that she was not addicted to drinking, and that there was no pretence for treating hers as a case of delirium tremens. Dr. Tunstal, the last of plaintiff's witnesses, described one case in which he had cured a patient of delirium ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton

... Chuk was in a black, discouraged mood, himself. He could understand the utter, sick dejection of this giant from the past, lost from his own kind. Probably insanity looming. In far less extreme circumstances than this, death from homesickness ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... the coffin merchant's insanity came to Eustace with a certain relief. For the first time in the interview he had a sense of the dark empty shop and the whistling ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... be more serious, wire me at once. Periodical insanity can be readily proved. He has just recovered from a paroxysm at this writing. He is subject to these attacks whenever his wishes are crossed, having been raised a pet. Therefore, you will be doing yourself a great favor by acceding to any request he may make, however ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... earthly thought, every beat of his youthful blood, became for him a cruel wrong. He began to despair of himself; he wrestled in unceasing prayer, fasted and scourged himself. At one time the priests had to break into his cell in which he had been lying for days in a condition not far from insanity. With warm sympathy Staupitz looked upon such heart-rending torment, and sought to give him peace by blunt counsel. Once when Luther had written to him, "Oh, my sin! My sin! My sin!" his spiritual adviser gave him the ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... weak-minded are easily controlled by the sex instinct. To prevent this certain State legislatures have forbidden the marriage of any feeble-minded or epileptic woman under the age of forty-five. It is well known that insanity is a family trait, and that criminal insanity is liable to recur if those who are afflicted are permitted to indulge in parenthood. Certain States accordingly annul the marriage of insane persons. Venereal disease is easily ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... an accident that the most frequent theme of the brothers is illness: the insanity of Demailly, the tortures of Germinie, the consumption of Madame Gervaisais, the decay of Renee Mauperin, the record of pain in Soeur Philomene, in Les Freres Zemganno, and in other works of the Goncourts. Emotion in less tragic circumstances they ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... vapours were dispelled, they were convinced of the delusion. To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension[200]; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgement. That his own diseased imagination should have ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... language of sheer insanity, Daphne, of mental excitement that passes reason." Mr. Withers spoke in a carefully controlled but quivering voice—as a man who has been struck an unexpected and staggering blow, but considering the quarter it came from, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... Kirk. That Mrs. Bailey should indulge in this particular form of insanity was intelligible. But that Ruth should have descended to ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... became known to her, she would break down both mentally and physically. Her hatred of the man who had wrought this misery was so deep and intense that once when she spoke of him to her brother, who was a leading lawyer in the place, he saw, with grave apprehension, the light of insanity in her eyes. Fearful for a breakdown in health, the physicians insisted that she should walk for a certain time each day, and as she refused to go outside of the gate, she took her lonely promenade up and down a long path in the deserted garden. One day she heard a conversation ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr

... on high medical authority, that motoring is a cure for insanity. We would therefore recommend several motorists we ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton

... M. Baleinier. "Like you, unhappy child, those women were young, fair, and sensible, but like you, alas! they had in them the fatal germ of insanity, which, not having been destroyed in time, grew, and grew, larger and ever larger, until it overspread and ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... other-worldliness and the highest wisdom. True happiness is in selflessness, in the furore of lovers, whom Plato calls happiest of all. The more absolute love is, the greater and more rapturous is the frenzy. Heavenly bliss itself is the greatest insanity; truly pious people enjoy its shadow on ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... he?" cried a female voice, which was followed up by the female herself, a respectable elderly woman, who went about the platform scattering people right and left in a fit of temporary insanity, "where is my Bobby, where is he, I say? Oh! why won't people git out o' my way? Git out o' the way," (shoving a sluggish man forcibly), "where are ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... the monarchy, laws, and liberties of England. He would not say that monarchy was the best form of government that ever existed, but an attempt to alter it in this country would be the height of insanity and crime. The only opposition to the measure in the house of lords came from Lord Brougham, who contended that due consideration had not been employed either in the framing or passing of this bill. The ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... fixedly at it. Milly had been wont seriously to grieve over her hopeless lack of artistic talent and she had never attempted to caricature. Tims was thinking of a young fellow of a college who had lately died of brain disease. In the earlier stages of his insanity, it had been remarked that he had an originality which had not been his when in a normal state. What if her friend were developing the same terrible disease? If it were so, it was no use fussing, since there was no remedy. Still, she felt ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... bearing upon the "plausibility" of the conclusion that Beaumont and Fletcher "influenced" Shakspere, the likelihood that "Philaster" was the original, "Cymbeline" the "copy." Shakspere at the age of forty-six, long after he had portrayed the real insanity of Lear, the simulated insanity of Hamlet, the confessional dream of Lady Macbeth; long after he had "filled the audience with surprise and delight" by the romantic realities of Hero and Portia, ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith

... influences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an improvement of the species ought to follow such a change. In certain specific respects we know, indeed, that the improvement has taken place. Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almost ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... gently, "because my father was a felon, that does not make me one—because he was led into wrong, it does not follow that I must do wrong. Insanity may be hereditary, but surely crime is not; besides, I have heard my father say that his father was an honest, simple, kindly northern farmer. My father had much to excuse him. He was a handsome man, who had been flattered and made ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... thanks to God, that he has not, in a fit of wrath, made them to resemble me! If, forgetful of earth, and trees, and the human stocks around me, I pour forth the language of the great song-masters, they grin at my insanity—they hold me incapable of reason, and declare their ideas of what that is, by asking who knows most of the dairy, the cabbage-patch, the spinning-wheel, the darning-needle—who can best wash Polly's or Patty's face and comb its head—can chop up sausage-meat the finest—make the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... have died within five miles of the labor; otherwise the pain in their slowly swelling throats would have taken their reason. For thirst in the desert carries the pangs of several deaths—death from fire, suffocation, and insanity. ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand

... was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to 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. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... I've been shooting into a covey of publishers for twelve years and never have touched a feather. Perseverance is a good quality, but there is such a thing as insanity." He stared unconsciously at the ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... marriage is annulled 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 ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson

... room, and Dorothy did not look at the young woman who had taken her place. There was something so humiliating about being suspected of insanity! ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose

... of toil. On the secluded farms during the long winter months, there is not much social intercourse. It has been asserted that the isolation and solitariness in sparsely settled districts are causes of the high percentage of insanity in rural and frontier communities. It is good for the mental and physical health of both old and young to be lifted, once in a while, out of the world of reality into that of the imagination. All children and young people like to play, to act, to make believe. This is a part of their ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... it by faith more than by all other things put together—a faith so rapt that, to our less passionate natures, it seems to have been the very insanity of fanaticism. But it did the work; and that is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... he were expecting her, he no longer asked that the carriage be sent to meet her. That had been one of the proofs of his insanity as alleged by his brother, and Arthur was sane enough and cunning enough to avoid a repetition of that offence, but he often went himself to the station, when the New York trains were due, for it was from the west rather than the east that he ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... corresponds well enough with his known character. The lives of thousands of law-abiding subjects are tossed to the favourite without inquiry or hesitation. He does not even ask the name of the 'certain people,' much less require proof of the charge against them. The insanity of weakening his empire by killing so many of its inhabitants does not strike him, nor does he ever seem to think that he has duties to those under his rule. Careless of the sanctity of human life, too indolent to take trouble to see things with ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... was asked by a man who knew more than any one else, and he knew very well what the answer would be. We should suspect a man of insanity who looked for grapes on a thorn bush. And yet we see numbers of both men and women looking for happiness and comfort in the Public House, and judging from their appearance afterwards, we feel sure they went for grapes and ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness

... the field of memory is further supported by such evidence as has been collected with regard to the influence of past experience in dreams, phobias and various forms of insanity, but in these cases, of course, it is only isolated past experiences here and there whose activity can be observed, and so, while helping to upset the most natural assumption that whatever cannot be recalled by ordinary efforts of memory may be assumed to have been destroyed, ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen

... taking him back to his home, but, as that was not to be accomplished without rough usage, he assumed the part indicated by practical sense; this man of common sense feigned insanity, and from the moment the insane people thought that he resembled them they let him alone and ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi

... next sitting of the Court John Coots was arraigned, tried, and convicted of murder in the first degree. His lawyer tried to bring in a plea of emotional insanity but failed. If insane he was insane through the influence of strong drink. It was proven that he had made fierce threats against the life of Loraine, and the liquor in which he had so freely indulged had served to fire his brain and nerve his hand to carry out his wicked intent; and ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

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

... and a verdict found: The jury, with great humanity, Acquitted the prisoner on the ground Of extemporary insanity. ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... applied to an infantry soldier. Hal and Noll, being in an infantry regiment, had thereby become doughboys. The "happy house" is the part of a military hospital where mild cases of insanity are confined. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock

... all my views in life, my ambition, my family, my fortune, my country, to have gained her; and I told her this in terms of respectful adoration. I worshipped the divinity, even while I attempted to profane the altar. When I had sent this letter I was in despair. Conviction of the insanity of my conduct flashed across my mind. I expected never to see her again. There came an answer; I opened it with the greatest agitation; to my surprise, an appointment. Why trouble you with a detail of my feelings, my mad hope, my dark despair! The moment ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... dear one, for judging me so charitably," said she. "I hope it was temporary insanity; and always when I think it over, it seems to me it must have been. I fell asleep smiling over the revenge I had taken, and I slept long and heavily. When I woke, my first wish was to change the dresses back again; but Chloe had gone to the plantation with my babe, and Mr. Duroy hurried ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child

... put together for the first time my analysis of the neurotic personality, which was soon followed by a series of studies on the influences of the mental factors, and in 1908 a paper on "What Do Histories of Cases of Insanity Teach Us Concerning Preventive Mental Hygiene During the Years of School Life?" All this was using for psychiatry the growing appreciation of a broad biological view-point in its concrete application. It was a reaction against the peculiar fear of studying the facts of life ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... them, and throwing them into the fire; and, if she did evil in it, she was very sorry for it, and desired he would be friends with her, or forgive her. This was the very day before she died." That night her distemper returned, and, in a paroxysm of insanity, she ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... persecuted to the verge of insanity with it," she said. "Every soul I've seen has tormented me about it, and people have written me about it. I've denied it till I was black in the face, but nobody believed me. I can't find out how it started. I hope you believe, Mr. Everett, that it couldn't possibly have arisen ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... God: "The world is entirely beautiful and good, with the one exception of insanity. What use does the world derive from a lunatic, who runs hither and thither, tears his clothes, and is pursued by a mob of hooting children?" "Verily, a time will come," said God in reply, "when thou wilt supplicate ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... yield now, and return home to be tortured and despoiled of the little all, which your own good sense and your own good conduct have procured you—for, apart from good sense and good conduct, there is no such thing in the world as good fortune—would not only be positive insanity, but positive ingratitude to the Giver of all good. My advice to you, therefore, is to remain altogether passive, to pursue the career which you have chosen, and, without yourself taking any steps to disclose your present situation, to authorise your brother ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat

... frightful incident which darkened her earlier years. She was, it appears, a woman of the sweetest disposition, and, in her normal state, of the highest and clearest intellect, but afflicted with periodical insanity which came on once a year, or oftener. To her parents she was a most tender and dutiful daughter, nursing them in their old age, when one was physically and the other mentally infirm, with unremitting ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... in letters as Gerard de Nerval, was one of the group of young Romanticists who gathered around Hugo. Symptoms of insanity developed early, and at different times he was an inmate of an asylum. He finally committed suicide. He felt profoundly the influence of German literature, and his lyrics show something of this in the spiritual quality of ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... inhabitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A clay-coloured kerchief, folded round her neck, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like complexion. Two light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her the effect of Hecate. Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the mariners paid a sort of tribute with a feeling between jest ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was in the narrow passage beside the stairs alone. Out of the clangor and confusion, the yells and oaths, there came a memory of Billie. My God! I had forgotten! and she was there, crouching in the blackness, not five feet away. The thought gave me the reckless strength of insanity. My feet were upon a rubbish heap of plaster, where a shell had shaken the ceiling to the floor. It gave me vantage, a height from which to strike. Never again will I fight as I did then. Twice they came, and I beat them back, the iron club sweeping a death circle. Somewhere ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish

... four years' insanity is going to prove the remedy?" Vane laughed cynically. "Except that there are a few million less men to carry on ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... be dated, says Lamartine, "all those enmities against the government of the Restoration which collected in one work of aggression the most contradictory ideas, which alienated public opinion, which exasperated the government and pushed it on from excesses to insanity, irritated the tribune, blindfolded the elections, and finished by changing, five years afterward, the opposition of nineteen votes hostile to the Bourbons into a heterogeneous but formidable majority, in presence of which the monarchy had only the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... more conspicuous than any of a greater degree of transparency or a more perfect white could be by an absence of any of the figures; so any degree of deformity is, more opposite to the general common form than beauty, and any degree of insanity is more opposite to ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds

... The association of the place and time impelled me to give him an account of the phenomenon. He heard me to the end—at first laughed heartily—and then lapsed into an excessively grave demeanor, as if my insanity was a thing beyond suspicion. At this instant I again had a distinct view of the monster—to which, with a shout of absolute terror, I now directed his attention. He looked eagerly—but maintained that he saw nothing—although I designated ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... English playwright, when he brought them on the stage, arrayed with intellectual power and gleaming with the lurid splendour of a Northern fancy, made them tenfold darker and more terrible. To the subtlety and vices of the South he added the melancholy, meditation, and sinister insanity of his own climate. He deepened the complexion of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italian character of levity. Sin, in his conception of that character, was complicated with the sense of sin, as it never had been in a Florentine or ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... which his wife wants him to have cut off: but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence; like his poetry, redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets. Beckey takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam-machine. The coroner found it insanity. I should not like him to sit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... unable to bear. Was this justice, or injustice? It then must be very contradistinctive—was the Minister, in this instance, the poor man's friend, or the rich man's friend? Was he exhibiting ingratitude and insanity, or a truly wise and honest statesmanship? We need not "pause for a reply." It has been sounding ever since in our ears, in the accents of national concord, and of admiration of the Minister who, in his very zenith ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... convinced Sam that it would be idle to deny it longer. The proofs of his guilt were too strong. He might have plead in his defence "emotional insanity," but he was not familiar with the course of justice in New York. He was, however, fertile in expedients, and thought of the ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger

... misery it inflicts. Marriage and competency had protected this one from the deteriorations which almost inevitably await those of her class, but they could not save her from the natural process of an undisciplined mind, an ungoverned temper, and a caprice verging on insanity. This self-torment of caprice could be assuaged only by constant change of circumstance and surroundings; her only resource was to metamorphose things about her as often and as rapidly as possible. She changed her lodgings, her furniture, her clothes, retrimmed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... labouring under a delusion, the Teutonic knights in Prussia not unfrequently condemned those maniacs to the stake who imagined themselves to be metamorphosed into wolves—an extraordinary species of insanity, which, having existed in Greece before our era, spread, in process of time over Europe, so that it was communicated not only to the Romaic, but also to the German and Sarmatian nations, and descended from the ancients as a legacy of affliction to posterity. ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... memorable Quixottical insanity of the Russian Emperor Paul, having operated, with the intrigues of France, to produce an intended naval confederacy of the northern nations against the maritime power of Great Britain, it was wisely determined, by the then British government, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... denote hitching-stalls for anybody. I thought, in that case, that I should stay where I was, and he politely informed me that I might stay and be—jammed. I found afterward that this individual was troubled with a kind of insanity peculiar to all headquarters, arising out of an exaggerated idea of his own importance. I had the pleasure, a few minutes afterward, of hearing him ordered to feed my horse. A thickset, gray-haired man sat near by, undergoing the process of shaving by a very ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... as to the lower races in recent years the topic has become so familiar that I need not stop to illustrate it by instances. I will merely say that among savages the theory of inspiration or possession is commonly invoked to explain all abnormal mental states, particularly insanity or conditions of mind bordering on it, so that persons more or less crazed in their wits, and particularly hysterical or epileptic patients, are for that very reason thought to be peculiarly favoured ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... laughing stocks for the whole business world to jeer at?" he asked as he paced the office furiously, "or to be bankrupted through methods that border strongly on insanity? For it is nothing else, Mr. Denton, but raving lunacy! No man in his sober senses would entertain such a plan for the space of a second! Why, your orders about those sweat-shops were simply ridiculous! Are we to ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon

... himself is to blame for designing an apparatus from which an escape of gas can be accompanied by sensible risks to property or life. However unpalatable this assertion may be, its truth cannot be controverted; because, short of criminal intention or insanity on the part of the attendant, it is in the first place a mere matter of knowledge and skill so to construct an acetylene plant that an escape of gas is extremely unlikely, even when the apparatus is opened for recharging, or ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield

... seat stood Susie Winthrop—rather Mrs. Leonard. The light of insanity glowed in her eyes; her long hair swept away to the north, and turning toward the fiery tempest she bent forward as if looking for some one. But after a moment she sadly shook her head, as if she had sought in vain. Suddenly she reached out her white arms toward the fire, and sang, clear and sweet ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... New York, while the roar of Chicago is the stillness of a cathedral compared to it. And most of it, I may be allowed to state, is entirely unnecessary. The papers are full of accounts of nervous collapses, the sanatoria are crowded, while I never heard as much about insanity in the whole of my life elsewhere as I have heard in New York in one year. There is not a day in which the papers do not contain some mention of insane wards in the city hospitals, but people here are so accustomed to it, that no one except a newcomer ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell

... I served time for that out in Illinois!" For some strange reason all the insanity had gone ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... least excitement his malady would return. In conversation something of his old brilliancy would return in flashes. For the rest, the chimes in that high soul no longer played the music of reason, but gave out only the discords of insanity. He was never reduced to serious delirium or to violent frenzy, but he was an insane man; and under this shadow he walked for the greater part of ten years, during which Independence was declared and the Revolution fought out to a ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... regions of ability and inability, would much oftener give scope to personal and party attachments and enmities than advance the interests of justice or the public good. The result, except in the case of insanity, must for the most part be arbitrary; and insanity, without any formal or express provision, may be safely pronounced to be a ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... at the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity—which some thought would prove a magnificent one to him—of showing the grotesque side of insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities. A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine! Perhaps the piece itself was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... happy to find scarcely any objection to it. I shall have trouble with every other Northern Cabinet appointment—so much so that I shall have to defer them as long as possible to avoid being teased into insanity, to make changes. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... act of generosity would appear to Europeans well- nigh insanity, but it is quite in Arab manners. Witness the oft- quoted tale of Hatim and his horse. As a rule the Arab is the reverse of generous, contrasting badly, in this point, with his cousin the Jew: hence his ideal of generosity is of the very highest. "The generous (i.e. liberal) is Allah's ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... endure. Beyond question one of the greatest blessings that could now be conferred upon the race would be to cure it of the drink evil. But at the same time, if drink were taken away before the causes of drink were removed, there would be an appalling increase in suicide—in insanity, in the general total of human misery. For while drink retards the growth of intelligent effort to end the stupidities in the social system, does it not also help men and women to bear the consequences of those stupidities? Our crude and undeveloped ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... when we reached the appointed place. We found Captain Stanwick angry and suspicious; it was not easy to pacify him on the subject of our delay. His insanity seemed to me to be now more marked than ever. He had seen, or dreamed of seeing, the ghost during the past night. For the first time (he said) the apparition of the dead man had spoken to him. In solemn words it ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins

... like manner there are affective qualities and affections of the soul. That temper with which a man is born and which has its origin in certain deep-seated affections is called a quality. I mean such conditions as insanity, irascibility, and so on: for people are said to be mad or irascible in virtue of these. Similarly those abnormal psychic states which are not inborn, but arise from the concomitance of certain other elements, and are difficult to remove, or altogether permanent, are called qualities, for ...
— The Categories • Aristotle

... But in The Innocence of Father Brown these principles, almost the fundamental ones of literary decency, were put on the shelf. Chesterton's criminals are lunatics, perhaps it is his belief that crime and insanity are inseparable. But even if this last supposition is correct, its approval would not necessarily license the introduction of some of the characters. There is Israel Gow, who suffers from a peculiar mania which drives him to collect gold from places seemly and unseemly, even to the point of digging ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... Sir John had shrugged his. This was common sense carried to the verge of insanity. There must fall a time when there is no further room for reasoning, and surely it had ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... heads, and to give to one of those heads regal power without regal dignity, and to the other regal dignity without regal power? It was notorious that such an arrangement, even when made necessary by the infancy or insanity of a prince, had serious disadvantages. That times of Regency were times of weakness, of trouble and of disaster, was a truth proved by the whole history of England, of France, and of Scotland, and had almost become a proverb. Yet, in a case ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Jane's mind could be affected. Could insanity come on thus suddenly? There was a secret in Jane's life, and he himself had seen her only a few hours before overcome ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina

... attendance on a paralytic old mother, had stiffened as she stood, and the local mould encrusting her was very thick. Nevertheless, she too had a good heart if a rough hand, and, though eccentric almost to insanity, as one so often finds with people living out of the line and influence of public opinion, yet was as sound at the core as she was rude and odd ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... colleague, and furnished them with an excuse, by insinuating that Cleomenes had been corrupted by the Athenians. But Demaratus was little aware of the dark and deadly passions which Cleomenes combined with his constitutional insanity. Revenge made a great component of his character, and the Grecian history records few instances of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and the time-serving. But to accept military command without experience of war except as an observer, and to lead an untrained and unprepared mob from Western Europe to Palestine through difficulties of which, as a pilgrim, he had had experience, connotes insanity, or, at the ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell

... who have fallen from a state of sanity into a state of insanity. And with regard to these we must be guided by their wishes as expressed by them when sane: so that, if then they manifested a desire to receive Baptism, it should be given to them when in a state of madness or imbecility, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... since," I hazarded. "Will you pardon me if I put it now as a question? Your niece, Mrs. Jeffrey, seemed to have everything in the world to make her happy, yet she took her life. Was there a taint of insanity in her blood, or was her nature so impulsive that her astonishing death in so revolting a place should awaken in you ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green

... adverted to, as his decease took place some time before this period. During his residence in the colony, he had conducted himself with singular propriety of conduct; and, by his industry, had saved some money; but, for a considerable time previous to his death, he was in a state of insanity, and was constantly attended by a trusty person. The general opinion of those around him was, that he brought on this malady, so destructive to the majesty of man, by his serious and sorrowful reflexions on his former career of iniquity. ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann

... and the unthinking, from the pursuits of regular industry, into the vortex of wild adventure and exasperated passions. Like gambling, they ultimately create a necessity for constant vicious excitement. Like gambling, they often lead to poverty and despair, to insanity and to suicide. Like gambling, they furnish strong temptations to fraud, and theft, and drunkenness. Like gambling, they work, in but too many cases, a permanent depravation of all moral principle and all moral habits. This fearful parallel might easily be extended. The picture ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... death, others had their hands and feet frozen. The rebel guards would occasionally, and on the least pretence, fire into the prison from mere demonism and wantonness. All the horrors that can be named, starvation, lassitude, filth, vermin, despair, swift loss of self-respect, idiocy, insanity, and frequent murder, were there. Stansbury has a wife and child living in Newbern—has written to them from here—is in the U. S. light-house employ still—(had been home to Newbern to see his family, and on his return to the ship was captured in his boat.) Has seen men brought ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... pleasant promises until they are tested by performance, yet we approach this apparently new opportunity with the utmost seriousness. We must strive to break the calamitous cycle of frustrations and crises which, if unchecked, could spiral into nuclear disaster; the ultimate insanity. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... remains incomprehensible; and yet a child may acquire its secrets by its individual efforts. Spiritual power comes to those who seek it in proper mood, but, injudiciously exercised, may cause insanity." ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... may follow injury to any part of the brain, and it may come on either immediately or after an interval. It may or may not be associated with epilepsy. Any form of insanity may occur, either as a direct result of the trauma, or from the resistance of the brain being lowered by the injury in a patient predisposed to insanity. When insanity follows as a direct consequence of injury, the organic lesion is usually a superficial one, and the disturbance of brain ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... English ever be called cool and phlegmatic again? It is really a pity some metaphysicianising philosopher is not here to observe, describe, and theorise on the extraordinary symptoms and effects of enthusiasm, curiosity, insanity—I am sure I do not know what to ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

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

... whole North American continent, Canada is only exceeded by the States of New Hampshire and Connecticut, in the lists of insanity; and, to show that intemperance as well as climate has something to do with this melancholy result, I shall only state, without entering into details, that a well-informed resident has calculated that, when the province contained ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... l'Empereur' till those frowning mountains over there echo with my shouts—and I'll have none of your English stiffness and reserve and curbing of enthusiasm to-day. I am a lunatic if you will—an escaped lunatic—if to be mad with joy be a proof of insanity. Clyffurde, my dear friend," he added more soberly, "I am ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... Mumbo-Jumbo—whether tariff, railway, mesmerism, or California—and by detaching the object from its relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare, and a multitude go mad about it; and they are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude, who are kept from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But let one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its right neighbourhood and bearings, and the illusion vanishes—the returning reason of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various

... cases of self-mutilation, either to escape continued promptings and desires, or simply from a resulting species of insanity. Of the first, Sernin[33] reported to the Medical Society of Paris the case of a young priest who had castrated himself with the blade of a pair of scissors, and who nearly lost his life with the subsequent haemorrhage. ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... completely disheartened and despairing, goes into an adjoining room, and dies by his own hand, to the consternation of the men from whom he has just parted. They give utterance to a few polite phrases, charitably accounting for the deed by the easy attribution of insanity to the king, and ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... of a consequence which no one would have thought of deducing,—setting up an absurdum on purpose to hunt it down,—placing guards as it were at the very outposts of possibility,—gravely giving out laws to insanity and prescribing moral fences to distempered intellects, could never have entered into a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller or Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

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

... of emotional insanity that you relieved the lady of her pocketbook?" asked Mr. Waterbury, bent on ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger

... inexorably did she extort the uttermost penny from him. About this time she was introduced to an eminent medical specialist in mental diseases, who, by some inexplicable means, was induced to give a certificate of her insanity. Then her cousins took her before a justice, and swore that she was an indigent lunatic, upon which showing the court issued an order of committal to an asylum. A few days before her contemplated abduction, the lawyer induced her to board at the Astor House, and on the morning of February ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... would have appeared a base desertion. He had understood at last that there was nothing to expect from a longer stay, neither accounts nor money, nor truth of any sort, but he stayed on, exasperating Cornelius to the verge, I won't say of insanity, but almost of courage. Meantime he felt all sorts of dangers gathering obscurely about him. Doramin had sent over twice a trusty servant to tell him seriously that he could do nothing for his safety unless he would recross the river again ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

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

... as Dudley Carleton, while admitting the man's intellectual power and unequalled services, could see nothing in the Advocate's present course but prejudice, obstinacy, and the insanity of pride. "He doth no whit spare himself in pains nor faint in his resolution," said the Envoy, "wherein notwithstanding he will in all appearance succumb ere afore long, having the disadvantages of a weak body, a weak ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... nights to be broken by the groans of maniacs, and my days devoured in a solitude that loathes the aspect of things around me? Am I mad? You know I am not! It is an old trick to say that poets are mad,—you mistake our agonies for insanity. See, I am calm; I can reason: give me any test of sound mind—no matter how rigid—I will pass it; I am not mad,—I ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... her undiscovered, boundless, bottomless Night-empire; that you may extort new Wisdom out of it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus. The higher the Wisdom, the closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere Insanity; literally so;—and thou wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this world, has oftentimes carried such tinctures and adhesions of Insanity still cleaving ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... temples, fixed but dead and unmeaning eyes, half opened and formless mouths, indicating even to childhood the absence of that intellectual light, which in those who possess it shines through the features. Insanity also was there, that most dreadful infliction of Providence; the purpose of which lies hidden in the darkness which surrounds His throne. Its unhappy subject was with them, but not of them. His eyes were fixed upon the scene, but the uncertain fire which illumined his ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... "An amiable insanity," answered Warrington. "He never did anybody harm by his talk, or said evil of anybody. He is a stout politician too, and would never write a word or do an act against his party, as many ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... have had more than a hand in it. This was Bonaventure Desperiers, a man whose history is as obscure as his works are interesting. Born in or about the year 1500, he committed suicide in 1544, either during a fit of insanity, or, as has been thought more likely, in order to escape the danger of the persecution which, in the last years of the reign of Francis, threatened the unorthodox, and which Margaret, who had more than once warded it off from them, was then powerless to avert. Desperiers, to speak ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre

... merely awaiting its splendid destiny, quite unconscious of the future. The Hamilton boys were no doubt as extravagant and thriftless as they were insane, but the Careys sympathized with their extravagance and thriftlessness and insanity so heartily, in this particular, that they could hardly conceal their real feelings from Bill Harmon. Nothing could so have accorded with their secret desires as the "fool changes" made by the "crazy Hamilton boys"; light-hearted, ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... in arrogant self-esteem, Germany's greatness in the modest appreciation of everything foreign. England is self-seeking to the point of insanity, Germany is just even to self-depreciation.—TH. FONTANE (about 1854), ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various

... he is gaining power over my heart, whilst I am preparing torments for his; he fancies that he is throwing chains round me, whilst I am rivetting fetters from which he will in vain attempt to escape. He is proud, and has the insanity of desiring to be exclusively beloved, yet affects to set no value upon the preference that is shown to him; appears satisfied with his own approbation, and stoically all-sufficient to his own happiness. Leonora does not know how to manage his temper, but ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... his visit, he never doubted one moment that the poor fellow had gone completely mad. He was at first tempted to ring the bell and have him put out; but, noticing his firm demeanor, his determined look, the fermier-general took pity on so inoffensive a case of insanity. He merely told his daughter to retire, so that she might be no longer exposed to ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... wasn't any remote-control guided missile. I'll say it again; it would be sheer insanity. Suppose that thing had crashed in Macon. At that speed it could have plowed its way for blocks, right through the buildings. It could have killed hundreds of people, burned the ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe

... sick who landed at Cumana was a negro, who fell into a state of insanity a few days after our arrival; he died in that deplorable condition, though his master, almost seventy years old, who had left Europe to settle at San Blas, at the entrance of the gulf of California, had attended ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... families but united in death; Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the ambitious criminals; Hamlet, the young man with a great mind and a great heart but with a feeble will which collapses under too heavy a task and comes to the verge of insanity; Cordelia, the English Antigone, the devoted daughter of the proscribed King Lear; Falstaff, glutton, coward, diverting and gay, a kind of Anglo-Saxon Panurge. A whole dramatic literature has come from Shakespeare. To France ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... fail me, I find. As to insanity in the sense intended by Gulielmus, namely, as 'mania',—I should as little think of charging Swedenborg with it, as of calling a friend mad who ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... attitudes of Nemorino Brignoli, contrasting, as they did, with the ardent pantomime of Adina R., who looked by his side like a wounded lioness. Poor woman! What has been your fate? The glossy tresses of which you were so proud in your scenes of insanity, those tresses that brought down the house when your talent might have failed to do so, are now frosted with the snow of years. Your husband has forsaken you. After a long career of success, he has buried his fame under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... iii. 519-524.]—a stupid and pointless vulgarism—and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language". The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised not to find him told, as he was by Blackwood, to "go back to the shop, Mr. John; back to the plasters, pills, and ointment-boxes". [Footnote: Quarterly Review, xix. 204. See Blackwood, vol. iii. 524; where the Reviewer ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... since become a well-anchored creed that William II. has occasional fits of insanity. This is by no means the case, but it must be admitted that the peculiar malady to which I referred above, and which is as yet not eradicated from his system, causes him, at times, days of the most excruciating pains all over the back and side of his head, and it is scarcely ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... guilt. I need not go into particulars. You know to what I refer—the ruin of an innocent, confiding young man, your daughter's husband. I do not wonder that he lost his reason! But I have information that his insanity has taken on the mildest form, and that his friends are only keeping him at the hospital until they can get a pardon from the governor. It is in your power and mine to establish his innocence at once. I leave you a single mouth in which to do this, ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur

... Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot. Out of this experience of hard life and harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas—perhaps the greatest this story of the skipper's wife who insisted on making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of insanity by months of ice-bound solitude. The motive of Captain Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay. Against his iron determination his wife's piteous pleading and evident suffering are more potent than the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... most disastrous period of its history. He ascended the throne in 1380, when only thirteen years of age. In 1385 he married Isabella of Bavaria, who was equally remarkable for her beauty and her depravity. The unfortunate king was subject to fits of insanity, which lasted for several months at a time. On the 21st October, 1422, seven years after the battle of Agincourt, Charles VI. ended his unhappy life at the age of 55, having reigned 42 years. Lewis the Dauphin was the eldest son of Charles VI. He was born 22nd ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare

... ago," I continued, "we parted, and he has fled, branded as a criminal in my eyes, by evidence which no one can doubt. I am alone, despondent, and insanity or hard work must be my escape. As I cannot get my mind on my business, I fear the worst. The blow is more ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... Rev. Mr. Mackenzie of North Leith—"he was a profound divine, an eloquent preacher, a deeply-experienced Christian, and, withal, a classical scholar, a popular poet, a man of original genius, and eminently a man of prayer." And his poor sister Isabel, though grievously vexed at times by a dire insanity, seemed to have received from nature powers mayhap not inferior ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... the stretcher, because his sobbing wrenched and tore his body so that the bearers could not control him otherwise. Something inexpressibly hideous—so it was said—had half robbed the poor devil of his reason, and the Frau Major suddenly dreaded a fit of insanity. She pinched the cavalryman's arm and exclaimed with a ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... Beyond Good and Evil there is an apophthegm to the effect that, "Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." And whilst, on the one hand mental specialists have been extending the boundaries of insanity to the point of justifying ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... propensities which lead him astray. In this, indeed, he will have dreadfully descended to the miserable level of the theologian, but he will nevertheless find him the partner of his folly—the partaker of his insanity—the companion of ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... merit to the practice of drinking, and which had a most injurious effect. I am afraid some of the Pleydells of the old school would have looked with the most ineffable contempt on the degeneracy of the present generation in this respect, and that the temperance movement would be little short of insanity in their eyes; and this leads me to a remark.—In considering this portion of the subject, we should bear in mind a distinction. The change we now speak of involves more than a mere change of a ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay

... understand the silence and sternness of the Norwegians, when he has travelled this road. But I would not wish my worst enemy to spend more than one summer as a solitary herdsman on these hills. Let any disciple of Zimmerman try the effect of such a solitude. The statistics of insanity in Norway exhibit some of its effects, and that which is most common is most destructive. There never was a greater humbug than the praise of solitude: it is the fruitful mother of all evil, and no man covets it who has not something bad or morbid ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... helped him out of the waggon she had said: "Are you prepared? I thought not; but there's no time to lose. Remember there are aged parents; two brothers living—one railroading in Spokane Falls, the other clerking in Washington, D.C. Don't mention the Universalists—there's be'n two in the fam'ly; nor insanity—there's be'n one o' them. The girl in the corner is the one that the remains has be'n keeping comp'ny with. If you can make some genteel allusions to her, it'll be much appreciated ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin

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

... heaven, but not the capacity for loving, except so far as he acts according to his understanding. Any apparent wisdom, therefore, which does not make one with the love of wisdom, sinks back into the love which does make one with it; and this may be a love of unwisdom, yea, of insanity. Thus a man may know from wisdom that he ought to do this or that, and yet he does not do it, because he does not love it. But so far as a man does from love what wisdom teaches, he is an image ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg

... a fit of maniacal insanity he flung himself over the rocks into the sea. Another that he was shot by one of the mutineers whilst digging ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various



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



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