"Neurotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "freedom" was attained hoped to force Montenegro into the correct path. His idea of education was primitive. He despised every form of game, exercise, and gymnastics as waste of time, and had never done any himself. "That is why you are so absurdly neurotic and you have never learnt to keep your temper." I chaffed him. He retorted: "Fishblood, fishblood." An interesting specimen ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... was the exact opposite to the podgy Governor. Slender, and loosely built, he had the large, sunken eyes of a dreamer, the narrow forehead of the self-opinionated, the delicate nostrils and mobile mouth of the neurotic temperament. It was easy to see that such a man would brood over an injury, real or imagined, till he had lashed himself into a tempest of wrath. His emotions could know no mean. From sullen despair he ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... said; "I don't go in for your subtleties. I use my eyes and nose. I can see that the woman will never be able to go on feeding the baby in the neurotic state she's in. It's a matter of health for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Holden thinly. "We are sent up here on a private job for Hopkins—one of your bosses. Hopkins has a daughter. She's married to a man named Dabney. He's neurotic. He's made a great scientific discovery and it isn't properly appreciated. So you and I and your team of tame scientists—we're on our way to the Moon to save ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... every raid on London,' and he is not much worse than others who scream in the same key." Nay, he is better than many of them. The people who use this language are not the men of action. They belong to a sedentary and neurotic class, who, lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture inflicted on ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... their naive joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic—another empty medical phrase!—or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Richard ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... passing from childhood to manhood. This is a very difficult time at best to the type of boy from which a criminal grows; he meets it without preparation or instruction. What he knows he learns from others like himself. He gets weird, fantastic, neurotic ideas, which only add to his ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... the neurotic, not the primitive. It is megalomania and egotism and the pride of the man in the Bible that waxed fat and kicked. But the results are the same. She wants to destroy and simplify; but it isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... failing under the attacks of an obscure malady which left him with a sense of the diminution of his powers and a gradual clouding of his intellect. Symptoms of general paralysis set in, at first mistaken for neurotic disturbances. He changed greatly. Those who met him as I did, thin and shivering, on that rainy Sunday when they were celebrating the inauguration of Flaubert's monument at Rouen would scarcely have recognized him. I shall never forget, as long as ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... an impulsive and exigent woman, rising at the outset to the height of a bold and womanly choice in defiance of social prejudice and family tradition, and then relapsing under the disillusions of marriage into the weakest failings of her class, rising again, from a self-torturing neurotic into a kind of Niobe at the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... met with in ulcers which occur, as a rule, just above the external malleolus in women of neurotic temperament. They are small in size and have prominent granulations, and by the aid of a probe points of excessive tenderness may be discovered. These, Hilton believed, correspond to exposed ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... men and true, who at grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager, and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves, and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive, dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years, strew sweet myrtle, thyme ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... and sensationalism was created, seething, ready to burst its bonds ... The canker spread through the country-side; the boundaries of class and class are now so vague that quickly the whole population was affected; the current literature of the day flourished upon it; the people of England, neurotic from the stress of the last sixty years, became unstable as water. And with the petty reverses of the beginning of the war, the last barriers of shame were broken down; their arrogance was dissipated, and suddenly the English became timorous as a conquered ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... in great discomfort. She did not see in Clare's hopeless passion the joy of the flagellant, or the self-dramatization of a neurotic girl. She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain fugitive sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been, vague and shy, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in by any means a large proportion of them, the parents were also epileptics. Authorities are not agreed as to the influence of heredity as a predisposing cause; but it is recognised by all that the children of insane, neurotic, hysterical or neuralgic parents are liable to become epileptics. Also that alcoholism in the parents conveys a predisposition to the child. The hereditary cases are therefore to be divided amongst all these causes. In what proportion it would be difficult to estimate; ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... opened, there are so many things piled on it. I never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never ride really well because I didn't begin as a child. There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. It isn't mere convention: everybody can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... their small sentimentalities is to be cold-blooded and cynical. Once, when I wasj imprudent enough to wonder if the "young person" with the well-known cheek, to which blushes were brought, existed any longer in this age of neurotic novels written by ladies for gentlemen, I received a delicious communication from an Australian damsel informing me that she had been in love with me up till the fatal day on which she read my cynical ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... being beloved and loving." Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus of love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic, comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind even more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well as less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire's ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... her personal antecedents we are almost entirely ignorant. Our only information concerning such matters comes from Jean d'Aulon, who, on the evidence of several women, states[2750] that she was never fully developed, a condition which frequently occurs in neurotic subjects. ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... known all the time what Edith hardly knew, what at least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the effect on Lucia. Edith had no patience with people who were so abominably sensitive. It was all nerves, nerves, nerves. Lucia was and always had been hopelessly neurotic. And if people were to be shaken and upset by every passing current of another person's thought, it was, Edith said to herself a little pathetically, rather hard upon the other person. Nobody can help their thoughts; and there was something positively ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... without (as he himself tells us) "having given a good thrashing to his schoolmaster." He was now a Greek, a follower of Spinoza and Goethe. He was a Romantique defroque—one who had risen above his neurotic fellow-poets and their hazy ideas and wild endeavours. But for this very reason he is able to use their mode of expression with so much the greater skill, and, knowing all their shortcomings, he could give to his Dreamland a semblance of reality which they ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... mouth. She had married him. She was sure of him. But there was a price. He would be a nuisance, a futile nuisance to her. He would demand kisses, he would pry, would watch her, would fuss. He would be a lover with all the empty ardour of the neurotic man. Sally's heart sank. She did not want a restrained lover, because she was young and high-spirited; but this singular trembling possessiveness would soon be intolerable. He would be a nuisance. Again and again the threat pressed ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... contemporary of Julius Caesar, is, of all the ancient lyrical poets, the one most modern and neurotic in feeling. One discerns in his work, breathing through the ancient Roman reserve, the pressure of that passionate and rebellious reaction to life, which we enjoy in the most magical of all later poets from ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... every day occurrence; thus as womanhood becomes more sacred in our eyes it is subjected to fouler insult. Nor is this all: The American people are becoming every year more mercurial. The whole trend of our civilization—of our education, our business, even our religion—is to make us neurotic, excitable, impatient. In our cooler moments we enact laws expressive of mistaken mercy rather than of unflinching justice. Some of the states have even abolished capital punishment and in but one can a brute be tied up and whipped for the cowardly crime of wife-beating. We establish courts ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton. Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests. The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... is of special value in the cases of certain neurotic women and those of low vital resistance; especially those patients suffering from certain forms of heart, respiratory, kidney, and other ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... knowledge. The question is, can strong tinctures of common drugs be given in all cases with safety; tinctures of the various bitters which contain from 10 to 40 per cent. of alcohol, and are used very freely by neurotic and debilitated persons? It is asserted with the most positive convictions that such tinctures are more sought for the narcotic effect of the alcohol than ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... night and which he epileptoid. He closes his brief communication on the subject with the belief that it is quite possible for black hair to turn white in one night or even in a less time, although Hebra and Kaposi discredit sudden canities (Duhring). Raymond and Vulpian observed a lady of neurotic type whose hair during a severe paroxysm of neuralgia following a mental strain changed color in five hours over the entire scalp except on the back and sides; most of the hair changed from black to red, but some to quite white, and in two days all the red hair became white and a quantity fell off. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... who treats "nervous" or neurotic cases has this problem of getting action from his patients. Strange as it may seem, these cases, while bemoaning their unfortunate condition, cling to it as if it had its compensations, and do not wholeheartedly will to get well. They have {546} slumped into the attitude ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... This type of woman, neurotic from her very birth, is often the very best product of our civilization from the standpoint of character and ability, just as the male neurasthenic is often the backbone of progress and advancement. But we are concerned with these questions: ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... she would puzzle and distress him in his ranch-house; she would Fret and exact and complain. Probably one of the Swedish farmers thereabout could give him a daughter who would make him an infinitely better wife, and bear him children, and worship him blindly. But no; he must yearn for this neurotic, abnormal little creature, with her ugly history and her ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... he loved to-day he loathed to-morrow. Scheme after scheme formed in his fertile brain, and jostled confusingly together. All in succession were pressed with enthusiasm. All at times were rejected with disdain. A temperament naturally neurotic had been aggravated by an acquired habit of smoking; and the General carried this to so great an extreme that he was rarely seen without a cigarette. His virtues are famous among men; his daring and resource ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... contributed to his correct taste and habit of subdued elegance, no man can say. When Giovanni Sanzio realized that death was at his door, he gave Raphael into the keeping of the priest Bartolomeo and the boy's stepmother. The typical stepmother lives, moves and has her being in neurotic novels ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Lourdes, so I knew in a general way what to expect. I know that modern science vindicates these things, demonstrating that any powerful stimulus given to the unconscious can awaken new vital impulses, and heal not merely the hysterical and neurotic, but sometimes actual physical ailments. Of course, to these ignorant Mexicans and Italians, there was no possible excitement so great as that caused by Carpenter's appearance and behavior. I understood the thing clearly; and yet, somehow, I could not watch ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... extinct. Modern science teaches that extinct species do not re-appear. Bossuet would say that the Eternal has destroyed the instrument of His providential work, because it is already useless. Remain, then, Bismarck, in retirement, and await, without neurotic impatience, the final judgment ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... anxiety, run into the danger of protecting and controlling their children too much. The father or mother spends too much time with the children. The children are pampered. Too many indulgences are permitted them. Children in these over-careful homes are likely to grow up neurotic, conceited, timid, babyish, daydreaming men and women, who are of little use in the world and are often a serious problem for normal people. Probably this second type of a deficient home is more dangerous ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... lambency and light sensuousness. It is rude and robust and male, full of angular movements and vigorous blows and lusty, childlike laughter, and, at the same time, of a singularly fine romantic fervor. It is almost the contrary of that of the neurotic, sallow Tchaikowsky of the hysterical frenzies and hysterical self-pity and the habits of morose delectation. If there is any symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it is assuredly Borodin's second, the great ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... was able to formulate the anxiety of many immigrant parents who are absolutely bewildered by the keen absorption of their children in the cheap theater. This anxiety is not, indeed, without foundation. An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they had been so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims of hallucination and mental disorder. The statement of this ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... and opposition, which had successively given way before her husband's quiet, masterful good humor, here took the form of a neurotic fatalism. She shook her ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... practical people who listen to these sayings sometimes attach importance to them, so that a habit has grown up of describing morbidly neurotic people as "over-sensitive" and cowardly ones as "too quick of imagination." Ultimately, this leads to the thought that both sensitiveness and imagination are mental luxuries too costly for ordinary folk to grow, and that it is safest to check, crush or uproot them when we discover ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... I could work myself into a neurotic state if I kept running through the worry cycle. It took an effort to concentrate on anything else, but it had to be made. The next ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... reaches its rococo climax of the twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story, bulges high and wide of ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... The man came to a pause beside Amber, looking down almost pitifully into his face. "I daresay all this sounds hopelessly melodramatic and neurotic and tommyrotic, David, but ... I can tell ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... any of these than in libraries of "Sludge the Medium" literature. Mere hard thinking does not involve profundity, any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. De profundis, indeed, must the poet come: there must the deep rhythm of life have electrified his "volatile essence" to a living rhythmic joy. In this deep sense, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... untold misery. Five days ago, monsieur, the doctor who takes care of my daughter, or rather I should say, observes her, told me that he was unable to cure a disease the forms of which varied perpetually. He says that neurotic patients are the despair of science, for the causes of their conditions are only to be found in some as yet unexplored system. He advised me to have recourse to a physician who has been called a quack; but he carefully pointed out that this man was a stranger, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... cry?—herself at the way Harry Prescott was looking from Ann to his mother. After she got Ann in the house she went back and begged somebody's pardon—she wasn't sure whose—and told Colonel Leonard that of course he could understand it on the score of Ann's being a neurotic. She was afraid she might have said that rather disagreeably. And she believed she told Mrs. Prescott—she had to tell Mrs. Prescott something, she looked so frightened and hurt and outraged—that Ann had a form of nervous trouble which made it impossible for her to hear the name ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... was only logical. Even a virtuous woman could not stand the strain, and Laura was not virtuous. Of neurotic temperament, inherently weak, if not actually vicious in character, with the spirit of the courtesan strong within her from an early age, fond of luxury and personal adornment she could not legitimately afford, it was not surprising that she listened to the flatterers and went to the devil ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... written at length anent the past lives of the characters, male and female, which go to the building of a novel, so in as few words as possible will try to outline the years which had brought Jill Carden to the dreary task of waiting hand and foot upon the whimsies of a neurotic German woman of great wealth, and still greater disinclination to part with the smallest coin of any realm she might be ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... of each other. The former was a tall, masculine-looking woman, with a masculine capacity for deep friendship. The latter was made in a slighter mould, with charming, delicate features, set off by a mass of pale-brown hair. Mr. Frederick Fairlie I found to be a neurotic, utterly selfish gentleman, who passed his life in his own apartments, amusing himself with bullying his valet, examining his works of art, and talking ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the statesman, the educator, the vocational expert, the student of the neurotic and of genius, of delinquents, deficients and criminals, the explorers of the exceptional and the commonplace, the understanding of the poetic and kinetic, base and dull types, as well as of those two master interests of mankind, Sex and War, are ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... found in the lean and often arid aspects of Spain. Spain, too, is romantic—but after its own fashion. Goya revived the best traditions of his country's art; he was the last of the great masters and the first of the moderns. Something neurotic, modern, disquieting, threads his work with devilish irregularity. He had not the massive temper of Velasquez, of those men who could paint day after day, year after year, until death knocked at their ateliers. As vigorous as Rubens in his sketches, Goya ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... penetrating story of modern life, written in the author's very best manner. The scheme, the root motive of the book, may be said to be a vindication of the present generation—the generation that was condemned as neurotic and decadent by common consent a little more than three years ago, but is now enduring the ordeal of the war with great singleness of heart. This theme, in Miss Sinclair's hands, assumes big proportions and gives her at the same time ample opportunity for character analysis, in which art ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... most was that Arthur's personality seemed thoroughly thrown out of gear. All that he had endured during these nine months had robbed him of the strength of purpose, the matter-of-fact sureness, which had distinguished him. He was now unbalanced and neurotic. ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... sensitive or so-called "nervous" temperament, especially if there is "nervousness" in the family, must be particularly looked after. For it is during the years of puberty and adolescence that any neurotic traits are apt to develop and become emphasized. It is also the period when bad sexual habits (masturbation) are apt to develop, and the careful mother will devote special attention to her girls in their years of puberty, and ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... become mere bodily conditions—more or less humiliating—when demonstrated, catalogued, and legalised. There is nothing modern nor uncommon in this especial disposition. One may describe it as ascetic, anaemic, sentimental, hysterical, neurotic; but the men and women who possess this fragile organism show, as a rule, powers of endurance and a strength of will by no means characteristic of the average sanguine and sensual creature who eats, drinks, fights, loves, and does his best in a world which he calls vile, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... "And think of all the crazy cases of mass-hysteria—that baseball-game riot in Baltimore; the time everybody started tearing off each others' clothes in Milwaukee; the sex-orgy in New Orleans. And the sharp uptrend in individual psycho-neurotic and psychotic behavior. All in connection with music, too, and all after Evri-Flave ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... quietly, "quit stalking around like a neurotic bear and suggest something for my invention team to work on. I enjoy visiting you and Daisy, but I ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... temperament and local influences, her apprehension of things unseen and super-normal had been remarkably acute. From the dawn of conscious intelligence these had formed an integral element in the atmosphere of her life; and that without functional disturbance, moral or physical, of a neurotic sort. She felt no morbid curiosity about such matters, did not care to dwell upon or talk of them.—Few persons do who, being sane in mind and body, are yet endowed with the rather questionable blessing of the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... purples and oranges by the time the little caravan arrived at the Desert Edge Sanatorium, a square white building several miles out of Las Vegas. Malone, in the first car, wondered briefly about the kind of patients they catered to. People driven mad by vingt-et-un or poker-dice? Neurotic chorus ponies? Gambling ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... me. I am attracted by neurotic types. Insanity has its source in the unconscious, and we English are afraid of looking inward." He glanced around the crowded room with an amused and cynical look. "Most of these people are as bad as my Trojans, Doctor Fenton. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... analyse causes, what bitter reproaches many poor little diseased, neurotic children might truly throw at their irresponsible mothers for endowing them with these ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been launched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is thus, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have been convinced that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation in which their own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary libidinousness of their swinish ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... performance," he said, still smiling. "I've been laughing over it the whole morning. What's so curious in an attack of hysterics is that you know it is absurd, and are laughing at it in your heart, and at the same time you sob. In our neurotic age we are the slaves of our nerves; they are our masters and do as they like with us. Civilisation has done us a bad turn in that way. . ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the Teutonic race. Nevertheless, this cannot alter the ethical truth, which stands apart from any considerations of nationality; nor can it affect the conclusion that the German Nation has been plunged into this abyss by its scheming statesmen and its self-centred and highly neurotic Kaiser, who in the twentieth century sincerely believes that he is the proxy of Almighty God ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Dr. McKerrel bluntly. "And for my part, I tell you frankly, Sir Chichester, I have no great pity for poor neurotic bodies like the young lady upstairs. If she had had a little of my work to do, she would have been too tired in the evening to think about her worries." He looked at the disconsolate Baronet with a sudden twinkle in his eye. "Eh, man, but you'll get all the publicity you want ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though some great ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... notions of them were shattered. The men and women in all classes of the French people are kind, industrious, very moral and deeply religious. They are not at all like the hysterical neurotic creatures of the ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... to a functional affection of the spine occasionally met with in neurotic females between the ages of seventeen and thirty, and liable to be mistaken for Pott's disease. The patient complains of pain in some part of the spine—usually the cervico-thoracic or thoracico-lumbar region—and there is marked hyperaesthesia on ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... the other hand, declare it to be merely the psycho-neurotic reaction of climatic environment on the ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... March 8, 1909. Maternal grandfather died suddenly from unknown cause. Was a race-track operator. Father alcoholic. Mother suffered from vertiginous attacks. There were twenty-one children in the family, fifteen of whom died in infancy. One brother died of brain tumor. One sister is neurotic; her eight year old son suffers from congenital heart disease. Patient was born in Manchester, England. He was the twentieth child; mother was over forty years old at the time of his birth. He was an unusually small and puny infant ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... seem to have been a stroke of any sort," explained that worthy and anxious man. "If Mrs. Kildare were an ordinary woman, I should call it hysteria, but she's not the neurotic type. It appears to be acute exhaustion, following, possibly, a shock of some kind." He looked at Jemima inquisitively, but without eliciting the information he sought. "At any rate, I am glad you have come, and I should suggest that Benoix and ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... that the more straightforward and open-eyed, the less subtle, temperamental, and neurotic are women, the more are they baffling. I had wondered for some time whither the catechism tended, and now, with a sudden jerk, it stopped short at this most unexpected terminus. It was startling. I rose ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... in their concerns; and a constant recollection that even the most patient hearers may sometimes wish to be speakers. Above all else, the agreeable talker cultivates gentleness and delicacy of speech, avoids aggressive and overwhelming displays, and remembers the tortured cry of the neurotic bard:— ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... understood. (With suppressed irritation.) For goodness' sake, let go my legs! I do wish you wouldn't be so confoundedly neurotic! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... called a scientifically organized confession that traces out with infinite patience even to the smallest ramifications, the spiritual inventory of what was tucked away in the mind of the person undergoing it. Psychoanalysis is used in medical practice to discover and relieve the spiritual causes of neurotic phenomena. The patient is induced to tell more and more, starting from a given point, thereby going into the most intimate details, and yet we are aware, in the network of outcropping thoughts and memories, of certain points of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Spasm secondary to disease of the stomach, liver, gall bladder, appendix, or other abdominal organ is clinically well recognized. A perpetuating cause in established cases is undoubtedly "nerve cell habit," and in many cases there is an underlying neurotic factor. Shock as an exciting cause has been well exemplified by the number of cases of phrenospasm developing in soldiers ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... creature!" he said—"I cannot make you out. If I were asked to give a 'professional' opinion of you I should say you were very neurotic and highly-strung, and given ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... what Eve had said about yachts and world traveling and wondered how she could hope to do so if the radius of influence was only five miles. Eve might be passionate, headstrong and neurotic, but she was not a fool. If she had planned travel on a world of two decades past she must have found a way of making his and her stay in ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... Ivanovna, and then with his right hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about the fact that a displacement of the diaphragm was sometimes accompanied by irregularities of the heart, or that a great number of neurotic complaints were met with of late, or that Dymov had the day before found a cancer of the lower abdomen while dissecting a corpse with the diagnosis of pernicious anaemia. And it seemed as though they were talking of medicine to give Olga Ivanovna a chance of being silent—that is, of not lying. ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... QUEEN, a sharp-featured, neurotic-looking woman. One of her Cabinet is speaking earnestly to her and she is paying him ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... for a long time, and that it was the meaning of the growing irritability which had of late changed his day in the laboratory from the rapt, swift office of the mind it used to be, to an interminable stretch of drudgery checkered with fits of rage at faulty apparatus, neurotic moods when he felt unable to perform fine movements, and desolating spaces when he stood at the window and stared at the high grassy embankment which ran round the hut, designed to break the outward force of any explosion that might occur, and thought grimly over the commercial ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... likely to be unsatisfactory, the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... maid of Kent," was, according to her own statement, born in 1506 at Aldington, Kent. She appears to have been a neurotic girl, subject to epilepsy, and an illness in her nineteenth year resulted in hysteria and religious mania. She was at the time a servant in the house of Thomas Cobb, steward of an estate near Aldington owned by William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury. During her convalescence she passed into trances ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... altering his bearings and taking his time about it. If he's promised to lunch here to-morrow, he will. He's as near as possible through the wood. Coming up in the train, he suggested a little conversation to-night and afterwards the normal life. He means it, too. There's nothing neurotic about Ledsam." ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eyes for a moment, and I thought she was going to faint. I was a little impatient with her; I had not suspected that she was so neurotic a woman. Then I heard Stroeve's voice again. It seemed to break ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... can make his personality felt. On the night of his mysterious advent, the Prophet had found his people in a condition of mental chaos—as liable to repudiate as to accept the seeker for their confidence; but before one month had passed he had, by domination of will, so moulded this neurotic mass of humanity that his own position had gradually and insensibly merged from suppliant into that of autocrat. Without a murmur of doubt or dissension the Mystics had proclaimed him ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Concerto" was given last night by the Queen's Hall orchestra. The tempo was throughout wonderfully high. The three fine solo passages for the left kidney were finely rendered; while the exquisite diminuendo to convalescence with which the work concludes greatly impressed a neurotic audience. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... Short, lean, neurotic, worn and bowed down with sixty years of misfortune, faded rather than aged, with a look of an invalid of uncertain age, with a long beard and hair still fair, and for all that still breathing forth the "cat-life." ... The face was that of a Russian peasant; a real Moscow mujik, with a flat nose, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... I am your slave," she murmured. "Don't be afraid that I am becoming neurotic. You see, this was all a little new to me, and for a moment I felt that I wanted to go and hide myself. That has all passed now. I am not even ashamed. I suppose one gets terrified with receiving so much, and wants to give. It's a very natural feminine impulse, isn't ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is a Song of the Tube. A ballad of sorrow, A grey sort of lay of To-day and a greyer To-morrow; A dismal, abysmal, chaotic, neurotic Creation Of one who was done after running a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... the strongest and healthiest women I have ever attended," Doctor Mayson added; "superb health. It's a pleasure to see any one like that. I look after so many neurotic women in London. They give themselves up for lost when they are confronted with a perfectly natural crisis. Mrs. Leith is ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... amongst the negroes showed no signs of abating. A black "prophet," a full-blooded negro named Bedward, made his appearance, and gained a great following. Bedward, dressed in a discarded British naval uniform, and attended by a neurotic bodyguard of screaming, hysterical negresses, made continual triumphal parades through the streets of Kingston. As far as I could ascertain the most important item in his religious crusade was the baptism of his converts in the Hope ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... When that fallen but indomitable foe again struggled to its feet in 1875, the Prussian military caste planned to give the stricken gladiator the coup de grace and was only prevented by the intervention of England and Russia. Later this acute and neurotic apprehension took the form of a hatred and fear of Russia, and this notwithstanding the fact that the Kaiser had in the Russo-Japanese War exalted the Czar as the "champion of Christianity" and the "representative of the white race" in the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... of my young days, whom I remember chiefly by her ramrod back and sharp tongue, used to say, "Nerves! nerves! nothing but nerves!" She thanked God she was born before the doctors had discovered nerves. Though neurotic theories had not been sufficiently elaborated for me to ascribe my state to the most refined of modern ills—nervous prostration—I was aware, as I dragged over the prairie with the horse at the end of a trailing ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... Nervousness.—Children of neurotic parents, particularly where they are reared in cities, are exceedingly prone to nervousness in one form or another. The condition is undoubtedly often due to heredity, but may be induced in otherwise healthy ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... pronounced, is readily explained by the difference in personal habits, the circumstances of different periods or the domestic regulations instituted by medical counsel. Also the fact that consumptives so frequently spring from neurotic parentage and the victims of dissipation, especially alcoholic, still farther goes to show that the hereditary element is essentially a reduced power of resistance to formative evils, and that as a negative condition it may hold the balance of power in focusing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... is sheer loose living; this is a life stripped of all purpose. She does not even sleep enough because she hears through the thin wall every sound made by her neighbor in the next room, while arriving or departing Englishmen bang doors all night. In a short time she has become a neurotic, sated with company, surfeited with herself and the place. She is ready to go off with the next halfway respectable organ grinder that happens along. And so she pairs off with the most casual visitors, flirts with the guide, hovering ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... youthful pranks led to a miserable old age. Neither prospect offered much encouragement to hope for a happy life, and from conversations with those brought up on this form of religious culture, it is certain that if a child escaped without becoming morbid and neurotic, there were dark and secret resolves to risk the unpleasant future in favor of ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... that it was of much importance; speaking of degenerates, weren't we? We have a curious example of the neurotic here: a fellow who makes a good many dollars by victimizing farmers who are forced to borrow when they lose a crop, as well as young fools from England, and by way of amusement studies modern magic and indulges in refined debauchery. It strikes me ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... tracked mud through this portal. No amount of foot-wiping could render the hired man fit for the kitchen steps after milking time—he used a step-ladder to bring up the milk to the back porch. Such intensity of attention to detail could not long fail to make this degenerating neurotic take note of her own body, which gradually became more and more sensitive, till she was fairly distraught between her fear of draughts and her mania for ventilation. It was windows up and windows down, opening the dampers and closing the dampers, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... of this emotion always betokens a neurotic diathesis, and not infrequently indicates the oncoming of insanity. It is responsible for much useless suffering and not a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... much eaten of it."[11] Whether or not this characterization of Tolstoi is justified, there can be no question that many of this type rushed to the aid of syndicalism. Its savage vigor appeals to some artists, decadents, and declasses. Neurotic as a rule, they seem to hunger for the stimulus which comes by association with the merely physical power and vigor of the working class. The navvy, the coalheaver, or "yon rower ... the muscles all a-ripple on his back,"[12] awakens ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... he could leave his parish work. He laughed about it all. "The souls of men! The souls of men!" he would say. "That is what I'm after, Miss Cardinal. You're not going to catch them with the latest neurotic novel, however well ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... gazing blankly into the fire. The light shone on his bald forehead and accentuated the lines which wounded vanity, petty purposes thwarted, and an ignoble life had written prematurely on his face, and his attitude emphasised the attenuation of his body. He looked a poor, peevish, neurotic specimen; and although he had only himself to thank for it, Beth, remembering the promise of his youth, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... have all been published and read, when the memoirs of others have told all that there is to be told, there will stand clear something inadequate, a lack of robustness, mental or nervous, an excessive sensitiveness, over self-consciousness, shrinking from life, a neurotic something that in the end brought on defeat and the final overthrow. He was never quite a normal man with the average man's capacity to endure and enjoy but ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... will after God, but he feels after God. He is not driven to action because he is impelled by a moral imperative, the law of duty, but he is controlled by his nerves which are his thermometer. With the nerves as his guide it is impossible to tell where he stands on many moral questions. Neurotic environments appeal quickly to him, and are fostered by the church in sermons which appeal largely to the imagination, in weird pictures of the unseen, in apocalyptic sermons, and by mystic preachers known as mourners, shouters and visioners. As a subject ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... makes much effort to develop the brain. Overuse of the young mind results, therefore, in diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... neurotic ailments I hear that he excels, And he insures Immediate cures Of weird, uncanny spells; The most unruly patient Gets docile as a lamb And is freed from ill by the potent skill Of Hoodoo-Doctor Sam; ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... chapter on crystal-gazing was in type, a work by Dr. Pierre Janet has appeared, styled 'Les Nevroses et les Idees Fixes.'[1] It contains a chapter on crystal-gazing. The opinion of Dr. Janet, as that of a savant familiar, at the Salpetriere, with 'neurotic' visionaries, cannot but be interesting. Unluckily, the essay must be regarded as seriously impaired in value by Dr. Janet's singular treatment of his subject. Nothing is more necessary in these researches than accuracy ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... consider myself fortunate in having been born well, except that I inherited a neurosis instead of an estate. "Neurosis" and "neurotic" are docile terms after you once form their acquaintance. They broke into my vocabulary while I was yet at a tender age, and during all the intervening years I have learned more and more about them, both from literary ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... theorizing about this case, let us once more state the matter precisely. I know that the reader may straightway and quite legitimately deny the value of anecdotes of this kind. He will say that we have to do with a neurotic who has drawn upon her imagination for all the elements that give a dramatic setting to the story and surround with a halo of mystery a sad but commonplace domestic accident. This is quite possible; and it is perfectly allowable to dismiss the ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of the latter had been limited to the most casual inspection through the crack of the folding doors; there wasn't any excuse for questioning the identification. The woman before her, like the woman of the picture, was of the slender, blonde class—intelligent, neurotic, quick-tempered, inclined to suffer spasmodically from exaltation of the ego. And if she had not always been pampered with every luxury that money has induced modern civilisation to invent, the fact was not apparent; she dressed with such exquisite ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... As with all who are greedy of pleasure, the foundation of her moral being was overweening egotism. Her dominant faculty, her intellectual axis, so to speak, was imagination—an imagination nourished upon a wide range of literature, connected with her sex and perpetually stimulated by neurotic excitement. Possessed of a certain degree of intellectual capacity, brought up in all the luxury of a princely Roman house—that papal luxury which is made up of art and history—she had received a thin coating of aesthetic varnish, had acquired a graceful taste, and, having thoroughly grasped ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... and the immodest dress of women produces an evil effect upon the mind of the overstimulated adolescent boy; opportunities to elude observation and to deceive one's parents abound; social control weakens; ideals become neurotic, flashy, distorted; the light and allurement of the street encourage late hours; the posters and "barkers" of cheap shows often appeal to illicit curiosity, and the galaxy of apparent fun and adventure is such as to tax to the full the wholesome and restraining ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... Doctor Allison, a person as contained and repressed as yourself usually has a clearly defined subsidiary personality. In neurotic individuals this complex of personality traits sometimes splits off, and we get a syndrome known ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Pains, vertigos, deafness, etc., following trauma; (f) Distant post-traumatic psychic disorders with cerebral lesions; (g) Unclassifiable observations. To this comprehensive material is added an appendix on the topic of psychic and neurotic disturbances as ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... his flat and brainless head. But his revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The serpent has bruised our ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the qualities making for greatness appears equally certain. That his instincts were so cruel as to make him derive pleasure from scenes of human suffering, such as the torture of a prisoner, may have been due to a neurotic condition induced by early excesses, but it must always stand to his discredit that he had neither judgment to estimate opportunities ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... its pathological twin brother, the neuropathic diathesis, roams at large unrestrained from without or that self-restraint which, bred of adequate self-knowledge, might come from within, and contaminates with neurotic and mental instability the innocent unborn, furnishing histogenic factors which the future will formulate in minds dethroned to become helpless wards of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in Germany, anxious mothers gave birth to an ardent, pale, and neurotic generation. Conceived between battles, reared amid the noises of war, thousands of children looked about them with dull eyes while testing their limp muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers would appear, raise them to their gold-laced bosoms, then place them ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things that we ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... to local irritations, as uterine disease, stricture, neurotic or nerve tumors, pressure of trusses, eye strain from weakened eye muscles, or lenses that need the help of proper spectacles, require for a permanent cure the removal of the cause. Sciatic neuralgia, one of the most common and painful forms of nerve irritation, is particularly amenable to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... form of speech marked by short, rapid muscular contractions instead of the smooth and easy action used in producing normal sounds. Neurotic Lisping is often found to be combined with stammering or stuttering, which is quite logical, since it is similar, both as to CAUSE and as to the presence of a MENTAL DISTURBANCE. In Neurotic Lisping, the muscular ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... are the victims not of circumstances but of disposition. Those who succumb to tragic events are those who, like Mrs. Gummidge, feel them more than other people. The characters that break down under brutalising influences, evil surroundings, monotonous toil, are those neurotic temperaments which under favourable circumstances would have been what is called artistic, who depend upon stimulus and excitement, upon sunshine and pleasure. Of course, a good deal of what, in our ignorance of the working of psychological laws, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the last offensive. The Australians and Canadians had all the British quality of courage and the benefit of a harder physique, gained by outdoor life and unweakened ancestry. In the mass, apart from neurotic types here and there among officers and men, the stock was true and strong. The spirit of a seafaring race which has the salt in its blood from Land's End to John o' Groat's and back again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but answered the ruffle ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... hardly a man I have ever known who could embrace it, and that only, for a lifetime. You could not, I think, and you would be miserable. It is a humble career though it is rich. The man who wins does not devote his life to an exacting passion for a neurotic woman. You are the man to win: ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... insanity, diabetes, chronic Bright's disease, and rheumatic fever. I wish I had sufficient medical knowledge to analyze that proposal. He mentions inherited defective eyesight and hearing also, and the "neurotic" quality, with which I have dealt in my text. He adds two other suggestions that appeal to me very strongly. He proposes to bar all "cases of non-accidental disease in which life is saved by the surgeon's knife," and he instances particularly, strangulated hernia and ovarian cyst. And he ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... religion that flourishes in such a place, an artificial faith that needs heat like tropical plants, that desires unnatural vows. It breathes of neurotic emotions with its damask-covered walls, with its carpet that deadens the footfall, its sombre, gorgeous pictures. The sweet breeze of heaven never enters there, nor the sunlight; the air is languid with incense; one is oppressed by a strange, heavy silence. In such a church sins ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... based on the assumption that all women are adapted to as well as specialized for reproduction. Neurotic tendencies which unfit women for marriage—the desire for domination. Sexual anaesthesia another neurotic trait which interferes with marital harmony. The conditioning of the sexual impulse to the parent ideal ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... bigger crowds and fill their houses better than any other, in the large cities running for over a year, I cannot help regarding this feature of theatrical life as so much theatrical chaos. It lacks culture, and is sometimes both bizarre and neurotic. I do not object to patter, smart give and take, in which the comical angles of life are exposed, if it is brilliant; neither have I anything to say against light comedy in which the ridiculous side of things ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... "A neurotic girl, sir, I agree. I have noticed her. But by acting promptly we should avoid such a contingency. The entire staff, with the exception of Monsieur Anatole, will be at the ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... rapidity, her disordered consciousness would conceive the idea that her friend had been murdered and that it was her duty to bring the slayer to justice. From this it would be an easy step to the development, in the neurotic child, of a full fledged secondary personality, akin to that found in the spiritistic mediums ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... out by Daland [Footnote: Daland: Pennsylvania Med. Jour., July, 1913.] that nervous exhaustion may raise the blood pressure in those who are neurotic, and he finds that this hypertension may exist for months in some cases. On the other hand, in neurasthenics the blood pressure is generally lowered. As he points out, there is often a very great increase in the systolic blood pressure at the menopause, while the diastolic ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... that man must cooperate in his own conversion. It insists that special measures must be resorted to in order to frighten men into doing their share of conversion, and to produce the emotional and neurotic conditions which warrant assurance of grace. As such measures it prescribes emotional appeals, shrieking and shouting in preaching and praying, special prayer-meetings, the anxious bench, protracted meetings, camp-meetings, etc. Revivalism brands men as spiritually dead and unconverted ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... am talking to the greatest nerve specialist of the day, and only realise the pleasure of entertaining so good a friend of Michael's and my own. Otherwise I should be tempted to consult you; for I really believe, Sir Deryck, for the first time in my life, I am becoming neurotic." ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... slight nerve contusion was simple; rest alone was necessary, and in the course of hours or days paralysis was recovered from. The symptoms were most troublesome in patients of a neurotic temperament, or those who had ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... You couldn't drive him away now! Last fall I sent him back to see if the cure was complete. Telegraphed me in a week that he was coming up,—life was too dull down there! ... And that little black-haired woman who is talking to Mrs. Pole,—similar case, only it was complicated. She was neurotic, hysterical, insomniac, melancholy,—the usual neurasthenic ticket. Had a husband who didn't suit or a lover, I suspect, and it got fastened in the brain,—rode her. She's my chief nurse in the surgical ward now,—a tremendous ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the emotions are more poignant and less controlled. Then tears flow more readily than in later life, and tears are not the only secretions which lie under the influence of strong emotion. Emotional states, which would stamp a grown man as a profound neurotic, are almost the rule in infancy and childhood, and may be marked by the same physical disturbances—flushing, sweating, or pallor, by the discharge of internal glandular secretions as well as by inhibition of appetite, by vomiting, gastric discomfort, or diarrhoea. Naturally enough, mothers ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital, the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts, the speed-mad fugitives from the furies of ennui, the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... neurotic being, met the polyandrous Sand, a trampler on all the social and ethical conventions, albeit a woman of great gifts; repelled at first he gave way before the ardent passion she manifested toward him. She was his elder, so could veil the situation with the maternal ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... excited, and nothing more, and from what I have heard since he had reason to be excited. Neither at the breakfast table nor in his room subsequently did his actions strike me as the actions of a man of insane, neurotic, or violent temperament. He was simply suffering from nerves. It is important to remember, in recalling the events which led up to this case, that Penreath was invalided out of the Army suffering from shell-shock, and that two ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... vapours, as thunder clears the air. And, finally, it is a natural function of the body. In his natural state man is always quarrelling—by instinct. Not to quarrel is indeed one of the vices of our civilisation, one of the reasons why we are neurotic and anaemic, and all these things. And, at last, our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for enjoying a ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... and similar attitude which is distinguished by the fact that we are never quite aware of it but are much subject to it. According to Lipps[1] and Lotze,[2] there is to be observed in neurotic attitudes a not rare and complete indifference to feeling, and in consciousness an essential lack of feeling-tone in perception. Our existence, our own being, seems to us, then, to be a foreign thing, having little concern with us—a story we need not earnestly consider. That in such condition ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... daily work to learn their parts as well as they should have done. The audience comes full of a smug self-satisfaction at the thought that it is excessively intellectual and select, and that it alone can appreciate blasphemy or the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the theatre, and watches the play. The author sits intellectually in his box, and intellectually accepts the plaudits of the audience. He lives thereafter in a highly intellectual ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... shorter, milder, or given up altogether. Bruce's temper was perennially good, and got better. Then the constant illnesses that he used to suffer from—he was unable to pass the military examination and go to the front on account of a neurotic heart—these illnesses were either omitted entirely or talked over with Madame Frabelle, whose advice turned out more successful than ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... Planet Eire had spoken of them scornfully as equal to mice. They were much worse. The planetary government needed at least a pied piper or two, but it tried other measures. It imported cats. Descendants of the felines of Earth still survived, but one had only to look at their frustrated, neurotic expressions to know that they were failures. The government set traps. The dinies ate their springs and metal parts. It offered bounties for dead dinies. But the supply of dinies was inexhaustible, and the supply of money was not. It had ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... can get exactly what they desire, because the question of price does not arise. The finest works are to be had at every free library, and for a few pence at every book-shop, and the public carefully avoids them. Novels containing chapter after chapter of neurotic aphrodisiacs and pornography masquerading as literature are priced at "a shilling net," and are avidly purchased and read by ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Psmith, 'I fear that I must take official notice of this. Comrade Jackson is essentially a Sensitive Plant, highly strung, neurotic. I cannot have his nervous system jolted and disorganized in this manner, and his value as a confidential secretary and adviser impaired, even though it be only temporarily. I must look into this. I ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... always expected her to look after Colin. At seventeen there was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... neurasthenia. It is true that not a few would doubt whether we have the right to class neurasthenia here where we speak of the harm done to the normal brain. Many neurologists are inclined to hold that neurasthenia demands a special predisposition and is therefore dependent upon a neurotic constitution of the brain itself. But if defenders of such a view, as for instance, Dubois, acknowledge that "we might say that everybody is more or less neurasthenic," we can no longer speak of any special ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... person would act. This, too, is role playing, but it does not explain analgesia, such as when the dentist hypnotizes the patient and proceeds to drill a tooth. No one (with the possible exception of a highly neurotic psychic masochist) is going to endure excruciating pain just ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers |
