"Neurotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brief communication on the subject with the belief that it is quite possible for black hair to turn white in one night or even in a less time, although Hebra and Kaposi discredit sudden canities (Duhring). Raymond and Vulpian observed a lady of neurotic type whose hair during a severe paroxysm of neuralgia following a mental strain changed color in five hours over the entire scalp except on the back and sides; most of the hair changed from black to red, but some to quite white, and in two days all the red hair became white ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... tendencies are eminently feminine; the affinity lies in a hysterical nature. Thus, excessive pietism is a frequent concomitant of excessive sexual passion; this, though notably the case with women, is common enough with men of unduly neurotic temperaments. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... tendency on the part of modern critics to cast a doubt on Byron's sanity. It is true that he inherited bad blood on both sides of his family, that he was of a neurotic temperament, that at one time he maddened himself with drink, but there is no evidence that his brain was actually diseased. Speaking figuratively, he may have been "half mad," but, if so, it was a derangement of the will, not of the mind. He was responsible for his actions, and they rise ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... rolling without any preliminaries, Telzey decided. The Moderator's picture of her must be that of a spoiled, neurotic brat in a stew about the threatened loss of a pet animal. He expected her to start arguing with him immediately ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... "bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was beyond her strength. Such insubordination ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... persons to-day, that a falling birth-rate means degeneration and disaster, is so altogether removed from the sphere of reason that we ought perhaps to regard it as comparable to those manias which, in former centuries, have assumed other forms more attractive to the neurotic temperament of those days; fortunately, it is a mania which, in the nature of things, is powerless to realize itself, and we need not anticipate that the outcry against small families will have the same results as the ancient ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... womanhood becomes more sacred in our eyes it is subjected to fouler insult. Nor is this all: The American people are becoming every year more mercurial. The whole trend of our civilization—of our education, our business, even our religion—is to make us neurotic, excitable, impatient. In our cooler moments we enact laws expressive of mistaken mercy rather than of unflinching justice. Some of the states have even abolished capital punishment and in but one can a brute be tied up and whipped ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... time, to his sorrow, seen his health failing under the attacks of an obscure malady which left him with a sense of the diminution of his powers and a gradual clouding of his intellect. Symptoms of general paralysis set in, at first mistaken for neurotic disturbances. He changed greatly. Those who met him as I did, thin and shivering, on that rainy Sunday when they were celebrating the inauguration of Flaubert's monument at Rouen would scarcely have recognized him. I shall never forget, as long as I live, his face wasted ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... men and true, who at grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager, and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves, and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive, dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years, strew sweet ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... formulate the anxiety of many immigrant parents who are absolutely bewildered by the keen absorption of their children in the cheap theater. This anxiety is not, indeed, without foundation. An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they had been so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims of hallucination and mental disorder. The statement of this physician ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... "losing the temper," and there is a type known as the irascible in whom anger is the readiest emotion. The bluff English squire, the man in authority, is this type, and his anger lasts. In its lesser form anger becomes irritability, a reaction common to the neurotic and the weak. When anger is not frank, but manifests itself by a lowered brow and sidelong look, we speak of sullenness or surliness. The sullen or surly person, chronically ill-tempered and hostile, is regarded as unsocial and dangerous, whereas ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... and end with self, unrelated to external things, are insane and unwholesome, destructive alike to rational enjoyment and to effectiveness in life. And this is true of spurious emotions alike, whether the pious ecstasies of a half-starved monk, the neurotic imaginings of a sentimental woman, or the riots of a debauchee. He is the wise man who for all his life can keep mind and soul and ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... a highly sensitive or so-called "nervous" temperament, especially if there is "nervousness" in the family, must be particularly looked after. For it is during the years of puberty and adolescence that any neurotic traits are apt to develop and become emphasized. It is also the period when bad sexual habits (masturbation) are apt to develop, and the careful mother will devote special attention to her girls in their years of puberty, and ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... door and admitted a tall, frail young man whom Thorndyke welcomed with quiet geniality, and settled in a chair by the fire. I looked curiously at our visitor. He was a typical neurotic—slender, fragile, eager. Wide-open blue eyes with broad pupils, in which I could plainly see the characteristic "hippus"—that incessant change of size that marks the unstable nervous equilibrium—parted ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... unfortunate ones to whom poverty and disease have stood sponsors, and have renounced all life's good things in their name before ever they saw the light. Man makes his god in his own image; and thus it comes to pass that while the strong and joyous Greek adored Zeus on Olympus, the anaemic and neurotic Englishman worships Christ on Calvary. Do you tell me that if people were happy they would bow down before a stricken and crucified God? Not they. And I want to make them so happy that they shall cease to have any desire ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... pains, due to local irritations, as uterine disease, stricture, neurotic or nerve tumors, pressure of trusses, eye strain from weakened eye muscles, or lenses that need the help of proper spectacles, require for a permanent cure the removal of the cause. Sciatic neuralgia, one of the most common and painful forms ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in Germany, anxious mothers gave birth to an ardent, pale, and neurotic generation. Conceived between battles, reared amid the noises of war, thousands of children looked about them with dull eyes while testing their limp muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers would appear, raise them to their gold-laced bosoms, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... would Fret and exact and complain. Probably one of the Swedish farmers thereabout could give him a daughter who would make him an infinitely better wife, and bear him children, and worship him blindly. But no; he must yearn for this neurotic, abnormal little creature, with her ugly history and her barren ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... course is not anthropological, but deals with personal documents— Questions of fact and questions of value— In point of fact, the religious are often neurotic— Criticism of medical materialism, which condemns religion on that account— Theory that religion has a sexual origin refuted— All states of mind are neurally conditioned— Their significance must be tested not by their origin but by the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... woman, with a masculine capacity for deep friendship. The latter was made in a slighter mould, with charming, delicate features, set off by a mass of pale-brown hair. Mr. Frederick Fairlie I found to be a neurotic, utterly selfish gentleman, who passed his life in his own apartments, amusing himself with bullying his valet, examining his works of art, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... been pointed out by Daland [Footnote: Daland: Pennsylvania Med. Jour., July, 1913.] that nervous exhaustion may raise the blood pressure in those who are neurotic, and he finds that this hypertension may exist for months in some cases. On the other hand, in neurasthenics the blood pressure is generally lowered. As he points out, there is often a very great increase in the systolic blood pressure ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... This is a very difficult time at best to the type of boy from which a criminal grows; he meets it without preparation or instruction. What he knows he learns from others like himself. He gets weird, fantastic, neurotic ideas, which only add ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... hackneyed class of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things that we ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the effect on Lucia. Edith had no patience with people who were so abominably sensitive. It was all nerves, nerves, nerves. Lucia was and always had been hopelessly neurotic. And if people were to be shaken and upset by every passing current of another person's thought, it was, Edith said to herself a little pathetically, rather hard upon the other person. Nobody can help their thoughts; and there was something positively ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... neurotic, worn and bowed down with sixty years of misfortune, faded rather than aged, with a look of an invalid of uncertain age, with a long beard and hair still fair, and for all that still breathing forth the "cat-life." ... The ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... day at the Place, he made a furious rush at a neurotic mother hen and her golden convoy of chicks. The Mistress,—luckily for all concerned,—was within call. At her sharp summons the puppy wheeled, midway in his charge, and trotted back to her. Severely, yet trying not to ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... her childhood. When 17 she married a Jew, although she was herself a Catholic. Her husband noted that she was fretful, sensitive, resentful and quick tempered, although apt to recover quickly from her rages. Previously healthy, neurotic symptoms began with marriage, taking the form of stomach trouble and a tendency to fatigue. Shortly after marriage an abortion was induced. After being married for two years she had a quarrel and separated ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... knew in a general way what to expect. I know that modern science vindicates these things, demonstrating that any powerful stimulus given to the unconscious can awaken new vital impulses, and heal not merely the hysterical and neurotic, but sometimes actual physical ailments. Of course, to these ignorant Mexicans and Italians, there was no possible excitement so great as that caused by Carpenter's appearance and behavior. I understood the thing clearly; and yet, somehow, I could not watch ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... Eve had said about yachts and world traveling and wondered how she could hope to do so if the radius of influence was only five miles. Eve might be passionate, headstrong and neurotic, but she was not a fool. If she had planned travel on a world of two decades past she must have found a way of making his and her stay in ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... periods of wakefulness at night which they attribute to the action of the full moon. One may perhaps refer also to the tendency of bright moonlight to stir the emotions of the young, especially at puberty, a tendency which in neurotic persons may become ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
