"Anodyne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there is no anodyne like duty, sweetened with a little charity towards your neighbours. Amusement and dissipation simply aggravate the evil. Personal danger, while its excitement braces nerve and intellect for the time, is an over-powerful stimulant for the imagination, and leaves a reaction sadly ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... not enough theology, good or bad, in these papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... second injunction, and she too lay down, keeping the child in her arms; of the 'mixture' she was afraid, for a few days since the child of a neighbour had died in consequence of an overdose of this same anodyne. For a long time there was silence in the room. Outside, voices kept sounding with that peculiar muffled distinctness which they have on a night of dense fog, when there is little or no wheel-traffic to make the ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... It is time to be old, To take in sail Know enough of a wide range of subjects Know something about everything, and everything about something Less you think about your health the better Man who knows too much about one particular subject Nature's kindly anodyne Never contradict a man with a squinting brain Never to countenance a wrong because others did No patience with any form of deceit or duplicity Old Men's Tears Old people have a right to be epicures, if they can afford it Old women of both sexes ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... suddenly became aware of how poignant to him was the sympathy of her interest,—and stopped. Thus to pour out, thus to be heard, was to experience the exquisite pain that comes with sudden relief of intolerable pain, as when an anodyne steals through the veins of torture. He stopped. He could not ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Oil is very anodyne, or an Easer of Pain, it is excellent, taken inwardly, to cure Hoarseness, and to blunt the Sharpness of the Salts that irritate the Lungs. In using, it must be melted and mix'd with a sufficient Quantity of Sugar-Candy, and made into Lozenges, which must be held ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... innumerable woes on account of intemperance. Alcohol is unknown to them, but they have had a two-thousand year's battle against three liquids that affect them as opium affects us. Strange to say that these terrible liquids were the bases of many of their medicines just like the anodyne medicines of our present day. Thus in Dore-lyn the old kinds of medicines created many drunkards. Since the dawn of the brighter age, a strict law prevails regarding the use of all narcotics in ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered. The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to administer the opiate potion of amnesty, powdered with all the ingredients of scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... really what he did mean, I guess it wuz anodyne, I keep a bottle to home for nerves. But 'tennyrate in a few minutes he wuz talkin' quite glib about home and the children and I felt richly repaid for all my trouble. And with such little agreeable talk and eppisodin' did ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... horror there are two bright spots. He never confused the past. He remained alive, and blessed are those who live, if it is only to a sense of sinfulness. The anodyne of muddledom, by which most men blur and blend their mistakes, never ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... to be out of the question, he fell back upon poor humanity's other anodyne, work, which has the incidental advantage of generating warmth. Seizing a shovel, he began to dig at the doorway of the tomb, whilst the jackals howled louder than ever in astonishment. They were not used to such a sight. For thousands ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... white English teeth; he took a joke without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very limited curiosity about all that was going on; he had small store of information; he lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me. His quiet animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of anxiety, and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don' know, Sir," better than I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... badly enough with John Clemens. Yet he never was without one great comforting thought—the future of the Tennessee land. It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... railway accident, probably represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But there is also another side to the matter. Instantaneous death in a great catastrophe must be reckoned as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the attendant excitement has often the effect of an anodyne. In the upshot, no doubt, such occurrences are rightly called disasters, since their tendency is to cause needlessly painful death, under circumstances, which in the main, enhance its terrors; but the sufferings of the victims cannot be added together ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... exclaimed in quite a shocked voice; "you will be so tired." But Malcolm assured her with absolute truth that he had never been less tired in his life. The storm and stress and excitement of the day had acted on him like a tonic as well as an anodyne; in thinking and planning for others he had found relief from the intolerable ache of ever-present pain that had made his life so purgatorial of late, and the unhealed wound ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... some conditional right of admission to it. We have purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is not an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness. It looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy where it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease. The only desperate case for a people is where its moral sense is paralyzed, and the first symptom is a readiness ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... golden ages. What I had to remark, for the present brazen one, is, that in several provinces, as in Education, Polity, Religion, where so much is wanted and indispensable, and so little can as yet be furnished, probably Imposture is of sanative, anodyne nature, and man's Gullibility not his worst blessing. Suppose your sinews of war quite broken; I mean your military chest insolvent, forage all but exhausted; and that the whole army is about to mutiny, disband, and cut your and each other's throat,—then were it not well could you, as if by ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... yourself, my lord,' he said decisively; 'nothing like change for mental worry. Go to Bath, or Putney, or Jericho, bishop; travel is your anodyne.' ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... divest the spot of a certain sadness, not displeasing, however, whether to the young, to whom there is a luxury in the vague sentiment of melancholy, or to those who, having known real griefs, seek for an anodyne in meditation and memory. The low lead-coloured door, set deep in the turret, was locked, and the bell beside it broken. Caroline turned impatiently away. "We must go round to the other side," said she, "and try to make the deaf old man ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the arena guards threw down their shields with a sudden clatter and seized the prisoners, four to each. The crowd shivered with delicious anticipation. The doomed men neither struggled nor cried, for fatalism is an anodyne as well as an explosive. King set his teeth. Yasmini, with both hands behind her head, continued to smile down on them all as sweetly as the ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... top of the hips. His wounds had inflamed from exposure, and were suppurating freely. He assured me that he had not slept for several days or nights. I dressed his wounds with a soothing ointment, and gave him a full dose of an effective anodyne, after which he slept long and refreshingly, and awoke to express his gratitude and shake my hand in a very cordial and sincere manner. When these harsher inflictions are not resorted to, the mourners usually repair daily for a few days to the place of burial, toward the hour ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... himself sits above, and both he and the four allegorical figures, two men and two women, commonly called Day and Night, Morning and Evening, are lost in pensive, eternal sorrow. So they brood for ever as if seeking in sleep and dumb forgetfulness some anodyne for the sense of their ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... fullback, and my questionable brunet beauty had been roughed up by the explosion years before as thoroughly as dock fighting on all the planets could have done. But sometimes I figured all that meant was that there was more of me to hurt, and that I'd had more experience screaming when the anodyne ran out. ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... cemeteries and the forest swamps—men whose battles have been fought out on lonely beaches far away from home and friends and often from another white man's help, sometimes with savages, but more often with a more deadly foe, with none of the anodyne to death and danger given by the companionship of hundreds of fellow soldiers in a fight with a foe you can see, but with a foe you can see only incarnate in the dreams of your delirium, which runs as a poison in burning veins and aching brain—the dread West Coast fever. And may England never again ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the drama well into its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful and life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished to do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called "the black drop." It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug in Nature's pharmacopoeia which ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... offered us the freedom of his settlement in a tobacco-box. Tobacco is hospitality in the compactest form. Civilization has determined that tobacco, especially in the shape of smoke, is essential as food, water, or air. The pipe is everywhere the pipe of peace. Peace, then, and anodyne-repose, after a day of travel, were offered us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... food, and happily snuffling over it, yet sparing time to be grateful, and showing taste and perception; the other is to go gardening boldly, in the spring of the year, without any misgiving about it, and hoping the utmost of everything. If there be a third anodyne, approaching these two in power, it is to smoke good tobacco well, and watch the setting of the moon; and if this should only be over the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... space remains for brooding or for anxious thought, on behalf of themselves or those at home. The men who remain behind, the fathers, brothers, friends, have the priceless boon of daily occupation, often vastly increased in amount. There is no such infallible anodyne of care as plenty of ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... every individual of her acquaintance, male and female, aged and youthful, orthodox and heretical, who sleeps regularly nine hours out of the twenty-four, has his or her own especial specimen recipe of a "perfectly harmless anodyne" to offer, with ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps |
