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Surfeit   /sˈərfət/   Listen
Surfeit

noun
1.
The state of being more than full.  Synonyms: excess, overabundance.
2.
The quality of being so overabundant that prices fall.  Synonyms: glut, oversupply.
3.
Eating until excessively full.  Synonym: repletion.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Surfeit" Quotes from Famous Books



... dry yards, and hay, wheat, or oat straw, as much as they will eat. They should be kept gaining by grain regularly fed to them, and so distributed that each gets its share. Corn, either whole or ground, or oil-cake meal, or both, are used for fattening sheep. They will easily surfeit themselves on any grain except oil-meal, which is very safe feed for them, and usually economical. Strong sheep will often drive the weaker ones away, and so get more than their share of food and make themselves sick. This must be guarded against, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... sufficient for man well taught! A wholesome sleep cometh of a temperate belly. Such a man riseth up in the morning, and is well at ease with himself. Be not too hasty of meats; for excess of meats bringeth sickness, and choleric disease cometh of gluttony. By surfeit have many perished, and he that dieteth himself prolongeth his life. Show not thy valiantness in wine; for wine hath destroyed many. Wine measurably taken, and in season, bringeth gladness and cheerfulness ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... ladies," he gurgled, "I had nearly died one night of a surfeit of ortolans; and now it is of a surfeit of emptiness that ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... was extended by a quarter-of-an-hour, to-day reverted to its old limits. Consideration for overworked officials was assigned as the reason, but I think the House as a whole was rather relieved at the disappearance of what was often a triste quart d'heure. One can easily have a surfeit of the piquant humours of Mr. GINNELL, Mr. KING and the rest of the Rosa ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various

... the tavern his heart was heavy and his head dull with a surfeit of ugly notions, but as he drank he felt his heart grow lighter and his breath come easier, while his head began to dance with merry thoughts. When he left the tavern, however hard he tried, it was ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... it; and if the butter cometh not quickly, she hindereth it. If the meat roast ill the witch hath turned the spit; and if the lumber pie taste ill she hath had a finger in it. If your sheep have the foot-rot—your horses the staggers or string-halt—your swine the measles—your hounds a surfeit—or your cow slippeth her calf—the witch is at the bottom of it all. If your maid hath a fit of the sullens, or doeth her work amiss, or your man breaketh a dish, the witch is in fault, and her shoulders can bear the blame. On this very day of the year—namely, May Day,—the foolish folk hold ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... track of him who proved himself the giant in mainly supporting her glory—was, no doubt, a high pitch of the note of Conservatism. But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise, and no longer relieved by the practice'—to translate from Dr. Gannius: we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not what to think: except, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... system whose very starting-point is Deity and whose great characteristic is the ignoration of everything but Deity, insomuch that the pure and devout Novalis pronounced the author a God-drunken man, and Spinozism a surfeit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... Hermia: Hermia sleepe thou there, And neuer maist thou come Lysander neere; For as a surfeit of the sweetest things The deepest loathing to the stomacke brings: Or as the heresies that men do leaue, Are hated most of those that did deceiue: So thou, my surfeit, and my heresie, Of all be hated; but the most of me; And all my powers addresse ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... the lean leech, its victim found, is pleased To fix itself upon a part diseased Till, its black hide distended with bad blood, It drops to die of surfeit in the mud, So the base sycophant with joy descries His neighbor's weak spot and his mouth applies, Gorges and prospers like the leech, although, Unlike that reptile, he will not let go. Gelasma, if it paid you to devote Your talent ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... have been a surfeit of these internecine brawls for some time to come, and, indeed, stories of dissensions among the servants of the company in the East are plentifully sprinkled throughout its history, both in this century and the next. Of hints for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... three or four of these birds waking the echoes beneath my bedroom window, trying in jealous rivalry each to outdo the other in compassing the whole gamut, “in the rich mazes of sound,” my admiration considerably abated, and I became rather disposed to vote the performance a veritable surfeit of song, to the utter banishment of much-needed slumber. Before, however, I had arrived at this prosaic way of viewing the “Queen of Song,” I composed in its honour the following lines, with which I shall close this chapter on the Birds ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... saw, at once, where the game was hidden, And viewed it with a favor stealthy. He spake: "That is the proper view,— Who overcometh, winneth too. The Holy Church has a stomach healthy: Hath eaten many a land as forfeit, And never yet complained of surfeit: The Church alone, beyond all question, Has for ill-gotten goods the ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... Master Jonson, bringing his fist down upon the board with a thump that made the spoons all clink, "thou art the very merry-maker of the feast. A full heart's better than a surfeit any day. Don't let him go, Will—this sort of thing doth make the whole world kin! Come, Master Attwood, sit thee down, and make thyself at home. 'Tis not my house, but 'tis my friend's, and so 'tis all the same in the Lowlands. Be free of us ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett

... will not get a surfeit," remarked Harry. "I suspect in a few days they'll wish the carcases at Jericho, or at all events, at a distance from their village. Our horses and the quagga would have fared ill, had the ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston

... the tall domes and kissing branches of the elms, that peeped on either side into open windows of people asleep and told across the street to each other the secrets there, were now themselves heavy as if with surfeit of gossip and they drooped and hardly rustled. Not a tipsy waiter lurked in the shadows, not a skylarking couple of darkey lovers whispered on doorsteps. No birds, nor even crickets, serenaded the torpid night. The shuffling feet of Andrew Waples barely made ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... till she has one: for faith in her confessor, she has as much as the law prescribes: for embroidery an Arachne: for music a Siren: and for pickling and preserving, did not one of her jars of sugared apricots give you your last surfeit at ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock

... his greedy eyes Rest on the burnished image, till mere sight Half swooned for surfeit of such luxuries, And then his lips in hungering delight Fed on her lips, and round the towered neck He flung his arms, nor cared at all his ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde

... sugar, but in tropical countries figs and dates are staple in many places and the inhabitants relish them day in and day out as we relish some of out staples. It is a matter of habit. Those who do not surfeit themselves do not weary quickly of any particular ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... him, among other offences, for having "expressed himself to be an enemy to frequent preaching, inveighing in his sermons against long Sermons, saying that Peters sword cut off but one eare, but long Sermons like long swords cut off both at once, and that the Surfeit of the Word is of all most dangerous, and that the silliest creatures have longest eares, and that preaching was the worst part of God's worship, and that if he left out anything he would leave out that." And that, for ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful application of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But though he declineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... Sforza-Riario had earlier been granted by her children full administration of their patrimony during their minority. To the defence of this she now addressed herself with all the resolution of her stern nature. Her life had been unfortunate, and of horrors she had touched a surfeit. Her father, Galeazzo Sforza, was murdered in Milan Cathedral by a little band of patriots; her brother Giangaleazzo had died, of want or poison, in the Castle of Pavia, the victim of her ambitious uncle, Lodovico; her ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... new. I do not say whether I like it. I cannot understand it all as yet, I who can comprehend all that even Wagner wrote. But it is wonderful. Continue.—No, nothing fresh, or my ears will be dazed with surfeit. Play again that—that piece, that study, I know not what you call it, which ran somehow thus"—the Italian hummed some broken snatches.—"It seemed to show me a procession of damned spirits scrambling down the ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... and I could see that I should not have much trouble in gaining my suit. I saw I should have to be careful if I did not want to be taken at my word; I could not bear such a surfeit of pleasures. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... soon did their fell work of producing the sense of surfeit, and presently Elizabeth's guests dropped off gorged from the tea-table. Diva fortunately remembered their consistency in time, and nearly cleared a plate of jumbles instead, which the hostess had hoped would form a pleasant accompaniment ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... they were hanged, to the number of sixty. A small number were pardoned on account of their youth, and a few individuals who effected their escape when led to the gallows, were not pursued. The fact that the townspeople almost connived at the escape of these desperadoes showed that there had been a surfeit of hangings in Rotterdam. It is moreover not easy to distinguish with exactness the lines which in those days separated regular sea belligerents, privateers, and pirates from each other. It had been laid down by the archdukes that there was no military ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... course! Why did I not realise it before? I had too much music during those last days at Overdene; and SUCH music! I have been suffering from a surfeit of music, and the miss of it has given me this blank feeling of loneliness. No doubt we shall have plenty at Myra's, and Dal will be there to clamour for it if ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay

... are convicted of injustice; while he that does not submit to him shall be subject to the same punishment, as if he had been guilty of impiety towards God himself. When we offer sacrifices to him, we do it not in order to surfeit ourselves, or to be drunken; for such excesses are against the will of God, and would be an occasion of injuries and of luxury; but by keeping ourselves sober, orderly, and ready for our other occupations, and being more temperate than others. ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus

... a surfeit: but it is not for readers to complain; the remedy is easy; nothing forces them to read. It is not any the more for authors to complain. Those who make the crowd must not cry that they are being crushed. Despite the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... work; his second error is his treatment of the work itself. Take, for instance, his criticism of that wonderful Ode to a Nightingale, with all its marvellous magic of music, colour and form. He begins by saying that 'the first point of weakness' in the poem is the 'surfeit of mythological allusions,' a statement which is absolutely untrue, as out of the eight stanzas of the poem only three contain any mythological allusions at all, and of these not one is either forced or remote. Then coming to the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... had, and strange ones; but for sufferings, instead of fetter-galls, I bring back, as you see, a new suit of clothes; instead of an empty and starved stomach, a surfeit from good victuals and good liquor; and whereas I went into Ely on foot, I came out on ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... presence of some other disease located in another portion of the body, as derangement of the stomach, mange, surfeit, &c. The presence of one of these affections will indicate the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... repose Imaged the gloomy shadows in his heart; Vultures, that, in the greed of appetite, Still sating blind their passionate delight, Lose all the wing for flight, And, brooding deafly o'er the prey they tear, Hear never the low voice that cries, "depart, Lest with your surfeit you partake the snare!" Thus fixed by brooding and rapacious thought, Stood the dark chieftain by the gloomy stream, When, suddenly, his ear A far off murmur caught, Low, deep, impending, as of trooping winds, Up from his father's grave, That ever still some fearful ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... of these reports is true or false, it is no concern of ours. For in this point we have nothing to do with English ministers, and I should be sorry it lay in their power to redress this grievance or to enforce it: For the "Report of the Committee" hath given me a surfeit. The remedy is wholly in your own hands, and therefore I have digressed a little in order to refresh and continue that spirit so seasonably raised amongst you, and to let you see that by the laws of GOD, of NATURE, of NATIONS, and of your own COUNTRY, you ARE and OUGHT to be as FREE a people ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... has been avaricious of the hours—'labuntur anni', 'pereunt et imputantur' ever in his thoughts: and though the world of old moved slower, the man of business has rarely belied his name. A more plausible explanation is that the custom has died of surfeit. As increased facilities of travel made the world smaller, the circle of those that might be visited and saluted by the active grew boundless; so that on both sides limits were desired. Another consideration is that with new facilities came ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... heard the weird, desolate cry of an owl to his left, and then the equally lone and desolate cry of another to his right. But the warriors still lay quiet. They had heard owls often and were not afraid of them. Then the cry came from the north, and now it was repeated from the south. There was a surfeit of owls, very much too many of them, and they called to one another too much. Tandakora did not like it. It was almost like a visitation of evil spirits. Those weird, long-drawn cries, singularly piercing on a still night, were ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler

... the regent, "heretic or not heretic makes but small figure. 'Twill take France a century to overcome her late surfeit of religion. For us, 'tis most a question of how to keep the king in the ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... by carnal sensualty To a degenerate and degraded state. SEC. BRO. How charming is divine Philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. Eld. Bro. List! list! I hear Some far-off hallo break the silent air. SEC. BRO. Methought so too; what should it be? ELD. BRO. For certain, Either some one, like us, night-foundered here, Or else some neighbour woodman, or, at worst, Some roving robber calling to his fellows. ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... Marah Rocke in a home of safety, plenty and kindness, in the old doctor's house, we must run down to Hurricane Hall to see what mischief Cap has been getting into since we left her! In truth, none! Cap had had such a surfeit of adventures that she was fain to lie by and rest upon her laurels. Besides, there seemed just now nothing to do—no tyrants to take down, no robbers to capture, no distressed damsels to deliver, and Cap was ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth

... its incomparable betrayals one brilliant night during the last week of that hot month. The preface to this romantic evening was substantial and prosaic: four times during dinner was he copiously replenished with hash, which occasioned so rich a surfeit within him that, upon the conclusion of the meal, he found himself in no condition to retort appropriately to a solicitous warning from Cora to keep away from the cat. Indeed, it was half an hour later, and he was ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... made in Essex. Ditto another way. Rennet-Bags, which are good. Rennet-Bags, how to make them good. Rennet with Spice. Red Surfeit-Water. Rosa Solis, to distil. Raspberry-Wine. Red Goosberry-Wine. ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley

... Where, clothed with thunder, Truth may roll along, And Candour justify the rage of song? Such things! such men before thee! such an age! Where Rancour, great as thine, may glut her rage, And sicken e'en to surfeit; where the pride Of Satire, pouring down in fullest tide, May spread wide vengeance round, yet all the while Justice behold the ruin with a smile; Whilst I, thy foe misdeem'd, cannot condemn, Nor disapprove that rage I wish to stem, 220 Wilt thou, degenerate and corrupted, choose To soil the credit ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... antiquity, that is, to the most ancient rule, and profession, and practice of truth in scripture, to Christ and his apostles, but halt in their grandfathers' tombs. But sometimes things are commended, because new. The nature of man being inclined to change and variety, and ready to surfeit and loath accustomed things, even as the stomach finds appetite for new and unusual diets, so the mind of man hath a secret longing after new doctrines and things. Now we have both these combined together in this subject, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... laying down rules for reading, and furnishing lists of the books which should be read in order, I will undertake the much humbler task of giving a little quasi-medical advice to persons, young or old, suffering from book-hunger, book-surfeit, book-nervousness, book-indigestion, book-nausea, and all other maladies which, directly or indirectly, may be traced to books, and to which I could give Greek or Latin names if ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... is an excellent thing to still restless, egotistic spirits, to convince them of the essential emptiness of life's coveted glories; but a surfeit of Schopenhauer is like a surfeit of lobster—mental indigestion follows and the victim blames the lobster (i. e., life) instead of his own inordinate appetite. Throughout Kubin's work I detect traces of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... and played the devil with everything, when he was called upon to put his Sire the Baron of Roche-Corbon some few feet under the turf. Then he was his own master, free to lead a life of wild dissipation, and indeed he worked very hard to get a surfeit of enjoyment. Now by making his crowns sweat and his goods scarce, draining his land, and a bleeding his hogsheads, and regaling frail beauties, he found himself excommunicated from decent society, and had for his friends only the plunderers of towns and the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... Kuchan at daybreak, and a few minutes later rolled up before the Persian custom-house in the valley below. There was no evidence of the proximity of a Russian frontier, except the extraordinary size of the tea-glasses, from which we slaked our intolerable thirst. During the day we had had a surfeit of cavernous gorges and commanding pinnacles, but very little water. The only copious spring we were able to find was filled at the time with the unwashed linen of a Persian traveler, who sat by, smiling in derision, ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... There was a surfeit of killing, and a waning Revolution. We are far from saying that such a thing happened. But ambitious royalists might have thought their money well expended in removing the son of the murdered king from the scene. The claim of the American dauphin, Eleazer Williams, may ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... harmful to them [who are splenitie] chiefly after meat, and copulation (following) on surfeit ... Let him also bathe himself in sweet water. Without, he is to be leeched and smeared with oil of roses, and with onlayings (or poultices made of) wine and grapes, and often must an onlay be wrought of butter, and of new wax, and of hyssop and of oil; mingle with goose grease or lard of swine, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I ramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could exhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses with a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its range the fine mechanism of the body, suffering each part of it to indulge its own hunger after beauty; to feel the texture of petals, and draw the long grasses through the fingers; to breathe an air laden ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... informed he is choleric and rash, so that he may be concerned in a duel. Then there are such things as riots in the street, in which a rake's skull may be casually cracked; he may be overturned in a coach, overset in the river, thrown from a vicious horse, overtaken with a cold, endangered by a surfeit; but what I place my chief confidence in, is an hearty pox, a distemper which hath been fatal to his whole family. Not but that the issue of all these things is uncertain, and expedients might be found which would more effectually ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... had done eating and drinking, he lit a cigar and lay back in his large chair, and closed his eyes in the ecstatic distention of his surfeit. After a grunt or two, he turned suddenly and asked with ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan

... what money could buy, were at an end. Where there was no want, men no longer bartered their souls, or women their bodies, for the means to keep themselves alive. The vices vanished with the crimes, and the diseases almost as largely disappeared. People were no longer sickened by sloth and surfeit, or deformed and depleted by overwork and famine. They were wholesomely housed in healthful places, and they were clad fitly for their labor and fitly for their leisure; the caprices of vanity were not suffered to attaint the beauty ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... the fiddle with an unerring beauty which makes strong men weep. You shall hear her. I pray you have your handkerchers ready. His Flutiness the Duke—the title was granted last Candlemas—has a voice of a rare richness. He is cursed with a melancholy disposition most pleasing. He suffers from a surfeit of rejected love. A ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne

... the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behaviour), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, moon, and stars: as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treacherous by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... all despairs and shames, What the mean, forgotten names Of the thousand more or less, For one surfeit of success? ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... uniform promptness several seconds in advance of time, renders them wild with delight. PAREPA'S voice, rising at intervals above even the combined din of instruments, voices, and cannon, is hardly heeded by them. Noise is what they want, and they have a surfeit of it. It is only after the performance is ended that the vision of GILMORE'S ecstatic coat-tails, as they danced to the wild whirling of his maniacal baton, comes back to their memory. Then they smile and say, "Curious fellow that ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various

... quiet evenings out of the seven which God has created in the week. I am the mainstay of the music shops. At Paris there are drawing-rooms which exactly resemble the musical snuff-boxes of Germany. They are a sort of continuous orchestra to which I regularly go in search of that surfeit of harmony which my wife calls a concert. But most part of the time my wife keeps herself buried in ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... instead, not stinting them, therefore, in their food. This excessively enraged the pampered menials, and their old butler, who was the most indignant, ate so much meat and puddings of various sorts, and drank so much beer, that he actually brought on a surfeit, and died from it. How angry most of the fellows at school would have been if told that they could not have butter, or sugar in their tea. Never mind if the butter was not to be procured, and the sugar had by chance not come from ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston

... others; and God sent famine and sickness, so that the living were scarce able to bury the dead. Our want of sufficient good food, and continual watching, four or five each night, at three bulwarks, being the chief cause; only of sturgeon we had great store, whereon we would so greedily surfeit, as it cost many their lives; the sack, Aquavite, and other preservations of our health being kept in the President's hands, for his own diet ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... he has his rivalries, his competitions, his troubles of caste and etiquette, so that the merchant, in his sumptuous apartments, comes to the same essential point, "sweats, and bears fardels," as well as his brother in the garret; tosses on his bed with surfeit, or perplexity, while the other is wrapped in peaceful slumber; and, if he is one who recognizes the moral ends of life, finds himself called upon to contend with his own heart, and to fight with peculiar temptations. And thus the rich ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... bowed and smiled, manifesting his pleased acquiescence. The dinner was substantial, and in all the dishes there was noticeable the excessive abundance of country banquets, realized at the expense of variety. There was enough to surfeit twice as many persons as sat down to table. The conversation turned ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... of Switzerland and the Italian lakes, the Fishers found themselves at the Hotel Splendide in Paris, surrounded by people from the States. It was a relief to Fisher, after his somewhat bewildering experience at Baden, followed by a surfeit of stupendous and ghostly snow peaks, to be once more among those who discriminated between a straight flush and a crooked straight, and whose bosoms thrilled responsive to his own at the sight of the star-spangled banner. It was particularly ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... basket and send it to the Hummels. Germans like messes. I'm sick of the sight of this, and there's no reason you should all die of a surfeit because I've been a fool," ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... alone, Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure: Sometime all full with feasting on your sight, And by and by clean starved for a look; Possessing or pursuing no delight, Save what is had, or must from you be took. Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day, Or gluttoning ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare

... rejected at a time for some hours after meals. When the aliment has had time to ferment, and become acid, it produces cardialgia, or heart-burn. This disease is perhaps generally left after a slight inflammation of the stomach, called a surfeit, occasioned by drinking cold liquors, or eating cold vegetables, when heated with exercise. This inflammation of the stomach is frequently, I believe, at its commencement removed by a critical eruption on the face, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... picture show, countenanced upon the seventh day by the legal but not the moral authorities. Here, in cozy darkness, he placidly insulted his liver with jaw-breaker upon jaw-breaker from the paper sack, and in a surfeit of content watched the silent actors on ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... man coming from the Southern Camps to the forest belt of Santa Fe, the cachape must appeal as something peculiar to the district, and most essentially local. He has had a surfeit of carts with two wheels, each 12 feet high, and dragged by anything from sixteen to twenty-eight horses; Russian carts, like Thames punts on four wheels, no longer amuse him, while American spring carts ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various

... shall!" said Ivan, laughing; "and all over it too. Great Czar! I think by the time we have captured one of Elisha's bears, we shall have had a surfeit of travel." ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid

... such things among them. But they have asked us, 'What sort of pleasure is it that men can find in throwing the dice?' (for if there were any pleasure in it, they think the doing it so often should give one a surfeit of it); 'and what pleasure can one find in hearing the barking and howling of dogs, which seem rather odious than pleasant sounds?' Nor can they comprehend the pleasure of seeing dogs run after a hare, more than of seeing one dog run after another; for if the seeing them run is that which gives ...
— Utopia • Thomas More

... Croesus? What of Smyrna, and Colophon? Are they greater or less than their fame? Are they all contemptible in comparison of the Campus Martius and the river Tiber? Does one of Attalus' cities enter into your wish? Or do you admire Lebedus, through a surfeit of the sea and of traveling? You know what Lebedus is; it is a more unfrequented town than Gabii and Fidenae; yet there would I be willing to live; and, forgetful of my friends and forgotten by them, view from land Neptune raging at a distance. But neither ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... ever dead; sins surfeit slew thee; The ambition of those wanton eyes betrai'd thee; Go from me, grave of honour; go thou foul one, Thou glory of thy sin; go thou despis'd one, And where there is no vertue, nor no virgin; Where Chastity was never known, nor heard of; Where nothing reigns but impious ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (2 of 10) - The Humourous Lieutenant • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... cometh all kind of folly, so he hoped by their good directions to find out his Foole of Fooles, so long looked for. So, thinking to pass away the dinner-hour with some pleasant chat (lest, being overcloyed with too many dishes, they should surfeit), he discovered to them his merry meaning, who, being glad of so good an occasion of mirth, instead of a cup of sack and sugar for digestion, these men of little wit began to make inquiry and to search for the aforesaid fool, thinking it a deed of charity to ease him ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston

... him, and he an answer—sometimes a sermon by way of answer. But he saw every item that we removed from the common packs, and sternly reproved us when we tried to exceed what he considered reasonable. At that he based our probable requirements on what would have been surfeit of encumbrance for himself. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... infinitesimal doses of these earth salts are incontestably curative. The parents had first undergone a gradual impairment of health because of calcareous matters to excess in their general conditions of sustenance; and the lime proves potent to cure in the offspring what, through the parental surfeit, was entailed as [xvii] a heritage of disease. Just in the same way the mineral waters of Missisquoi, and Bethesda, in America, through containing siliceous qualities so sublimated as almost to defy the analyst, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... gaming: of whose madness they have only heard, for they have no such things among them. But they have asked us, what sort of pleasure is it that men can find in throwing the dice? For if there were any pleasure in it, they think the doing of it so often should give one a surfeit of it: and what pleasure can one find in hearing the barking and howling of dogs, which seem rather odious than pleasant sounds? Nor can they comprehend the pleasure of seeing dogs run after a hare, more than of ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... himself; cared for him so sedulously that he shall hardly know how to take care of himself; sheltered him so rigorously that, once removed from the sphere of your strong personality, he would be pitifully lost and helpless. In short, he is suffering of a surfeit of love, determined tenderness and pertinacious care—in a word, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... in silent quietness; Let nothing wake you, till the power of sleep, With his sweet dew cooling your brains enflam'd, Hath rectified the vain and idle thoughts, Bred by your surfeit and distemperature; Lo, here the Senses, late outrageous, All in a round together sleep like friends; For there's no difference 'twixt the king and clown, The poor and rich, the beauteous and deform'd, Wrapp'd in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... itself after conquest will settle down to riot and mad surfeit, but this man kept his forces strong by keeping them at work—discipline was never relaxed, yet there was such kindness and care for his men that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... this ridge through pastures where cows with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and where one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the night before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread or coffee, which ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... if, on any occasion, a surfeit of society, or a dislike of business, came upon him, when he was desirous to take some recreation; just as ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... Reeve,—The Naval Review and the ensuing operations have not, I hope, given you such a surfeit of naval affairs as to indispose you to hear a little of the recent cruise of the Mediterranean squadron. We left Malta, under the command of the Duke of Edinburgh, in May, and visited several ports on ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton

... being shut up with the disorder till it had run its course inside the walls of the ship, and no more victims were to be claimed, was too much for his nerve. He fled like some frightened animal to his room, and deliberately set about guzzling a surfeit ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... tell? And yet, men who gave vent to their appetites for novelty, their riotous longings for new adventures, new risks, new pleasures, these suffered, no doubt, from the reverse side of starvation, from surfeit. No getting out of it—a maladjusted animal, civilised man! There could be no garden of his choosing, of "the Apple-tree, the singing, and the gold," in the words of that lovely Greek chorus, no achievable elysium in life, or lasting haven of happiness for any man ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... dictates of decency, is not only unimportant but incongruous and vexatious. During bright but cloudless days the less worn the higher the degree of comfort, and upon comfort happiness depends. Sick of a surfeit of pleasures, the whining monarch, counselled by his soothsayers, ransacked his kingdom for the shirt of a happy subject. He found the enviable man—a toil-worn hind who had never fidgeted under the discomfort of the badge ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... you compliments about your dancing," he observed quietly, after a pause. "You must receive a surfeit of them. But"—looking at her with those direct grey eyes of his—"I'm glad I didn't leave England when I ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... were often punctuated by laughter I take it that they succeeded. To give Mr. DORNFORD YATES his due he is expert in light banter; but some three hundred pages of such entertainment tend to create a sense of surfeit. The first part of the book is called, "How some passed out of the Courts for ever," and then comes an interlude, in which we are given at least one stirring war-incident. I imagine that Mr. YATES ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various

... story in Boswell's Biography which is transferred to "Pickwick," that of the unlucky gentleman who died from a surfeit of crumpets; Sam, it will be recollected, describes it as a case of the man "as killed hisself ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald

... a surfeit of those dreams 'such as the poets know when they are young.' Sweet chuck, beat not the bones of the buried; when he breathed he was a likely lad," Mr. Wycherley declared, with ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... laudable end:— The general has his star; Shylock his four per cent; The contractor's wife a costly gem To enhance her vulgar charms; The mother a harvest of tears; The wife a broken heart; The unborn babe a prenatal curse; While I have my surfeit of blood. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... go on in this way, felt prompted, with the idea of affording his mind some distraction, to think of this and to devise that expedient; but everything had been indulged in with surfeit by Pao-yue, and there was only this resource, (that suggested itself to him,) of which Pao-yue had not as yet had any experience. Bringing his reflections to a close, he forthwith came over to a bookshop, and selecting novels, both of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... a surfeit of the precious metals was instantly felt on prices. The most ordinary articles were only to be had for exorbitant sums. A quire of paper sold for ten pesos de oro; a bottle of wine, for sixty; a sword, for forty or fifty; a cloak, for a hundred,—sometimes more; a pair of shoes cost thirty ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... class see the revolution. Most of them are too ignorant, and many are too afraid to see it. It is the same old story of every perishing ruling class in the world's history. Fat with power and possession, drunken with success, and made soft by surfeit and by cessation of struggle, they are like the drones clustered about the honey vats when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... the handful of fellow potentates who say what law shall be and how it shall be enforced. No stern, masterful men and women are they as some future moonstruck novelist or historian bent upon creating legendary lore may portray them. Voluptuaries are most of them, sunk in a surfeit of gorgeous living and riotous pleasure. Weak, without distinction of mind or heart, they have the money to hire brains to plan, plot, scheme, advocate, supervise and work for them. Suddenly deprived of their ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... up with loud exclamations of joy and wonder. One of them took out of his haversack a quantity of provisions and a flask of aguardiente; and Coronado handed them to Thurstane with a smile, hoping that he would surfeit himself and die. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... was sent to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicester, to the school of Mr. John Brinsley, who 'was very severe in his life and conversation, and did breed up many scholars for the universities; in religion he was a strict Puritan.' 'In the fourteenth year of my age, about Michaelmas, I got a surfeit, and thereupon a fever, by eating beechnuts.' 'In the sixteenth year of my age I was exceedingly troubled in my dreams concerning my salvation and damnation, and also concerning the safety and destruction of my father and mother: in the nights I frequently ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... PHILOSOPHY! Not harsh, and crabbed, as dull Fools suppose, But Musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. MILTON. ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... it is not merely that everything is exaggerated, but everything is factitious. Simultaneously, the imaginary attributes of the idol disappearing, and vanity being satiated, all ends in a crash of iconoclastic surfeit. ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... London to such an extent that he died of surfeit, and was buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, where his tombstone still exists, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... pass the weeks of courtship like those who consider themselves as taking the last draught of pleasure, and resolve not to quit the bowl without a surfeit, or who know themselves about to set happiness to hazard, and endeavour to lose their sense of danger in the ebriety of perpetual amusement, and whirl round the gulph before they sink. Hymenaeus often repeated a medical axiom, that the succours of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... life long I have seen this excess of work as compared with the power to do it; but the evil has increased with the surfeit of wealth, and there is no sign that the increase is near its end. The people of this country are a very strong people; but there is no strength that can permanently endure, without provoking inconvenient consequences, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... County Gentry; the teachers were glad when she would treat them from her abundant store of play-money; and she was a kind of divinity among the schoolmaids her companions, to whom she gave so many cakes and sweetmeats that the apothecary had to be called in about once a week to cure many of surfeit. But this fair young flower-bed was saved from blight and choking weeds, first, by the innate rectitude and nobility of her disposition, which (save only when that dangerous look was in her eyes) taught her to keep a rein over her caprices, and subdue a too warm and vigorous imagination; next, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... to be allowed to surfeit themselves? Shall they be suffered to take their fill of dainties and make themselves ill, as they certainly will do?" As thus put, the question admits of but one reply. But as thus put, it assumes the point at issue. We contend that, as appetite is a good ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... deal of embroidery in the evenings, because, as he said, it was such a change. The embroidery stood for a symbol, a type of the pleasures of the senses, and when he fell to it with fervour beyond the ordinary, one understood that he had been having a surfeit of the displeasures of the senses, and felt need to restore ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... has robbed men of their bodies and of their lives, and has torn them limb from limb wantonly, as a spoiled hawk tears a pheasant and scatters the bright feathers on the ground. Rome has robbed men of their souls and has fed hell with them to its surfeit. And now, in her turn, her grasping hands have withered at the wrists, her insatiable lips are cracking upon her loosening teeth, and the mistress of the world is the ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... of Childe Harold had on his feelings; effects which, however, did not last long. He was gratified to the fullness of his hopes; but the adulation was enjoyed to excess, and his infirmities were aggravated by the surfeit. I did not, however, see the progress of the change, as in the course of the summer I went to Scotland, and soon after again abroad. But on my return, in the following spring, it was ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... and 'tis said to-day, That wealth to prosperous stature grown Begets a birth of its own: That a surfeit of evil by good is prepared, And sons must bear what allotment of woe Their sires were spared. But this I refuse to believe: I know That impious deeds conspire To beget an offspring of impious deeds Too like their ugly sire. But whoso is just, though his wealth like a river Flow down, shall ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... write to Desiree from Moscow. As he lay, all dressed on the hard ground, he fell to thinking of what he should write to Desiree to-morrow from Moscow. The mere date and address of such a letter would make her love him the more, he thought; for, like his leaders, he was dazed by a surfeit of glory. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... ship's company disarmed and helpless, Jack. And pirates a-plenty to work her till he recruits a stronger force. All hands of 'em have a surfeit of ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... am, Sir, a Person past being Amorous, and do not give this Information out of Envy or Jealousy, but I am a real Sufferer by it. These Lovers take any thing for Tea and Coffee; I saw one Yesterday surfeit to make his Court; and all his Rivals, at the same time, loud in the Commendation of Liquors that went against every body in the Room that was not in Love. While these young Fellows resign their Stomachs with their Hearts, and drink at the Idol in this manner, we who come to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... strewn with broken glass, chairs, and bottles. I got hold of a three-legged chair, and by balancing myself against one of the walls, tried to do a bit of a doze. I was precious near tired out now, from want of sleep and a surfeit of marching. I told my sergeant to wake me when the order came along, and then and there slept on that chair for twenty minutes, lulled off by the shrapnel bursting along the road outside. My sergeant woke me. "We are going on again, sir!" "Right ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather

... a small hut, situated at the top of a mountain near Herat, where we made the good people believe he was living upon no other food than that which the Gins and Peris brought to him; but unfortunately he actually died of a surfeit, having ate more of a roast lamb and sweetmeats than his nature could support. For my own credit, I was obliged to say, that the Gins, jealous of us mortals for possessing the society of so wonderful a person, had so inflated him with celestial food, that, leaving no room for his soul, it ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... Sconces, that might Souldiers teach, To fortifie by works as well as Preach. I'le say no more; for as I am a sinner, I've wrought my self a stomach to a dinner. Inviting Poets not to tantalize, But feast, (not surfeit) here ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May

... While a young man, he had suffered from a painful attack of vertigo, brought on by a surfeit of fruit; "eating," he says, in a letter to Mrs. Howard, "an hundred golden pippins at a time." This had occasioned a deafness; and both giddiness and deafness had recurred at intervals, and at last manifestly affected his mind. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I not talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and killed by a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence! Inexperienced as I was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the experience of my impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very thought of calculation would have been abhorrent. But ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... further intervention on their part. By slow but sure alchemy the fierce suns would change the acid and bitter juices in the apples, peaches, plums, and pears into nectar. Already Alf was revelling in the harvest apples, which, under Maggie's culinary magic, might tempt an ascetic to surfeit. ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... contemplation of its author. This will apply equally to the heaping up of unnecessary illustrations: it is as great a fault to supply the reader with too many as with too few; having given him at most two, it is better to let him read slowly and think out the rest for himself than to surfeit him with an abundance of explanation. ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler

... be a new page: nobody else shall see it till spring. In the first place, the prints will not be finished: in the next, I intend that two or three other things shall appear before it from my press, of other authors; for I will not surfeit people with my writings, nor have them think that I propose to find employment alone for a whole press—so far from it, I intend to employ it no ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... When he rolled his greedy eyes like a lizard, And, "all is rightly disposed," said he, "Who conquers wins, for a certainty. The church has of old a famous gizzard, She calls it little whole lands to devour, Yet never a surfeit got to this hour; The church alone, dear ladies; sans question, Can give ...
— Faust • Goethe

... blue," you said; "I dread ophthalmia. Surfeit of blue compels the use of green spectacles. I adore the skies of Hobbema and Backhuysen; one can look at them with the naked eye for twenty years, and yet never need an oculist in ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... beautiful record of a beautiful festival [At the "Century," New York, Nov. 5, 1864, in honor of Mr. Bryant's seventieth birthday.] to a beautiful—but enough of this. You must have [278] had a surfeit. 'T was all right and due, but it must have been a hard thing to bear,—to be so praised to your very face. . . . Your reply was admirable,—simple, modest, quiet, graceful,—in short, I don't see how it could be better. For the rest, I think our cousin Waldo chiselled out the nicest bit of praise ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... It would seem that the matter of lust is not only venereal desires and pleasures. For Augustine says (Confess. ii, 6) that "lust affects to be called surfeit and abundance." But surfeit regards meat and drink, while abundance refers to riches. Therefore lust is not properly ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... art-criticisms. They do not want the simple life, nor the esthetic life; on the contrary, they want very much to wallow in all the costly vulgarities from which the elect souls among the rich turn away with loathing. It is by surfeit and not by abstinence that they will be cured of their hankering after unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the Kelmscott Chaucer ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... invisible guards. We have thronged with fiery faces and arms the fences of our gardens and parks. The plate-glass of our windows we have made more impenetrable than adamant. To our very infants we have given the strength of giants. Babies surfeit, while strong men starve; and the foetus in the womb stretches out unformed hands to annex a principality. Is this liberty? Is this Nature? No! It is a Merlin's prison! Yet, monstrous, it subsists! Has our friend, then, no ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... perpetual interest in it. We go and look at the deer (a herd of two, I think) behind their wire netting in the southward valley of the park, and we would feed the trout in their blue tank if we did not see them suffering with surfeit, and hanging in motionless misery amid the clear water under a cloud of bread crumbs. We are such devotees of the special attractions offered from time to time that we do not miss a single balloon ascension or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... of war. One pulled one way whilst the other tugged in the opposite direction; and the observer could almost have supposed that the burden itself might have been parted in twain by the treatment to which it was subjected—the incident affording a new application of the remark that a surfeit of zeal is destructive of the best intentions. The nature of the bodies which the ants seemed so excessively anxious to preserve from injury was readily determined. The oval bodies, resembling grains of corn, were ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... the diverting equally blended through the whole. If there be too much of the first, let the music be composed ever so masterly in that style, it will become heavy and tiresome; if the latter prevail, it will surfeit with its levity: wherefore it is the poet's business to adapt the words for this agreeable mixture: for the music is but secondary, and subservient to the words; and if there be an artful contrast in the drama, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson



Words linked to "Surfeit" :   overmuch, render, eating, provide, luxuriate, feeding, overmuchness, superabundance, fullness, excess, supply, furnish, indulge



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