"Morbidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more popular; to make English the tongue of the court for the first time, and to reopen the French wars with the fine flag-waving of Agincourt. It led it again to lean on the Church, or rather, perhaps, on the higher clergy, and that in the least worthy aspect of clericalism. A certain morbidity which more and more darkened the end of mediaevalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against the last crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy of these heresies will lend little support ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... gleaming beauty and of bitter sorrow. There is always before us a "cord-grass festival," the amber fragrant flowers budding upon the piercing spikes of the cord-grass and luring man to the deadly bog where there is no redemption. One might say that the poet verges on morbidity. ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... attempted revelation of Balzac's adolescent mind we have both Madame Surville's and Champfleury's additional testimony to prove. Discounting the exaggerations, due either to literary morbidity of the kind that produced Chateaubriand's Rene and Sainte-Beuve's Joseph Delorme, or to the natural vanity of which the novelist had so large a share, there yet remains a considerable substratum of truth in this record of twin, boyish existence, which affords a valuable secondary help towards ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be found in any other branch of art, except in the end of the pantomime, where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite this vast nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, "Jane Eyre" is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... diseases peculiar to childhood abates and the liability to the far more numerous diseases of maturity begins, so that with the liability to both it is not strange that this period is marked at the same time by increased morbidity. ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... want to know," he said, "I think it's the most damnable thing I've ever seen. When the Gallic mind runs to morbidity there's nothing to touch ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... should he not he happy? Why should he not wake up out of his nightmare and begin to live? In a momentary flash he seemed to see his past in a true perspective, as it really was, as some well-balanced person not himself would have seen it. Mere morbidity to say, as he had been saying privately for years, that marriage was not for him! Marriage emphatically was for him, if only because he had fine ideals of it. Most people who married were too stupid to get the value of their adventure. Celibacy ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of the little head. Her bosom breathed softly, and her arms were pressed somehow awkwardly and severely against her narrow waist. Her blue gown fell without folds—like a child's—to her little feet. The general impression this girl made upon me was not one of morbidity, but of something enigmatical. I saw before me not simply a shy, provincial miss, but a creature of a special type—that I could not make out. This type neither attracted nor repelled me; I did not fully understand ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... globe with his own hands [an allusion to the motto appended to Queen Mab]. I am bound to state thus much; because, hopeless of recovering his health, under circumstances that made the feeling extremely bitter, an irritable morbidity appears even to have driven his suspicions to excess; and this not only with regard to the acquaintance whom he might reasonably suppose to have had some advantages over him, but to myself, who had none; for I learned the ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... confessed that the Calvinist view of sin led to a distrust of human nature, and incidentally of child-nature, which had a not altogether healthy reaction on home discipline and school-life. It is very difficult to maintain the right balance, and the danger of morbidity through emphasis on sin is undeniable. Yet it seems to me that the worst errors of Calvinism and Evangelicalism in this regard have lain in a tendency to theological formalism and a failure to keep in touch with real life. In consequence, those who ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... departure became known, but still North did not make his appearance. Had it not been a step beneath the dignity of a woman, Mrs. Frere would have gone herself and asked him the meaning of his unaccountable rudeness, but there was just sufficient morbidity in the sympathy she had for him to restrain her from an act which a young girl—though not more innocent—would have dared without hesitation. Calling one day upon the wife of the surgeon, however, she met the chaplain face to face, and with the ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... chill should creep over me, or the sunshine seem to darken as if a thin veil drifted between me and the surrounding brightness. Let me say again that no place could have been more unlike the traditional haunted house. There hung about it no sense of morbidity or depression. Yet, what was I to think? I was not sick or mad; and the Thing had come to me twice. I turned from the married lovers and made my way to the veranda, where I might be alone to consider the pomander whose perfume was like a diaphanous ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the prisoner is habituated to his environment, once he accepts the fact that speculation as to when he will regain his liberty cannot possibly shorten the hours of his incarceration and may very well drive him into a state of unhappiness (not to say morbidity), events can no longer succeed each other: whatever happens, while it may happen in connection with some other perfectly distinct happenings, does not happen in a scale of temporal priorities—each happening is self-sufficient, irrespective of minutes, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... had taken his stand on that ground, realising to the utmost every difficulty to be encountered, every interest to be thrown aside, from the exigencies of such a position. The misunderstandings which would arise, the restraint, the loneliness, the possible morbidity of his own feeling, the sure absence of charity in all outside criticism of his conduct, were not overlooked or under-estimated by a man so versed as himself in the tariff of the market-place. He had known full well that his decision, robbed of its romantic and picturesque motives, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Mortality and morbidity of bronchoscopy vary directly with the degree of skill and experience of the operator, and the conditions for which the endoscopies are performed. The simple insertion of the bronchoscope is devoid of harm if carefully done. The danger lies in misdirected ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... mortal, in a corner—and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps, after all, we may. And as to seeing you besides, I observe that you distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... himself cognizant of most forms of unhappiness. So, in a blind, insensate fashion, he was. But the night on which his mother left him opened his eyes to that land of grief where consolation waits on time; it shook from him the last vestige of morbidity; and, lastly, it brought him, too, in generous measure, perception of those beauties of thought and action to be gained by one who accepts his loss unselfishly, in a true ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... finicality that so often is pure morbidity, Hubbard was the most conscientious man I ever knew, a man who was continually thinking of others and how he might help them. Doubtless some will see in his brave life's struggle only a determination to win for himself a recognised place as a writer and expert upon out-of-door ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... unfavorable and the seed was not of the right sort. In Spain, the king stands shrouded in etiquette like a mummy in its wrappings, while a too rigid pride, incapable of yielding to the amenities of the worldly order of things, ends in a sentiment of morbidity and in insane display.[2202] In Italy, under petty despotic sovereigns, and most of them strangers, the constant state of danger and of hereditary distrust, after having tied all tongues, turns all hearts towards the secret delights ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... spite of psychic lesions; the second corresponds to a state in which, owing to the prolonged stress of psychic traumatism,—sexual or not,—a definite condition of hysteria has arisen. The one state is healthy, though abnormal; the other is one of pronounced morbidity. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... that "morbidity" is transformed by this magic alchemy into breadth and sweetness and all health. Now we have for our children the influence of "normal womanhood"—of "the wife ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... on the faded ray, a flash of intuition laid his character bare to him. He read himself ruthlessly. It was not by conscious effort; insight was uncanny and apart from will. He saw that blatancy had joined with weakness, morbidity with want of brains; and that the results of these, converging to a point, had produced the present issue, his expulsion. His mind recognized how logical the issue was, assenting wearily as to a problem proved. Given those qualities, in those circumstances, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... pursue myself with this morbidity (I would almost, rather kill myself than write this). As I got older my terror was less, but my melancholy greater, until I would be only half conscious of what I was allowing myself to do. I seemed to have engendered within ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Uncle Beck all my morbidity began to melt away, and, growing better in mind, my body grew stronger ... he wrote to my father that it was not consumption ... so now I was turning my coming West into a passing visit, instead of a long enforced sojourn there for ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... began: "Free speech being permitted to me, O most mighty Zephoranim, I would in the first place say that the poem so greatly admired by your Majesty, is totally devoid of common sense. It is purely a caprice of the imagination,—and what is imagination? A mere aberration of the cerebral nerves,—a morbidity of brain in which the thoughts brood on the impossible, —on things that have never been, and never will be. Thus, Sah- luma's verse resembles the incoherent ravings of a moon-struck madman,—moreover, it hath a prevailing tone of FORCED SUBLIMITY..." here Theos gave ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... The emotional aspects and influences of Nature! I, too, like the rest, feel these modern tendencies (from all the prevailing intellections, literature and poems,) to turn everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death. Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results, influences of Nature at all, but of one's own distorted, sick or silly soul. Here, amid this wild, free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean and vigorous ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of art, issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent impulses, whether grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or religious. Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially insane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very many tainted with morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe a masterpiece although we gird against its blemishes. We are not, above all, to look for faults but merits. There is no book perfect, even in design; but there are many that will delight, improve, or encourage ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible. His thought, strung to a new morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, with painful, vivid stroke upon stroke, the insufferable series of events that lay ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts |
