"Morbid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sure I tried to gratify all her wishes," responded he. "I have nothing to reproach myself with, and certainly you were always a devoted sister. This is a morbid state of feeling, and you must try to drive it off. You said a little while ago that you wanted to see how the plantation was looking, and what flowers had come out in the garden. Shall I take you there ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... audience and actor as a mercenary contract, for the hours during which the latter yields his quantum of strength and spirit to the former for so much coin, and there is an end. Were I, unhappily, possessed by such a morbid feeling, I could no longer act, the spell would be broken. It is true, I might constrain bone and sinew to administer to my necessities, and continue to barter these with the public for bread; but the inspiring spirit would be away, sunk past recall. ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... suggested anything but the Christian charity of reply; what should he say? Putting aside angry comment, he fell back upon his one constant resource, What would Christ have said to this sinful man? He stood so long silent by the bed, which creaked as Lamb sat up, that the man's agony of morbid thirst caught from his silence a little hope, and he said, ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... it was due to the fact that in 1843 he came back from Paris wearing a beard. We can see, however, that he was restless and discontented; he felt in himself the possession of powers which were not being used; there was in his nature also a morbid restlessness, a dissatisfaction with himself which he tried to still but only increased by his wild excesses. As his affairs became more settled he travelled; one year he went to London, another to Paris; of his ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... by the extension of the Roman Empire led to a great development of human sympathies, unknown in earlier times, and called forth unquiet yearnings, desire for amelioration, a sense of short-coming, and a morbid self-consciousness. It is accordingly under Roman sway that we first come across characters approximating to the modern type, like Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. It is then that we find the idea of social progress ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... gained the power of realising its own deeper thoughts, still less of explaining them to another; and this man, Bates, who, being by natural constitution peculiarly susceptible to the strain of the sight of illness and death which he had just undergone, was not in the best condition to resist the morbid influences of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the lack of spiritual activity and in the predominance of the material side of religion. The mediaeval Church suffered badly from excessive conservatism, which led towards sloth and a complacent inactivity. The morbid element showed itself during the fifteenth century mainly in lack of real earnestness, in the enjoyment of luxurious laziness, and in the steady neglect of the age to revise its Christianity. The Church moreover, with its complete segregation from other estates ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... Germans it may be said that, as a rule, they had, until recently, no special liking for the tempo rubato. Dr. Hanslick, the eminent Viennese critic, referred to it thirty years ago, as "a morbid unsteadiness of tempo." Mendelssohn, who always liked a "nice, swift tempo," repeatedly expressed his aversion to Chopin's rubato. Nevertheless, traces of it may be found in the rhythms of the classical school. Although ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... of cases of morbid sleep lasting for days and even for weeks. But this was the first case I had ever actually encountered and I was glad to ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... tend to cure certain rather self-centred countries of affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of the passersby who knew ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... keep irregular hours; thus she could pretend to herself that his absences were certainly because of office duty. Still, whenever he was gone overnight, she became unhappy—not the crying kind of unhappiness; to that she was little given—but the kind that lies awake and aches and with morbid vivid fancy paints the scenes suspicion suggests, and stares at them not in anger but in despair. She was always urging herself to content herself with what she was getting. She recalled and lived again the things she had forgotten while ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... ancient hermits and mediaeval monks. Is this an integral part of the mystic's "upward path"? We shall find reason to conclude that, while a certain degree of austere simplicity characterises the outward life of nearly all the mystics, and while an almost morbid desire to suffer is found in many of them, there is nothing in the system itself to encourage men to maltreat their bodies. Mysticism enjoins a dying life, not a living death. Moreover, asceticism, when regarded as a virtue or duty in itself, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the innocency of fancy much more than the effrontery of licentiousness. Besides, there is reason to think, that dissoluteness in the particular now alluded to, among a civilized and luxurious people, seeks concealment in its gratification, as congenial to its excessive and morbid sensibility. The opposite to this condition is to be found in some of the earlier stages of society, where the climate and fertility of the soil are naturally suitable,—as at Otaheite, when first known to Europeans. If, however, the terrifying pages of Juvenal may ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... your riches consist of things which you haven't got—now that sounds strange, does it not? And I don't mean the scarlet fever which you haven't, or a hair lip, or such like. No. You're rich in not being morbid, for instance,—in not dwelling on what's unpleasant, and ugly. Also because you don't harbor malice and ill-will. Because you don't fret, and sulk, and brood, all these goings-on being a sad waste ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... be seen from the numerous facts herein cited, that the so-called monstrous formations (excluding morbid growths the result of disease or injury) present no peculiarities absolutely foreign to the normal organisation of plants. The difference between the natural and monstrous development is one of degree and frequency of ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... sounds, and witnessed happiness, such as is not likely to be my lot again. PHILEMON is at rest in his grave, as well as MENANDER and SICORAX. The two latter, it is well known, were Tom Warton and Joseph Ritson. "The husband of poor Lavinia" was a most amiable gentleman, but timid to a morbid excess. Without strong powers of intellect, he was tenacious of every thing which he advanced, and yet the farthest possible from dogmatic rudeness. There are cankers that eat into the heart as well as the cheek; and because Mr. Shacklewell (the NICAS of my text) happened to discover ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... lowering of moral tone, which results largely from the closer identification of the drama with the Court party. There is a lack of seriousness of purpose, an increasing tendency to return, in more morbid spirit, to the sensationalism of the 1580's, and an anxious straining to attract and please the audiences by almost any means. These tendencies appear in the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, whose reputations are indissolubly linked together in one ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... It was another face that he saw,—older and matured with an intensity of abstraction that struck a chill to his heart. It was not HIS Sue that was standing there, but another Sue, wrought, as it seemed to his morbid extravagance, by some one ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... the gay laughter of a woman or the chatter of children could be heard, for the red Martians are a social, pleasure-loving people—in direct antithesis to the cold and morbid ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... doubted that Grenfell had ever found the quartz-reef at all, for it seemed quite possible that he had, as the track-grader suggested, merely fancied that he had done so, and the man's manner had borne out that supposition. Cut off from the whisky, he had now and then fallen into fits of morbid moodiness, during which he seemed very far from sure about the gold. This had naturally occasioned Weston a good deal of anxiety. He had thrown up his occupation and sunk his last dollar in the venture, and the finding of the quartz-reef would, he commenced ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... derangement of the stomach? Take this rule from us, that wherever the pure white of the eye is clouded, or is veined with red streaks, or wherever a continual weeping moistens the eyelashes, there the digestive organs are touched with some morbid affection, probably in it's early stages; as also that the inferior viscera, not the stomach, must be slightly disordered before toothache can be an obstinate affection. And as to le catch-cold, the-most dangerous shape in which it has ever been known, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... character. The white man has strong will and convictions and is set in his ways. He lives an indoor, monotonous life, restrains himself like a Puritan, and is inclined to melancholy. The prevalence of Populism throughout the South is nothing but the outcome of this morbid tendency. Farmers and merchants are entirely absorbed in their business, and the women, especially the married women, contrast with the women of France, Germany, and even England, in their indoor life and ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... mysterious author of what was seen, was Tituba, a female slave in the family, and she was harassed by her master into a confession of unlawful practices and spells. The girls then fixed on Sarah Good, a female known to be the victim of a morbid melancholy, and Osborne, a poor man that had for a considerable time been bed-rid, as persons whose spectres had perpetually haunted and tormented them: and Good was twelve months after hanged ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... opinions. The intrigue of the French government was successful, so far that the Queen of Spain was married to a Spanish Bourbon, brother to Don Enrique, a man whom the queen personally hated, a bigoted devotee and reactionary, whose fanaticism against liberty was morbid, and who was an avowed Carlist, openly denying the right of the Queen of Spain to the throne. Whatever could be supposed as likely to influence the fortunes of the young queen and of the Spanish nation, unfavourably, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... medical men seem to have regarded it as a form of mental malady to be brought under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be punished by law. But it is very fearful to contemplate that there may still exist persons in the world filled with a morbid craving for human blood, which is ready to impel them to commit the most horrible atrocities, should they escape the vigilante of their guards, or break the bars of the madhouse which ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Disgrace, ruin, stared her in the face. A sea of faces in a courtroom, morbid faces, hideous faces, leered at her. Gray walls rose before her, walls that shut out sunshine and hope, pitiless, cold things that seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. And to-night, in just a few minutes ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... but very contentious. Day after day was wasted on the most unimportant questions. A member, one of those afflicted with the morbid rage of debate, of an ardent mind, prompt imagination, and copious flow of words, who heard with impatience any logic which was not his own, sitting near me on some occasion of a trifling but wordy debate, asked me how I could sit in silence, hearing ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... faintly. Indeed, we have here 'a kind of picture of his own disposition,' as he tells us Piscator is the Walton whom honest Nat. and R. Roe and Sir Henry Wotton knew on fishing-days. The book is a set of confessions, without their commonly morbid turn. 'I write not for money, but for pleasure,' he says; methinks he drove no hard bargain with good Richard Marriott, nor was careful and troubled about royalties on his eighteenpenny book. He regards scoffers as 'an abomination to mankind,' for indeed even Dr. Johnson, who, a century ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... He was still young, as every man of forty-three will agree, but he was getting older. A few years ago a windfall of three hundred and forty-one pounds would not have been followed by morbid self-analysis; it would have been followed by unreasoning, instinctive elation, which elation would have endured at least ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... fire crackles and leaps with steady cheer, and the red rose on my window is warm and sanguine with bloom,—yet this whole air is full of tiny sparks of chill to my sensitive and morbid nature; it is at once electric and cold, the very atmosphere of spirits.—What a shadow passed that pane! Roger, was it you?—The storm bursts, in one fierce rush of sleet and roaring wind; the little spaniel crouched at my feet whimpers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... forgotten rest; but then it won't always come, sometimes sleep is impossible." Mary sighed again, for to-night her mood verged on the morbid. ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... heroine chanced to be obliged to lunch at a railway refreshment-room. My last chapter had described the poor lady lunching lonely in the bleak and gritty waiting room of Swilby Junction, lonely except for the company of her little boy. I showed how she fell into a strange and morbid vein of reflection suggested by the qualities of the local sherry. If she was to live, her lord and master, Sir W. Buckley, must die! And I described how a fiendish temptation was whispered to her by the glass of local sherry. "William's ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... the impulse under which he wrote was purely creative, he could give us works like Carmosine or Fantasio, in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to have been found again to touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality. But the truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine times heated and ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in motion an avalanche of racial feeling to play off against the just and moderate measures taken by other powers to checkmate Austrian aggression. In addition to the racial hostility, which had been lashed into bitterness during the spring of 1914, came Germany's morbid conception of national and personal honour. Lastly the fear of a Russian invasion was ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Miss Ludington replied, "You must not think of it that way. What has a spirit like her to do with earthly passions? Your love has saved Paul from a dream as vain as it was beautiful, and which, had it gone on, might have gained a morbid strength and blighted his life. I like to fancy, and I know it is Paul's belief, that the spirit of my Ida influenced you to come to us just as you came, that under her form Paul might fall in love with you. In no other ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... perplexed and troubled by her sister's unusual emotion. Elizabeth's strong, healthy nature was never morbid; her temperament was even and sunshiny, and a depressed mood was a rare thing ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... goes into his own pocket? What you fellows want to do is to go and scare the cook to death—or half way to it. If it's only for a couple of days, it'll help. Here, let's go back and shake him up. Besides, we might as well start something to make a fellow smile. Most morbid packet ever I was in. You'd think it was a crime to ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... the way of this union? Is there a morbid growth—a cause of irritation and disease tending to dissolution? Then, it must be removed. Is ambitious and reckless demagoguism to be apprehended? Then educate the people and diffuse science. But is there not still a worse ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and travels, only to sink prematurely ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... forty-eight hours, when the pain became intense, and fever set in. Dr. Kendrick was summoned; and, though the case was severe, it had no alarming symptoms at first. Jack went to and fro with his merry whistle; speculative he might be, but he was not introspective or morbid: wife ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... such as feebleness of constitution of the variety planted, rendering them an easy prey to the disease; by planting on low, moist land, or on land highly enriched by nitrogenous manures, causing a morbid growth which invites the disease; also by insects or their larvae puncturing or eating off the leaves or vines. But by far the most wide-spread and most common cause of the disease is sudden changes of atmospheric temperature, particularly when accompanied ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... easier," I admitted, admiring inwardly the directness and the subtlety of the girl's outlook. She was dealing with life as it was made for her by the political conditions of her country. She faced cruel realities, not morbid imaginings of her own making. I could not defend myself from a certain feeling of respect ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... was one of genuine misery. It seemed to his morbid fancy that whatever path he might take, he was sure of running upon one or more of those detestable girls who were visiting at Elmhurst. Even in Donald's harness-room he was not secure from interruption, for little Patsy was frequently perched upon the bench there, watching with serious ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... But so morbid a vice in a mind like his can be protected by no madness of the passions or vindictiveness of misanthropy from the healing influence of time; and if the leisure of his tedious incarcerations gave us four or five books in the worst of services, they gave us also those extensive studies of history ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... among his tragedies the best known is that entitled The Revenge. Very popular in his own day, Young has been steadily declining in public favor, partly on account of the superior claims of modern writers, and partly because of the morbid and gloomy views he has taken of human nature. His solemn admonitions throng upon the reader like phantoms, and cause him to desire more cheerful company. A sketch of the life of Young may be found in Dr. Johnson's Lives of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... French and German sentimentalities against which I have been warned. There is such a thing as a wholesome sense of repulsion, an honest manly recoil, a pure instinct of loathing, a thousand times to be preferred to this morbid mixture of good and evil, friend and foe, life and death, this defiance of decency and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... that he seriously regarded his physical peculiarity as a stamp of the Divine reprobation, that "he was possessed by an idee fixe that every blessing would be 'turned into a curse' to him" (letter of Lady Byron to H. C. Robinson, Diary, etc., 1869, in. 435, 436). No doubt he indulged himself in morbid fancies, played with the extravagances of a restless imagination, and wedded them to verse; but his intellect, "brooding like the day, a master o'er a slave," kept guard. He would never have pleaded on his own behalf that the tyranny of an idee fixe, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the joys of her life. He read to her often, and read exceedingly well. Books were the bond of union between them, the prop and stay of their married life. Poor as they were, they always managed to find money for new ones, which they enjoyed together in this way. Intellectuality balanced the morbid irritability of the husband's temperament, and literature made life tolerable to them both as nothing else could have done. As he read now, his countenance cleared, and his imaginary cares fell from him; ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... friend. He yearned for his old work. To think that the engineer corps needed him filled him with joy. But at the same time he knew what an effort it would take to apply himself to any task. He hated to attempt it. He doubted himself. He was morbid. All that day he wandered around at Larry's heels, half oblivious of what was going on. After dark he slipped away from his friend to be alone. And being alone in the dark quietness brought home to him the truth of a strange, strong growth, out of the depths of him, that was going to overcome ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... often ask us when a letter of condolence should be written? As soon as possible. Do not be afraid to intrude on any grief, It is generally a welcome distraction; to even the most morbid mourner, to read a letter; and those who are So stunned by grief as not to be able to write or to read will always have some willing soul near them who will ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... this is all a morbid mood; but still this inactive, lifeless monotony, without any change, wrings one's very soul. No struggle, no possibility of struggle! All is so still and dead, so stiff and shrunken, under the mantle of ice. Ah! ... the very soul freezes. What would I not give ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... for you to indulge in that morbid talk of yours to-day, Maggie, darling. Let us consider what's best to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... of this pipette, in which a constriction or short length of capillary tube is introduced just below the plugged mouth (Fig. 13, b), will also be found extremely useful in the collection and storage of morbid exudations. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... grow morbid in her monotonous work and seclusion; and irrepressible Belle, to whom shop life was becoming an old, weary story, was looking around for "pastures new." Her nature was much too forceful for anything like stagnation. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... overflowing; people even sat up the steps of the pulpit and stood against the walls; every place was taken save in the front pew that was being kept for penitents. Annie had told Ishmael of its import, and he stared at it in morbid fascination. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... long, and had awaked in a state of violent hypochondria which had ended in his quarrel with Hippolyte, and the solemn cursing of Ptitsin's establishment generally. It was also observed during those two or three days that he was in a state of morbid self-esteem, and was specially touchy on all points of honour. Colia insisted, in discussing the matter with his mother, that all this was but the outcome of abstinence from drink, or perhaps of pining after Lebedeff, with whom up to this time the general had been upon terms of the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to its intention. It is the philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether shun. And in this proud estrangement it promises release from all the inquisition of morbid fears, and an imperturbable calm above the need of earthly friends or comfort or happiness; it plants the feet upon that path of nature along which a man may go strongly, consoled in solitude by a god-like sense of self-reliance. This immutable ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... this means that Parry established a character for ready and happy expedients, accompanied by a sound judgment, which kept alive the active powers of the mind, and prevented it from falling into the worst of all conditions,—a state of morbid torpor. His plan was completely successful, and the crew, as well as the officers, were as happy as, under the circumstances, could ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... over by insensible gradation into the morbid automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick. In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... taken ill, seized with; indisposed, unwell, sick, squeamish, poorly, seedy; affected with illness, afflicted with illness; laid up, confined, bedridden, invalided, in hospital, on the sick list; out of health, out of sorts; under the weather [U.S.]; valetudinary^. unsound, unhealthy; sickly, morbid, morbose^, healthless^, infirm, chlorotic [Med.], unbraced^. drooping, flagging, lame, crippled, halting. morbid, tainted, vitiated, peccant, contaminated, poisoned, tabid^, mangy, leprous, cankered; rotten, rotten ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... than the first. She had been dreadfully spoiled: and it was very fortunate for her that there was no evil in her nature,—outside the egoism common to almost all children, though in children who are too rich and too much pampered it assumes various morbid shapes, due to the absence of difficulties and the want of any goal to ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... interposes an adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; "I thought I was right, but I was not,"—and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Degeneracy upon Crime. By degeneracy we mean, to use Morel's definition, "a morbid deviation from the normal type." That is, degeneracy is such an alteration of organic structures and functions that the organism becomes incapable of adapting itself to more or less complex conditions. Ordinary forms of degeneracy that are well recognized ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... light-hearted pair have evidently been through some anxious times. Rosie Potash can never have been a very easy woman to live with. She has not improved. And now that she has infected Ruth Perlmutter with her morbid jealousies the alert and as yet unbroken Mawruss begins to know something of what his long-suffering, not to say occasionally abject, partner, Abe, has had to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... impulse of gratitude and admiration that he had felt towards Mr. Rassendyll died away. He came to brood more and more on what had passed while he was a prisoner; he was possessed not only by a haunting dread of Rupert of Hentzau, at whose hands he had suffered so greatly, but also by a morbid, half mad jealousy of Mr. Rassendyll. Rudolf had played the hero while he lay helpless. Rudolf's were the exploits for which his own people cheered him in his own capital. Rudolf's were the laurels that crowned his impatient brow. He had enough nobility ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... strange delusion, founded upon a well-known medical theory, strongly contended for by some, and as strongly contested by others, that an hereditary madness existed in his family. This produced a settled gloom, which in time developed a morbid insanity, and finally terminated in raving madness. There is every reason to believe that the events he detailed, though distorted in the description by his diseased imagination, really happened. It is only matter of wonder to those who were acquainted ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... of morbid anatomy and pathology as useless in practice, and propounded his famous "similia similibus curantur"—that all diseases were to be cured by medicine which in health produced symptoms dynamically similar to the disease under treatment. If a certain medicine produced a headache when given to a healthy ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... things that distinguish such a woman as I have described to you from a common thief. There is the insane desire to steal—merely for stealing's sake—a morbid craving. Of course in a sense it is stealing. But it is persistent, incorrigible, irrational, ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... right," murmured the Governor, buttering a piece of toast reflectively. "How indecent to prop up a corpse that way and take a snapshot merely to satisfy the morbid curiosity of a silly public! As you seem to be entranced with the literary style of our Bailey Harbor correspondent, I shall take the liberty of helping you to ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... acetic acid, is frequently taken as a cure for obesity, but there is no warrant for this application. Its continued employment may, indeed, so injure the mucous membrane of the stomach as to interfere with digestion and so cause a morbid and dangerous reduction ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... one pre-eminent fault,—a fault which must be considered as deeply criminal by everyone who does not, as I do, believe it to have resulted from monomania. He had a morbid love of a bad reputation. There was hardly an offence of which he would not, with perfect indifference, accuse himself. An old schoolfellow who met him on the Continent told me that he would continually ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... revolting to herself as it appears to the moralist and philanthropist. Authors of vivid imagination love to portray the misery that is brought on an innocent and confiding girl by the perfidy and desertion of her seducer. The stage presents the picture with all its accessories of light, color and morbid emotion. The pulpit takes up the theme and howls its evangelical horrors, picturing those women as being a continuous prey to "the long-beaked, filthy vulture of unending despair." Women who in youth have lost their virtue, often contrive to retain their reputation, and ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... can't completely understand, I'm afraid, this morbid hankering of mine to keep my family about me, to have the two chicks that are left to me close under my wing. And never once, since Pee-Wee went, have I actually punished either of my children. It may be wrong, but I can't help it. I don't want memories of violence to be ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... collectors, may be suspected not to have been very difficult in his choice, and for him the curious was not less valued than the beautiful. The mind and temper of Cicero were of a robust and philosophical cast, not too subject to the tortures of those whose morbid imagination and delicacy of taste touch on infirmity. It is, however, amusing to observe this great man, actuated by all the fervour and joy of collecting. "I have paid your agent, as you ordered, for the Megaric statues; send ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... foremost, he must realize the "majestic unity" of his nature, and not attempt by morbid introspection ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... that, independent of the mental anguish it occasions - an anguish so acute and so tremendous, that all imagination of it must fall far short of the reality - it wears the mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough contact and busy action of the world. It is my fixed opinion that those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased. There are many instances on record, of men who have chosen, or have ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... place with a delicious abandonment. Flossie was one of fifty girls who sat, row after row, at long flat desks covered with green cloth. A soft monotonous light was reflected from the cream-coloured walls against which Flossie's head stood out with striking effect, like some modern study in black and morbid white. You would have picked her out among the fifty at once. Hers was the lightest of light labour, the delicate handling of thousands of cancelled notes—airy, insubstantial things, as it were the ghosts of bank-notes, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... tin box nineteen thousand pieces of paper containing drawings by the old painter, and through many weary and uncompensated months assorted and arranged them for public observation. People say John Ruskin in his old days is cross, misanthropic, and morbid. Whatever he may do that he ought not to do, and whatever he may say that he ought not to say between now and his death, he will leave this world insolvent as far as it has any capacity to pay this author's pen for its chivalric and Christian ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... introduce the smallest possible modicum of information into the heads of the victims, the surgical operations necessary to inculcate into them the simplest facts, would, if narrated, form a curious chapter in morbid psychology. I suggest this merely as a pregnant hint for the future historian of Camford; personally I am only acquainted by report ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... extended to Johnson would have been as irksome as the dinners given to Robert Hall by his plebeian parishioners; and had not Mrs. Unwin been as refined as she was sympathetic, she would never have soothed the morbid melancholy of Cowper, while the attentions of a fussy, fidgety, talkative, busy wife of a London shopkeeper would have driven him absolutely mad, even if her disposition had been as kind as that of Dorcas, and her piety as warm as that of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... drank deep from the well of modern French literature, and chattered interminably of RICHEPIN, GUY DE MAUPASSANT, PAUL BOURGET, and the rest. They themselves were their own favourite native writers; but their morbid sonnets, their love-lorn elegies, their versified mixtures of passion and a quasi-religious mysticism, were too sacred for print, though they were sometimes adapted to thin and fluttering airs, and sung to sympathisers in private. Most of these gentlemen were "ploughed" in their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... is recognized universally as one of the great composers. But during his lifetime he was much criticised, called morbid and effeminate and a composer of small ideas because he wrote almost entirely in the smaller forms. As if size had anything to do with the beauty of a work. In every art the best work of each great man should be ranked with the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... a sort of smouldering rebellion known as passive resistance. It is difficult to say when it had its origin; but probably it could be traced back to the Reformation. For it is merely a veiled manifestation of that anarchic individualism and that morbid conscientiousness—the extremes of qualities admirable in moderation—which first became formidable in England on the break-up of mediaeval Christendom. In recent times it has displayed itself in many ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... There is nothing morbid or narrow in Burns's letters. They are frank and healthy. You can spend a day over them, and feel at the end of it as if you had been wandering at large through the freedom of nature. They seem to have been written in the open ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... departed members of the Romani family were placed one above the other like so many bales of goods arranged evenly on the shelves of an ordinary warehouse. I held the candle high above my head and looked about me with a morbid interest. I soon perceived what I ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... is this solemn covenant, the covenant so faithfully kept by man, which has been violated by the militant suffragist in the interest of her morbid, stupid, ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... you are talking a lot of rot," Gurdon said emphatically. "You love the girl, you believe implicitly in her, and you are desperately anxious to get her out of the hands of that blackguard, Fenwick. From some morbid idea of self sacrifice, your wife continues to lead this life of misery rather than betray what she would probably call a trust. It seems to me that you would be more than ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... it barbed the arrow of that cruel and remorseless enemy on which his thoughts so ran, and put into its grasp a double-handed sword. Because he knew full well, in his own breast, as he stood there, tinging the scene of transition before him with the morbid colours of his own mind, and making it a ruin and a picture of decay, instead of hopeful change, and promise of better things, that life had quite as much to do with his complainings as death. One child was gone, and one child left. Why was the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... another possibility quite as probable, and very often recurring, and that is that the disease, like some other morbid states of the human frame, shall leave a tendency to recurrence. A pin-point hole in a dyke will be widened into a gap as big as a church-door in ten minutes, by the pressure of the flood behind it. And so every act which we do in contradiction of our standing as professing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... often assumes the color of the religious."[73-1] "The unaccomplished sexual designs of nature," observes a later author speaking of the effects of the single life, "lead to brooding over supposed miseries which suggest devotion and religious exercise as the nepenthe to soothe the morbid longings."[73-2] ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... restore the system to its natural tone. To prevent an attack of fever, medicine should be taken on the very first symptoms of a diseased stomach; it should not be tampered with, but taken in sufficient doses to relieve the system from morbid effects, and then followed up by tonics, to restore its vigor ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... publications. If you find one day insufficient for this, you can keep by you a newspaper, to fill up little broken intervals of time, which cannot well be employed in regular study. Do not, however, read everything you find in the newspapers, nor suffer yourself to acquire such a morbid appetite for the exciting subjects discussed in them, as to tempt you to break in upon your systematic course of reading. Newspapers and periodicals contain much trash; and you may fritter away all your leisure upon them, to ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... but a fanatic on the subject of art, ceaselessly searching for new tonal combinations, he preferred a hermit's existence. In Aix he was considered eccentric though harmless. His pride was doubled by a morbid shyness. Strangers he avoided. So sensitive was he that once when he stumbled over a rock Bernard attempted to help him by seizing his arm. A terrible scene ensued. The painter, livid with fright, cursed the unhappy young Parisian and finally ran away. An explanation ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... inflammation of the bowels, asthma, epilepsy, and soreness of the bill. No animal deviates so far from the simplicity of nature in its habits, as man; none is placed under the influence of so many circumstances, calculated to act unfavourably upon the frame. His morbid affections are hence abundant and diversified, as may be seen by referring to the different nosological arrangements; these long catalogues of diseases affording strong evidence that man has not carefully followed that way of life which has been marked out for him by nature. The crowded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... found for him at the other tables, and, as was the custom of the widow under such circumstances, he was intruded upon the society of this morbid duet, after ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... moments of contending strife Dale was immeasurably removed from that dark gulf of self which had made his winter a nightmare. And when he stood erect again it seemed that the old earth had a stirring, electrifying impetus for his feet. Something black, bitter, melancholy, and morbid, always unreal to him, had passed away forever. The great moment had been forced upon him. He did not believe Roy Beeman's preposterous hint regarding Helen; but he had gone back or soared onward, as if by magic, ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... to procure food for, and nurse, his friend. At the same time, he knew that the rainy season, if indeed it had not already begun, would soon set in, and perhaps render the country impassable. There was no use, however, in giving way to morbid fears, so Ned faced his difficulties manfully, and, remembering the promise which he had given his old uncle at parting from him in England, he began by offering up a short but earnest prayer at the ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... and man. It also encouraged vivisection—a practice common with Descartes himself.[43] The recluses of Port Royal seized it eagerly, discussed automatism, dissected living animals in order to show to a morbid curiosity the circulation of the blood, were careless of the cries of tortured dogs, and finally embalmed the doctrine in a syllogism of their logic,—No matter thinks; every soul of beast is matter: therefore no soul of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the wind that shakes it with music. Here, however, there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left dead, unmissed by his leader or companions, in the haste of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... it means till he experiences it. I worked all day without food. It seemed as if I must strike it then. Besides, I took a sort of morbid pleasure in abusing myself—as if I were to blame. I had been living on canned beans, and flapjacks, and coffee without milk or sugar, and I was weak and sick—but it all had to end. About four o'clock I dropped my pick and staggered out ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... fluxions was under the name of Wallis; the Optics were delayed until the death of Hooke; the first appearance against Leibnitz was anonymous; the second originated in a hint from the King. This morbid fear, which is often represented as modesty, would have made him, had he acted a part with regard to his niece which he could not avow, conduct it with the utmost reserve. The philosopher who would have let the theory of gravitation die in silence rather than encounter the opposition which a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... late to read a romance of Berrian, handed me by Dr. Leete, the plot of which turned on a situation suggested by his last words, concerning the modern view of parental responsibility. A similar situation would almost certainly have been treated by a nineteenth century romancist so as to excite the morbid sympathy of the reader with the sentimental selfishness of the lovers, and his resentment toward the unwritten law which they outraged. I need not describe—for who has not read "Ruth Elton?"—how different is the course which Berrian takes, and with what tremendous effect he enforces ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... sure as he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident from one side to the other, with skies stippled into morbid blue, and warm lights set against them in violent contrast; one of Bamborough Castle, a large water-color, may be named as an example. But the truly noble works are those in which, without effort, he has expressed his thoughts ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... one takes almost an objective interest in the operation of tooth-filling; and in like manner after two or three wagon-loads of your household stuff have passed down the public street, and all your morbid associations with them have been desecrated, you begin almost to like it. Yet I cannot regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy emotion, and I do not counsel my reader to mount himself upon the wagon and ride to and fro even once, for afterwards the remembrance ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... like this had, in Ashe's case, melted into final delight and intoxication which more than effaced the memory of what had gone before. Now for several months he had dreaded the issue of the crisis, no less than the crisis itself. It left him unnerved as though some morbid sirocco had passed ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her, noting with a morbid minuteness the exquisite finish of her dress, that finish which seemed so much a part of herself that it had never before struck him as a merely purchasable accessory. He knew so little what a woman's dresses cost! For a moment ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... regret, a paragraph going the round of the papers headed, "THE LADY THIEF AT LINCOLN," as if a lady could commit larceny! "Her disorder," says the newspapers, "is ascribed to a morbid or irrrepressible propensity, or monomania;" in proof of which we beg to subjoin the following prescriptions of her family physician, which have been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... heart of a man in strong health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life." It is an erring habit of life if we are not first of all cheerful. We are thrown into a morbid habit through circumstances utterly beyond our control, yet this fact does not change our duty toward God and toward man,—our duty to be cheerful. We are human; but it is our high privilege ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... second since the crime—Sir Marmaduke still lingered in Thanet. Prudence whispered urgent counsels that he should go, and yet he stayed, watching the progress of events with that same morbid and tenacious curiosity. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... silence returned, and when I looked over my shoulder, Ransome—the intelligent, serene Ransome—had vanished from my side. The intense loneliness of the sea acted like poison on my brain. When I turned my eyes to the ship, I had a morbid vision of her as a floating grave. Who hasn't heard of ships found floating, haphazard, with their crews all dead? I looked at the seaman at the helm, I had an impulse to speak to him, and, indeed, his face took on an expectant cast ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... same Moreau? He had published some very astonishing facts in connection with the transfusion of blood, and in addition was known to be doing valuable work on morbid growths. Then suddenly his career was closed. He had to leave England. A journalist obtained access to his laboratory in the capacity of laboratory-assistant, with the deliberate intention of making sensational exposures; and by the help of a shocking ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... Amy, shivering, "but too cold and still. I love life, and this reminds one of death, the thoughts of which, with all that it involves, have oppressed me so long that I must throw off the burden. I was growing morbid, and giving way to a deeper and deeper depression, and now your sunny home life seems just the antidote ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... had a full music, instinct with tenderness, and gradually Ruth's troubled spirit was eased. "I don't know what's the matter with me," she said, meditatively, "for I'm not morbid, and I don't have the blues very often, but almost ever since I've been at Aunt Jane's, I've been restless and disturbed. I know there's no reason for it, but I ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... a morbid dread of being thought a gushing girl, this guileless woman too well concealed from the world under a manner of carelessness the warm depths of her strong emotions. But now there was no reserve. In her distraction, instead of advancing ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy |
