"Neurotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dog-stealers, and opposed all treaty with such rogues, even at the cost of an unrecovered Flush, could not but oppose the new trade of elaborate deception. But his feeling was intensified by the personal repulsiveness of the professional medium. The vain, sleek, vulgar, emasculated, neurotic type of creature, who became the petted oracle of the dim-lighted room, was loathsome in his eyes. And his respect for his wife's genius made him feel that there was a certain desecration in the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... 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
... brow, my dear: observe them in your face. I am not a medical student for nothing. I tell you you are anaemic and neurotic; indeed, your nerves have reached a rare state of irritability. At the present moment you are in quite a crux, and do not know what to do. Oh, I am a witch—I am quite a witch; I can read people through and through; but I like you, my dear. You are vastly ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... Words: neurology, neurologist, neurography, neuron, lecithin, rete, plexus, neurasthenia, neurasthenic, neurotic, sensorium, funiculus, ganglion, hilum, neurism, innervation, neuration, neuritis, neuropathic, nervine, neuroma, neuropathy, neuroid, neuric, neuricity, aneuria, glioma, neurosis, cinerea, cholesterin, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 code of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... (c. 1506-1534), "the 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... belonged to a Woman's Club, but was by no means the neurotic and dismal type of member who was always thinking of her rights. She took her rights unconsciously, they came natural to her, and she knew exactly how to make the most of them without exciting anything but admiration amongst that great class to whom she was affiliated, not precisely perhaps by ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 conception of her sex,—which reminds me of another well-meaning young lady who wrote me ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These Russian and Bavarian minxes were neurotic, fickle, shifting as sand; the daughters of Judaea were sane, cheerful, solid. Then he thought of his own sister married to that vulgarian, Friedland. He saw her, a rosy-cheeked girl, sitting at the Passover table, with its picturesque ritual. How happy were those far-off pious days! And ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was a little 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 nights before the scene at the hotel there was an air ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... Hume's gay impieties, and could not, if they would, 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 ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was beyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and every Saturday night when ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... baths merely as a refreshing tonic—of those whom I have had the opportunity of observing, were in a condition that might be called normal. By far the greater majority were suffering from some complaint, in most instances of a neurotic or rheumatic nature, the presence of which, while it afforded admirable opportunity for observing therapeutic results, modified more or less the physiological effects of the baths, and served to deprive them of a uniformity which might to a great extent justly be looked for in healthy organisms. ...
— The Electric Bath • George M. Schweig
... 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 sort—yes." 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 you nothing ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 physician ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... 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 ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... 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 ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... Alfred. The Neurotic Constitution. Outlines of a comparative individualistic psychology and psychotherapy. Translated from the German by ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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 ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... 'lay a German town in ashes after 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
... minutes and to resemble that of sinking into innumerable layers of swansdown. The sinuous figure bending over her grew taller with the passage of each minute, until the dark eyes of Mrs. Sin were looking down at Rita from a dizzy elevation. As often occurs in the case of a neurotic subject, delusion as to time and space had followed the depression of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... strain, overwork, and worry come next. Adverse conditions, bereavement, business troubles, etc., rank third, equally with heredity. The arterial diseases of old age, epilepsy, childbirth (generally in the neurotic), change of life, fright and nervous shock, venereal diseases, sexual excesses or irregularities follow ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... euphoniously called 'a past,' and I don't belong to the right-down vicious company of 'Souls.' So I should never do for a heroine of latter-day fiction. I'm afraid I'm abnormal. It's dreadful to be abnormal! One becomes a 'neurotic,' like Lombroso, and all the geniuses. But suppose the world were full of merely normal people,—people who did nothing but eat and sleep in the most perfectly healthy and regular manner,—oh, what a bore it would be! There would be no pictures, no sculpture, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... health 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 I live, his face wasted by suffering, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... caravan arrived at the Desert Edge Sanitarium, 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 czars with ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... promptly in the bud, and an imaginative and humorous view of things encouraged. The child must be taught to keep the passions under control, and to face pain (that great educator which neurotic natures feel with ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... French or in the version prepared by me. Now, I have always thought that some of the characters introduced by Zola into his narrative were somewhat exceptional. I doubt if there were many such absolutely neurotic degenerates as "Maurice" in the French Army at any period of the war. I certainly never came across such a character. Again, the psychology of Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage," published a few years after "La Debacle," and received with acclamations by critics most of whom had ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Poe's neurotic temperament had led him into a number of escapades, but he gave evidence of improvement after he enlisted in the American Army at Boston in 1827. He served two years, and was promoted sergeant-major. He was then 20 years old, and on the basis of his ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... little cruel smile played round her small 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
... 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 that past permanent, ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... the ball rolling without any preliminaries, Telzey decided. The Moderator's picture of her must be that of a spoiled, neurotic brat in a stew about the threatened loss of a pet animal. He expected her to start arguing with him immediately ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... 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
... I must try to forget that I 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
... his agonies was equalled only by the alacrity with which he tested every cure or remedy of which he happened to hear. He agreed enthusiastically with his expensive physicians that he was neurasthenic, psychasthenic and neurotic. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... conditions; (d) Post-traumatic sensual perversions; (e) 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
... 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, ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... 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 ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Middlesex or Lancashire is getting on. England versus Australia is greatly starred. England loses matches, and the nation seems as much plunged in gloom as she was at the failures of the old South African War. In the golf and tennis and polo competitions there is a similar neurotic interest in the supposed sporting rivalry of England and America. It seems even fortunate for the mens sana of old Britain that she has failed in boxing, and that the Dempsey-Carpentier match in America did not affect our national status ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... certainly had, but it fed on strong meat for an unhealthy mind; it fattened on the sordid history of the earlier bushrangers; its favorite fare was the character and exploits of Stingaree. The sallow and neurotic face would brighten with morbid enthusiasm at the bare mention of the desperado's name. The somewhat dull, dark eyes would lighten with borrowed fires: the young fool wore an eye-glass in one ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... 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 mile ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... is one of 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 all ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... 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 ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... The neurotic pharmacopoeia contains nothing so potent as despair to steady quivering nerves, and steel to superhuman endurance. For Beryl, the pendulum of suspense had ceased to swing, because the spring of hope had snapped; and the complete surrender, the mute acceptance of the worst possible ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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 ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 as multiple, ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... 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 a ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... the things you mean. They were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse than old. My magazine will be really young. It's the young writers that I want. And there isn't one of them I want as much ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... 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 worker; can go three nights ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... 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; Feathers of strangled chickens, Moss from the ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... forward by neurotic women who are not one whit too delicate to bear a child. Where the ill-health is genuine, or some constitutional weakness or disorder is present, of course this plea is sensible enough. An apparently sane woman once told me quite seriously that she would have ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... 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 heel till we limp. The lame ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... purely a gift of God, and teaches 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 ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... that he did not believe either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It had not gone so far as this in the judge's experience of a neurotic invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain, and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not a hysterical man, and this is not a neurotic story. It is, as a matter of fact, the same old rot to which the shilling shockers have made us accustomed. I cannot account in any way for my experiences last night in the Haunted Room, but they certainly were not due to nervousness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... do not seem to be able to fall in with the idea, preferring to bear the greatest evils rather than take an active part in the undoing of themselves. That was Mektoub: to bow the head, dumbly resisting. And were they not right? Did not the great majority of European cases of suicide imply a neurotic condition—such as when men of business have suffered reverses on Exchange or lost some trivial appointment? How easily things could be bridged over, or repaired, or even endured! The most hopeless invalid could testify to the fact that some ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... 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 guard them as much ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... of 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
... 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 atmosphere. He is driven to become a member of the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... does not 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 his wife be sent ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... on the part of modern critics to cast a doubt on Byron's sanity. It is true that he inherited bad blood on both sides of his family, that he was of a neurotic temperament, that at one time he maddened himself with drink, but there is no evidence that his brain was actually diseased. Speaking figuratively, he may have been "half mad," but, if so, it was a derangement of the will, not of the mind. He was responsible for his actions, and they rise up in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... a vaudeville actress in Cleveland, which was the home of her childhood. When 17 she married a Jew, although she was herself a Catholic. Her husband noted that she was fretful, sensitive, resentful and quick tempered, although apt to recover quickly from her rages. Previously healthy, neurotic symptoms began with marriage, taking the form of stomach trouble and a tendency to fatigue. Shortly after marriage an abortion was induced. After being married for two years she had a quarrel and separated from her husband. They were reconciled later, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... himself, so we 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 ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 had not the steady, slow nerves of that ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... eminently feminine; the affinity lies in a hysterical nature. Thus, excessive pietism is a frequent concomitant of excessive sexual passion; this, though notably the case with women, is common enough with men of unduly neurotic temperaments. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... traditions of 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 on ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... 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
... window, Jacob Kent awoke. Turning on his elbow, he raised the lid and peered into the ammunition box. Whatever he saw, or whatever he did not see, exercised a very peculiar effect upon him, considering his neurotic temperament. He glanced at the sleeping man on the floor, let the lid down gently, and rolled over on his back. It was an unwonted calm that rested on his face. Not a muscle quivered. There was not the least sign of excitement or perturbation. ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... persons to-day, that a falling birth-rate means degeneration and disaster, is so altogether removed from the sphere of reason that we ought perhaps to regard it as comparable to those manias which, in former centuries, have assumed other forms more attractive to the neurotic temperament of those days; fortunately, it is a mania which, in the nature of things, is powerless to realize itself, and we need not anticipate that the outcry against small families will have the same results as the ancient ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... his health holds out." Gideon's health was watched over as if he had been an ailing prince. His bubbling vivacity was the foundation upon which his charm and his success were built. Stuhk became a sort of vicarious neurotic, eternally searching for symptoms in his protege; Gideon's tongue, Gideon's liver, Gideon's heart were matters to him of an unfailing and anxious interest. And of late—of course it might be imagination —Gideon had shown a little physical ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... know nothing; and of 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
... Olga 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 ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... means that as far as you're going to be concerned, I'm just another Ihelian private first class for awhile, not a space-neurotic Earthman! And our girls ... well, I think—I think they'd prefer anything to the living death in store for them—the rotting away of their lives in some infested alien jungle. Anyway, somebody's got to be judge. So let's get this ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... remedial; restorative &c 660; corrective, palliative, healing; sanatory^, sanative; prophylactic, preventative, immunizing; salutiferous &c (salutary) 656 [Obs.]; medical, medicinal; therapeutic, chirurgical [Med.], epulotic^, paregoric, tonic, corroborant, analeptic^, balsamic, anodyne, hypnotic, neurotic, narcotic, sedative, lenitive, demulcent^, emollient; depuratory^; detersive^, detergent; abstersive^, disinfectant, febrifugal^, alterative; traumatic, vulnerary. allopathic^, heteropathic^, homeopathic, hydropathic [Med.]; anthelmintic [Med.]; antifebrile ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... shall be yours," the physiologist said with decision, "for you are a good-hearted young man, and one of the best neurotic subjects that I have ever known—that is when you are not under the influence of alcohol. My experiment is to be performed upon the fourth of next month. You will attend at the physiological laboratory at twelve o'clock. It will be a great ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... A neurotic type—a poor weed of life who had been reared in the dark lairs of civilization. Yet I had no contempt for him as he gibbered with self-pity. The tragedy of the future of civilization was in the soul ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... said 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 will go and see if the orgy is concluded. I will hear what Comrade Jackson ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... forgotten—forgotten, it seemed, by every one save Craven. He had been forgotten because his death did not belong to the Cambridge order of things, because it raised unpleasant ideas, and made one morbid and neurotic. It had, in fact, nothing in common with cold baths, marmalade, rugby football, ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age of twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... all his struggles and his oaths are in vain. The dread salt is forced down his throat and he dies. The very fortunate have only an acrid taste which defies analysis left them. Of these more fortunate there are, however, many classes. Some, because they are neurotic or have some hereditary taint, the existence of which they have never suspected, in the end succumb; others do not entirely succumb, but carry traces to their graves; yet others do not appear to mind at all. It is a very subtle poison, which may lie hidden ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... intemperate, a drunkard. B Blind I Insane Sy Syphilitic C Criminalistic M Migrainous Sx Sexually immoral D Deaf Neu. Neurotic T Tuberculosis E Epileptic Par. Paralytic ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... 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 ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... you, McCulloch—not that you are of the neurotic habit, judging by the way you took a chance of having a hole bored through you while searching that blessed barge—but if you believe you can frame a cut-and-dried programme during the time you have retained John D. Curtis's services as ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... 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
... acquired by the individual, the outcome of voluntary wrongdoing. In some few cases this may be true, but in the majority of instances inquiry into the family history will reveal the presence of an inherited taint, such families usually showing a neurotic condition. No position in the social or intellectual world is, or ever has been, entirely free from the tendency towards alcoholism, and a study of the family history of the great men who have fallen victims to alcohol will show that the cause ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... The Observer draws our attention to the phenomenally early return of the swifts. But after all there must be something particularly soothing about England these days to a neurotic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... scarcely questionable; but that he lacked all 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 nor ability ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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
... protected by a bearded janitor, and remark at once a band of three performing dogs, who are, as the guide-book would say, "discoursing sweet music." In neither ward of the city does there seem to be the slightest restraint upon the use of musical instruments. It is no place for neurotic people. ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... in moody silence. In aspect, he 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 ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... 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 ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... sensitive, took sorrows and troubles hardly, and was deeply shocked and distressed by sad news of any kind. I have heard him say that he often had great difficulty in forcing himself to open a letter which he thought likely to be distressing or unpleasant. He was naturally, I imagine, of an almost neurotic tendency; but he did not seem so much to combat this by occupation and determination as to have arrived at some mechanical way of dealing with it. I remember that he said to me once: "If you have a bad ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... simply 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
... 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
... 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 taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poems ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... remained unidentifiable to her, but the office appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made: the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star, then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole novel, a story told and retold, in the girls' gossip about each of the men before ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... silence or generalities. The campaign seemed, therefore, to fall a little flat. In the light of subsequent events it seems improbable that the Coalition Party was ever in real danger. But party managers are easily "rattled." The Prime Minister's more neurotic advisers told him that he was not safe from dangerous surprises, and the Prime Minister lent an ear to them. The party managers demanded more "ginger." The Prime Minister looked about ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... which he belongs is fading out and becoming 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 of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... 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 overstrain on the eye, which not only results in ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... attention, and, besides, he wrote a series of aphorisms of his own. The most interesting of his writings, however, is a series of letters on dietetics written for the son of his patron Saladin. The young prince seems to have suffered from one of the neurotic conditions that so often develop in those who have their lives all planned for them, and little incentive to do things for themselves. The main portion of his complaints centred, as in the case of many another individual of leisure, in disturbances of digestion. Besides, he suffered from constipation ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... nervous type," said the Dean, whose weakness it was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen with enormous families, as "neurotic." ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... life's good things in their name before ever they saw the light. Man makes his god in his own image; and thus it comes to pass that while the strong and joyous Greek adored Zeus on Olympus, the anaemic and neurotic Englishman worships Christ on Calvary. Do you tell me that if people were happy they would bow down before a stricken and crucified God? Not they. And I want to make them so happy that they shall cease to have any desire ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... 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 ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... "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 ball ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... if you say so," he rejoined, "though there again it is more my misfortune than my fault. If my patients elect to make me the butt of their neurotic imagination, surely I am more to be ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... periods of wakefulness at night which they attribute to the action of the full moon. One may perhaps refer also to the tendency of bright moonlight to stir the emotions of the young, especially at puberty, a tendency which in neurotic persons may ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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
... strength, like a true artist, but from weakness—the weakness of his age, which he never overcame. It is for this reason that he should be rather pitied than judged as he is now being judged by his German and English critics, who, with thoroughly neurotic suddenness, have acknowledged their revulsion of feeling a ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... indignation, 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 head ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... might try inviting them to dinner, some evening. Oh, thunder, let's not waste our good time thinking about 'em! Our little bunch has a lot liver times than all those plutes. Just compare a real human like you with these neurotic birds like Lucile McKelvey—all highbrow talk and dressed up like a plush horse! You're a great ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 rather ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and answered differently by persons who claim to have some expert 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 for ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... 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 than the first, for children without sufficient home care often discover a substitute ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... who should not teach sex-hygiene are the men and women who are the unfortunate victims of sexual abnormality, either physical or psychical, that more or less influences their outlook on life. Certain neurotic and hysterical men or women who lack thorough physiological training and whose own sexual disturbances have led them to devour omnivorously and unscientifically the psychopathological literature of sex by such authors as Havelock Ellis, ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... 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, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... from which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge's manner, upon the neurotic weakness of Georgina's unmarried state, upon the general decay of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the unfairness ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... morbidity is inherited through both parents it appears more frequently and in a more marked degree than where one parent is entirely free from taint. This is what occurs when a consanguineous marriage takes place between descendants of a neurotic family. The percentage of idiotic children would then be somewhat higher from consanguineous marriages than from the average marriage purely through the action of the ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... degree, as the mere result of old age. Entirely normal people of sound heredity do not tend to manifest signs of pronounced mental weakness or abnormality even in extreme old age. We are justified in suspecting a neurotic strain, though it may not be of severe degree. This is, indeed, illustrated by our records of British genius. Some of the eminent men of genius on my list (at least twelve) suffered before death from insanity which may probably be described as senile dementia. But several of these were somewhat abnormal ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... said, "is manhood, virility, energy, simple strength, directness, all that this poor neurotic world is yearning for, the primal force, uncomplex, untroubled, just the exultation of ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Russian." This latter is to be preferred, for it leads your companion to say, "But don't you like TschaiKOWsky?", pronouncing the second syllable as if the composer were a female bull. You can then reply, "Why, yes, TschaiKOFFsky DID write some rather good music—although it's all neurotic and obviously Teutonic." Don't fail to ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... that the subject acts as he believes a hypnotized 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
... 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 ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... obviously enjoying herself as much as Valeria Schmitt. Even Kessler was relaxed now, leaning back in the choice chair by the window with his collar pulled open. His search had been a neurotic one, he decided, as he listened to Miss Schmitt's pleasant chatter. He realized he would learn nothing here, but now he was not angry even ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... 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 Seer's sixth ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... requires somewhat more elaborate mounting and mechanical effects than are at present afforded by the ordinary Punch Show. In M. MAETERLINCK's version, Ponsch becomes the Prince of Half-seas-over-Holland; he is the victim of hereditary homicidal mania, complicated by neurotic hysteria. Inflamed by the insinuations of Mynheer Olenikke—a kind of Dutch Mephistopheles and Iago combined—he is secretly jealous of his consort the Princess Joedi's preference for the society of Djoe, the Court Jester and Society Clown. Here is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... 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
... that we be very gentle to one another and even a little patient with ourselves. I conceive it much better to use contraceptives than to bear unwanted children; I conceive it also better to use them than to be cruel to others or become neurotic oneself; but that it is the ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... developing, when he is 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
... did not mean that really; because certain qualities she inherited from her sturdy Yorkshire ancestors would always prevent her from choosing the way of the neurotic. She would be brave enough to live out her life, though she had ceased to ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the young men of this country need is restraint, not stimulant; what this Nation needs is reserve. The only serious fear I entertain for our future is that the great rapidity of our common lives will make us neurotic. I prefer a young man to be a little less scintillant, than that his brilliancy should be at the expense of exhausted nerves and ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... flatter 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. Only they conceal their badness, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... irritable."[18] A little farther on, Dr. Anstie adds, "But I confess, that, with me, the result of close attention given to the pathology of neuralgia has been the ever-growing conviction, that, next to the influence of neurotic inheritance, there is no such frequently powerful factor in the construction of the neuralgic habit as mental warp of a certain kind, the product of an unwise education." In another place, speaking of the liability of the brain to suffer from an unwise ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... this young man Romilly is my cousin, it would be the second or third time already that he has disappeared. He is an ill-balanced, neurotic sort of creature. At times he accepts help—even solicits it—from his more prosperous relations, and at times he won't speak to us. But of one thing I am perfectly convinced, and that is that there is no ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 bridle rein, that something ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and 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 ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... not be supposed that the demand on the lover and husband to approach a woman in the same spirit, with the same consideration and skilful touch, as a musician takes up his instrument is merely a demand made by modern women who are probably neurotic or hysterical. No reader of these Studies who has followed the discussions of courtship and of sexual selection in previous volumes can fail to realize that—although we have sought to befool ourselves by giving an illegitimate connotation to the word "brutal"—consideration and respect for ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... dream," continued Constance, rapidly thrusting home her interpretation so that it would have its full effect. "You dreamed that your husband was dying and you were afraid. She said it meant love was dead. It did not. The fact is that neurotic fear in a woman has its origin in repressed, unsatisfied love, love which for one reason or another is turned away from its object and has not succeeded in being applied. Then his death. That simply means that you have a feeling that you might ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... once plagued himself and his friends by believing that he had elephantiasis, and says that he was really very healthy The truth seems to be that his constitution was naturally strong, though weakened from time to time by neurotic conditions, in which mental pain brought on much physical pain, and by irregular infrequent, and ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... to, but which were always trying, were now 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 that of a ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... sprang, rather than from the act itself. A partially disorganized—or as we prefer to say "denuded"—brain may be fully capable of sane thought, except on some one topic, and able to exercise every intellectual function except of a particular order. Or there may be mental weakness and neurotic susceptibility in regard to a special class of impressions. It would be difficult to name any form of act or submission which may not be the outcome of incipient or limited disease. The practical difficulty is to avoid, on ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... The problems of the social order are so massive that the interests of the individual often are sacrificed. Increasingly, people are unable to endure the frustrations caused by their social, political, and industrial environment, and develop neurotic responses in which their aggressions are turned in on themselves. The autonomy and initiative that once belonged to the individual have been transferred to the social order, with the result that instead of individuals receiving their direction from within, they now receive it from ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... difference went far beyond externals; there was a wide psychological gulf between them—the difference between a woman of healthy mind and calm, equable temperament, who had probably never bothered her head about the opposite sex, and a woman who was the neurotic product of a modern, nerve-ridden city; sexual in type, a prey to morbid ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... of the morbid nature of the symptoms; it almost regularly controls some portion of the social behavior of the patient. The transformation of love into hatred, of tenderness into hostility, which is characteristic of a large number of neurotic cases and apparently of all cases of paranoia, takes place by means of the union of ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... 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 ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... really superbly beautiful; but Valgrand knew too much about women of every temperament, neurotic, hysterical, and many another kind, not to suppose that here he was merely taking part in a sentimental comedy. He made a rough gesture and laid his ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Kara had made. This T. X. had obtained through sources which might be hastily described as discreditable. Mansus knew of the baccarat establishment in Albemarle Street, but he did not know that the neurotic wife of a very great man indeed, no less than the Minister of Justice, was a frequent visitor to that establishment, and that she had lost in one night some 6,000 pounds. In these circumstances it was remarkable, ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... 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
... yet," said 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
... railroad 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 ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... 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
... 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
... soul's reaction to God—the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his austere, self-giving life[43]—as the probable result of the reaction of a neurotic temperament to mediaeval traditions. But if, for instance the Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student—another Oxford undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... then no ransom letter came; no evidence of the crime of kidnapping. This did not close the case; there were other cases on record where a child was stolen by adults for purposes other than ransom. It was not very likely that a child of six would be stolen by a neurotic adult to replace a lost infant, and Paul Brennan was personally convinced that James Holden had enough self-reliance to make such a kidnap attempt fail rather early in the game. He could hardly say so, nor could he suggest that James had indeed ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... 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 of experimentation ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma |
