"Sanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... earthquake of the war will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into the arms of the "great brother" constructed for them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to picture them flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus—the Christ uncrucified, and restored to sanity, of ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... recovery. Captain Annesley had suffered greatly in mind through the long continuance of my affliction, and had spent hours by my side whenever the frigate happened to be in port, and had directed that no expense should be spared in the endeavour to secure my restoration to sanity. ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... conviction she would not depart. It was a folly, a frenzy, her two friends contended. Its indulgence would threaten her sanity. They besought her to consider anew. The discovery of such a stone in this mountain region was altogether devoid of significance. Right reason and religion alike dictated submission to the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... innocence that Hardie v. Hardie was now at an end, with Captain Dodd ready to prove Alfred's sanity; but the lawyer advised them not to put the captain to the agitation ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... country that the white Christian people of Paris, Texas and the communities thereabout had deliberately determined to lay aside all forms of law and inaugurate an entirely new form of punishment for the murder. They absolutely refused to make any inquiry as to the sanity or insanity of their prisoner, but set the day and hour when in the presence of assembled thousands they put their helpless victim to the stake, tortured him, and then burned him to death for the delectation and satisfaction of ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... "Sanity went, too, Johnny," said the man softly. "You could not stand that fear and remain sane, so something cut off. That ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... in all its various phases, of which he is now acknowledged to be the subtlest poetic interpreter in our language, though, profound as its attraction always was for him, never was poet with a more exquisite balance of intellectual sanity. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... humanity have been able to control and master your imagination and your antipathies. To this power over yourself you owe many of your virtues, and all the strength of character, and, I will say it, the sanity of mind, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... has hitherto been able, and probably it is impossible, to define madness, or to give a clearly marked indication of the boundary line between sanity and insanity. Mental soundness is merged in unsoundness by degrees of decadence which are so small as to be practically inappreciable. It is with the mind-state which precedes the development of recognized form of insanity the therapeutist and the ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... instinctively she turns to the peasant for sympathy in the strain of her emotion. It is his entrance, perhaps, which prevents Orestes from being swept away and revealing himself. The peasant's courage towards two armed men is striking, as well as his courtesy and his sanity. He is the one character in the play not somehow tainted ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... this? Had he actually caught and kissed this girl, this girl whose name he did not know, whose face he had never seen, of whom he knew nothing but that she was the daughter of a Turk and utterly forbidden by every canon of sanity and self-preservation? ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... nations, and epochs it is the rule." And whilst, on the one hand mental specialists have been extending the boundaries of insanity to the point of justifying the popular adage that everyone is a bit mad, they have, on the other hand, tended to narrow down the difference between sanity and its reverse until it has become almost entirely a question ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... too much to say that Adolphe Denot was insane, for that would imply that he was not responsible for his own actions; but there certainly lacked something in his brain or mind, which is necessary to perfect sanity. He was no fool; he had read, enjoyed, and perhaps written poetry; he was, for the times, well educated; he could talk fluently, and, occasionally, even persuasively; he understood rapidly, and perceived correctly, the arguments and ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... wreckage. I saw that by some miracle of chance the microscope was still standing, and I had a moment of sanity. ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... less upon the nobility of their characters than upon the medicinal effect of their post-mortem humours; but no one can fail to be struck with this brave, clean, smiling face, which looks out upon us from a not impossible past, radiant with sense and wit, with holiness and sanity combined, whom we can all reverence as at once a saint of God and also one of the fine masculine Makers of England. We cherish a good deal of romance about the age in which St. Hugh lived. It is the age of fair Rosamond, of Crusades, of lion-hearted King Richard, and ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... free with a dreadful effort and rose, sick, bewildered, stunned. My world—my refuge of truth, and honor, and safety and sanity that had lain in Ernst von Gerhard's great, steady hands, was slipping away from me. I think the horror that I felt within must have leaped to my eyes, for in an instant Von Gerhard was beside me, steadying me with his ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... forms, as though ghosts beckoned and danced in the haze, luring him on to become one of themselves. Keith was not a dreamer, nor one to yield easily to such brain fancies, but the mad delirium of loneliness gripped him, and he had to struggle back to sanity, beating his hands upon his breast to stir anew the sluggish circulation of his blood, and talking to the horse in ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... pocket her letter and the copy of the will I had prepared I explained as best I could why I had come. I was tolerably confused. I could not question her entire sanity, and as I did not wish in any way to hint at what I felt concerning Emily I soon involved myself in a veritable dust of legal pedantry. Finally I asked ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... afraid I always do worry good, sensible, proper people. I'm made that way, mad north north west like Hamlet," she added whimsically. "Maybe we Holidays are all mad that much, excepting Uncle Phil of course. He's all that keeps the rest of us on the track of sanity at all. But Alan is madder still. Jean, he is going to Mexico to take ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... reached safety, the girl's troubles were not ended. With the coming of darkness her peril would increase. As long as Whaley was with West there was hope. The gambler was cold-blooded as a fish, but he had the saving sense of sanity. If he meant to return to Faraway—and there was no reason why he should not—he dared not let any harm befall the girl. But West was a ruffian unmitigated. His ruthless passion might ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... things. Why should I go on living here, working, slaving, haunted by the terror of Hellbeam? With my boy, my wife, to fight for it was worth all the agony. But without them—why? Why in the name of sanity should I go on? To beat the Skandinavians out of Canada's trade, and claim it all for a country that doesn't care a curse? To build up a great name that in the end must be dragged in the mire of public estimation? ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... reactions of self-contempt, made her feel the need he had of her, the place she had taken in his life. But for her, what ear would have been open to his cries? And what hand but hers could drag him up again to a footing of sanity and self-respect? All through the stress of the struggle with him, she had been conscious of something faintly maternal in her efforts to guide and uplift him. But for the present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... have been accumulated in a very few years by bumping the heads of other suckers. He pays the rate prescribed without considering whether it be high enough to keep the company solvent or low enough to stamp his investment as commercial sanity. He is little concerned about "dividends," but wants to be assured that at the time of his death his heirs will be paid a certain number of dollars. So he goes up against a mammoth slot-machine which absorbs dollars while it rolls ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... talking about it," I said to Peters, "the man is ruining me. Socially with the Travises I am an outcast, and I have no doubt they will tell about it, and my ostracism will extend. On the Digestic my sanity is seriously questioned, and now for the first time in my life, before some two thousand people, I break down in a public lecture which I have delivered dozens of times hitherto without a tremor. The ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... at night, devising means of telling Ian about this strange blank in her life. But she shrank from saying things that might make him suspect her of an unsound mind. She had plainly been sane enough in her abnormal state, and there was no doubt of her sanity now. She told him she had had since the autumn, and still had, strange collapses of memory; and he said that quite explained some peculiarities of her work. She tried to talk to him about French experiments in hypnotism, and how it was said sometimes to bring ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... even in the cocoon safety of his well-armed ship, began to dream. And from those dreams a horror of the apparently empty world developed, until he fled the planet to preserve his sanity. There had been a second visit to Warlock in check; worlds so well adapted to human emigration could not be lightly thrown away. And this time there was a negative report, no trace of dreams, no registration of any outside influence on the delicate and complicated equipment ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... us to live together any longer would be an obscene joke. Let's end it while we still have some sanity and decency left. ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... diction, not because of the supremacy of his imagination, nor because of the variety of his melodious verse,—not even because of the matchless combination of all these charms; but the Bard of Stratford lives and shall live because his sanity enabled him to see the "God of things as they are," and his passion penetrated into the deepest sorrows and rose to the highest aspirations of the human heart,—and throughout all this sympathizing with goodness and while despising the depraved yet pitying with a ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... further than this when he speaks of the soundness and sanity of Burns's nature. 'The attentions he received during his stay in town from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would have turned any head but his own. He retained the same simplicity of manner and appearance which had struck me so forcibly when I first saw him ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... died. A whit less gloomy were his imaginings of the said prince and princess rushing into the house, in the nick of time, just before life was extinct, and cutting him down. How they were to find him he did not know. This side-track exploration of possibilities was a symptom of sanity. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification. For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall it from the tree. An observation of yours about its great weight ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... appeared to have passed over him, instead of months, while I had been absent from England. Remembering the medical report which Mr. Playmore had given me to read—recalling the doctor's positively declared opinion that the preservation of Dexter's sanity depended on the healthy condition of his nerves—I could not but feel that I had done wisely (if I might still hope for success) in hastening my return from Spain. Knowing what I knew, fearing what I feared, I believed ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... absence. They had slipped away and left me with a prisoner that I didn't know what to do with; with an inquiry by the American Department of State hanging over me; with Torrence to reckon with, and, in general, a muddled head that only a vast number of lucid explanations could restore to sanity. ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... complete annihilation can be so named, is the one and only conclusion to the doctrine that mind—crude, undiagnosed mind—is dependent on matter, a doctrine confirmed by the apparent facts that injury to the cranium is accompanied by unconsciousness and protracted loss of memory, and that the sanity of the individual is entirely contingent upon the state of his cerebral matter—a clot of blood in one of the cerebral veins, or the unhealthy condition of a cell, being in itself sufficient to bring about a complete mental metamorphose, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... dancing. He heard the tiny hissing and rattling of the dry grains. It was uncommonly weird. This visible and practical result made the clergyman's astonishing words seem true and convincing. That moving sand brought sanity, yet a certain curious terror of ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... the others flickering upon the sheet. I wanted to ask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that absurd business, I did not even know her name, and the whole story would have sounded a little mad. Just now, it suited me that Fox should have a moderate idea of my sanity. Besides, the thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. One wouldn't talk about her in a smoking-room full of men telling stories, and one wouldn't talk about ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... again he read between the lines, finding sanity and sense, compassion and humor. The inherited charm of Brian's personality ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... over, and sold his children's very school-books in order to supply himself with the necessary gum. At this time he lived almost exclusively on money gifts from pitying friends, who shook their heads in their doubts of his sanity. Often his house had neither food nor fuel in it; his family were forced to go out into the woods to get wood to burn. "They dug their potatoes before they were half-grown, for the sake of having ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Trevor's acquaintance with Mrs. Rush and other friends of the Neville family, and her looks toward that lady were now so glum and ill-natured that Mr. Powers could not fail to notice them, and was more than ever beset by doubts as to her perfect sanity. They were a queer couple, he thought, to go wandering together through the distracting ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... the welter of the present, she clutched at the high dignities and distinctions of the past as at a lifebelt. Not vulgarly, in a spirit of self-aggrandizement; but in the simple interests of self-preservation, as a means of keeping endangered sanity afloat. For the distinctions and dignities of that period were real too, just as uncontrovertible a contribution to her knowledge of men and of things, just as vital an element in her experience, as chaos let loose on her now. The one in ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... this singular being many anecdotes were prevalent among the seafaring men of Nantucket. These anecdotes went to prove his prodigious strength when under excitement, and some of them had given rise to a doubt of his sanity." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... basalt columns, looking like a shattered temple of Antediluvians; and when my foot at last touched land, I sat down there a long, long time in the rubbly snow, and silently wept. My eyes that night were like a fountain of tears. For the firm land is health and sanity, and dear to the life of man; but I say that the great ungenial ice is a nightmare, and a blasphemy, and a madness, and the realm of the Power ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a question it were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths. Today we call them "effective" subjects; we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think it ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... somewhat impatient. He really fancied that Forbes was trifling with him. Indeed, a queer doubt of the man's complete sanity now peeped up in him. Forbes was regarded as a crank by a large section of the public on account of his peace propaganda; if that opinion were justified why should he not be ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... echoed. "Awhile ago, monsieur, you appeared to cast a doubt upon my sanity. Is it a case of the drunkard who thinks all the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... of alarming the house by letting the smoke escape through the door, he opened the window, and when it had partly dispersed, sought refuge himself from the arctic air of his bedroom in the drawing-room. So far the act did not seem inconsistent with his sanity, or even intelligence and consideration for others. But Marie fixed upon him a ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... introduction.—You mention having consulted some friend on the MSS.—Is not this contrary to our usual way? Instruct Mr. Murray not to allow his shopman to call the work 'Child of Harrow's Pilgrimage!!!!!' as he has done to some of my astonished friends, who wrote to enquire after my sanity on the occasion, as well they might. I have heard nothing of Murray, whom I scolded heartily. Must I write more notes?—Are there not enough?—Cawthorn must be kept back with the 'Hints.'—I hope he is getting on with Hobhouse's quarto. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Steve's viewpoint. It was his intention not to try to evade his personal blame in the matter but to make reparation to his own self and to his wife if he were permitted. If he could once convince his wife that their sole chance of future happiness and sanity lay in beginning as medium-incomed young persons with all the sane world before them it would have been worth ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... My wife's deeper sanity and clearer vision always inclined her to distrust our American acquaintance, Peter Ganns. From the first moment that Jenny's eyes fell upon that fine figure of a man, she judged him to be built on a very different mental pattern from Brendon. He was no New World edition of our poor, ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... him with glances of astonishment, and doubts about his sanity. Some of them actually think he has ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... extraordinary man before him. For a moment, as the strange story of his miraculous escape and his still more wonderful indifference to it all recurred to his mind, he felt a doubt of the narrator's truthfulness or his sanity. But another glance at the sailor's frank eyes dispelled that momentary suspicion. He held out his hand as frankly, and grasping Captain Dornton's, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... unwittingly we got so deep down among the ponderous mysteries of psychology; so wrought with the mighty thoughts evolved from our own brains; so uplifted in grappling with gigantic reasonings, that, fearful for our very sanity, we rushed out upon the lawn like children; we rolled upon the grass; we found a ball and tossed to each other; anything,—anything to keep ourselves down ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... We earnestly desire that women should be highly educated. And yet is there not a type of educated woman which we do not wholly admire? I am not going to caricature a bluestocking, but to point out one or two real dangers. Education is good; but perfect sanity is better still. Sanity is the most excellent of all women's excellences. We forgive eccentricity and one-sidedness—the want of perfect sanity—in men, and especially men of genius; and we rather reluctantly forgive it in women ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... is done, and done thoroughly, consistently, and intelligently, the other man's resistance reacts back upon himself, and he finds himself out as he never could in any other way. Having found himself out, unless his mulishness is almost past sanity, he begins to reject his habit of resistance ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... I come to consider my present condition, I have doubts as to my complete sanity. Here am I, in a little, semi-fashionable French seaside place, away from my books and my comforts and my habits, as much interested in its vapid distractions as if the universe held no other pursuits worth the attention ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the chief end of life. Now if God is too kind to allow his children to suffer some of the natural consequences of sin, he is not a really kind and loving father, he is spoiling his children. Salvation is soundness, sanity, health; just as holiness is wholeness, escape from the disease, and not merely from the consequences of sin. A physician, unless a quack, never promises relief from a deep-seated disease without any pain or discomfort. And if the disease is ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... if they represented positive classes. With words just as with numbers and abstract forms there have been definite phases of human development. There was with regard to number, the phase when man could barely count at all, or counted in perfect good faith and sanity upon his fingers. Then there was the phase when he struggled with the development of number, when he began to elaborate all sorts of ideas about numbers, until at last he developed complex superstitions ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... dimension by a suitably operating device. Tommy had sat up all night drawing those plans. He told Dalzell just enough of what he was up against to enlist Dalzell's enthusiastic cooperation without permitting him to doubt Tommy's sanity. Dalzell had known Tommy as an amateur tennis player, but not as ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... LAMDA}{GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON}{GREEK SMALL LETTER NU}. For if the fact be that there is no difference between the appearance that a thing presents to a madman and to a person in his senses, then who can feel quite sure of his own sanity? And to wish to produce such an effect as that is a proof of no ordinary madness. But they follow up in a childish manner the likenesses of twins, or of impressions of rings. For who of us denies that there are such things as likenesses, when they are visible in numbers of things? But if ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... country. It vibrates in the sparkling tone of the new type of musical performer like Willeke, the 'cellist. Like a starter's pistol it sounds out of the writings of hard-trained men of the hour like John Masefield and Alfred Noyes. One has only to compare the overflowing life and sanity of workers like these with the condition of the ordinary "Out-of-the-way young man" to see what a gulf yawns between exuberance and exhaustion, between absolute sanity and a state somewhere on the sunny ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... back from the fascination of the precipice) You think I can't smash anything? You think life can't break up, and go outside what it was? Because you've gone dead in the form in which you found yourself, you think that's all there is to the whole adventure? And that is called sanity. And made a virtue—to lock one in. You never worked with things that grow! Things that take a sporting chance—go mad—that sanity mayn't lock them in—from life untouched—from life—that waits, (she turns toward the inner room) ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... that social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is a consciousness ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... that and, of course, I don't believe for a moment that God's coming in a chariot of fire on New Year's Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn't end it—it ought to end it, but it doesn't. There's more in some people's madness than in other people's sanity, and anyway, even if it's all nonsense it means life or death to your aunt and some of the others, and it means a certain breaking up of all this place. And it probably means the triumph of a charlatan like Thurston and the increase ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... to consult, she sent a swift messenger to her husband with word to break camp and move forward at once—"he could not have the reason for haste, but there was reason enough." And he, knowing well and well trusting the sanity and breadth of that girl-brain, hastened forward, unquestioning, while she promptly informed the officer whose order she had vetoed, what she had done, and why. So far as human wit may penetrate, obedience to that backward summons would have meant, three years later, the winning ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... the roar of cannon, the beating of drums, the sobs of women. And below the racket and its sad accompaniment was always the low indignant mutter of a triumphant people at those who had dared to set themselves above the popular clamour and ask for sanity. The intolerable longing that had become her constant companion would be fed by every device of unpropitious Circumstance. Again and again she would experience this impulse to go to him, and some night the blood would not recede from her brain ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... given you a heart. God knows I envy the man who wins it! You have been in the college of the Limberlost all your life, and I never met a graduate from any other institution who could begin to compare with you in sanity, clarity, and interesting knowledge. I wouldn't even advise you to read too many books on your lines. You acquire your material first hand, and you know that you are right. What you should do is to begin early to practise self-expression. Don't wait too long to ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... plan for regenerating the world! Beloved child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Madness—madness on the face of it!" But, madness or sanity, he could not choose but ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and Joseph Glanvill were men of acute intelligence and complete sanity; the one an aged statesman deeply versed in the deceits and follies of men; the other a young cleric, educated in the Oxford of the Commonwealth, and stirred to enthusiasm by what he had there heard of the progress of natural philosophy. In this perennial debate the man of the world ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... Jews are not like other races; they remain as unique to everybody else as they are to themselves. The Roman Empire did not pass like other empires; it did not perish like Babylon and Assyria. It went through a most extraordinary remorse amounting to madness and resuscitation into sanity, which is equally strange in history whether it seems as ghastly as a galvanised corpse or as glorious as a god risen from the dead. The very land and city are not like other lands and cities. The concentration and conflict in Jerusalem to-day, whether we regard them as a reconquest by Christendom ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... music is readily understood. Indeed, we cannot refrain from urging everyone to cultivate such a love himself; for in the works of Mozart are found a purity, a sanity and a delight in creation which keep them alive and make them in very truth "things of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... similar to my captors hemmed us in. Before us, they thinned into nothingness as we approached, only to swarm into being in some other spot. It was terrifying; an unbelievable experience that made me question my sanity. The only vestige of comfort left me was the hope that they were taking ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... shouldn't, in order to convince The Master's deputy. The key men in nearly every republic in South America are in The Master's power. Paraguay belongs to him, body and soul. Bolivia is absolutely his. Every man of the official class from the President down knows that he has two weeks or less of sanity if The Master's deputy shuts down on him—and he knows that at the crook of the deputy's finger he'll be assassinated before then. If they run away, they go murder mad. If they stay, they have ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... with a glance at Mr. Fett—who had fallen asleep with his head on his arms—stepped out upon the moonlit terrace. I waited for Nat to speak and give me a chance to have it out with him, if he doubted (as he must, methought) my father's sanity. But he gazed over the park at our feet, the rolling shadows of the woodland, the far estuary where one moonray trembled, and stretching out both hands drew the spiced night-air into his lungs with ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... had taken for granted that Frank had some well-concocted scheme for gaining admittance to the Rose; and as the wiles of love were altogether out of his province, he had followed in full faith such a sans-appel as he held Frank to be. But now he almost doubted of his brother's sanity, though Frank's manner was perfectly collected and his voice firm. Amyas, honest fellow, had no understanding of that intense devotion, which so many in those days (not content with looking on it as a lofty virtue, and yet one to be duly ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... at her with tenderness and admiration, and the look was the flower, the perfection of his sanity. ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... whatever, that professes to stand for Socialism, makes an altogether too presumptuous claim. The whole is greater than the part, the will than the instrument. There can be no official nor pontifical Socialism; the theory lives and grows. It springs out of the common sanity of mankind. Constructive Socialism shapes into a great system of developments to be forwarded, points to a great number of systems of activity amidst which its adherents may choose their field for work. Parties and societies may come or go, parties and organizations ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... all of the powers to be in their right minds at one time. It has been tried. We are not going to try to get all of them to go into the scheme peaceably, are we? In that case I must withdraw my influence; because, for business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity. Four is enough if they can be securely harnessed together. They can compel peace, and peace without compulsion would be against nature and not operative. A sliding scale of reduction of 10 per cent a year has a sort of plausible look, and I am willing to try that if three other ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said Don Antonio, "may God forgive you the wrong you have done the whole world in trying to bring the most amusing madman in it back to his senses. Do you not see, senor, that the gain by Don Quixote's sanity can never equal the enjoyment his crazes give? But my belief is that all the senor bachelor's pains will be of no avail to bring a man so hopelessly cracked to his senses again; and if it were not uncharitable, I would say may Don Quixote ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... said. But as I pass the barrier in Times path, formed by the death of my beloved, and proceed with the second era of my existence, I feel that a shadow gathers over my brain, and I mistrust the perfect sanity of the record. But let me on.—Years dragged themselves along heavily, and still I dwelled within the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass; but a second change had come upon all things. The star-shaped flowers shrank ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... are the leaders of the world for all that, and one hour of their Divine madness is worth more to humanity than a cycle of our sanity. And yet we deny them friendship and love, and do our best to put them out of the pale of the human family! We have invented a new name for them too—degenerates—pygmies and pigs as we are, who ought to go down on our knees to them with ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the death of Priam Venus has to remind him of his duty to his father, wife, and son (ii. 594 foll.), reproaching him for his loss of sanity ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... great waste of human life and energy now going on in Europe is a waste pure and simple. We refuse to believe that some purification is not to result from the fire through which mankind is passing, and that some sanity in handling human affairs is not to follow the evident insanity with which we are now confronted. Something a little more stable because a little more reasonable must appear at the end to replace the inconstancy and unrest which have up to now characterized the relations of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... our own form, or summing up,) that thinker or analyzer or overlooker who by an inscrutable combination of train'd wisdom and natural intuition most fully accepts in perfect faith the moral unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in history, science, and all life and time, present and future, is both the truest cosmical devotee or religioso, and the profoundest philosopher. While he who, by the spell of himself and his circumstance, sees ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... you. That would solve all difficulties in the most satisfactory way. She would have the variety that seems necessary to her existence; you could lie on your knees before her all day long; and our friend would be restored to sanity. Think it over, Heinz. It's ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... most contemptible of the jungle breed! Who knows? my blows may inject some slight sanity of consideration into their thick heads. I am headmaster in a forest finishing school, to teach ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... see things in their proper dimensions. You will expend your energy on things that require it, and you will smile at the things that do not deserve your attention, and pass them by. You will substitute duty for ambition, and you will go your way with sanity for perhaps ten months. Then you will need again the elemental lesson of the forest, the ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... following the meeting between Saul Chadron and his mysterious guest, a chattering group stood on the veranda of Colonel Landcraft's house in the bright friendly sun. They were waiting for horses to make the short journey to the agency—for one's honesty was questioned, his sanity doubted, if he went afoot in that country even a quarter of a mile—and gayest among them was Nola Chadron, the sun in ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... of it on the whole as the English, and next to them the Spanish—both inclined to gravity. Let us not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity. Humor, in its highest level, is the sense of comic contradiction which arises from the perpetual comment which the understanding makes upon the impressions received through the imagination. Richter, himself, a ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... not for Froude's; I should also think the Letters about that Squire business would be well to clear somewhat up: but that can scarcely be done unless by vindicating Squire's honesty at the expense of his sanity: and, as I have no reason to suppose but he is yet alive, I know not how this can be decently done. Froude says he cannot see his way into the truth further than Carlyle's printed Article on the subject goes: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... that a sensible man like Cathcart could take such rubbish seriously. In every other department of life the solicitor was an eminently shrewd and sane man, with, moreover, a youthful kind of brisk humor that is perhaps the surest symptom of sanity that ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... very marked in the first and somewhat so in the last of these papers. They are certainly interesting to the geneticist. We now often speak of dreams as protectors of sleep. I am inclined to think that a good many delusions are protectors of sanity in much the same way, and I am not at all sure that we cannot say that we shall ere long see that this is to a great extent true for the imagination. If this patient had a less vivid fancy perhaps his delusions would have been kept less fluid and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... reason. I am no dreamer; no speculator in aerial nothings; no clever charlatan like Casimir, who, because he is able to magnetize a dog, pretends to the same authority over human beings, and dares to risk the health, perhaps the very sanity, of his own sister, and that of the unfortunate young musician whom he has inveigled in here, all for the sake of proving his dangerous, almost diabolical, experiments. Oh, yes; I see you are indignant, but I speak truth. I am a plain man;—and if I am deficient ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... culture and the mould of wit. To submit my works to you, to win your approbation—if such a thing might be!—were to reach the goal of my desire; for your suffrage carries the rest with it. Whom, indeed, could I substitute in your place, and hope to preserve a reputation for sanity? In a sense, no doubt, I shall be hazarding all on one cast of the die: yet with more truth I might be said to have summoned the whole population into one audience- chamber; for your single judgement must assuredly outweigh ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... to describe the strange feelings, almost sensations, that arose in me while listening to these extraordinary utterances, lest it should be supposed I was ready to believe all that Margaret narrated or concluded. I could not help doubting her sanity; but no more could I help feeling very peculiarly moved ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... of it all right. His behaviour was the crowning proof, if Milly wanted more proof, of his sanity. He went up to London and made all the arrangements for his sister. When he returned he forestalled Milly's specious consolations with the truth. It was better, he told her, that the dear little girl should have died, for there was distinct brain trouble anyway. He took it as a sane ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... in Lever's tale? Partly, I think, in a new seriousness in dealing with Potts's disease. Formerly, the contrast between madness and sanity was deemed comic: Hogarth shows us how fashionable people went in parties to Bedlam to laugh at the lunatics. I myself have had a village idiot exhibited to me as some thing irresistibly funny. On the stage the madman ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... prevented from the spring, made witless by thirst, to mill about until they piled up and killed threescore in their midst. By no urgency of the dogs could they be moved forward or scattered until night fell with coolness and returning sanity. Nor does the imperfect gregariousness of man always save us from ill-considered rushes or strangulous in-turnings of the social mass. Notwithstanding there are those who would have us to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... have devised this exquisite, hellish torture! Day after day was the thing repeated, until I was on the verge of madness; and then, as I had done in the pits of the Warhoons, I took a new, firm hold upon my reason and forced it back into the channels of sanity. ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of blows brought Freund back to sanity, to the extent of changing his craven terror into Fear's secondary phase—the impulse to strike back at the thing that had caused the fright. Rolling over and over on the ground, under the impact of his superior's fist blows and kicks, Freund ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... forced itself to a semblance of sanity, and he found himself piecing together vaguely the things that had happened to him. He could remember seeing Milo Standish strolling toward the veranda in the shaft of light from the window, then the black figure which detached itself from the shrubbery and ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... to-day by a colonnade of beeches along the brawling Allan. My character for sanity is quite gone, seeing that I cheered my lonely way with the following, in a triumphant chaunt: 'Thank God for the grass, and the fir-trees, and the crows, and the sheep, and the sunshine, and the shadows of ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "unexpended mythological values" carried him off his feet. He knew it was true. Veiled behind that carefully chosen phrase was something more—a truth brilliantly discovered. He knew, too, that it bit at the platform-boards upon which his personality, his sanity, his very life, perhaps, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... wage begins down in the shop. If it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of work. Nature has seen to that. Idle hands and minds were never intended for any one of us. Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing. Exact social justice flows only out of honest work. The man who contributes much should take away much. Therefore no element of charity is present in the paying of wages. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... of an ancient religious ideal, awful but pathetic, the people were asked to find artistic delight in the contemplation of a woman's maniacal thirst for a mother's blood. It is not necessary to recall the history of the opera at the Manhattan Opera House to show that the artistic sanity of New York was ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... she looked away from him. Then silently he drew his gun from its holster; the thing was madness, but just now there was no sanity in the universe. He could not run; he must not kill Courtot. He dropped the gun behind him and with the heel of his boot thrust it away from him so that it fell into a fissure in the rock. He turned again to watch ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... and pain. And with Spinoza, as with the Freudians, it sometimes seems that desire is more fundamental than the other two, for desire expresses, in Spinoza's terminology, the essence of man. Desire however may be stimulated by almost anything. It requires the least sanity of mind, therefore, to prevent one from scandalously over-emphasizing one particular ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... aye, away back into what they of that Age conceived to be the early days of the earth, when the sun, maybe, still gloomed dully in the night sky of the world. But of all that went before, nothing, save as myths, and matters to be taken most cautiously, and believed not by men of sanity ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... gleam in Collins' eyes and his disjointed utterances as a sign of hopeless madness,—but in reality it was returning sanity. A new warmth stole over him, and the certainty ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... our investigation we shall find that we must rely in the end on our trust in some person; either ourselves or someone else. Even the certainty of the mathematical formula depends on our confidence in the sanity of our own mental processes. The man who sees the basket filled with white pebbles must trust the accuracy of his eyesight. If he relies for his information on what someone else told him, he must trust not only ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... there is beginning to arise a half-formed consciousness that amid all these changes in circumstances we must be careful how we admit changes in character and in mental calibre; a consciousness that we are in need of some fixed point by which the world may be enabled to retain its sanity. Now there are two classes of people who believe in permanence: those who think that the world is the same always because they are too silly to open their eyes; and the very small class of those who have felt profoundly that all things are changing in something more than ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... whole question of an inquiry into his sanity," objected Keyork. "We come back to the starting-point. We must settle all this before we go to him. A lunatic asylum is not a club in this country. There is a great deal of formality connected with getting ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... me. I have come to see that there is no possibility of peace or sanity for the world till that race of mad militarists is destroyed. I am still a pacifist, but, thank God, no longer a fool. Is there no other news ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... explain, so she turned to the stove while mumbling to herself the doubts she had over the sanity of the women-folks of this queer family—excepting herself ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Moreover, it was full of superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide. He was in his studio after his first perusal, and he turned to an Apollo which he was carving. The god looked at him with such overpowering, balanced sanity, such a contrast to Christian incoherence and the rhapsodies of the letter to the Romans, that he was half ashamed of himself for meddling with it. He opened his Lucretius. Here was order and sequence; he knew where he was; he was at home. Was all this nought, were the accumulated labour ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... turned his searching eyes away from mine. "There's a heap o' darkness wherever you try to step," he said, "and I thought I'd left off wasting thoughts on the subject. You see"—he dexterously roped a horse, and once more his splendid sanity was turned to gold by his imagination—"I expect in many growed-up men you'd call sensible there's a little boy sleepin'—the little kid they onced was—that still keeps his fear of the dark. You mentioned ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... whether a person of present sound mind, but who had formerly been deranged, can legally be initiated. The answer to this question turns on the fact of his having perfectly recovered. If the present sanity of the applicant is merely a lucid interval, which physicians know to be sometimes vouched to lunatics, with the absolute certainty, or at best, the strong probability, of an eventual return to a state of mental derangement, he is not, of course, qualified for initiation. But if there has been ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... standpoint of a moment ago, and must start afresh. In an hour's time you have discovered every stake on the hill but the one you want. In two hours' time you are staggering homeward a gibbering idiot. Then you are brought back to profane sanity by falling at full length over the very object of ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... voiced other expletives, too, even more forcefully indicative of surprise. He was not an imaginative man; it did not occur to him to doubt his sanity or to wonder if he were awake, nevertheless he opened one of the pokes and incredulously examined its contents. "I'm dam' if it ain't!" he said, finally. "I should reckon they was ready to quit. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... madam," I said finally, "but I have grown adamant to criticism. I have done my work as well as it lies in me to do it. It is the part of sanity to throw it aside without compunction. A ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... of her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity. I had, indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure, when I found one in ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... true work of mind or technical skill brings peace, composure, sanity, to one to whom the proper outlet of his energy has been denied. To youth, possessed by an almost riotous vitality, with great but unused powers of endurance and of positive action, the finding of its task means concentration of energy instead of dissipations ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... good-day to their recent possessor, I set off at full speed to find a secure nook where I could throw myself down on the grass, and let loose the absurd laughter that was dangerously bottled up within me; but even before I do that it behoves me if possible to vindicate my sanity to ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... nightfall, though the street lamps were not yet lighted. The glow of Mrs. Owen's kindness lingered with Sylvia as she walked toward Elizabeth House. She was constantly surprised by her friend's intensely modern spirit—her social curiosity, and the breadth and sanity of her views. This suggestion of a vocational school for young women had kindled Sylvia's imagination, and her thoughts were upon it as she tramped homeward through the slush. To establish an institution ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... tones. "And there are moments, Kemper, since I have come into possession of Miss Grey's story, when I find myself seriously doubting my own sanity." ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... He was by no means sure of the sanity of this young fellow, but his curiosity had been aroused by his appearance and that of his craft, and he therefore condescended to undertake a mission that at ordinary times he would have scorned. Stephen watched the boat ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... of the inherent madness of men of genius. One of the testimonies that we have as to Borrow's later life at Oulton is to the effect that he got bewildered at times and fancied himself Wodin; but the substratum of sanity is strongly exhibited in the remedy which he himself applied. "What do you think I do when I get bewildered after this fashion? I go out to the sty and listen to the grunting of the pigs until I get back to ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the muddle of hope and madness, It's the tangle of good and badness, It's the lunacy linked with sanity, Makes up ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... to be alone and, avoiding the short cut, she enjoyed the sanity of the highway used by ordinary men and women in the decent pursuit of their lives. But now the road was empty and though at another time she would have been afraid of the lonely country, to-night she had a sense of escape from greater perils than any lurking here. And before ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... had not his sanity. Though he was fearless in thought, he was a prey to his diseased nerves; with his ardent soul in his rickety body, he was driven on to the fight and was unfitted for it. The animosity of certain opinions ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... she had looked for. Joan sighed as she closed her door behind her. What was the meaning of it? On the one hand that unimpeachable law, the greatest happiness of the greatest number; the sacred cause of Democracy; the moral Uplift of the people; Sanity, Wisdom, Truth, the higher Justice; all the forces on which she was relying for the regeneration of the world—all arrayed in stern demand that the flabby, useless Mrs. Phillips should be sacrificed for the general good. Only one voice had pleaded for foolish, helpless Mrs. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... all thinking people to gather their forces together and seriously apply themselves to consider how they can better this condition of things. In their daily life they can do so by setting up a high standard of sanity and right behaviour, by the encouragement of fine aims and high ends, by the firm avoidance of hypocrisy and hysterical altruism, and by intelligent explanation to those under their care of the reason why individual responsibility is necessary ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... appeared like his old self, while the games of euchre at Georgie K.'s were not resumed, nor the boyish enjoyment of things, which James now recognized to have been simply feverish attempts to live through the horrible ordeal of his life and keep his sanity, while he had now settled down into a state of austere gloom, yet he begun again to attend to his practice and to take interest in it. Clemency remained away for a week. Then Gordon brought her home. She was at the ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... For a moment a wild idea of securing possession of the figure some dark night, and, in company with his fellow-conspirators, of trying those beautiful clothes upon her, passed through his mind, but he dismissed it. And then occurred a strange incident, which startled even his cool, American sanity. ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... enough, that is all.... Yes, laugh, laugh at me: everybody knows I am mad. Prudent people act in accordance with the laws of logic and reason and sanity. I am not like that: I am a man who acts only on his own impulse. When a certain quantity of electricity is accumulated in me it has to expend itself, at all costs: and so much the worse for the others if it ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland |
