"Mania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the flowers of the coral to a "petite ortie" or "little nettle" is perfectly just, but needs explanation. "Ortie de mer," or "sea-nettle," is, in fact, the French appellation for our "sea-anemone," a creature with which everybody, since the great aquarium mania, must have become familiar, even to the limits of boredom. In 1710, the great naturalist, Reaumur, had written a memoir for the express purpose of demonstrating that these "orties" are animals; and with this important paper Peyssonel must ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the collector is a man of strong and genuine artistic taste the possession of works of beauty is a thing of enduring pleasure, but in general the mere love of collecting, though it often becomes a passion almost amounting to a mania, bears very little proportion to pecuniary value. The intelligent collector of fossils has as much pleasure as the collector of gems—probably indeed more, as the former pursuit brings with it a much greater variety of interest, and usually depends much more on the personal ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of rising at this pleasant place near Mackery End in Hertfordshire was six. Then I washed the babies. I had a perfect mania for washing everything and everybody. We had one little servant, and I insisted on washing her head. Her mother came up from the ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... impossible for us to be friends; and when you have thought it over you will think as I do. My father teaches fencing and boxing in London; I was educated at a school you never heard of; I am helped here by an old gentleman who discovered that I was more or less intelligent. He has a mania for experiments, and I am his latest hobby. Have I said enough to put you off, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... the way, of quite a different type from Lady Kynnersley, who has lately benefited by my eleemosynary mania is Rex Campion. I have known him since our University days and have maintained a sincere though desultory friendship with him ever since. He is also a friend of Eleanor Faversham, whom he now and ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... humanity. Portraits of her were sold in the print-shops all over the land; and the enthusiasm, which at first was the natural impulse of admiration for one who had performed a noble and heroic deed, at last rose to a species of mania, in the heat of which not a few absurdities ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... the fancy, however, to assure you that what took place that day at the Cafe Grand was not the impulsive act of a man inspired with a homicidal mania, but was the necessary outcome of a long sequence of events. You know the peculiar relations existing between Isobel and myself. I had not the right to approach her, or to assume any overt act of guardianship. Any association ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inaccessible mountain, surrounded by a band of moustachioed desperadoes in fustanella petticoats engirdled with an armoury of pistols, daggers and yataghans, who if they are unkind make a surgical demonstration with these lethal implements, and if they are smitten with a mania of amiability, hand you over, for superintendence of your repose, to an army of satellites of whom you are only too glad to call the flea brother? I trow not. Personally, I dislike mountains. They were made for goats and cascades and lunatics ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... 'Asuramaya' might very easily grow; and since, by the later tradition, this 'Maya' is distinctly assigned to Romaka-pura in the West." Had the "Piyadasi inscription" been found on the site of ancient Babylonia, one might suspect the word "Turamaya" as derived from "Turanomaya," or rather mania. Since, however, the Piyadasi inscriptions belong distinctly to India, and the title was borne but by two kings—Chandragupta and Dharmasoka—what has "'Ptolemaios' of the Greeks" to do with "Turamaya" or the latter with "Asuramaya," ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... hands, English education has steadily deteriorated in quality as the output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has little or no use for them. Soured on the one hand by their own ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... a time the storm of bigotry raged fiercely, and, as the following incident will show, while the mania lasted even the police were not entirely free ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... used to like fast riding. If I remember correctly, all of my guests were a little afflicted with the speed mania. It is a common disease with New-Yorkers. I hope, Stevens, that you will not give them reason to think we are altogether steeped in the slow, dreamy manana languor of ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... steward a waiter, call the port-hole a window, call the promenade deck the front porch, but call oh, call the transatlantic bully down! Be ready for him the instant he bawls that he's a member of the Travellers' Club. For the rest, be the ingenuous traveller, if you like. Be the man who has a mania for sitting at the captain's table, the man who goes abroad to get a lot of labels on his suit-case, the man who buys a set on Broadway (for two dollars) and sticks them on at home, the man who howls when bands play "Dixie," ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... "This is mania, Eloise!" she returned coaxingly. "Very well, I shall go and speak to the child. She shan't be able to tell her ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... and justified on scientific grounds, the most cruel and cowardly superstitions of the mob; and again and again raised literal crusades against women, torturing, exposing, burning, young and old, not merely in the witch-mania of the 17th century, but through the whole middle age. It is a detestable page of history. I ask those who may think my statement exaggerated, to consult the original authorities. Let them contrast Rothar's law about the impossibility ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the pander Brutus. But Lorenzino de' Medici had none of the feeling of Tourneur's Vindici; there was in him none of the ghastly spirit of self-immolation of the hero of Tourneur in his attendance upon the foul creature whom he leads to his death. Lorenzino had the usual Brutus mania of his day, but unmixed with horror. To be the pander and jester of the Duke was no pain to his nature; there was probably no sense of debasement in the knowledge either of his employer or of his employment. To fasten on Alexander, to pretend ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the banks of the Faleme every where covered with large and beautiful fields of corn, but on examination I found it was not the same species of grain as is commonly cultivated on the Gambia; it is called by the natives Mania, and grows in the dry season; is very prolific, and is reaped in the month of January. It is the same which, from the depending position of the ear, is called by ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... never made a bellow and the glances of her eyes Seemed to thank me for the pleasure of a genuine surprise. She snuggled up against me in a loving sort of way, And I hugged her all the tighter for her trustifying play,— Tell you what the joys of heaven ain't a cussed circumstance To the hug-a-mania pleasures of ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... sensible men and women to ruin and even to suicide. It is a form of emotional insanity, not loss of control of the will, but perversion of the will. Some are models in their lucid intervals, but when the mania is on them they cannot resist. The very act of taking constitutes the pleasure, not possession. One must take into consideration many things, for such diseases as kleptomania belong exclusively to civilisation; they are the product of an age of sensationalism. Naturally enough, woman, with ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... is a lunatic, prince?" whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch in his ear. "Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends to pass the examinations. I am expecting a splendid ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... France and England seems to have become a temporary mania. The ascent of Messrs. Barral and Bixio, of which a detailed and very interesting account will be found in a preceding page, has encouraged imitators in various styles. One M. Poitevin made an ascent in Paris seated on a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... that such pleuro might last for the season, save that the Commissioners were so costly, and the dear cattle were having an unusually sanguinary Bull Run. I know what our vegetarian friend, Mr. Alcott, will say; but he must indulge me in a very small mania, even if it seem to him a kind of cannibalism; therefore, whatever rhapsodies are left from bread and potato, let them all be given to good beef. While the quarrel of round, rump, and sirloin goes on, this let us buy and eat and reinforce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... fan mania had left its mark over the divan in the shape of a gigantic fan constructed of little fans and opening out towards the ceiling. A few pen-and-ink and pencil sketches and studies, apparently the cast-off of many studios, were tacked up here and there. The high mantel ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... of the Hive." In the domestic and international policy of the Prussian State, in the Hohenzollern dynastic tradition, we discover such a collective spirit, the "Spirit of the Prussian Hive," the evil spirit of war mania and megalomania, the treachery, the brutality, the greed, and, above all, the predatory instinct dignified into the name of Real Politik. And Europe will only enjoy permanent peace and security if she succeeds ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... forgotten till Lord Macaulay revived the memory of it. But, in fact, in the South Sea Bubble, which has always been remembered, the form was the same, only a little more extravagant; the companies in that mania were for objects such as these:—' "Wrecks to be fished for on the Irish Coast—Insurance of Horses and other Cattle (two millions)—Insurance of Losses by Servants—To make Salt Water Fresh—For building ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... town has its thousand weird fore-fingers, pointing, pointing still, to the moment of doom. In London it was 3.10 on a Sunday afternoon. I first noticed it going up the river on the face of the 'Big Ben' of the Parliament-house, and I now find that they all, all, have this 3.10 mania, time-keepers still, but keepers of the end of Time, fixedly noting for ever and ever that one moment. The cloud-mass of fine penetrating scoriae must have instantly stopped their works, and they had fallen ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... are feverishly addicted to early rising. Men with gardens are like those hard drinkers whose susceptibilities are hopelessly blunted. Who but a man diverted from the paths of honest feeling and natural enjoyment, possessed of a demoniac mania, lost to the peace and serenity of the virtuous and the blessed, could find pleasure amid the damps, and dews, and chills, and raw-edgedness of a garden in the early morning, absolutely find pleasure in saturated trousers, in shoes swathed in moisture, in skies that are gray and gloomy, in flowers ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... was crazed beyond his English subjects with the witch mania of Scotland and the Continent. No sooner had his first parliament enacted new death laws than the judges and the magistrates, the constable and the mob began to hunt up the oldest and ugliest spinster who lived ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... substance of two lectures on this pestilent heresy, delivered by the author before the Kennington Branch of the Church of England Young Men's Society, and is worth the attention of those who wish to know something of this now wide-spread mania. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... "told me he'd been poisoned, and treason asked as the price of the antidote. I've heard that the Brazilian Minister for Foreign Affairs went insane six months ago. I heard, also, that it was homicidal mania—murder madness. And I'm wondering if these people who fawn upon Ribiera aren't paying a price for—well—antidotes, or their equivalent. The Minister for Foreign ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... blood near them—no farther off than their chief's wigwam; and eight or ten braves vowed they would make an end of "Old Bets." But she heard of their threats, left the village for a time, and after the Dahcotahs had gotten over their mania for shedding blood, she returned, and right glad was Good Road to see her. For she has an open, good humored countenance; the very reverse of that of the first wife, whose vinegar aspect would frighten away an army ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... "Recreation? I have a mania, by no means always gratified,—to be out of doors. Once each summer 'the Lady' and I go somewhere for a time,—and forget it absolutely. In this way we've been able to travel a bit. We,—again 'the Lady' and I,—steal an hour when we can, and drive a gasoline car, keeping within the speed laws ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Danglars, "when a father asks his daughter to choose a husband, he has always some reason for wishing her to marry. Some are affected with the mania of which you spoke just now, that of living again in their grandchildren. This is not my weakness, I tell you at once; family joys have no charm for me. I may acknowledge this to a daughter whom I know to be philosophical enough to understand my indifference, and not to impute ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Mrs. Eddy copyrighted the early editions and revisions of Science and Health, and why she had a mania for copyrighting every scrap of every sort that came from her pen in those jejune days when to be in print probably seemed a wonderful distinction to her in her provincial obscurity, but why she should continue this delirium in these days of her godship and her ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of insanity must always be a matter of the degree of the primary structural weakness and the energy and persistence of the operative forces; on these must depend the mere gentle, persistent illusion, or that fury of mania which transforms man, the "image of the Creator," into a wild beast. That insanity, no matter what its form or degree, is an evolution from an ancestral structural legacy, not essentially different from the structural conditions ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... somewhat similarly attired, and does the same thing, the case is diagnosed as temporary insanity—and we drape a strait-jacket on him and send for his folks. Such is the narrow margin that divides Marathon and mania; and it helps to prove that sport is mainly a state ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... brother John is seized with a poetic mania, and is now rhyming away at the rate of three lines per hour—so much ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... his men had died on the Lusitania, a quiet little chap, with a family in the suburbs and a mania for raising dahlias. He had been in the habit of bringing in his best specimens, and putting them in water on Clayton's desk. His pressed glass vase ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... escaped attention is the small marble figure, about four feet high, which stands in a niche over the sacristy door of San Giovanni Fiorentino in Rome. It was placed there a few years ago, when, owing to the prevalent mania of rebuilding, it became necessary to demolish the little oratory on the Corso which belonged to the Mother Church close by. The statue was scarcely seen in its old home: how it got there is unknown. The church itself was not founded ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... north to look up the members of my family and learn who I really am. I resigned from the Ranger force to-day. That's no place for a fellow with a—homicidal mania." ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... was the gang-plank out than we all made a rush for the trading stores in search of curios. The faculty of acquisitiveness grows with what it feeds on; and before the Alaskan tour is over, it almost amounts to a mania among the excursionists. You should have seen us—men, women and children—hurrying along the beach toward the heart of Juneau, where we saw flags flying from the staves that stood by the trading-stores. It was no easy task to distance ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the manufacture of copies was substantially perfected, and publication was effected with comparative rapidity and cheapness; bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's shop a usual meeting-place of men of culture. Reading had become a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library. The superior officer was seen in the camp-tent with the obscene Greek romance, the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... numbers in 1746, after Culloden, and settled them on the Cape Fear River. Cross Creek, now Fayetteville, was the center of these Highland settlements, and hither came the Scottish heroine, Flora MacDonald, in 1775. The mania for emigration to North Carolina affected all classes in Scotland and continued for many years. The Scots Magazine for May 1768 records that a number of settlers from the Western Isles had embarked for Carolina and Georgia, including forty or fifty ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... mainly founded on the latter basis. If Montesquieu's principles as to no nation ever arriving at durable greatness but by institutions in harmony with its spirit and origin, had been generally adopted, the French Revolution, which originated in the Anglo and American mania, and the desire to transplant English institutions into the soil of France, would never have taken place. Had the same views prevailed in the British Cabinet, the iniquitous support of the revolt of the South American colonies in 1821 and 1822, and the insidious encouragement ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... I no longer know what I wish. If she came to-morrow, should I be glad or not? I cannot tell. I can no longer tell. Those who do not suffer from this absurd mania for action escape those painful moments when we are at the mercy of a distracted will that no longer knows exactly what it ought to want. In absence, our feelings pass through so many contradictory phases! When the hour of return comes, finding it impossible to collect so many conflicting sentiments ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... wonderful portraits. He loved landscape, from his earliest youth to his dying day. Loved it for itself. For among all the drawings of his which I have ever seen, I do not remember one which can be identified as any particular place. In the eighteenth century there was a perfect mania among the smaller fry for making topographical drawings, in pencil or water-colour, views of some town or mountain or castle. But with Gainsborough the place was nothing—it was the spirit of it that charmed him. A cottage ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... instructions (but I find you a very dull scholar), do you mean to go traveling about, in search of adventures and rare sights, without even asking me to be of the party?—I, who am afflicted with a mania for traveling which can only be cured by being gratified? But such ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... also during the winter of 1802-3, that Switzerland took arms against the unitarian constitution which had been imposed upon her. Singular mania of the French revolutionists to compel all countries to adopt a political organization similar to that of France! There are, doubtless, principles common to all countries, such as those which secure ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... man to death on the assumption that it will be a fine day. The question is whether the jury are justified in coming to their verdict by cogent and decisive evidence. In this case I can see nothing of the sort. An eccentric old lady, with a mania for hoarding jewels, has disappeared in the night, carrying her jewels with her. A hand, identified as hers, because of the rings on it, was found on the beach next day. On those grounds, practically, we are asked to say that she is dead. I can only say that I decline to come to any such conclusion, ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... practice being once introduced, spread into the provinces, so that instances of it were found in every part of Egypt. It then no longer caused any surprise; the horror it had at first inspired vanished; and it was mentioned as an indifferent and ordinary thing. This mania of devouring one another became so common among the poor, that the greater part perished in this manner. These wretches employed all sorts of artifices, to seize men by surprise, or decoy them into their houses under false pretences. This happened to three physicians among ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... business and the professions, women, at home or in society, and children at school overtax their mental and nervous forces by work, worry and care. This brings about nervous disorders, indigestion, and eventually mania. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... a soothing answer, and pretended to assent. Of course I never locked my door. Then Jasper began to talk to me. He said that Uncle Edward was not only mad, but that his mania was assuming a terrible form, and against me. He said that my life was in danger—he thought to frighten ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... a creed-mania, Knowles. You have a confession of faith ready-made for everybody, but yourself. I only meant for you to take care what you do. That woman looks as the Prodigal Son might have done when he began to be in want, and would fain have fed himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... women. The violent faction-fights which took place at the fairs which he frequented, were of a kind which he had never before observed among the pacific people of North Italy. These faction-fights were the result, partly of dram-drinking, and partly of the fighting mania which then prevailed in Ireland. There were also numbers of crippled and deformed beggars in every town,—quarrelling and fighting in the streets,—rows and drinkings at wakes,—gambling, duelling, and riotous living amongst all classes of ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... players; he produces as novel effects as Paganini does on the violin, and performs wonders which one would never have imagined possible. Hiller, too, is an excellent player, powerful and coquettish enough. Both are a little infected by the Parisian mania for despondency and straining after emotional vehemence [Verzweif-lungssucht und Leidenschaftssucherei], and often lose sight of time and repose and the really musical too much. I, on the other hand, do so ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Helen the square-hand letters as a sort of diversion. It gives her something to do, and keeps her quiet, which I think is desirable while this enervating weather lasts. She has a perfect mania for counting. She has counted everything in the house, and is now busy counting the words in her primer. I hope it will not occur to her to count the hairs of her head. If she could see and hear, I suppose she would get rid of her superfluous energy in ways which would not, perhaps, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... "I have rather a mania for that sort of thing, myself. Wait. Let me show you." And he went into the inner cabin. When he came back he held up an alabaster cup. "A Greek kylix!" he cried. "Pure Greek! What an outline, eh? This is what keeps me from ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... overlooking the park and high enough to make the noise of the traffic endurable. A Swedish maid, prepossessingly white and clean, ushered her into the little drawing-room, which was furnished with more simplicity and individual taste than is usual anywhere in New York, cursed of the mania for useless and tasteless showiness. There were no messy draperies, no fussy statuettes, vases, gilt boxes, and the like. Mildred awaited the entrance ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... several illustrious exiles returned to the capital. Louis Blanc and Edgar Quinet arrived there, after years of absence, in the most unostentatious fashion, though they soon succumbed to the prevailing mania of inditing manifestoes and exhortations for the benefit of their fellow-countrymen. Victor Hugo's return was more theatrical. In those famous "Chatiments" in which he had so severely flagellated the Third Napoleon (after, in earlier years, exalting ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... whim for thinking it so (which was one of the reasons perhaps why Alfonso, as he complained, would not believe a word be said); and finally, that, whether the madness was or was not so pretended, it unfortunately became a confirmed though milder form of mania, during a long confinement. Alfonso, too proud to forgive the poet's contempt, continued thus to detain him, partly perhaps because he was not sorry to have a pretext for revenge, partly because ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed forever. With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Each century has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grace; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Genevieve. Each country has its Saint-Peter's of Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has two or three. The insignificant ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... me tell you something, Dan: a woman that will stoop to the petty leg-pulling, sponging, grafting that she does to save two bits or less has got a thief's make-up. Her mania for money, for getting, for saving it, is ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... doctor, being questioned in his turn, definitely and emphatically repeated that he considered the prisoner's mental condition abnormal in the highest degree. He talked at length and with erudition of "aberration" and "mania," and argued that, from all the facts collected, the prisoner had undoubtedly been in a condition of aberration for several days before his arrest, and, if the crime had been committed by him, it must, even if he were conscious of it, have been almost involuntary, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... bargains were usually struck, would have been patent to any observer. The tone of pretended indifference, the 'Let me see' muttered with dry lips, the quivering of the covetous fingers, marked the progress from passion to mania, the growth of the hard and selfish cyst, which was feeding its monstrous size upon the ruin of the whole organism. Astier was becoming the intractable Harpagon of the stage, pitiless to others as to himself, bewailing ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... asked Sidney calmly. "What is this mania for keeping up an effete ism? Are we to cripple our lives for the sake of a word? It's all romantic fudge, the idea of perpetual isolation. You get into little cliques and mistaken narrow-mindedness for fidelity to an ideal. I can live for months and forget there are such beings as ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... This mania for assassination completed the depression of spirits which for some time past had been noticeable in the French emperor. Severely wounded in the great toe at Ratisbon, he had there been compelled to exercise enormous self-control ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Elsie swears it was old dye Martin sold her and wishes we'd have another drug store because a little competition would do Martin good. And next door to Elsie, Pete Sweeney's tickled to death. He says it serves Elsie right, that Green Valley women've got a mania for dyeing things and trying to make 'em last forever; that he's had two bolts of just the kind of color Elsie was trying to get but that she ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... nervous system. Hence bromide of potassium—or bromide of sodium, which is possibly somewhat safer still though not quite so certain in its action—is used as a hypnotic, as the standard anaphrodisiac, as a sedative in mania and all forms of morbid mental excitement, and in hyperaesthesia of all kinds. Its most striking success is in epilepsy, for which it is the specific remedy. It may be given in doses of from ten to fifty grains or more, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... or less than the desire to leave the world, to leave the conditions that prevented—in fact to leave the body. My discontent with modern life had gone as far as that. It was the birth of the suicidal mania." ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... the theatrical mania, who annoys a manager with impertinent flattery and advice. It is said that Thomas Vaughan, a playwright of small reputation, was the original of this character.—Sheridan, The Critic ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... individual; here, the welter of democracy, which has not evolved into distinct human form, uniformly ignores it; leveling down, not up, it is quick to see a scoundrel in any man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to abate the public mania for success in the form of concrete wealth which multiplies inducements to crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish acceptance of such inducements, with the result that while in its practical life it rushes in one direction, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... devotion to their work grew almost to mania. It increased their interest that the little settlement of five cabins was fast taking shape. The men slept in beds now; for they had furnished their rooms. They had begun to decorate the walls. They re-opened the trunks and made another ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... "Simply of her mania for making my happiness after her own fashion. I read in your eyes that Camille has returned to Paris. What ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... heard, and am inclined to trust, arises, generally speaking, not so much from indigence as from self-denying frugality, pushed to an extreme. The French peasant is the possessor of property, and has a passion, almost a mania, for acquisition. He saves money and subscribes to government loans, which are judiciously brought out in very small shares, so as to draw forth his little hoard, and thus bind him as a creditor to the interest of the Empire. The cottage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... the companionship of ruffianly prize-fighters, belonging to this or that speculator in the flesh of ferocious savages. He must find some outlet for his energies and interests and is carried away by the fashionable mania, which is corrupting our whole population, especially our young nobles, and which, even at his tender age, fills the thoughts of my son, to the despair ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... evidence tending to show that an excess of either internal or external environmental stimuli may modify one or more organs of the kinetic system, and that this modification may cause certain diseases. For example, alterations in the efficiency of the cerebral link may yield neurasthenia, mania, dementia; of the thyroid link, Graves' disease, myxedema; of the adrenal link, Addison's disease, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... forecast the workings of the drink-maddened mentality masked by that rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... slept. Presently in came the jeweller's wife and seeing them asleep, looked upon Kamar al-Zaman's face and her wit was confounded at his beauty. Said she, "How can he sleep who loveth the fair?" and, turning him over on his back, sat astraddle upon his breast. Then, in the mania of her passion for him, she rained down kisses on his cheeks, till she left a mark upon them and they became exceeding red and his cheek bones shone; and, she sucked his lips, till the blood ran out into her mouth; but with all this, her fire was ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... alone. The habit of yielding to the importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression follows, till one form of mania supervenes—that which consists in the undue mastery and eternal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... told them they were a bunch of fools, they belonged in the nursery; for Jimmie classed German spies with goblins, witches and sea-serpents. And here suddenly the bewildered little man found himself in the midst of a German spy mania, the like of which ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... threw open to the world the East, who waved his chromatic wand to Liszt, Tschaikowsky, Saint-Saens, Goldmark, Rubinstein, Richard Strauss, Dvorak and all Russia with its consonantal composers. This Polish psychologist—a fulgurant expounder of Nietzsche—finds in Chopin faith and mania, the true stigma of the mad individualist, the individual "who in the first instance is naught but an oxidation apparatus." Nietzsche and Chopin are the most outspoken individualities of the age—he forgets Wagner—Chopin ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... on cold beef; and talks of nothing but that d——d good speech of Sir Robert's'. Revolution! faith, the revolution is come already. Revolutions only change the aspect of society, is it not changed enough within the last six months? Bah! I suppose you are bit by the mania?" ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Republic might have survived even such horrors as these had it not been for the out-breaking of another craze more terrible far than an army with gattling guns, I refer to the most destructive of all scourges, the mania for stock-gambling. The crafty, unscrupulous managers of bucket-shops, stock-exchanges, and brokerages filled the columns of the press with manufactured accounts of vast fortunes made in an hour by imaginary investors of small sums, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... home, whatever might be the sacrifice, became almost a mania with him, but he would not beg his way. And so he struggled on, meeting with disappointment again and again, yet never yielding in his purpose. Then, on the threshold of success, when he landed in Philadelphia without money and without friends, he ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... rising sun shone upon Stratford-on-Avon; and here revived in some degree my Shakspearian mania, to the still higher exaltation of my English stilts, and the deeper debasement of all "rough Irish kernes." At Shrewsbury we parted with a kind old lady, who had shown me some good-natured attentions, ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... forgotten after the hour of joy and gratitude which they gave her in their novelty was over. But he would not listen to her, carried away by a veritable mania for giving; unable, from the moment the idea of giving her an article took possession of him, to resist the desire of buying it. It was a munificence of the heart; an imperious desire to prove to her that ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... restless, somewhat intractable and gave the impression of brooding over her imaginations rather than luxuriating in them. In other words, her condition seemed to be more that of absorbed than active mania. Second, these same ideas, somewhat reduced, continued in an apathetic state while impulsive symptoms developed: She began to shout like a huckster to be taken to Heaven and made numerous affectless, suicidal attempts. Third, came a true stupor and, fourth, a period of recovery ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and so far there had been no restrictions ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves." Little did they think that the breach they were attempting to heal was widened by their procedure. The author of the address was John Jay, a lawyer from New York, with whom Papaphobia was a mania. ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... British Government on behalf of the mining industry of the Transvaal, were founded solely upon the statement of the Volksraad Commission itself. This mania of the Government for a monopoly by which the shareholders profit greatly and the State hardly at all, proves that there are other interests at stake than ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... some mania that I could cultivate, does not come into my life, I feel I shall sink at last into the gulf where all ideas are dulled, where character deteriorates, motives slacken, virtues lose their backbone, and all the forces of the soul are scattered,—a gulf in ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... fevers, for instance from typhoid fever, is very similar to that arising from the excessive use of intoxicants and narcotics; similar in these respects; that the mania is only temporary, and that the exciting cause ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... cause the failure of his own scheme? Why should he on such a supposition send energetic messages to Johannesburg forbidding the British to co-operate with the raiders? The whole accusation is so absurd that it is only the mania of party spite or of national hatred which could induce ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Calendar, and a poem of some length entitled Cupido Conquered, which Spenser may also have seen. Googe has more sustained power than Turberville, but is much inferior to him in command of metre and in lyrical swing. In him, or at least in his printer, the mania for cutting up long verses reaches its height, and his very decasyllables are found arranged in the strange fashion of four and six ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... inspiration seemed to be upon the man; a stranger could hardly have helped believing him, but George had heard a good deal of this, though the mania had never gone quite so far. He said quickly, "Come, let us go down ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... to be my God," said Paul, once more suspicious—and now hideously so—of religious mania. "And possibly the real God is somebody else's God altogether. Anyway, England's the only God I've got left, and I'm going to fight ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... pistol in its case between them, Trent and the inspector looked into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was the first to speak. 'This mystery is all wrong,' he observed. 'It is insanity. The symptoms of mania are very marked. Let us see how we stand. We were not in any doubt, I believe, about Manderson having dispatched Marlowe in the car to Southampton, or about Marlowe having gone, returning late last night, many hours after ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... these symptoms had tempted him to drink, or to resort to some of those narcotics he is known to have indulged in towards the close of his life. Whatever the cause of his delay, the consequences were fatal. Whilst in a state of temporary mania or insensibility, he fell into the hands of a band of ruffians, who were scouring the streets in search of accomplices or victims. What followed ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... character, with only two serious weaknesses. One of these was an exaggerated fastidiousness about clothes, and the other an undue deference to the dicta of the Press. A leader in The Tailor and Cutter would make him thoughtful for days. This fatal concern about clothing amounted to a mania where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... mania for writing such doggerel spread with a rapidity only equalled by the avidity with which the people seized upon the songs, and sung them. A complete collection of these remarkable efforts of poetic art would form an ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Juggernaut was considered to be divinely ordained," said Aubrey, "And the wretched and ignorant populace flung themselves under it in the fit of hysterical mania to which they were excited by the priests of the god, and so perished in their thousands. Not THEY were to blame; but the men who invented the imposture and encouraged the slaughter. THEY had an ideal;—the priests had none! But Juggernaut ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... self-suasion though she was, she had not seemed to find solid footing here; and she had early been driven irresistibly to quite a different conclusion. Evidently this man Mr. Vivian was a queer kind of street-preacher type, victim of a pious mania which rendered him dangerously unsound in the head. This, obviously, was the truth of the matter. On no other theory could his pitying her ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Fontaine, in imitation of the Arch of Septimius Severus at Rome, and once crowned by the famous bronze Roman horses from St. Mark's at Venice. The arch, designed as an approach to the Tuileries during the period of the classical mania, is too small for its present surroundings, since the removal of the Palace. The north wing, visible to your right, is purely modern, of the age of the First and Second Empire and the Third Republic. The meretricious ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... at Jimmy wondering whether he was seated with an insane man or not, and if so whether the latter might develop homicidal mania. ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... there twenty-five or thirty years old, dressed with extreme elegance, members of the association of Avengers, who seemed possessed with the mania of assassination, the lust of slaughter, the frenzy of blood, which no blood could quench—men who, when the order came to kill, killed all, friends or enemies; men who carried their business methods into the business of murder, giving their bloody checks for the heads of such or ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... shall be known to the uttermost item, then pathology can begin its search for abnormal compounds or derangements of quantities." The great diseases of the brain and spine, such as general paralysis, acute and chronic mania, and others, the author believes will all be shown to be connected with special chemical changes in neuroplasm, and that a knowledge of the composition and properties of this tissue and of its constituents will materially aid in devising ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... mania melancholia scribo, ut sciam quo pacto in hominibus gignatur, fiat, crescat, cumuletur, minuatur; haec inquit animalia quae vides propterea seco, non Dei opera perosus, sed fellis ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... one of the servants to find my brother and tell him I want to see him here. He will undoubtedly be located in some group where there is a rural gentleman displaying the largest banner of beard. My brother has an insatiable mania for laying bets with sporting young men that he can fondle any set of luxuriant whiskers without giving the wearer ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... and to skipping about among the seven that he was assured it was the keyed path to his purpose. He amazed Sabre by telling him, without trace of self-consciousness and equally without trace of religious mania, that he was waiting, daily, for God to call upon him to fulfil the purpose for which he was placed there. He expected it as one expects a letter by the post. When he talked about it to Sabre he positively trembled and shone with eagerness as a child trembling and shining with ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... at Plassans. He was afflicted with homicidal mania, and was confined for a time in the asylum at Tulettes. While there he was treated by Doctor Pascal Rougon, who affected a cure by hypodermic injections of a substance with which he had long experimented. Sarteur was released from the asylum, but the cure was not permanent, for a few months afterwards ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... now to go to Captain Ambrose for assistance," said Ada Greene, poising herself before me, and having surrendered or forgotten her first idea, evidently, in the new mania of the moment. "Of course, he does not intend to leave us here to perish, and he is in the next cabin—but a step; see how easily I can get to him, and I shall be back before you can ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... travelling without a ticket a Walworth girl was stated to have a mania for travelling on the Tube. The Court missionary thought that a position could probably be obtained for her as scrum-half at a West ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... matter with the man? This mania for conversation irritated Stanley beyond words. And it was always the same—always some piffle about a dream he'd had, or some cranky idea he'd got hold of, or some rot he'd been reading. Stanley turned over on his back and kicked with his legs till he was a living waterspout. ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... verse 3 may be taken as a general resume of what follows in detail, but this vigorous speech to the priests was clearly among the new king's first acts. No doubt his purpose had slowly grown while his father was affronting Heaven with his mania for idols. Such decisive, swift action does not come without protracted, previous brooding. The hidden fires gather slowly in the silent crater, however rapidly they burst out ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... good managers, the mother had her one weakness—a mania for little strategies that should economise horses and vehicles. Her men-folk complained that she turned them into common carriers, and there was a legend in the family that she had once said to the ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... entirely, in condemning the mania of giving names to objects of any kind after persons still living. Death alone can seal the title of any man to this honor, by putting it out of his power to forfeit it. There is one other mode of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... to the cost of books and writing materials in those times. As may be supposed, the monkish librarians often became great bibliophiles, for being in constant communication with choice manuscripts, they soon acquired a great mania for them. Posterity are also particularly indebted to the pens of these book conservators of the middle ages; for some of the best chroniclers and writers of those times were humble librarians to some ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... end: the indulgence of his own tastes, and the humiliation of a former rival who lies modestly buried in the same church. In the delirium of his weakness, these motives, which we imagine always prominent, assume the strength of mania. His limbs are already stiff; he feels himself growing into his own monument; and his fancy revels in the sensations which will combine the calm of death with the consciousness of sepulchral magnificence. He pleads, as for dear life, with those who are to ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... character of the French Emperor, with its singular combination of greatness and littleness, of wide-sweeping aims with official pedantry. The University, as it existed during the First Empire, offers a striking example of that mania for the control of the general will which philosophers had so attractively taught and Napoleon so profitably practised. It is the first definite outcome of a desire to subject education and learning ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... this excellent man. "I have taken considerable pains to see to it. As your mother and I have often agreed, there is no such safeguard for a young girl as a hobby or mania of this sort." ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... or does in Cuba will depend mainly upon the purpose of the visit, and upon the violence of the individual mania for seeing as many places as possible. If the object is merely an excursion or an escape from the rigors of a northern winter, there is no occasion for wandering out of sight of the capital city. There is more ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... Vargrave, fell on public questions; and as one was opposed to the other, Vargrave's exposition of views and motives had in them so much of the self-seeking of the professional placeman, that they might well have offended any man tinged by the lofty mania of political Quixotism. It was with a strange mixture of feelings that Maltravers listened: at one moment he proudly congratulated himself on having quitted a career where such opinions seemed so well to prosper: at another, his ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... turned and went out of the chamber. Yet, as the door closed, old habit was so strong on him that, even in his hot and bitter pain, and his bewildered sense of sudden outrage, he almost smiled at himself. "It is a mania; he does not know what he says," he thought. "How could I be so melodramatic? We were like two men at the Porte St. Martin. Inflated language is such ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked with figures to the thorax and painted blue. This was an attention of the clerk's. He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses fashionable, Leon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on his knees in the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... fierce and dangerous, and often attacked men without provocation. They have grown afraid of us, because they know that we are dangerous to them; and they can easily distinguish our upright form and shape from those of other animals. Look how they have been hunted by men during the mania for alligator-leather, and see how many of them are still killed for their oil and tails. It is quite natural, then, they should fear us; and you may notice they are much more timid near the plantations and settlements than in the wilder parts. I have no doubt—and I ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... question what prompted Melanchthon to make his alterations will embrace also the following points: 1. Melanchthon's mania for changing and remodeling in general. 2. His desire, especially after the breach between the Lutherans and the Papists seemed incurable, to meet and satisfy the criticism that the Augustana was too ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... had said, extremely hospitable; they had a perfect mania for receiving; they practically lived for it, and the big house at Hampstead, with its large garden covered in, and a sort of studio built out, was scarcely ever without guests. When they didn't have some sort of party they ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... despotic rule of Columbus; of the disregard of distinctions of rank which he had manifested by placing the hidalgoes on the same footing as the common men, as regards work and rations, during the construction of the settlement; and of his mania for discovery, which made him abandon the colony already formed, in the unremunerative search for new countries. The commissioner who was sent to investigate these charges, as well as to report on the condition of the colony, found no difficulty in collecting evidence to substantiate ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... have pealed for James's. Men were loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the storm. As in the South Sea Bubble almost everybody gambled; as in the Railway mania—not many centuries ago—almost every one took his unlucky share; a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at his opportunity. His bitterness, his scorn, his rage, his subsequent ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by the others; but allowed to totter about, and give speech to their incoherent mumblings!—sometimes diversified by yells, or peals of mania laughter,—always thickly interlarded with oaths ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... Haarlem realized in three years ten millions sterling by the sale of tulips. A single tulip (the Semper Augustus) was sold for one thousand pounds. Twelve acres of land were given for a single root and engagements to the amount of L5,000 were made for a first-class tulip when the mania was at its height. A gentleman, who possessed a tulip of great value, hearing that some one was in possession of a second root of the same kind, eagerly secured it at a most extravagant price. The moment he got possession of it, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson |
