"Monomania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself, and occasionally some of my other friends, by teasing me on the subject of what he called my hallucination with regard to my having married in America. He never allowed any allusion to the circumstance without the most comical expressions of regret for this, as he called it, curious form of monomania. On the occasion to which I refer in this letter, he and Mrs. Smith had met some friends at dinner at our house, and I was taking leave of them, previous to my departure for Liverpool, when he exclaimed, "Now do, my dear child, be ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... lies the power to rescue me from a forced bridal. You have heard that despotic note from the empress. Match-making is a monomania with Maria Theresa: it is useless, therefore, for me to appeal to her, for on a question of marriage she is inexorable. But you, Count Esterhazy," continued she, in tones of caressing melody, "you will rescue ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... hither and thither about the room with apparent aimlessness and I fancied had taken on a wild expression, such as is sometimes observed in cases of dementia. Perhaps this was my own imagination, but at any rate I was now persuaded that my friend was afflicted with a most singular and interesting monomania. Without, I trust, any abatement of my affectionate solicitude for him as a friend, I began to regard him as a patient, rich in possibilities of profitable study. Why not? Had he not described his delusion in the interest of science? Ah, poor fellow, he was doing more for science than he knew: ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... fieri, tres necessariae plane dici & indubitatae possunt 1 veritas notorij & permanentia facti. 2 confessio voluntaria eius qui reus factus est, atque peractus. 3 certorum testium firmorumque testimonium: his & 4 addi potest violentae praesumptiones de Rodinus de D[e,]monomania lib. 4. cap. 2.3.4.] ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... patient is not a pauper, but a gentleman of good standing and means. He is unmarried, and owns a lovely place in the country. He spent the early years of his life in India, and when there the craze began which now assumes the magnitude of a monomania." ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... meet all here present at dinner to-morrow evening, after his discharge, on the plea that Professors Hanky and Panky and Dr. Downie may give him counsel, convince him of his folly, and if possible free him henceforth from the monomania under ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... more are laid hold of. The piece gets rent down the middle—a rag is caught up, then another, and whatever comes to hand is sewn together in breathless haste. The effect of this stitching monomania has been, to keep constantly changing the map of Europe, to bring together, as chance willed it, races and religions of every pattern, and to trouble the existence of twenty peoples, without making the unity of a nation. Certain ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... the reader already knows, was a somewhat unobservant man of what was passing around him in the world. He had his own deep, stern trains of thought, which he pursued with a passionate earnestness almost amounting to monomania. The actions, words, and even looks of those few in whom he took an interest, he could sometimes watch and comment on in his own mind with intense study. True, he watched without understanding, and commented wrongly; for he had too little experience of the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... whom be praise!) had granted her of magnificence. He forgot all that happened to him in other days and also his affair with the Caliph and his people and his friends and his society. Such was the burden of his thoughts until he was taken with monomania and his body wasted. Hereupon Attaf sent for doctors, they surrounded him constantly, they employed all their talents for him, but they could find no remedy. So he remained during a certain time without anyone being able to discover what ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... question became a ministerial difficulty. Pitt's administration failed on this very point, although it had seemed invincible a few weeks before. The obstinacy of the King, which, indeed, almost amounted to a monomania, was the principal cause. He made it a personal matter, declared it the "most jacobinical thing he had ever heard of;" and he informed the world at large that he would consider any man who proposed it his personal enemy. Pitt ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... out his song in a bass voice, and made prodigious claims to musical knowledge. His self-conceit had taken a stand upon solfeggi; he began by admiring his appearance while he sang, passed thence to talking about music, and finally to talking of nothing else. His musical tastes had become a monomania; he grew animated only on the one subject of music; he was miserable all evening until somebody begged him to sing. When he had bellowed one of his airs, he revived again; strutted about, raised himself on his heels, and ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... island, all for the same cause, all found where they had no business, and speared by some indignant father of a family; the figure was given me by one of their contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived. The strange persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or a series of romantic passions; gin is the more likely key. The poor buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case; they drank; their brain was fired; they stumbled towards the nearest houses on chance; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... could have done it any way," said Allen, sighing. "I never can enter into the taste the others have for that style of thing; but Bobus might have succeeded. You must have expected it of him, at the time when he and I used to laugh at what we thought was a monomania on your part for our taking up medical science as a tribute to our father, when we did not need it ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to him. He seemed to recollect nothing but that Heaven had "made Spaniards to be killed, and him to kill them." If he had not been the most sensible of John Bulls, he would certainly have forestalled the monomania of that young Frenchman of rank, who, some eighty years after him, so maddened his brain by reading of the Spanish cruelties, that he threw up all his prospects and turned captain of filibusters in the West Indies, for the express purpose ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Perche district from no one knows where, some armed with only a piece of salt pork, a little meal, and a prospecting pick; some mounted on mules, others on foot; old men and men half-crippled were among the number, but all bitten by the monomania which possesses every prospector. Now there are probably 2,000 men in the Perche district, and the number of prospects located must far exceed 1,000. Three miners from there with whom I was talking recently owned forty-seven mines among them, and while one acknowledged that hardly one prospect ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... from Hellbeam's eyes. They were fiercely burning. They were the hot, passionate eyes of a man obsessed, of a man possessed of a monomania. Peterman, watching, beheld the sudden change in him. He shrank before the insanity he had so ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... 'you see what comes of having too much soul. It is impossible but that such fixed attention to any one organ should prove injurious, even if the organ is not there. You really have a great deal to answer for, in encouraging this kind of monomania.' ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... the possibilities of monomania," I answered. "There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the 'idee fixe,' which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way. A man who had read deeply about Napoleon, or who had possibly ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him: the dissecting-room; curious cases that had puzzled him; drawing-rooms, beautiful women; he sang airs from the operas, sad, broken little snatches, in a deep, mellow voice, finely trained,—fragments of a litany to the Virgin. Birkenshead's love of beauty was a hungry monomania; his brain was filled with memories of the pictures of the Ideal Mother and her Son. One by one they came to him now, the holy woman-type which for ages supplied to the world that tenderness and pity which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... character Lady Eleanore was remarkable for a harsh, unyielding pride, a haughty consciousness of her hereditary and personal advantages, which made her almost incapable of control. Judging from many traditionary anecdotes, this peculiar temper was hardly less than a monomania; or if the acts which it inspired were those of a sane person, it seemed due from Providence that pride so sinful should be followed by as severe a retribution. That tinge of the marvellous which is thrown over so many of these half-forgotten legends ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of laughter, were weapons against which Mackintosh had nothing to counter, and he learned that the wisest thing was never to betray his irritation. He learned to control himself. But his hatred grew till it was a monomania. He watched Walker with an insane vigilance. He fed his own self-esteem by every instance of meanness on Walker's part, by every exhibition of childish vanity, of cunning and of vulgarity. Walker ate greedily, noisily, filthily, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... escaped me as to the sanity of the writer of the letter, acting together on my mind, suggested an idea, which I was literally afraid to express openly, or even to encourage secretly. I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. I resolved, this time, in defence of my own courage and my own sense, to ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... Bettina, and her voice sounded particularly low and mellow. "I have a little monomania, father. Some people have a monomania for one thing and some for another. Mine is for NOT taking a bargain ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the beauties of a marvellous cap. The brother and sister began to think the atmosphere of the rue Saint-Denis unhealthy, and the smell of the mud in the markets made them long for the fragrance of the Provins roses. They were the victims of a genuine nostalgia, and also of a monomania, frustrated at present by the necessity of selling their tapes and bobbins before they could leave Paris. The promised land of the valley of Provins attracted these Hebrews all the more because they had really suffered, ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... the Snug within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan in his nightcap is the tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature shudders at the petrifaction of the intellect of Mr. F.'s aunt. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... own observation, I should think it the most unproductive source of satisfaction to the possessor. I have heard of many very wealthy men that have tormented themselves with the fear of coming to actual want, but I never heard of one man in moderate circumstances that was afflicted with this monomania." ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... was ominous. It sounded like monomania. So ghostly and elusive! I began to suspect my American ally ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... caught sight of some graceful female form above the ordinary stature, and plunging onward in pursuit, with his heart throbbing madly, and his fevered brain cheating him with phantoms. His search became almost a monomania. His mind, fixed strainingly upon this one, all-engrossing object, lost its balance, and he could no longer reason upon his own course, or see its futility, or devise a better. The invariable disappointment which closed every day's search, by some ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... altogether to mine,—that the abnormal position of certain molecules in the brain produced an eccentricity or peculiar bias in one direction which, practically viewed, might be described as an intelligent form of monomania, but which most people chose to term 'genius,' and that from a purely scientific standpoint it was evident that the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, and all the widely renowned 'great ones' of the earth should be classified as so many brains more or less affected by abnormal molecular ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... feel more and more that old age or his monomania had shaken White Henshaw's reason, but he said bitterly: "And I suppose, if that voice never fails you and if these South Seas natives can read the future, that you are bound ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... de l'Estorade, getting more excited instead of calmer, under this form of studied though friendly reproach, "your maternal feelings are turning into monomania, and you make life intolerable to every one but your children. The devil! suppose they are your children; I am their father, and, though I am not adored as they are, I have the right to request that my house be not ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... came into operation the incipient symptoms of monomania were rarely noticed, and many were driven into confirmed madness and crime by neglect or improper treatment, whilst some of the supposed lunatics were really wiser than their keepers or the doctors who attended them. It often happened that the aspirations of a superior ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she liked his young naivete and monomania; she liked his face and all his gestures, and the poise and ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... the deafness and blindness of monomania that they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor Chadd was in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... author who don't believe in Bibles. At any rate Sebastian, son by the first marriage, is desperately in love with Ruby—so, you see, the old man had something to worry about. However, it all turns out to be, in fact, mere illusion, developing into a fatal monomania, and the family business is left to be carried on by such of the next generation as have not been convinced by the formidable array of evidence, anti-Theistic and anti- Christian, of two of the characters (who, it is clear, have sedulously read the same books). Sebastian ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... life than most people,' thought Graham, as he trotted briskly along, 'and there is nothing in it that I can see to upset him so. He hasn't forged, or coined, or murdered, or sold himself to Pluto-Pan Satan so far as I know; and he is too clear-headed and sane to have a monomania about a non-existent trouble. Dear, dear,' the doctor shook his head sadly, 'I shall never understand human nature; there is always an abyss below an abyss, and the firmest seeming ground is usually quagmire when you come to step on it. George Pendle is a ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... was, little by little, passing away. His faculties evidently grew more feeble, as he concentrated them on a single thought. By a sad association of ideas, he referred everything to his monomania, and a human existence seemed to have departed from him, to give place to the extra-natural existence of the intermediate powers. Moreover, certain malicious rivals revived the sinister rumours which had spread ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... kind master endeavor to soothe him with comforting words—as vain the attempt of the garrison surgeon to cure him with varied prescriptions. His malady grew in proportion with their efforts to heal it, until it took the form of monomania. He saw no means by which he could accomplish his return to his beloved country so as to be able to remain there in safety,—did he leave his kind master and fly, it would be of no avail, for the same power that had at first compelled his forced service, would ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... some danger that threatened them. This work of rescue was the fulfilment of an ideal. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of it! The senior partner of Hatch & Buckley had been quick to note this condition of mind and to reap the profits that came therefrom. Monomania means money, was a business axiom in that gentleman's office, but he had pumped the stream dry and Von Barwig was now at the end of his resources. By some strange process of thought, Von Barwig recognised this fact, but it seemed to him to mean that because his money had come to ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... insanity in the family," he thought to himself. "I am quite interested in this case. A new form of monomania! I should be quite sorry to lose sight of it. I shall be loath to give ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... "that's getting to be a monomania with you. I agree we are in grave danger. I don't relish the prospect of dying any more than you do—perhaps less, in view of certain peculiarities! But it's now further back to Earth than it is to Saturn. And before we can reach either, we'll have new ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... to know. But don't you trouble; I shall find out quick enough. And don't be offended," he added. "You see, I'm obsessed—that's the new word, you know—by this detective business. I want to find out everything about everybody. But there's no harm in me; it's a kind of monomania; and if you don't want me to be inquisitive, ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... big armchair very carefully so as not to crease his shining shirt-front, "I must give you another piece of advice. It is serious. I have heard again and again that when a man thinks only of one thing—when he keeps brooding over it day and night—he is bound to become mad. They call it monomania. You are becoming ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Government. Monomania had produced Great Things, in the form of a c/2 drive. It now ...
— Subjectivity • Norman Spinrad
... He is always spelling out words from them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and asking what this is and what that is; but his whole stock from beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for anything I can say. It's a monomania with him to think he is possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... practicable by the end of the summer of 1846. A second obstacle lay in the nature and opinions of Miss Barrett's father, who governed even his grown-up children by "an incredible system of patriarchal absolutism." By what was variously termed an obliquity of the will, an eccentricity, a monomania, he had decided that none of his children should marry, and on this point he demanded "passive obedience." It was perfectly clear that Miss Barrett could not gain his consent to her marriage, and so, after long hesitation and much unhappiness, she decided to marry Mr. Browning ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... dear Doctor, you must excuse me if I appear to dwell on this rather, because I feel so very strongly. I call it quite my monomania, it is such a subject of mine. You are a blessing to us. You really are ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... takes possession of the woman's mind—a species of dumb monomania which is only observable when her fixed idea happens to be ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... confided, he conceived the notion that Shah Alam, as the head of the family, was probably, nay, certainly, the possessor of an exclusive knowledge regarding the place of a vast secret hoard. All the crimes and horrors that ensued are attributable to the action of this monomania. On the 29th, he made the new Titular, Bedar Bakht, inflict corporal chastisement upon his venerable predecessor. On the 30th, a similar outrage was committed upon several of the ladies of Shah Alam's family, who filled the ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... war temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... monomania which tainted Sir Julius Verity-Stewart's courtly soul, pinned Lady Auriol down to the green-covered table for the rest of the evening. But the next day she set herself to satisfy her entirely ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... a wave, with no look-out or means of judging where I was to be cast, and had formed no opinions. As yet, everything looked fair with Mr. Bonflon. His face was as honest as the morning sun, and it was next to impossible to doubt him. He might be the prey of some strange phantasm, some monomania; but the evidences did not show it. The account he had given of himself was manly and coherent; his claims as a discoverer had been modestly presented, and were not wholly unsupported by circumstances, or unreasonable in themselves. Indeed, they must be regarded as coming within ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... sublime idea, the lofty certitude which he had of abolishing suffering, of strengthening man's will, of making a new and a higher humanity, a healthy humanity, was assuredly only the beginning of the monomania of vanity. And in his bitter complaint of being watched, in his desire to watch the enemies who, he thought, were obstinately bent on his destruction, were easily to be recognized the symptoms of the monomania of suspicion. So then all the diseases of the ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Mackaye's stand for the Chicago anarchists was not due to sympathy with their political monomania, but rather championed justice which, only when rightly used, will stem the tide of overwrought minds. With the execution of these men, he believed the cause of anarchy would be strengthened by the general impression gained of their martyrdom. His attitude was widely discussed, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy • Steele Mackaye
... Mania, or Monomania, also called Melancholia, is a form of the disease in which the patient becomes possessed of some single notion, contradictory alike to ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to him, a glass of sherry before dinner was a poison, whereas half the world, especially the Eastern half, prefers its potations preprandially; a quarter of the liquor suffices, and both appetite and digestion are held to be improved by it. The result of "turning over ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... you've seen him fight! It's a disease, I tell you—a monomania like any other monomania. Why don't they say to a crazy man in his lucid intervals, 'Trouble with you is your lack of will power and moral strength. Brace up. Go ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... heart. Miss Burton, permit me to present to you Mr. Stanton, whose only fault is a slight monomania for New ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... robbed you of a fortune, and that I helped to rob you of a woman. You wished to buy my business, and add it to the roll of your companies. And I deprived you of that triumph. Your hatred of me grew and grew. Leading a solitary and narrow life, you allowed it to develop into a species of monomania. I had come out on top once too often for your peace of mind. In your opinion the world was too small to hold both of us. Accordingly, you evolved your terrific campaign. My business was to be seriously damaged. And I was to be murdered. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... with his artist friend what he had read. It was the priest, pale and perturbed, who told him that war was upon the world. Peter didn't believe it. In his heart he thought that the fear of war with her great neighbor had become a monomania with ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... little doubt of his issuing successful from the present crisis. Iscah Nicholas, though his strength was beyond question, was heavy and slow. Yet he was struggling with surprising agility. He was animated by a convulsive energy, a volcanic outburst characteristic of the obsession of monomania. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with some grounds for the belief, that the evidence of Charles Nolin, who swore that the prisoner was willing to leave the country if he obtained from the Government a gratuity of $35,000, was inconsistent with the real existence of such a monomania as the prisoner was afflicted with. But not one isolated portion, but the whole, of Nolin's evidence should be considered. Other portions of his testimony, for instance, prisoner's opinions on religious matters, and his intention to divide ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... musicians do, makes a failure of his simplest work, and has to go off and sharpen his wits at another trade. I am in that condition. For twenty months I sought the track of a man, who disappeared as if the air absorbed him where he last breathed. I did not find him. The search gave me a touch of monomania. For two months I have not been able to rest upon meeting a new face until satisfied its owner was not—let ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... I leave the dark tragedy with the recital of this solemn sentence from a paper on the culprit in the "Final Memorials of Charles Lamb": "Wainwright's vanity, nurtured by selfishness and unchecked by religion, became a disease, amounting perhaps to monomania, and yielding one lesson to repay the world for his existence, viz. that there is no state of the soul so dangerous as that in which the vices of the sensualist are envenomed by the grovelling intellect of ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Mr. Hobson, and Mr. Albany into a room together. But when we have them there, we soon forget probability in the exquisitely ludicrous effect which is produced by the conflict of four old fools, each raging with a monomania of his own, each talking a dialect of his own, and each inflaming all the others anew every time ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches. His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might, without exaggeration, be called a 'long disease,' should defend himself by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... inept. The poor patients were whipped or otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania. Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem tragic to ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... unassuming manners of his father, Sebituane, speaks distinctly, in a low pleasant voice, and appears to be a sensible man, except perhaps on the subject of his having been bewitched; and in this, when alluded to, he exhibits as firm a belief as if it were his monomania. "Moriantsiane, my aunt's husband, tried the bewitching medicine first on his wife, and she is leprous, and so is her head-servant; then, seeing that it succeeded, he gave me a stronger dose in the cooked flesh of a goat, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... took out his snuffbox, opened it, and offered me a pinch; on my refusing, he took a large one. He was happy! A man who has no hobby does not know all the good to be got out of life. A hobby is the happy medium between a passion and a monomania. At this moment I understood the whole bearing of Sterne's charming passion, and had a perfect idea of the delight with which my uncle Toby, encouraged ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... unloved ally. But Charles Felix was not the man to hesitate. Not caring a straw for the privilege of wearing a crown himself, his belief in the divine right of kings, and the obligation to defend it, amounted to monomania. The Austrian offer was therefore accepted. On her part Austria declined the obliging proposal of the Czar of a loan of 100,000 men. She felt that she could do the work unaided, ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... for her money, and if he had convinced her that she had bought him, it was perhaps natural in return that she should wish for her money's worth. The poor woman was passionately in love with Nigel. She suspected him of infidelity, with and without reason, morning, noon, and night; it was almost a monomania. They had two children in the first and second years of the marriage. Nigel was carelessly fond of them, but he regarded them rather as a private luxury and resource of his wife, mistakenly thinking their society could ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... disease proceeding from a defect in the hypochondria; which disease, by lapse of time, being naturalised, chronic, habitual, ingrained, and established within him, might well degenerate either into monomania, or into phthisis, or into apoplexy, or even into downright frenzy and raving. All this being taken for granted, since a disease well-known is a disease half cured, for ignoti nulla est curatio morbis, it will not be difficult for you to conclude ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... or cease to play, from out the cold, damp earth, she cannot be anxious. She may only be glad or sorry, and continue her way. She is perfectly herself, whatever befall! even if frosts cut her off. Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfilment. It is not laisser aller. It is life-rootedness. It is being by oneself, life-living, like the much-mooted lily. One toils, one spins, one strives: just as the lily does. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... countess had left Paris?" said la Peyrade, rushing at the chance of speaking on the subject of his present monomania. ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac |
