"Lunacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allotriophagical symptoms, a consequence of his ascetical mode of living; nymphomania of old age; hypochondriacal fancies: all symptoms that are frequently found together. To second his morbid intention of changing his diet and habits would be sheer lunacy; nay, worse, it would be actual murder. Yet first I must win his confidence as a physician, so that he may trust me and take my advice. I embraced him, and thanked him most heartily and tenderly for his kind intentions, ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... his prejudices? He hated Moses for his fate, and Rebekkah for her forms of worship. He was insane on Judaism. He was a monomaniacal Gentile. Who could make out a mental diagnosis, or anticipate the conduct of a mule afflicted with religious lunacy? Well for your correspondent had he discovered beforehand the bias of the brute, or suspected he was a quadruped zealot! Much might have been saved to him, and more to a number of unoffending gentlemen from church, ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... in the first rank, but attractive by reason of their relation to the spirit of their age, and of the seal of intimite set upon their work have passed. In the last century and the beginning of this, our present preoccupation with Botticelli would have passed for a mild lunacy, because he has none of the qualities then most in vogue and most enthusiastically studied, and because the moment in the history of culture he so faithfully represents, was then but little understood. The prophecy of Mr. Ruskin, the tendencies of our best contemporary art in Mr. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... sae when King Charles the Second came in, wha was in sic favour as the laird of Redgauntlet? He was knighted at Lonon Court, wi' the king's ain sword; and being a red-hot prelatist, he came down here, rampauging like a lion, with commission of lieutenancy (and of lunacy, for what I ken), to put down a' the Whigs and Covenanters in the country. Wild wark they made of it; for the Whigs were as dour as the Cavaliers were fierce, and it was which should first tire the other. Redgauntlet was aye ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... manager. Up by daybreak, after Communion she soaps and washes all the linen herself, makes the sheets and shirts, mends the Abbe's gowns, and lives with amazing economy, while taking care that her master wants for nothing. Such a sagacious apprehension of the conduct of life has no connection with lunacy or delirium." ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Burke said that few are the partisans of a tyranny that has departed: he might have added that fewer still are the critics of a tyranny that has remained. Burke certainly was not one of them. While lashing himself into a lunacy against the French Revolution, which only very incidentally destroyed the property of the rich, he never criticised (to do him justice, perhaps never saw) the English Revolution, which began with ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... expression at all in his voice. "They used to put lunatics in snake-pits. When they were people who'd taken to lunacy for escape from reality, it made them go back to reality to escape from the snakes. Shock-treatments used to be used, later, for the same effect. We're too soft to use either treatment now. But Johnny gave himself the works. The odds are that from now ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Under the pressure of the present necessity he felt able to accomplish better things. Something must be done which would produce fifteen, or at least ten, dollars a week. It was no use to think it couldn't be done; it must be done. It looked like a species of lunacy on his part to flatter himself that it was possible to make even more than a ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... seconded Mr. Gordon's Bill, and first came publicly forward in support of measures designed to advance the interests of the insane. A laborious and sometimes fruitless examination of Hansard, from the earliest period of lunacy legislation, has been necessary in order to present a continuous narrative of the successive steps by which so great a ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... the administration department went down and all the wards in that part of the building collapsed. Twelve attendants were killed and Dr. Kelly, second assistant physician, was crushed to death. There were 1,100 patients in the hospital. C. L. Seardee, secretary of the state commission in lunacy, who was in Agnews and attending to official business, declared that it was a marvel that many more were not killed. Dr. T. W. Hatch, superintendent of the state hospitals for insane, was in charge of ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... priest of Such-zen looking for a River, address care of Tirthankars' Temple, Benares. P. M.—Please note boy is apple of eye, and rupees shall be sent per hoondi three hundred per annum. For God Almighty's sake." Now, is that ravin' lunacy or a business proposition? I ask you, because I'm fairly at my ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... title of it, as a feather in one's cap, is worth nothing to Sigismund. And he is still short of money; and will forever be. Why could not he give up Brandenburg altogether; since, instead of paying, he is still making new loans from Burggraf Friedrich; and the hope of ever paying were mere lunacy! Sigismund revolves these sad thoughts too, amid his world-wide diplomacies, and efforts to heal the Church. "Pledged for one hundred thousand gulden," sadly ruminates Sigismund; "and fifty thousand more borrowed since, by little and little; and more ever needed, especially ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a vicious institution, that was but another phase of the partial lunacy which affected him: for to no man were purity and fidelity more essential elements in the idea of real love. Again, De Quincey speaks of Shelley's "fearlessness, his gracious nature, his truth, his purity from all ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... can do nothing with Mr. Dartrey. He has just decided that our whole scheme of life is absurd, that politics and power are shadows, and that work for others is lunacy. All that he wants is your cottage, a fishing rod and ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mass of foliage. Dozens of similar examples might be cited, of the most extraordinary invention, which the metal-workers of the seventeenth century particularly gave their imaginations licence to construct. Indeed, the German artists of that period seem to have had a spice of lunacy in their compositions, and the works of Breughel were rivalled and outdone by many others whose fancies were of most unearthly type. Salvator Rosa in Italy, and Callot in France, occasionally depicted what their grotesque and mystic imaginings suggested, and Teniers ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... Horace Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... he is no worse; but as ill-used as ever—mewed up, kept in solitary confinement. They mean to make either an idiot or a maniac of him, and take out a commission of lunacy. Horsfall starves him; you ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Loveyet, you run on in such a surprising manner with your narrations, imprecations, admirations, and interrogations, that, upon my education, sir, I believe you are approaching to insanity, frenzy, lunacy, madness, distraction,—a ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... when the auld man had gone ashore: 'We're to creep round a' the south coast, standin' in for orders his weather, too. There's no question o' his lunacy now.' ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In truth, Merimee was the unconscious parent of much we may think of dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred, and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of maliciously ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... without any of the power to prophesy like her, or to construct a connected sentence like anybody else. We have already had a Monomaniac; and we designate you 'The Mad Poet of the Batch;' as being mad not in one direction only, but in all. A little lunacy, like a little knowledge, would be ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... he, interrupting her and pushing back her hands, "what lunacy are you uttering? Do you imagine that I go about fiddling for ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... indicative of elegance, of taste, of refinement, of wit, of intelligence. Weakly marked eyebrows indicate a feeble constitution and a tendency to melancholia, Deep sunken eyes are selfish, while eyes in which the whole iris shows indicate erraticism, if not lunacy. Round eyes are indicative of innocence; strongly protuberant eyes of weakness of both mind and body. Eyes small and close together typify cunning, while those far apart and open indicate frankness. The normal distance between the eyes is ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... into his confidence,' returned the lawyer. 'But I may say one thing: if he's your advertiser (and he may be, for he seems to have been seized with criminal lunacy) you can go ahead with a clear conscience, for I hold him in ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... seated on horseback a few paces off, had a mind to ride forward and protest. To his mind the order spelt sheer lunacy. The barrier, to begin with, stood close on twenty feet high, built of rough timbers staked in the ground and densely packed with furze. Nothing could be seen behind it but the top of the second barrier, which at fifty yards distance guarded the approach from Helleston. ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... obliged to Confederate with Nature, and with-hold the Birth-right of Brains, which otherwise the young Gentleman might have enjoy'd, to the great support of his Family and Posterity. Thus the famous Waller, Denham, Dryden, and sundry Others, were oblig'd to condemn their Race to Lunacy and Blockheadism, only to prevent the fatal Destruction of their Families, and entailing the Plague of Wit ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... wife, must have something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged—a fate which is partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives so plainly or so practically put before ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... most portentous pauses (which a delectable and lazy conference of leaves made eloquent) because of many unfinished sentences. "Oh, YOU know what I mean, dear!" one would say as a last resort. And she-why, bless her heart! of course, she always did. . . . Heigho, youth's was a pleasant lunacy. . . . ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the hall door. "Very good!" he observed with grim determination. "I think he'll cure your lunacy." ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... rather too skeptical. Well, Mr. Cathcart believes both in indigestion, so to speak, and the devil. He believes that those evil spirits are at us all the time, trying to get in at any crack they can find—that in one person they produce lunacy—I must say it seems to me rather odd the way in which lunatics so very often become horribly blasphemous and things like that—and in another just shattered nerves, and so on. They take advantage, he says, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... you to work your way out upon that limb as far as you can. If you see anything strange, let me know." By this time what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity, was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's voice was ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual talk. Then he remembered—in his surprise he had lost sight of it—that Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre discourse was probably the effect of the girl. Davidson shook off the absurd feeling, and asked, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... heartless lunacy that runs through the sickly plagiarism of the Book of Mormon, pervades all this, and instead of the odor of sanctity you notice the flavor of bilge water, and the emigrant's own hailing sign, the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... must say it sounds like lunacy. But all Almo's words and all the small details of his behavior show no signs of derangement. Up to the last report he slept well, ate well, looked well, talked sensibly, in respect to all minor matters acted like a rational being, and seemed to thrive. But ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... regard to your daughter-in-law. I shall be waiting to see you at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. The matter is so utterly vital to the happiness of all your family, that I cannot imagine you will fail to come." Now, what's the meaning of it? Is it sheer impudence, or lunacy, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a liven soul, gentle or simple, can stand on level ground. As to getten up hill to the church, 'tis perfect lunacy. And I speak of foot-passengers. As to horses and carriage, 'tis murder to think of 'em. I am going to send straight as a line into the breakfast-room, and say 'tis a closer.... Hullo—here's Clerk Crickett and John Day a-comen! Now just look at 'em and picture a wedden ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents, or from any ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in their blood, but they do receive from their progenitors certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould, fix and shape their ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... feel sure that, however others may have referred it to stupidity, ignorance, or lunacy, you took it as the sign of a modest, simple, unspoiled, unsophisticated soul. Absolute confidence in such matters comes dangerously near audacity and impudence. My first wish would be to make no such blunder; my second ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... brainless observer you may be quite right. I may be a lunatic. I feel much like one just now. It is lunacy to go climbing back to a level in society from which I have been kicked. But as I knelt there by that little fire, before you came, yearning sprang up in me—and I had thought all that sort of yearning was dead ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... as well as a beautifier, and the old fancy of partial madness when the moon was at the full (from which the word "lunacy") was not altogether unwarranted by reality. At sea, in the tropics, a night on deck under the broad full moon stiffens and entirely maddens, if it does not kill; here the madness is only partial and it has a general reference to mischief and the opposite sex; but the influence is the ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... back, remembering the tales that Mrs. Jobson had told, and not being by any means sure but that the Colonel was in a dangerous condition of lunacy. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... off on a further search. "First" has no other intelligible sense or meaning than this. "First" in relation to a given cluster of phenomenon we may grant; "First" in the sense of calling for no further explanation is downright theological lunacy. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... hand, certain plants have been credited at most periods with hurtful and injurious properties. Thus, there is a popular idea that during the flowering of the bean more cases of lunacy occur than at any other season. [17] It is curious to find the apple—such a widespread curative—regarded as a bane, an illustration of which is given by Mr. Conway. [18] In Swabia it is said that an apple plucked from a graft on the whitethorn will, if eaten by a pregnant woman, increase her pains. ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the present inhabitants of England are mentally fit, and could therefore not have descended from an ancestry of undiluted lunacy he brushes aside with the assertion that insanity is not necessarily hereditary; and that even though it was, in many cases a return to natural conditions from the state of high civilization, which is thought to have induced ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in use, pure, duke, tune, tube, blue, duty, flew, new, student, subdue, pursue, absolute, illumine, tumult, suit, during, pursuit, presume, lunacy, Tuesday, numeral. ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... also because I had reached the conclusion that he was simply a shallow dissembler and rascal. In a minute more I had cause to reconsider my charge of hypocrisy, and to question whether he might not lay claim to the nobler distinction of lunacy. The conductor came down the car, picking out Troubletonians with his undeceivable eye, and leaned toward us with outstretched fingers. Mr. Riley rose to his whole gaunt height at a jerk, and laid his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... and seized the required number, including their owners. I engaged two wild young Arabs of eighteen and twenty years of age, named Bacheet and Wat Gamma: the latter being interpreted signifies "Son of the Moon." This in no way suggests lunacy, but the young Arab had happened to enter this world on the day of the new moon, which was considered to be a particularly fortunate and brilliant omen at his birth. Whether the climax of his good fortune had arrived at the moment ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... we are permitted to know what took place—for the House of Commons had another Secret Session—in both Houses it was Ireland, Ireland all the way. The Commons began by granting a return relating to Irish Lunacy accounts, and then by an easy transition passed to the report of the Sinn Fein rebellion ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... them—like the unscrupulous God-forsaken clerk that he is—he will defend himself as though it were the Peace for which he was being tried. Not that he wishes to account for more than is charged against him—that would be lunacy. No! He sees rather that in all his own proceedings no good can be found—that his crimes are his whole history; while a defence of the Peace, if it has no other merits, has at least the kindly sound of the name to recommend it. {96} I fear, indeed, men of Athens, I fear that, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... before they turned the lights out and went up-stairs it was thoroughly understood between them that Mrs. Vertrees should seek the earliest opportunity to obtain definite information from Sibyl Sheridan concerning the mental and physical status of Bibbs. And if he were subject to attacks of lunacy, the unhappy pair decided to prevent the sacrifice they supposed their daughter intended to make of herself. Altogether, if there were spiteful ghosts in the old house that night, eavesdropping upon the woeful comedy, they must ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... had not considered the subject in that light, and had founded his conclusions on the alleged lunacy of the bull, he allowed himself to be put down for the present. But he sat turning it over in his mind, with such an obvious intention of fixing Mrs Pipchin presently, that even that hardy old lady deemed it prudent to retreat until he ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... might, the knowledge came to her that Mariana and a Polder—that name she never repeated—a married Polder without his wife, were poking over the hills together at Shadrach? She would have him, Howat, examined for lunacy. Mariana demanded too much. He told her this with ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... people stare by doing better than others, why, make them stare till they stare their eyes out. But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes. You remember the gentleman in The Spectator, who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap. Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... an Appeal in Lunacy. No other appeals save in Lunacy lie from the Court of Chancery to the King in Council, and these are very rare. Drax v. Grosvenor is reported in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... head, "I fear your charge of lunacy will not stand upon such ground as that. 'Tis ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... age of forty-five, I succeeded in achieving the most sublime folly of my life. I should have taken a degree in madness and been raised to a professor's chair in some college of lunacy! Herbert, at the age of forty-five I fell in love with and married a girl of sixteen out of a log cabin! merely, forsooth, because she had a pearly skin like the leaf of the white japonica, soft gray eyes like a timid ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... my brain," Thomson continued, "a secret weakness, perhaps even a dash of lunacy, and I might be quite reasonably the master-spy of the world. I was in Berlin six weeks ago, Ambrose. There wasn't a soul who ever knew it. I made no ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... action was brought which resulted in the affirmation of the mother's right to its custody. The circumstance in which a fourth sister who joined the community was abducted by her brothers led to an inquiry in lunacy and to her final settlement at Spaxton. A few years after the establishment of the "Abode of Love,'' a peculiarly gross scandal, in which Prince and one of his female followers were involved, led to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... enough for you to try to prevent your ruining your life by a single piece of lunacy," he told her as he sought to steady her with the directness of his gaze. "You don't have to go on with Holbury if you choose to leave him, but this is the one place of all others for you to avoid." He cast a hasty glance about ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... boys among these men who, in spite of their lunacy, had an eye to business, and begged pathetically for coppers, though of what use they could be to them in that place I cannot imagine. I saw no girls under twelve years of age. There were several boys who appeared ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... from thinking of itself, because such work, not being of a religious character, partook of the nature of sin. It is no wonder that such a rule of life had not infrequently the most distressing consequences. Newton himself admits that his preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy. In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one poor victim to an asylum he says: "I hope the poor girl is not without some concern for her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. I believe," he continues, "my name is up about the county ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... heart—" But still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this,—looked on it amazed, and at last their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... tempers. 'I would add a touch of earthquake, Miss Ilchester, just to make sure that all the party know one another's edges before starting.' This was too far a shot of nonsense for Janet, whose native disposition was to refer to lunacy or stupidity, or trickery, whatsoever was novel to her understanding. 'I, for my part,' said he, 'stipulate to have for comrade no man who fancies himself a born and stamped chieftain, no inveterate student of maps, and no dog with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... very wild improbable circumstance were to occur, I should be heartily sorry for poor Adelais! Only imagine me with such a wife as she would make! Why I wouldn't have so transparent, white- skinned a beauty about my house all day for a mine of gold! I should be seized with lunacy before long, through mere contemplation of her very unearthliness, and be goaded into fancying her a picture, and hanging her up framed and glazed over my drawing-room mantelpiece! No, no, I'll leave Miss Cameron ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... under it, that prescribes the rule to govern conduct and warns against transgression.[810] In contrast, the Court sustained as neither too vague nor indefinite a State law which provided for commitment of a psychopathic personality by probate action akin to a lunacy proceeding, and which was construed by the State court as including those persons who, by habitual course of misconduct in sexual matters, have evidenced utter lack of power to control their sexual impulses and are likely to inflict injury. The underlying conditions, i.e., habitual course of misconduct ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... was clearly useless to resist a legalised process, I gave in, and thus was I, a perfectly sane man, incarcerated in a lunatic asylum! There I had to remain while Sir Lockesley saw my solicitors, communicated with the Commissioners in Lunacy and others, and after much correspondence and innumerable interviews, at last secured my release; but not until I had endured more than a week's confinement in that ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... self-expression, is very 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 ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Anything in the wide world. He could have gone to the world's end. I would have helped him. I made him, didn't I, Polly? Didn't I create that man? Doesn't he owe everything to me? And to reward me, just when everything was nicely arranged, by this lunacy that ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... is possessed only by him who is afflicted over much with himself because he has been crazed by others and made mad by his escape from them. I suppose I am mad, for to believe myself perfectly sane in a greatly mad world is surely a subtle species of lunacy. And yet I am compelled to act towards others as if they were more sane than I. To feel as if one were eternally in a court-room trial, with lean lunatics for lawyers and fat philistines for judges, this ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... little, mentally a good deal at sight of the others' torments— but only from time to time. By the fourth day (the eleventh after the Eurotas went down) we were all more or less mad, I reckon. But my lunacy took the form of light-headedness with a strange, almost persistent, sense of exaltation. I kept my strength so much better than they that almost unconsciously they left most of the trimming and steering in my ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and destruction on my household gods—did he think that, in less than three years, a natural event—a severe domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road, or stamp his name in a Verdict of Lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary * * *) reflect or consider what my feeling must have been, when wife, and child, and sister, and name, and fame, and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health was declining, my fortune embarrassed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... more gracious in her own house. I have her formal word that I am to come. Soon, not too soon, I will come over; and you shall meet me and take me to see her. There is something in her opposition that I can't fathom: I wondered twice was lunacy her notion: she looked at ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... said Aubrey. "Let's get back to Brooklyn as soon as we can. God only knows what may have happened. Fool that I was, to go away and leave those women all alone. Triple-distilled lunacy!" ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Does not lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... unpoetical past all degree, never leave it except to get drunk. Their money gone, back they go to get fresh strength and more pelf for another orgie; but if by chance they abandon the wild, free life, they soon drink themselves to lunacy or death, and their last babblings are of the glorious wilderness they all love." [Footnote: "The Great Deserts and Forests of North America," p. 22.] This is the too exuberant expression of one who had probably never had a hearth of his own in France, but it gives some intimation ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... tolerate any man's difference of opinion, but let him tell it me without getting himself up as a lunatic. At this stage of the world, if a man wants to be taken seriously, he must keep clear of melodrama. Don't misunderstand me. I am not suspecting you of setting up any lunacy on your own account. I only think you might easily be led arm in arm with a lunatic, especially if he wanted defending. You have a passion for people who are pelted, Dan. I'm sorry for them too; but so far as company goes, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the Turkish Knight with three attendant monsters, severally named the Good, the Beyootiful, and the Ter-rew, and representing in themselves the current forms of Religion, Art, and Science. These three Snt George successively challenges, tackles, and flattens out—the first as lunacy, the second as harlotry, the third as witchcraft. But even so the play would not be long enough had I not padded a good deal of buffoonery into the scene where the five corpses ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... cheaper; and as to making the slightest difference in style on account of our late pursuits, as whether, for instance, we were a retired candlestick-maker, or a Lord Chancellor, or a physician, the very idea would savour of lunacy. Not so Jacques Coeur. This man wished, in dying, to leave a beautiful shell behind him, so that the passers-by might say: 'Here lived a great merchant; he had a wife, sons, and a daughter, and numerous domestics. He liked his money, but loved art more. He kept a negro; he ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... "enlist our strongest and angriest feelings. It is held that only wickedness or lunacy can resist the evidence that has convinced a vast majority. By arithmetical calculation the chances that twelve men are wrong and twelve thousand [11] right, on a matter of inductive or deductive proof, are found to amount to what must be taken for practical certainty; ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... danseuse could not throw a glance to the conductor of the band without the juggler being jealous, the Variety Profession was coming to a pretty pass. She also remarked that for a girl to entrust her life's happiness to a jealous man would be an act of lunacy. And then "Little Flouflou, the Juggling Genius," who was dying to marry her, would suffer tortures. He tried hard to conquer his failing, but it must be owned that Clairette's glances were very expressive, and that she distributed them indiscriminately. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... replied: 'A conviction of your lunacy would prevent my taking offence, though I might wish you enclosed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... below the circles of fire. Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay for seven hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and always we said no. Yet there was nothing I should have liked better: I was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That day we had advanced 11/2 miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay work. This was quite a good march—and Cape Crozier is 67 ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... sort of pre-Raphaelite tendency which does not suit my aged feelings. I am for Love, or the World well lost. But I forget that, if I live beyond the 21st of next November, I shall be seventy-four years of age. I have been obliged to resign my Commissionership of Lunacy, not being able to bear the pain of travelling. By this I lose about L900 a year. I am, therefore, sufficiently poor, even for a poet. Browning, as you know, has lost his wife. He is coming with ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Portsmouth (see 'Letters', vol. i. p. 9, 'note' 2 [Footnote 3 of Letter 3]), who had long known the Hansons, from whose house he married his first wife, married, March 7, 1814, Mary Anne, eldest daughter of John Hanson. A commission of lunacy was taken out by the brother and next heir, the Hon. Newton Fellowes; but Lord Chancellor Eldon decided that Lord Portsmouth was capable of entering into the marriage contract and managing his own affairs. The commission was, however, ultimately granted. Byron swore an affidavit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... forfeited by the sovereign: that to dethrone a king and to elect his successor, was a practice quite unknown to the constitution, and had a tendency to render kingly power entirely dependent and precarious: that where the sovereign, from his tender years, from lunacy, or from other natural infirmity, was incapacitated to hold the reins of government, both the laws and former practice agreed in appointing a regent, who, during the interval, was invested with the whole power of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... spirituality, as to natural physical health. It is no use saying they are so few. Two millenniums ago, how many were the Anglo-Saxons? Three millenniums ago, how many were the Latins? Supposing the white race in America failed. The statistics of lunacy—of that alone—are a fearful Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision to read. I think Naure must also take into account these possibilities. Does she keep in reserve hereditary streams and racial stocks other than her great and main ones, in case of accidents? ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... term "Insane Diathesis." This diathesis may be inherited or acquired. Those who are born to become insane do not necessarily spring from insane parents or from an ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in the blood. But they do receive from their progenitors oftentimes certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as upon their physical being, which impressions, like iron molds, fix ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... is very bad for any man not to have a fixed occupation; however great his natural energy may be, it either relaxes with time, or expends itself uselessly. The mere thinker often ends by hovering on the confines of lunacy. ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... attempt to absolve himself or mitigate his offense by telling her that he loved her. He was voiceless—he could not control his speech. He did not dare to show such presumption as talk of love must seem to be to her. He knew he must not speak of love; such proffer to her would be lunacy. But this greater presumption, this blind capture of her in his arms—this was something which he had not intended any more than a sane man considers flight ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Fancy lunacy, etc., coming out of the primary fact that one's nth ancestor lived between tide-marks! I declare it's the grandest suggestion I have heard of for ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... squat little man rolled forward, affectionate concern on his great ugly face, and he set one of his podgy hands on his godson's shoulder. "Now listen to me, Andre," he reasoned. "This is sheer knight-errantry—moonshine, lunacy. You'll come to no good by it if you persist. You've read 'Don Quixote,' and what happened to him when he went tilting against windmills. It's what will happen to you, neither more nor less. Leave things as they are, my boy. I wouldn't have ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... are pretenders in a double sense," said one of the party; "they can do nothing which it is worth one's while to be made a dupe by. The humblest wayside juggler in India could mystify them to the verge of lunacy." ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... goal of human endeavour on that day of long ago when she named her first-born Samuel? Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the self-willed peasant-mind? Was it whim or fancy?—the one streak of lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind? Or, reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... chez les Grecs: 6 tomes: Groningue—1840), alleges a case (which, however, we do not remember to have met) where the client ventured to object:—"Mon roi Apollon, je crois que tu es fou." But cases are obvious which look this way, though not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord of prophetic vision. Battus, who was destined to be the eldest father of Cyrene, so memorable as the first ground of Greek intercourse with the African shore of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the floor as if her awkward body were a burden. "Is the instant response to an obvious truth—platitude even—always a diagnosis of lunacy? I state a thought so old no one knows who first expressed it and a hearer feels bound to choose between offense to himself and contempt for the speaker. Believe me, Weener, I was offering no exclusive indictment: I too am guilty—infinitely ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... afraid that in this respect I resemble Gontcharov, whom I don't like, who is ten heads taller than I am in talent. I have not enough passion; add to that this sort of lunacy: for the last two years I have for no reason at all ceased to care about seeing my work in print, have become indifferent to reviews, to literary conversations, to gossip, to success and failure, to good pay—in short, I have gone downright silly. There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... of that name, and other resinous plants, curing ulcerated lungs, &c. Sardinia, melancholy and madness, replanted with true Anticyran hellebore, was famous; whilst Thusus (especially in Summer) brought almost all the inhabitants to lunacy and distraction for want of it. And what the effects and benefit of such plantations have produc'd, is conspicuous in one of the most celebrated cities of the East, the famous Ispahan, clear'd of the pestilence, since the surrounding ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Smith is about to run for a special licence in order to marry one of the women in the house, and the other boarders have just paired off when a telegram posted by one of the ladies in a misapprehension brings two lunacy experts around in a cab. Smith adds to the excitement of the moment by putting a couple of bullets through a ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... operation; it may destroy the lives of some, and the senses of others; but either of these effects will answer the purposes of the ministry, to whom it is indifferent, provided the nation becomes insensible, whether pestilence or lunacy prevails among them. Either mad or dead, the greatest part of the people must quickly be, or there is no hope of the continuance of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... "Lunacy is mighty becoming, Polly. Try it again," answered Tom, watching her as she went laughing away, looking all the prettier for her dishevelment. "Dress that girl up, and she 'd be a raving, tearing ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... an annual cost of $16,000. In it nothing European, either in the way of drugs or treatment, is tried. There is a dispensary connected with it, where advice is daily given to about a hundred and twenty people; and, though lunacy is rare in China, they are building a lunatic asylum at the back ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... was so at variance with Mr. Athel's views of life that it made him seriously uncomfortable. It suggested criminality, or at least lunacy, both such very unpleasant things to be even remotely connected with. Poverty he could pardon, but suicide was really disreputable. From the philosophic resignation to which he had attained, he fell back into petulance, always easier to him ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... The lieutenant of the Britomart and the Superintendent of Enlistments were in a state of incipient lunacy. Oh, the fool! They would break him if they could. They would write to the Secretary. They would—but as they growled and cursed behind him, Eben McClure suddenly remembered that Julian Wemyss and my Lord Erskine were first cousins, and that so long as the government ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... it inhabits the thickest sort of cover in a sheer mountainous country; its senses are wonderfully acute; and it is very wary. A man might, once in a blue moon, get one by happening upon it accidentally, but deliberately to go after it was sheer lunacy. So we were told. As a matter of fact, we thought so ourselves, but Greater Kudu was as ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... selling the bodies of deceased inmates of her public institutions for money. General Butler's charges were refuted to the public satisfaction by the simple certificate of Mrs. Clara Leonard, a member of the State Board of Lunacy and Charities, who knew all about the matter, and in whose high integrity and capacity to decide the question ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... that the abbess had refused to deliver up her lunatic husband to her care. While she was speaking, her real husband and his servant Dromio, who had got loose, came before the duke to demand justice, complaining that his wife had confined him on a false charge of lunacy, and telling in what manner he had broken his bands, and eluded the vigilance of his keepers. Adriana was strangely surprised to see her husband, when she thought he had ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... Simon is one of Exmoor's greatest pals; and it would ruin that cousin of the Eyres that's standing for us at Bradford. Besides, old Soap-Suds was sick enough at not getting his peerage last year; he'd sack me by wire if I lost him it with such lunacy as this. And what about Duffey? He's doing us some rattling articles on "The Heel of the Norman." And how can he write about Normans if the man's only a solicitor? Do ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... begun to grumble. It seemed just as if Long Tom Lane was making game of an old man in trouble. 'Twas either that or lunacy. And there was no time for nonsense off the Gingerbread coast in ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... Sumner publicly cut his acquaintance. Adams was the more puzzled because he could not believe Sumner so mad as to quarrel both with Fish and with Grant. A quarrel with Seward and Andrew Johnson was bad enough, and had profited no one; but a quarrel with General Grant was lunacy. Grant might be whatever one liked, as far as morals or temper or intellect were concerned, but he was not a man whom a light-weight cared to challenge for a fight; and Sumner, whether he knew it or not, was a very light weight in the Republican Party, if separated from his Committee ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Commissioners of Lunacy committed to the asylum Mr. James R. Colston, a writer of some local reputation, connected with the Messenger. It will be remembered that on the evening of the 15th inst. Mr. Colston was given into custody by one of his fellow-lodgers in the Baine House, who had observed him ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... continuance of any man's affection? Would it not be painful to owe his appearance of regard more to his honour than his love? and is not my person, already faded, likelier to fade sooner, than his? On the other hand, is his life a good one? and would it not be lunacy even to risque the wretchedness of losing all situation in the world for the sake of living with a man one loves, and then to lose both companion and consolation? When I lost Mr. Thrale, every one was officious to comfort and to soothe me; but which of my children or quondam friends would look with ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... "the other night I had d.t.—just a mild attack. Ask any doctor and he'll tell you about it. Those things I said to you I didn't say, really. They were just lunacy. There was an Indian student at the hospital who used to assure us solemnly that delirious or drugged or drunk people were possessed by the spirits of dead folks; drunkards by drunkards' spirits who wanted drink so badly they got into living bodies to satisfy their craving that even death ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Delphine de Father Goriot The Thirteen Eugenie Grandet Cesar Birotteau Melmoth Reconciled Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Firm of Nucingen Another Study of Woman A Daughter of ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... man of sense, the lunatic and the man of genius, there are degrees—streaks—of idiocy and lunacy. How many expectant politicians elected to Congress have entered Washington all hope, eager to dare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and fortune, happy to get back home—sometimes unable to get away, to linger on in obscurity and poverty to a squalid and wretched ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... a powerful drug. There came, amongst other evils, materialism and covetousness and irreligion; overweening arrogance, an impatient contempt for the rights of the weak, a mania for world dominion, and a veritable lunacy of power worship. There came also a fixed and irrational distrust of the intentions of other nations, for the evil which had crept into their own souls made them see evil in others, and that distrust was nurtured carefully and deliberately by ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... others whom I may call the Precedenters; who flourish particularly in Parliament. They are best represented by the solemn official who said the other day that he could not understand the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill, as it only extended the principles of the old Lunacy Laws. To which again one can only answer "Quite so. It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to persons without a trace of lunacy." This lucid politician finds an old law, let us say, about keeping lepers in quarantine. ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... "Lunacy, even if it did break for you," Vernon drawled. "You ought to be shot at sunrise. No more ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... not insisting that all books admitted should be models of style; even a purist must admit that one of the greatest charms of literature is its infinite variety. But when book after book is filled with such specimens of literary lunacy as this, one is tempted to believe that Homer and Shakespeare, to say nothing of Thackeray and Hawthorne, have ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... change in their constitution, and Prussia has put an army into readiness, for marching, at a moment's warning, on the frontier of Poland. These events are too recent, to see, as yet, what turn they will take, or what effect they will have on the peace of Europe. So is that also, of the lunacy of the King of England, which is a decided fact, notwithstanding all the stuff the English papers publish, about his fevers, his deliriums, &c. The truth is, that the lunacy declared itself almost at once, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... gaped at this local magnate in wonder, and thought that sudden lunacy had seized him. He blurted out, "Surely, Mr. J——, you have not lost your ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... him?" On the eve of the battle of Copenhagen he wrote to her, "Before you receive this, all will be over with Denmark. Either your Nelson will be safe, and Sir Hyde Parker victor, or your own Nelson will be laid low." What deep and genuine love-lunacy to be found in a terrific warrior, whose very name terrified those who had the honour to fight against him! The incongruity of it baffles one's belief, and seems to reverse the very order of human construction. In matters concerning his profession and highly ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... been,' exclaimed Thomas Idle, casting up his eyes, 'over a lunatic asylum! Not content with being as great an Ass as Captain Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... Katharine," he resumed, with a change of voice, "to ask you to forget my folly, my bad temper, my inconceivable behavior. I came, Katharine, to ask whether we can't return to the position we were in before this—this season of lunacy. Will you take me back, Katharine, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... a toy, an absurd and pitiful toy. Real genius and lunacy had many an over-lapping line, Jerry reflected as he approached to look inside. But he found Winslow in a room surrounded by a network of curving, latticed struts. The machine was no makeshift of a demented ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... of nourishment, and purged from the spleen"; Gk. melancholia, black bile. See Sams. Agon. 600, "humours black That mingle with thy fancy"; and Nash's Terrors of the Night (1594): "(Melancholy) sinketh down to the bottom like the lees of the wine, corrupteth the blood, and is the cause of lunacy." ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... just strong enough to make him a visible object; for, suddenly, ping! something hit him violently on the leg and bowled him over like a rabbit into a providential shell-hole. And there he lay quaking for a long time, while the lunacy of his adventure coarsely ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... which is extended beyond common effects, or comprises many intermediate operations. Many that presume to laugh at projectors, would consider a flight through the air in a winged chariot, and the movement of a mighty engine by the steam of water as equally the dreams of mechanick lunacy; and would hear, with equal negligence, of the union of the Thames and Severn by a canal, and the scheme of Albuquerque, the viceroy of the Indies, who in the rage of hostility had contrived to make Egypt a barren desert, by turning the Nile into ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... illustrated during the past forty years in the flourishing county of Glamorgan in Wales, as is shown by Dr. R.S. Stewart ("The Relationship of Wages, Lunacy, and Crime in South Wales," Journal of Mental Science, January, 1904). The staple industry here is coal, 17 per cent of the population being directly employed in coal-mining, and wages are determined by the sliding scale as ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Mercy, and (let philosophers and theologians explain it as they may) instantaneous peace of mind followed the sight, or fancied sight, of that noon-tide star! The load was removed which threatened to crush my brain into lunacy, the "salt surf waves of bitterness" were stilled, and within me there ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... swung themselves from their saddles, at last bowed to me. They were a little pale, but quite collected. "Excellency," they said, "forgive him; it is not his fault. He has been frightened into semi-insanity." "Hsia hu-tu-lo," they said. Yes, that is the phrase, frightened into semi-lunacy. They are employing this for everyone. The tragedy has been so immense, the strain has been endured for so many months, there has been so much of it, that all minds excepting those of the common people have become a little unhinged. Half the time you speak to men you are not understood; they ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... description of Menou see the Memoirs of Marmont:— "Clever and gay, he was an agreeable talker, but a great liar. He was not destitute of some education. His character, one of the oddest in the world, came very near to lunacy: Constantly writing, always in motion in his room, riding for exercise every day, he was never able to start on any necessary of useful journey. . . . When, later, Bonaparte, then First Consul, gave him by special favour the administration of Piedmont, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... this as a mild form of lunacy, and have no disposition to debate with men who indulge in such delusions, which have prevailed to some extent, at different times, in all countries, but whose life has been brief, and which have ever shared the fate of other popular delusions. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... and then invite four or five comrades, all arrayed in much warlike impedimenta, but lacking more extra covering than a waterproof sheet each, to the hole to spend two nights and a day in it—I should be credited with lunacy. Yet I should be offering a fair sample of front-line accommodation during the ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... always were, and will be; but, Betsy, I have this wery momink fixed him up with a shoehorn in his mouth, as was lying round providential, and the strings of my bonnet, and the last word as he will say this blessed night was some lunacy about "denouncing the clogeure," as won't give ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... cry, For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. What standard is there in a fickle rout, Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be Infected with this public lunacy, And share the madness of rebellious times, To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790 If they may give and take whene'er they please, Not kings alone, the Godhead's images, But government itself at length must fall ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... than the rest of mankind, is subject to all the defects and failings of it. He may therefore be incapable of directing the government and dispensing the public treasure, &c. either by absence, by infancy, lunacy, deliracy, or apathy, whether by nature or casual infirmity, or lastly, by some invincible prejudices of mind, contracted and fixed by education and habit, with unalterable resolutions superinduced, in matters wholly inconsistent and incompatible with the laws, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the cause of education in the State, as president of the board of education, and in visiting schools and colleges for personal inspection. He also carefully watched over the several State institutions for correction, for reform, and for lunacy and charity, encouraging, as opportunity offered, both officers and inmates, and, at the same time, unsparing in merited ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... well-known symptom of solitary confinement; it is by shattering a man's nerves all to pieces that it prepares the way for his death, which death comes sometimes in raging lunacy, of which eight men have died under Mr. Hawes's reign. Here is the list of deaths by lunacy from breach of Rule 37, eight. You will have the particulars by ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... she?" said Andrew. He dropped into a chair and looked at his wife. There was something about the intense interchange of confidence of delight between these two faces of father and mother which had almost the unrestraint of lunacy. Andrew's jaw fairly dropped with his smile, which was a silent laugh rather than a smile; his eyes were wild with delight. "She has, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... wandered and I spoke Thus unto myself. How strange! Lunacy itself sits there Singing on ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... tennis, she suddenly, muttering her strange language and dancing new corroboree steps, clad only in her black skin, came up. Matah told her to go away, but she only corroboreed round him and said she wanted to see me. I have the most morbid horror of lunacy in any form. I was once induced to go over a lunatic asylum—the horror of it haunts me still. However, I thought it would never do to show the coward I was, so though I felt as if I had been scooped out and filled up with ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... terms in which every one who has mastered the peculiarities of the Otto speaks of it would be considered as evidence in its favor, if we were not all considered by other cyclists to be in various stages of lunacy. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... feeling that the whole affair was stark lunacy. Here were we three simpletons sitting in a London flat and projecting a mission into the enemy's citadel without an idea what we were to do or how we were to do it. And one of the three was looking at the ceiling, and whistling softly through his teeth, and another was playing Patience. The farce ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or unknown to men of the world. I have myself known it to exist in both, and particularly in a man that might be said to live in the street, such was ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... if, having got an aim on a soldier's baby, they had started to pick off its hands and feet, saying to the soldier: "Yield, or we will finish your baby." Either the military ratiocination is thus, or the deed is simple lunacy. ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... strictly correct in saying that in half a century, while the population increased by seventy-five per cent., lunacy had increased by two hundred ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... and a desperado's egotistical ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature. When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... to state here, as an act of justice to others, and to save myself from the charge of lunacy, that the Markerstown was a mere interloper. Our covetous, good old uncle had set his eye on the regular steamer of the line, and his greedy fingers had taken her away to Dixie, where her decks were now swarming with blue coats ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... becomes Enormous! My house is at this moment virtually ready for patients. Patients may present themselves in a week's time. Patients may communicate with Mr. Armadale, or Mr. Armadale may communicate with patients. A note may be smuggled out of the house, and may reach the Commissioners in Lunacy. Even in the case of an unlicensed establishment like mine, those gentlemen—no! those chartered despots in a land of liberty—have only to apply to the Lord Chancellor for an order, and to enter (by heavens, to enter My Sanitarium!) and search the house ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Mr. Parris. The man was surely more than mortal. His voice, hollow and sepulchral, seemed to issue from the tomb. His thin, cadaverous face was sufficient in itself to inspire wonder. Those great, blazing eyes had within them all the fires of lunacy, fanaticism and cunning. Mr. Parris was nothing more than an unscrupulous bigot. He was ambitious, as is proven by his machinations in getting himself declared the pastor of Salem. He was greedy, as is shown by his taking the parsonage and lands as well as demanding an increase in ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... indications of lunacy. He marched up to the road-gate, and stood close to it, so that the barbed wire top was even with his hair; then he backed off, and gazed first at the gate, then at the bewildered Hicks, while he grinned at the dazed squad ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... of intense low speech, crowded with gestures: and suddenly the Captain's face, till now haggard, reddened; out went his shaken fist; with eyes blazing like lunacy, up he flew to the bridge; and now he is bending down with howling ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... to allow of men raising their heads above the water, there, 5 for scores of acres, were to be seen all forms of ghastly fear, of agonizing struggle, of spasm, of death, and the fear of death—revenge, and the lunacy of revenge—until the neutral spectators, of whom there were not a few, now descending the eastern side of the lake, at length 10 averted their eyes in horror. This horror, which seemed incapable of further addition, was, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... accepted the whole Christian dogma, but conceived himself to be the second embodiment [of Christ], and proclaimed himself as such and summoned the missionaries to acknowledge him." It sounds much like blasphemy, or mere lunacy; but in India one learns not to be shocked at what in Europe would be rankest blasphemy; the intention must decide the innocence or the offence. Hakim Singh "professed to work miracles, preached pure morality, but also venerated the cow,"—strange ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... the most criminal act of this generation. Germany has nothing but friendship for England. I ask you, what British interests are threatened by this inevitable clash between the Slav and the Teuton? It is miserable enough for France to be dragged in. It would be lunacy for England. Therefore, though it is true that serious matters are pending, though, alas! I must return at once to see what help I can afford my country, never for a moment believe, any of you, that there exists the slightest chance of war between ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
