"Sanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... interminable discussion as to whether certain single-celled organisms were animals or vegetables, until Haeckel introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista, which ended the disputes. In law courts no tertium quid is recognized between insanity and sanity. If sane, a man is punished: if insane, acquitted; and it is seldom hard to find two experts who will take opposite views of his case. All the while, nature is more subtle than our doctors. Just as a room is neither dark ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... truth is higher and better than that. For to think that his thought is superior to the purpose of God, thus making himself the real God, is too much for the extremist human egotist within the limits of sanity. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... ridiculous eccentricity, while genuineness we conceive to be always wholesome, balanced, and touched with dignity. It is a quality that goes with good sense and self-respect. It is a sort of robust moral sanity, mixed of elements both moral and intellectual. It is found in natures too strong to be mere trimmers and conformers, too well poised and thoughtful to fling off into intemperate protest and revolt. Laughter is genuine which has in it neither the shrill, hysterical note ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... previous book on Shakespearean Tragedy we declared our opinion that it was probably the best Shakespearean criticism since Coleridge. The new volume shows the same complete sanity of judgment, the same subtlety, the same persuasive ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... gown, trimmed with cream lace, cut low enough to show the "beautiful white shoulders"—ye gods and little fishes! Where were the authorities, and why was not "Miss Sallie" taken to the detention hospital, pending an inquiry into her sanity? ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... Harrington, you have given proofs that your matured reason and your humanity have been able to control and master your imagination and your antipathies. To this power over yourself you owe many of your virtues, and all the strength of character, and, I will say it, the sanity of mind, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... not angry," answered Corona, quietly. "I am merely giving you an immediate opportunity of proving your assertion and your sanity." ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... antagonism in us. But when it is done, and done thoroughly, consistently, and intelligently, the other man's resistance reacts back upon himself, and he finds himself out as he never could in any other way. Having found himself out, unless his mulishness is almost past sanity, he begins to reject his habit of ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... it to them for a moment. The model millionaire is more of a crank than the Socialists; just as Nero was more of a crank than the Christians. And avarice has gone mad in the governing class to-day, just as lust went mad in the circle of Nero. By all the working and orthodox standards of sanity, capitalism is insane. I should not say to Mr. Rockefeller "I am a rebel." I should say "I am a respectable man: and you ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... keep your eye on LULU Who Greater Britain sways From distant Woolloomooloo To Nova Scotia's bays; Whose sumptuous urbanity, Combined with well-groomed sanity And freedom from profanity, Stirs DAVID'S ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... this, as already explained; while we feel bound to maintain that his higher mood is his true mood, and that the Pascal of the ‘Pensées’—the veritable Pascal—is to be judged, not by his weakness but by his strength; by his moments of clear mental sanity and insight, and not by his moments of despair or of derisive mockery of all ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... left it, and the character of the society in which it had to be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity. Mahmud, as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a framework. His operations had been almost entirely forcible—of a kind understood by and congenial to the Osmanli character—and partly ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... march of the universe. "There will never be Justice for the People," he thought bitterly. "I was a dreamer. Heine was right. A mad world, my masters." But sometimes he had a gleam of suspicion that it was he that had lacked sanity. His Will had become mere wilfulness. In his love as in his crusade he had shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed. "I die by my own hand," he said. If he had only married Rosalie Zander, who still lived on, loving him! These ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the senior surgeon, rising abruptly with the others, "since you will neither listen to me, to reason, nor to my book, though I will not answer for the sanity of your mind, I will for that of your body. My duty, sir, my duty, will not permit me to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... assault upon the windmills as a chapter of mad buffoonery. An ideal knight, without fear or reproach, subject to disaster and ridicule, august from his faith in God and the manly consecration of his life,—is he not rather the type of a Christian sanity? No doubt, such a character seems altogether mad to you, my friend, who pass the window as I write these words. You have huckstered away opportunity just upon the edge of indictable knavery; your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... periods of sanity, or of only partial aberration, Otis's wit and humor, rendered more quaint and striking by the peculiarities of his mental condition, made him the delight of a small circle of friends. The following anecdote, admirably told by President Adams, ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... mental condition will excuse you," and then asked one of the men to assist me out of the office. And I needed his assistance. I was so weak I could hardly stand. I wondered afterwards the judge did not commit me for examination as to my sanity. ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... shielding and trying to spare her, and she felt inexpressibly degraded by the terms of his forbearance. She could not accept, and she had not the strength to refuse it; and Putney said: "I've not seen anything to make me doubt his sanity; but I must say the present racket shakes my faith in his common-sense, and I rather held by that, you know. But I suppose no man, except the kind of a man that a woman would be if she were a man—excuse me, Annie—is ever absolutely right. I suppose the truth is a constitutional thing, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... him to relieve the situation and establish his own sanity to combat one illusion with another. Cecily had already been deceived—another lie wouldn't hurt her. But, strangely enough, he was satisfied that Cecily's visitant was real, although he still had ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Chausse d'Hypocras, where the prisoners, ankle deep in water, were neither able to stand upright nor to sit; the Fosse, down which one was lowered by a rope, and the hideous Fin d'Aise in which no man retained his sanity. So it had come to this! And in sullen despair I stood amongst the guards, awaiting Martines' pleasure. At first it seemed as if I were the only prisoner; but any doubts on that point were soon set at rest, for another unfortunate was dragged up and placed beside me. I felt ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... stopped suddenly, like a man whose tongue has run away and made a fool of its governor. "And now please forget what I've said. It doesn't affect the case. I went down to see whether there was reason to fear for Major Lyveden's sanity. I've found that there is. And I advise that he be taken ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... sufficient at any rate to colour Lombroso's theory of the inherent madness of men of genius. One of the testimonies that we have as to Borrow's later life at Oulton is to the effect that he got bewildered at times and fancied himself Wodin; but the substratum of sanity is strongly exhibited in the remedy which he himself applied. "What do you think I do when I get bewildered after this fashion? I go out to the sty and listen to the grunting of the pigs until I ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... thought very much about it, however. He accepted as a matter of course his sanity, very much as he accepted most other things that came in his way. His loosely curled fists within his pockets, his head erect and his lips smiling, he went striding along through life, taking the best of it as his natural right, and letting the rest of it alone. From kindergarten ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... down, leaned his elbow on the desk and took his face between his hands. The man behind him undoubtedly talked madness; but after five years of dreary sanity madness had a fascination. Against all reason it stirred and roused him. For one instant his pride and his anger faltered before it, then common-sense flowed back again and ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... out of it all right. His behaviour was the crowning proof, if Milly wanted more proof, of his sanity. He went up to London and made all the arrangements for his sister. When he returned he forestalled Milly's specious consolations with the truth. It was better, he told her, that the dear little girl should have died, for there was distinct ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... straight at me with a stout silver-mounted bamboo which he held in his hand, uttering a sonorous "Umph!" as he did so; to which somewhat unusual mode of salutation may be attributed Coleman's doubts as to his sanity. ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... he was preoccupied with a new thought that was taking shape in his mind—what a scientist would have called an hypothesis; a detective, a theory. It might throw an added light, albeit a lurid one, upon such doubt of her sanity as her own assertion ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... spirit, family, credible, visible, charity, unity, sanity, humanity, ruin, promise, divide, divisible, dissolve, languid, negative, similar, abominable, imitate, inimitable, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... not tell her that she made her head ache, but, on the contrary, she hugged her, and laughed, and cried, till her sanity was a thing to be doubted of; and when released from her, Eva flew from one to another, shaking hands and kissing, in a way that Miss Ophelia afterwards declared fairly ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... judge of poetry as poetry and to leave it its ancient privilege of passionate overstatement. Of this privilege Schiller availed himself in the fullest measure, going quite beyond the bounds of sanity in his idealization of the Greeks, Well might the indignant Stolberg ask him if he really believed that the 'eternal bonds of the heart were gentler and holier when Hymen tied them'. Whatever else ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Newbegin died and was buried in the little cemetery on the landward side of the island. Newbegin was a man of about forty-eight, without family or near connections, and eccentric to a degree that sometimes inspired questions as to his sanity. What money he had earned by many seasons' fishing upon the banks was invested in quarters of two small mackerel schooners, the remainder of which belonged to John Hodgeson, the richest man on Pocock, who was estimated by good authorities ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... it, feeling between them, as it were, the bared sword of his ascetic will—no less than her own terrors and hesitations. But she set herself to lift him from the depths; and as they walked about the mountains and the forests, in a glory of summer sunshine, the sanity and sweetness of her nature made for him a spiritual atmosphere akin in its healing power to the influence of pine and glacier upon ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the pay is so much better and they are so much better housed and fed—and everything. Besides," she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband, though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by the illogicality of the civilization, "they're not half so good as the foreign servants. They've been brought ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... out to be more a curse than a blessing. Of the seven known telepaths in the world, only Her Majesty retained anything like the degree of sanity necessary for communication. The psych men who were working with the other six had been trying to establish some kind of rapport, but their efforts so far had been as fruitless ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... bring its dim light full upon his companion's face, gazing at him hard as if in doubt of his sanity. For the words were spoken as calmly and coolly as if he had been proposing some ordinary jump into clear water ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... Spanish quartette, and Brinton was publicly credited with the performance. Then had come Mrs Quantock and her Princess, and, lo, it would be kind to remember the name of an establishment for rest-cures, in the hope of saving poor Daisy's sanity. Again Colonel Boucher and Mrs Weston were intending to get married, and consulted a Palmist's Manual, so they too helped to develop as with acid the print that had lain so long ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... inwardly, during all the time that he had been so calmly addressing his captive, was tortured with cruel doubts as to the Cap'n's sanity. But he believed in discharging his duty first. And he remembered that insane people were more easily prevailed upon by those who appeared to make ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... sell." The man whipped out a signed, blank check, and quickly filled in astronomical figures. Denver looked at it, whistled, then doubted first his sanity, then ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... have flown to her rescue,—they, who for her would have chanced all accidents, ay, even life itself, were sleeping, and knew not of the loved one's danger. She was alone, and far enough from the house, to be driven to that tottering verge where sanity ends, and the dream of madness, with all its ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... summons, how will Texas respond? Facing the Mexican boundary for eight hundred miles, Texas is to-day peculiarly the guardian of our nation. The situation calls not for agitation and jingoism, bit for rare patience, sanity, and self-control. Through troubled waters our chosen captain is guiding the Ship of State. It is no time for mutiny, but rather a ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane. It has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secure. Take any sentence of it,—"Any questions that I can honorably answer, I will; not otherwise. So far as I am ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... long hands from about her knees, stretched her limbs and body with feline grace, then slowly raised her head and extended her arms with open, curving fingers, as if to gather to her all the glory and overwhelming sanity of the morning. This was a gesture not to be mistaken: it was a gesture of freedom, the movement of a soul's resolution to be, to possess, to ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... Cloister be here recognised; and in some measure the actual need, the potential place be recognised also. Here is the need and use, beyond the fundamental claims of the material life of the Town, and the everyday sanity of the Schools, with all their observations and information, their commonsense and experience, their customs and conventions, even their morals and their law, for a deeper ethical insight than any rule or ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... loss of a first love, one Annie Rutledge—a name he said he always loved—his friends were alarmed for his health and sanity. They took away the knife every man carried in the West, and discovered it was the obligatory one presented to the ugliest man and not to be disposed of otherwise than to one ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... with Gumbo. Night came, and very much needed quiet and sleep came with it. Then we passed an indolent day, and I presumed that adventures were over, and that on the subject of "the Secret of the Pyramid" Moore had recovered his sanity. I was just taking my bedroom candle when Moore said, "Don't go to bed yet. You will come with me, won't you, and see out the adventure ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... mental and bodily, for more than seven years in that abode of misery and despair, his powers remained unbroken, his genius unimpaired; and even there he composed some pieces, both in prose and verse, which were triumphantly appealed to by his friends in proof of his sanity. To this period we may probably refer the "Veglie," or "Watches" of Tasso, the manuscript of which was discovered in the Ambrosian Library, at Milan, toward the end of the last century. They are written in prose, and express ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the gleam in Collins' eyes and his disjointed utterances as a sign of hopeless madness,—but in reality it was returning sanity. A new warmth stole over him, and the certainty that he ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... and the intolerable heat, and concealing ourselves by day as best we could. Sometimes, having exhausted our supply of wild meat and emptied our casks, we were days without food or drink; then a water-hole or a shallow pool in the bottom of an arroyo so restored our strength and sanity that we were able to shoot some of the wild animals that sought it also. Sometimes it was a bear, sometimes an antelope, a coyote, a cougar— that was as God pleased; all ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... you doubt my sanity, madam. My nerves are a little out of line; I have just left the hospital and must be quiet. Do you see? If you must have references, I work for the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to see that croquet or poker were in any way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loftiness of thought hitherto satisfied by the hazards of war, drove him on an exploring expedition through Upper Egypt; his sanity or impulse directed his enthusiasm to a project of great importance, he turned his attention to that unexplored Central Africa which occupies the learned of today. The scientific expedition was long and unfortunate. He had made ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... inquired Harley, and the tone of his voice suggested that he was beginning to entertain doubts of the Major's sanity ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. A madness which is fit for dramatic treatment is not sufficiently removed from sanity. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... sound, his insight was very penetrating, and his knowledge of matters of criminal procedure and of prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts which I afterward learned for myself were never out of accord with information he had given me; and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were refreshing and remarkable. His courage was undemonstrative but indomitable; he never complained of his own condition and experiences, but was instant in his sympathy with the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... of us how torturing they sometimes are!—concerning that future life. The more we keep ourselves within the broad limits of these promises that are intertwined and folded up together in that one saying, 'They shall walk with Me in white,' the better, I think, for the sanity and the spirituality of our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... an increasing tendency on the part of modern critics to cast a doubt on Byron's sanity. It is true that he inherited bad blood on both sides of his family, that he was of a neurotic temperament, that at one time he maddened himself with drink, but there is no evidence that his brain was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... one in which Holmes had taken an interest on account of the peculiar ferocity of the crime and the wanton brutality which had marked all the actions of the assassin. The commutation of his death sentence had been due to some doubts as to his complete sanity, so atrocious was his conduct. Our wagonette had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... the severest regime possible to life. He had even visited Brunn, and been within hearing of his victims, and sent his physician to ascertain their condition; but refused any mitigation of sufferings, moral and physical, which involved sanity, health, and almost vitality. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... birthday, only his parents' adamant attitude had saved him from becoming a side show. Once the initial household uproar had died down and some degree of general sanity been restored, Helen and Jerry had another bad fright. They had grudgingly allowed Clancey, the family sawbones, to call in a psychologist friend, Philip Warwick. The combined efforts of these two to find an explanation for Timmy resulted ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... overloaded with blood, or if it be subjected to local pressure, the part of the brain so acted upon ceases to be capable of exercising its functions. The regularity of the action of the brain and the sanity and completeness of the thought which is one of the functions of its activity depend upon the healthy regularity of the quantity of blood passing through all its parts, and upon the healthy quality of the blood so circulating. If we press upon the carotid ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... an immediate reply. That reply was neither written nor sent. Mr. Bangs could not think of a reply which would embrace the two elements, safety and sanity. It was impossible to tell the truth and dangerous to attempt to tell anything else. So he did not answer the ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... sanity produced in Rebecca's mind a teasing compound of wrath and uneasiness. These people seemed to find something fundamentally irregular in her behavior. What could it be? The situation was intolerable, and she set to work in her straightforward, energetic way ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... which he is now acknowledged to be the subtlest poetic interpreter in our language, though, profound as its attraction always was for him, never was poet with a more exquisite balance of intellectual sanity. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... instant conclusion of the bystanders as to her guilt. There have been no greater fluctuations in historical opinion than those that have arisen around the facts of Mary's life. Historians of the eighteenth century considered it as a test of a man's moral sanity whether he persisted in believing in Mary's innocence or not. Among her contemporaries the progress of time which softened impression, and the many pathetic situations of her later history, the terrible misfortunes under ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... he had grown into the habit of talking to himself—or with himself—to keep up his courage and sanity. "Keith, old boy, we've got to fight it out," he would say. Now it was, "Conniston, old chap, we'll win or die." After the third day, he never spoke of John Keith except as a man who was dead. And over the dead John ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... sanity in him yet to prevent his doing anything rash: an uncontrolled act might cause astonishment, suspicion mayhap, in the minds of those who witnessed it. He made a violent effort to steady himself even now, above all to steady his voice and to veil that excited glitter which he knew must ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... all lands. With the overstrong bitterness of youth he had meant to die sword in hand, fighting for Ireland. The few burning words of Owen Ruadh had stripped all this false heroism from him, however, and had sent a flame of sanity into ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... subconsciously, with my old problem. The change in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater sanity." ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... can do his best, his highest thing, who is not perfectly normal, and happiness is a fundamental necessity of our being. It is an indication of health, of sanity, of harmony. The opposite is a symptom of disease, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Wood, and Rohe had not personally met with such cases; Burr believed that there was strong evidence "that a sexual dream may be so vivid as to make the subject believe she has had sexual congress"; Kiernan knew of such cases; C.H. Hughes, in persons with every appearance of sanity, had known the erotic dreams of the night to become the erotic delusions of the day, the patient protesting violently the truth of her story; while Hersman reports the case[242] of a young lady in an asylum who had nightly delusions that a medical officer visited her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is as detestable as any known in the annals of the American colonies. Many of his acts, and all the closing scenes of his career, seem hardly compatible with moral sanity; in our day, when science is so prone to find the explanation of crime in insanity, he would undoubtedly have been adjudged to the nearest asylum. In his early years, he had been stupid and illiberal, but nothing worse; ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... quite easy to maintain that the health, happiness, and sanity of the whole community are more precious even than genius. It is so easy, indeed, that if the question of eugenics were submitted to the Referendum on this sole ground there can be little doubt what the result would be. There are not many people, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the company of the weeping Mamma Achun, was driven down to the Pacific Mail steamer, leaving behind him a panic in the bungalow. Captain Higginson clamoured wildly for an injunction. The daughters shed copious tears. One of their husbands, an ex-Federal judge, questioned Ah Chun's sanity, and hastened to the proper authorities to inquire into it. He returned with the information that Ah Chun had appeared before the commission the day before, demanded an examination, and passed with flying colours. There was nothing to be done, so they went down and ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... or lawyer, had more of the spirit of the debonair swashbucklers of romance than any other man Archie had known. He might be a great liar, and Archie suspected that he was; and doubts of the man's sanity troubled him not a little; but it sufficed for the moment that his comrade was steering him rapidly away from Bailey Harbor, and so far had managed the business ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... understanding, and all the rest of it. I want to know whether, taking into account all that you are, and your inevitable connection with God, and your certain death and certain life in a state of retribution—I want to know whether we should call your conduct sanity or insanity? Which? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the mighty power that lies in propinquity—the propinquity of an inspiring ideal. Miss Farnham was never enthusiastic; that, perhaps, would be asking too much of an ideal; but what she lacked in warmth was made up in cool sanity, backed by a moral sense that seemed never to waver. Unerringly she placed her finger upon the human weaknesses in his book-people, and unfalteringly she ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... suppose you gentlemen see, now, who was really crazy around here?" Colonel Hampton addressed them bitingly. "That woman has been dangerously close to the borderline of sanity for as long as she's been here. I think my precious nephew trumped up this ridiculous insanity complaint against me as much to discredit any testimony I might ever give about his wife's mental condition as because he wanted to get control of my estate. I also suppose that ...
— Dearest • Henry Beam Piper
... these barbarian auxiliaries is of no great importance to Aristotle, but it is worth arguing that the barbarous German imagination at an earlier stage, relatively, than the Homeric, is found already possessed of something like the sanity of judgment, the discrimination of essentials from accidents, which is commonly indicated by the term classical. Compared with Homer these German songs are prentice work; but they are begun in the right way, and therefore ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... varieties of political creed now offered us, and there can be little doubt both of the difficulty and the necessity of finding guiding principles for the practical life and to preserve sanity of mind. The monarchical idea still lingers; there is a variety of conceptions of democracy, differing widely; there are socialists—state socialists, Marxian socialists of the old line, Bolshevists, regionalists, syndicalists, and others—and anarchists of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... he was secure in his room, the blind drawn down and the gas flaring, he made vigorous efforts toward sanity. It was not of his free will that he allowed terror to overmaster him, and he desired nothing better than a placid and harmless life, full of work and clear thinking. He knew that he deluded himself with imagination, that he had been walking through London suburbs and not through Pandemonium, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... could not bear to answer him, even to raise my eyes to meet his. I do not know how long the intense silence would have continued. Just as I felt that I could not bear the situation any longer, Lillian Underwood came into the room, bringing with her, as she always does, an atmosphere of cheerful sanity. ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... that old philosophical pinax of the life of man: whether thou art yet in the road of uncertainties; whether thou hast yet entered the narrow gate, got up the hill and asperous way which leadeth unto the house of sanity; or taken that purifying potion from the hand of sincere erudition, which may send thee clear and pure away unto a virtuous and happy life.' And having taken his reader up through a virtuous life, Sir Thomas thus parts with him at its close: 'Lastly, if length ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... "Uh-huh." Woodley was twenty-six years old and due to retire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He had gotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best of them. He had kept his sanity by not thinking very much about his job, meeting the strains of the task whenever he had to meet them and thinking nothing more about his duties ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... laws of life. If it is fundamentally false, even with the longest and completest preparation, it rings hollow. We cannot completely enter into it. Thus we see that the one central requirement, the dramatic germ, leads to the most far-reaching demands for logic, sanity, and morality in the ideas of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... probably saved Dane's sanity while he learned to face the facts. All men are mortal; Harding is not mortal; therefore, Harding is not a man! Nor was Harding alone—Dane found enough evidence ...
— Dead Ringer • Lester del Rey
... a ghost summoned by memory, or the airy creation of fancy. One evening an incident occurred which will test your credulity, or make you doubt my sanity. I sat alone, and reading,—nothing more exciting, however, than a daily newspaper. My health was perfect, my mind unperturbed. Suddenly my eye was arrested by a cloud passing slowly back and forth several times before me, not projected upon the wall, but floating in the atmosphere. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is now gone." He also said: "Let the friends of the negro, and I am one, be satisfied to treat him as he is treated in Pennsylvania; as he is treated in Ohio; as he is treated every-where where people have maintained their sanity ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... is me. I have come to see that there is no possibility of peace or sanity for the world till that race of mad militarists is destroyed. I am still a pacifist, but, thank God, no longer a fool. Is there no other news ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... was about to make a final test. It would be not only a test of my new plate, but of my own sanity, which I had at various times doubted. I felt, that, unless my idea should be proved true, I could no longer trust my reason, which had at every step beckoned me on to the next. I had studied medicine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... reprimand which his absurd efforts in the arts aforesaid would have brought upon him. And now that Doggie was gone, they deplored his loss. But so many had gone. So many had been deplored. Human nature is only capable of a certain amount of deploring while retaining its sanity. The men let the pale French girl, who was Doggie Trevor's friend, pass by in respectful silence—and that, for them, was their final tribute ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... that of a demon. Of this singular being many anecdotes were prevalent among the seafaring men of Nantucket. These anecdotes went to prove his prodigious strength when under excitement, and some of them had given rise to a doubt of his sanity." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... "his family feel their blood as a degradation." If there be some who so feel, they are indeed very much to be pitied; but their sentiments are not entitled to the serious importance with which our critic has invested them. But is it at all conceivable that a people whose sanity has never in any way been questioned would strain every nerve to secure for their offspring a [37] distinction the consequence of which to themselves would be a feeling of their own abasement? The poor Irish peasant who toils and starves to secure for his eldest ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... never yet been quite able to make up my mind with any degree of definiteness in regard to the sanity of my son Noah. In many respects he is a fine fellow. His moral character is beyond reproach, and I have never caught him in any kind of a wilful deception such as many parents bewail in their offspring, and I know that he has no bad habits. He ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... for supper are the cure-alls of the true Galloway man. It is not every Scot who stands through all temptation so square in the right way as morning and night to confine himself to these; but he who does so shall have his reward in a rare sanity of judgment and lightness of spirit, and a capacity for work unknown to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... consider my present condition, I have doubts as to my complete sanity. Here am I, in a little, semi-fashionable French seaside place, away from my books and my comforts and my habits, as much interested in its vapid distractions as if the universe held no other pursuits worth the attention of a rational man. And ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... about Mrs. Jardine. Something in Madame von Marwitz's low-toned and richly murmured confidences as she told Maude and Mrs. Slifer that it was important for Mrs. Jardine's peace of mind, and for her very sanity, that her dreaded husband should not hear of her whereabouts, made Beatrice, as she expressed ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... is technically called "becoming spirit." A high quarrel ensued; Don Ramiro pronounced him a mad man, and forbade all farther intercourse with his daughter, until he should give proof of returning sanity by abandoning this mad-cap enterprise; while Don Fernando flung out of the house, more bent than ever on the expedition, from the idea of triumphing over the incredulity of the gray-beard when he should ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... asleep, Frank," she said. "She has had no sleep for three nights. A long rest may be the means of preserving her sanity. Why did ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... been put in the box at the inquige, and I'd 'a said Yes, you was blue, and I thought there was a screw loose the minit I see yer, and I'd seen yer empty a paper of powder in your corfee while you thort nobody wasn't a-looking. And the jury'd say it was tempory 'sanity and sooiside, and say they considers I was a honest young feller, and vote me a bob out of the poor-box. There you are. What do you think ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... sir. I have not the least doubt of your sanity. Your mind has been quite—nay, uncommonly clear since your recovery," ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... When the constitution of the United States was drawn up it was said to be "insanely ideal." We do not have to stretch our imaginations this morning to the point of a question of our sanity when our president's compositions are put before us. His paper seems sanely ideal. There is only one thing that interests a child more than history, (unless it is Sunday school), and that is a dollar ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... arrival on the 16th, he had had the good fortune to get into a line regiment that was being recruited up to its full strength. Then, reverting to facts of history, he described in brief but vigorous terms the principal events of that month of terror: how Paris, recovering her sanity in a measure after the madness into which the disasters of Wissembourg and Froeschwiller had driven her, had comforted herself with hopes of future victories, had cheered herself with fresh illusions, such as lying ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... assumptions with such coolness and apparent unconsciousness of their utter improbability to his readers, and with such an entire ignoring of the necessity of any further attestation than his own ipse dixit, as to warrant serious suspicions of his sanity. Take, for instance, his bear and whale story. Hearne reports having seen in the Arctic regions a bear swimming in the water for hours, with his mouth wide open, catching flies; and Mr. Darwin says if the supply of flies were constant (where the winter lasts eight months of the year 40 deg. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... have freed the world from those who live by violence, kill by violence, and are themselves killed by violence. If crime is a disease, then to treat criminals as wrongdoers is absurd. If every murderer is insane, then hanging is nonsense; if a murderer is sane, then sanity is capable of being more ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... set down the details of the strange episode of last night. I have spoken with persons whom I know to be of normal type. I have breakfasted, as usual heartily, and have every reason to consider myself in perfect health and sanity. So that the record following may be regarded as not only true in substance, but exact as to details. I have investigated and reported on too many cases for the Psychical Research Society to be ignorant of the necessity for ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. By your leave, Aline, I think I ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... eyes upon a strange and weird landscape. I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... manner, true work of mind or technical skill brings peace, composure, sanity, to one to whom the proper outlet of his energy has been denied. To youth, possessed by an almost riotous vitality, with great but unused powers of endurance and of positive action, the finding of ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... it is supposed that Catherine is dead, but by the exertions of Danilowitz she is at length discovered, though in a lamentable plight, for her troubles have cost her her reason. She is restored to sanity by the simple method of reconstructing the scene of the Finnish dockyard in which she first made Peter's acquaintance, and peopling it with the familiar forms of the workmen. Among the latter are Peter and Danilowitz, in their old dresses of labourer and pastry-cook, and, to crown all, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... sooner, far, have had them attack the house, openly. Then, at least, I should have known my danger, and been able to meet it; but to wait like this, through a whole night, picturing all kinds of unknown devilment, was to jeopardize one's sanity. Once or twice, the thought came to me, that, perhaps, they had gone; but, in my heart, I found it impossible to ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... revolutionary religious and moral reformers has not been sufficiently recognised. It is remarkable that, unlike other reformers, he has not contradicted error by an exaggeration, which itself very soon stands in need of contradiction, but by simple sanity which requires no correction. One reason for this peculiarity is that the Ethic was the result of long meditation. It was published posthumously and was discussed in draft for many years before his death. Usually what we call our convictions ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Sanity came back to Cochrane with the effect of something snapping. He got up. He nodded to Babs and she picked up the gun Johnny ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... life, and will, in pursuit of that money, batter in the doors of their fellow men, sell them up, sweat them in fetid dens, shoot, stab, hang, imprison, sink, burn and destroy them in the name of law and order. And this shews their fundamental sanity and rightmindedness; for a sufficient income is indispensable to the practice of virtue; and the man who will let any unselfish consideration stand between him and its attainment is a weakling, a dupe and a predestined slave. If I could convince our impecunious mobs of this, the world would be ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... Pontiac," a highly-colored narrative in two volumes appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical writing. Then came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years Parkman fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He had had to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by ill-considered efforts to harden ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... whither she went or what happened. She was incapable of reasoning. She was stunned by the cruel blow that had fallen. Later she would recover herself, for all such blows are but passing; in waking moments mind and reason cannot long remain inert and sanity obtain. For the present ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... believe her ears. She looked at the man earnestly. Surely he could not have been drinking at that time of the morning, and she would have doubted his sanity had it not been for the calm and earnest look in his face. He ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... replied he, with his frank smile that was so full of the suggestions of health and sanity and good humor. "You'll never get a martyr's crown at ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... meeting between Edith and the others that evening. She was naturally pale and weak, but her buoyant spirit triumphed over physical defects, and she made light of her injuries. Even Fairholme was restored to a state of sanity by his brief visit, a fact that was evidenced by his quiet enjoyment of a cigar when he walked down to the quay to witness ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar; and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of the young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of the hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... abroad in my small world for worthy work and found plenty to do. My unknown friend evidently kept track of my expanding efforts, for he commented and criticized, encouraged and advised freely. There was a humour in his letters that I liked; it leavened them with its sanity and reacted on me most wholesomely, counteracting many of the morbid tendencies and influences of my life. I found myself striving to live up to the writer's ideal of philosophy and ambition, as pictured, often unconsciously, in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is recorded by Rev. Samuel J. May, himself in full alliance with the Abolitionists, but a man of great sweetness and sanity, never diverted from his religious ministry or losing his mental balance. Dr. Channing dwelt on the excesses of the Abolitionists until Mr. May was aroused, and broke out: "Dr. Channing, I am tired of these complaints! The cause of suffering humanity, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... him dumbly. It was like a line out of a melodrama. He feared, first for his own, then for the butler's sanity. The latter was smiling gently, as one who sees light in ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... by culture describes everything which Dean, or, as he ought now to be called, President, Briggs says or writes. The genius of sanity, sound judgment, and high aim seems to preside over his thought, and he combines in an unusual degree the faculty of vision and the power of dealing with real things in a real way."—The Outlook, ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... great delight. It is on occasions like these that one sees the immense artistic power which lies under all the seriousness and gravity of Mr. Gladstone—the thorough exuberance of vitality which marks the splendid sanity ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... tragic end wrings the heart with its infinite pathos. By some singular discretion Mr. HEWLETT has chosen to eschew the least approach to Wardour-Street idiom, and this gives the narrative a simplicity, a sanity and a vivid sense of reality which are extraordinarily more effective than the goodliest tushery, of which flamboyant art Mr. HEWLETT is no mean master. I am sure he has chosen this time a more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... of the historian Bergenroth to establish Dona Juana's sanity and to depict her as the victim of religious persecution because of her suspected orthodoxy have been conclusively refuted by Maurenbrecher, Gachard, and other writers, who have demolished his arguments ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... matters that come under the notice of medical experts there is room for honest differences of opinion. Of such nature are questions of sanity and insanity. It must be remembered that these are, after all, relative terms. Reason leaves its seat by almost imperceptible steps. Who can determine with exactness the line that separates eccentricity from madness—responsibility from irresponsibility? Moreover, the phenomena upon which opinion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... triumph of the evening. On the whole she felt elated. She had no objection to being confuted by Lewisham. But she was angry with the Medium, "It is dreadful," she said. "Living a lie! How can the world grow better, when sane, educated people use their sanity and enlightenment to darken others? It ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... had worshipped, Melchior falls in ecstasy at her feet, but soon discovering the trick kills her in a sudden paroxysm of madness. The horror of the act restores his reason; but, with the return of sanity, the dreams and visions of the artist's nature begin to vanish; the musician sees the world not through a glass but face to face, and he dies just as the world ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... great personages have emerged. Never has there been so much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very abundance of good qualities has prevented our focusing upon those of any one individual. We all play our part in the realisation of God's sanity in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic end of Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no single individual of all the allied nations whose death can materially affect the great destinies of ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... consideration of a part only of what is known [111] concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central expressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities; and ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... that might be well explained by the circumstances, and I have not the same absolute conviction in his sanity that I had before. I suppose you will not care to honor the wedding ceremony ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... twenty-one years of age, and of sound mind, and all unmarried women of like age and sanity, may by will bequeath their property to whom they please. Infants, that is, all persons under twenty-one years of age, and married women, except where they have an estate to their "own separate use," are incapacitated, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... little doubt he will answer "Health." After that probably he may say "Beauty." In addition the reader of Mr. Galton's Hereditary Genius will probably say, "ability," "capacity," "genius," and "energy." The reader of Doctor Nordau will add "sanity." And the reader of Mr. Archdall Reid will round up the list with "immunity" from dipsomania and all contagious diseases. "Let us mark our human beings," the reader of that way of thinking will suggest, "let us give marks for 'health,' ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... child," he went on, speaking so earnestly that his brow was drawn into an expression which she mistook for a frown of disapproval, "your most characteristic quality was an irrepressible sense of humor. It gave both sparkle and sanity to your outlook. It held you immune ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... of his lost wife, Henry Callandar forgot Esther. His mind, careful of its sanity, removed her instantly from the possibility of thought. She was gone—whisked away by some swift genie and, with her, vanished the world of blue and gold inhabited ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... closely synchronous as the flash and the peal, as soon as the consciousness of sin and the aversion from it spring in a man's heart, the seraph's wings are set in motion. Remember that beautiful old story in the historical books, of how the erring king, brought to sanity and repentance by Nathan's apologue, put all his acknowledgments in these words, 'I have sinned against the Lord'; and how the confession was not out of his lips, nor had died in its vibration in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... possessed of the hope that she might be rescued from her condition. Night after night he patiently tried to teach her to read and to write, stopping again and again to humor her whims and indulge her foolish fancies. More than once he had surprised a new look in her eyes, a sudden gleam of sanity, of frightened understanding; and at such times she would cling to him for protection against that ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is a consciousness of the illuminating and dynamic value of this wider ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams |
