"Senility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that we remember as Cromwell's laureate; but among the sub-laureates there were some by no means insignificant. Old George Wither, though his marvellous metrical fluency had now lapsed into doggrel and senility, had done his best by sending forth, in 1654-5, from some kind of military superintendentship he held in the county of Surrey (Wood calls it distinctly a Major-Generalship at last, but that is surely an exaggeration), ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... slippers, and grumped: "Can't those kids keep quiet?" if it heard the voice of the children of love, and which hid itself behind a hedge of daily paper, or flung out again from home, in the ill-tempered senility of its ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... embarrassed him. He hated to be so deeply indebted to a man he could never repay and from whom he would not willingly have accepted the lightest favour. It has been truly said that the concupiscence of the eye outlives desire. Tiberius succumbed to premature senility (and was strangled by Macro) in a bedchamber decorated with figures from the works of Elephantis; and Sir Jacques' secret library, which he had omitted to destroy or disperse, bore evidence to the whited sepulchre of his ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... faded out of his eyes; his head fell a little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of my presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that aged mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed over it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze frightened me. It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in that gaze than I had previously imagined the whole earth to contain. Useless for Frank to rouse ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... never change," replied the official. "From infancy to senility the fingerprints of an individual change only in size, except as injuries alter the loops and whorls. But if imprints have been taken of the thumb and four fingers of both hands one must needs lose all entirely ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... winter he was pretty feeble. (He was only seventy, but he'd got in the habit of making it eighty to show that the mineral water kept him young. Finally he got to BEING eighty, from thinking it, and he died of senility ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... doubt this letter has more marks of senility than the one I announced at the beginning. When I had no news to send you, it was no reason for tiring you with commonplaces. But your lordship's indulgence spoils me. Does not it look as if I thought, that, because you commend my letters, you would like whatever I say? Will ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Blanchard in the crisp, brittle accents of senility; "so you're back again, eh? Well, well, well." There was no emphasis laid on the words. They were all struck from the same piece ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That's as far as her story went; she told him the rest herself, but that ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... is old enough already to have given us the portraits of infants who are now growing into adolescence. By-and-by it will show every aspect of life in the same individual, from the earliest week to the last year of senility. We are beginning to see what it will reveal. Children grow into beauty and out of it. The first line in the forehead, the first streak in the hair are chronicled without malice, but without extenuation. The footprints of thought, of passion, of purpose are all treasured in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... decrepitude, and death—more or less rapid, according to the stock and situation. Those who accept that dogma argue that all that is necessary in order to predict the fate of a nation is a correct calculation of its present age; whether of childhood, manhood, or senility. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... yet paid the full penalty of her stupid acquiescence in the rule of Disraeli and Salisbury; and it will cost her yet far more than she paid for the results of Tory infamy and Whig senility in the "Alabama" business, for she has enemies to deal with who are far less generous and far slyer than the people of the United States. It was under the Beaconsfield-Salisbury cabinet that Sir Bartle Frere made that infamous declaration of war against ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... felt at the mention of my great house, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the Comtes of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... another as they were of all other classes of society. If we wish to form a clear picture of this earliest stage of civilization, an age which represents at once the naivete of childhood and the suspicious reticence of senility, we must turn our eyes to the priest, on the one hand, claiming as his own all art and science, and commanding respect by his contemptuous silence; and, on the other hand, to the mechanic plying the loom, ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... Belfort, cannot talk for more than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour without becoming completely aphonous. Different doctors consulted find no lesion in the vocal organs, but one of them says that M. X—— suffers from senility of the larynx, and this conclusion confirms him in the belief that he is incurable. He comes to spend his holidays at Nancy, and a lady of my acquaintance advises him to come and see me. He refuses at first, but eventually consents in spite of his absolute disbelief in the ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... another stead where if I fruit not then fell me.' But he rejoined, 'Being upon the water-edge thou gavest ne'er a date, so how shalt thou bear fruit being in other site?' O dear my son, better the senility of the eagle than the juvenility of the raven. O dear my son, they said to the wolf, 'Avoid the sheep lest haply the dust they raise in flight may do thee a damage;' but Lupus made answer, 'Verily their ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... loss of voice; and from clarinet cadenzas more than two inches in length; and from the first two acts of Il Trovatore; and from such fluffy, xanthous whiskers as Lohengrins wear; and from sentimental old maids who sink into senility lamenting that Brahms never wrote an opera; and from programme music, with or without notes; and from Swiss bell-ringers, Vincent D'Indy, the Paris Opera, and Elgar's Salut d'Amour; and from the doctrine that Massenet was a greater composer than Dvorak; and from Italian bands and Schnellpostdoppelschraubendampfer ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... into the only repose he ever allowed it; for he had a habit of twitching and moving his lips such as some old men have. And occasionally, in an access of further senility, he fumbled with his fingers at his mouth. He was clean shaven, and even in his old age he was handsome beyond other men—standing an upright six ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... laugh—a queer metallic "Ha! ha! ha!" with reverberations in it from the days of Pitt and the Congress of Vienna—was heard no more in Piccadilly; Lord John Russell dwindled into senility; Lord Derby tottered from the stage. A new scene opened; and new protagonists—Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli—struggled together in the limelight. Victoria, from her post of vantage, watched these developments with that passionate and personal interest ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... those days her attention used to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days. At the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... through the greater part of the day in an easy-chair on the verandah, taking no interest in anything; just gazing vacantly in front of him for hours at a time. Mental and bodily strength seemed to have deserted him. From vigour he had passed suddenly into senility. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... because the Roman Empire was ripe for a new religion. It conquered because it threw in its lot with the ruling powers. It throve because it came with the tempting bribe of Heaven in one hand, and the withering threat of Hell in the other. The older religions, grey in their senility, had no such bribe ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... fruit-trees among Christmas-Eve ceremonies; and doubtless when he dwelt in Devon the use was gloriously maintained; but an adult generation in the years of this narrative had certainly refused it much support. It was left to their grandfathers and their sons; and thus senility and youth preponderated in the present company. For the boys, this midnight fun with lantern and fowling-piece was good Christmas sport, and they came readily enough; to the old men their ceremonial possessed solid value, and from the musty storehouse ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... light, his face looked ghastly. It had gone all to pieces; advanced old age had taken possession of it in a night. Moreover the truth about the auburn mustaches and goatee was coming out in snowy splotches; the fading dye showed a mottle of red and white not agreeable to the eye. Here was not merely senility, but ignoble ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... commented upon was that of a child of six years who showed every symptom of senility or old age, which could hardly be possible without having ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Police Office in the vain attempt of identifying him as a lost child. But I never saw him or heard of him since. Strange fears have sometimes crossed my mind that his venerable appearance may have been actually the result of senility, and that he may have been gathered peacefully to his fathers in a green old age. I have even had doubts of his existence, and have sometimes thought that he was providentially and mysteriously offered ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... people. Gradually the old man seems to have developed a preference for two or three strictly exquisite intimates, over a throng of your vulgar pensioners. His tardy literary schemes, too—fruit of his all but sapless senility—have absorbed more and more of his time and attention. The end of it all is, therefore, that Theodore and I have him quite to ourselves, and that it behooves us ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... certain peoples, the Massagetae and others, used to kill their aged folk in order to spare them the miseries of senility. The fatal blow on the hoary skull was in their eyes an act of filial piety. The Necrophori have their share of these ancient barbarities. Full of days and henceforth useless, dragging out a weary existence, they mutually ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... it was the senility of an educated man, and as the cultivated accents wavered forth, my mind changed in, regard to the position he held in the house. Interested anew, I sought to give him another look, but he had already vanished through the doorway, and so noiselessly, it was more like a shadow's flitting ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... action except outbursts of naughtiness in the women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get at present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they pass from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body. The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably more self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often more of a man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately this precocity is disabled ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... the door opened a little, showing an old, old man, bent with age and gaunt with malaria. Over his head he held a big Roman lamp, with three wicks, that cast strange shadows on his face,—a face that was harmless in its senility, but intolerably sad. He made no reply to our timid salutations, but motioned tremblingly to us to enter; and with a last "good-night" to Giuseppe we obeyed, and stood half-way up the stone stairs that led directly from the door, while the old man tediously ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... work—and if he has the true Spirit in him, I care next to nothing for his orders: though to many less independent minds human authorisation may be a necessity. From cradle hymns to the more serious prayings of senility, my own religion in two words is crystallised as "Abba, Father;" my only priest being my Divine Brother; and my Friend and Guide through this life and beyond it the Holy Spirit, who unites all the family ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... they will die of old age; but there is no such thing as old age under one hundred and fifty years; what you call old age is not old age at all. There are two kinds of old age or senility. Old age, properly speaking, results from a distinct modification of the nervous tissues and a hardening of the arteries—the former caused by unnatural conditions, nervous strain and dissipation, and the latter from over-feeding ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... will be wise in repressing it at least in your remarks to me. I am no longer young, but am very far from senility; and finding no harmony in your household, no peaceful fireside where I can spend the residue of my days in quiet, I have finally consulted the dictates of my own heart, and am prompted by the hope of great happiness with the woman whom I sincerely love—to marry her. Under these circumstances you ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... along over the rough foreshore which had been cleared of its human debris. His blanket-clad shoulders, though gay with color, were bowed with senility, a mockery of the vaunting splendor which glared out in vivid stripes. His escort, too, was mostly elderly. There were no fighting men in it. They were the counselors, who worked overtime with inadequate brains, and delivered the result by word ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... old age. Senility, which sets in with men when they are from sixty to eighty years old, begins after twenty to thirty months in a rat. He is then about through. But when an operation is performed on a senile rat he gets from six to eight months' new ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... read some of the book criticisms of days past to learn whether they too were pulpy—whether our present silken criticism always wore its gloves and perfumed itself, or whether it has fallen to this smiling senility from a sterner youth. Although I am usually a rusty student, yet by diligence I have sought to mend my knowledge that I might lay it out before you. Lately, therefore, if you had come within our Public Library, you would have found me in one of these ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... lived worse than any homeless outcast. As time went on, I suppose he accumulated arrears of taxes and, young and sturdy as he was, he was sent by the commune to do an old man's job—to be watchman and scarecrow in the kitchen gardens. However much they laughed at him for his premature senility he did not object to it. This position, quiet and convenient for motionless contemplation, exactly ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Emory, where the colonel found himself ordered to send all his transportation to Frayne forthwith, and all his remaining troops except one of foot. "Damnation! I've only got two companies of foot," he screamed, in the shrill treble of piping senility. "And they mean to rob me of my cavalry, too! 'C' troop is ordered to be held in ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... punktokomo. Seminarist seminariano. Seminary seminario. Semolina tritikajxo. Senate senato. Senate-house senatejo, senatdomo. Senator senatano. Send sendi. Send away forsendi. Send back resendi. Senile maljuna. Senility maljuneco. Senior plenagxa, pliagxa. Sensation sentado. Sensational sensacia. Sense sento. Sense (meaning) senco. Senseless sensenta. Senseless (unmeaning) sensenca. Sensibility sentemo. Sensible (feelings) sentebla. Sensible sagxa. Sensitive sentema. Sensual voluptema. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... age and those diseases of the system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd, treacherous corners of his body, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... whistling sound, and her cunning old face became as expressionless as a mask. In a second, save for her wicked black eyes, which smouldered like two sparks of fire under her drooping lids, she became a picture of stupidity and senility. 'Bless 'ee, my pretty master, I knows nought; all I knows I told the Gentiles yonder,' and the hag pointed a crooked finger ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... on the part of your representative—for I surely never explain, and Art certainly requires no "indignant protest" against the unseemliness of senility. "Horsley soit qui mal y pense" is meanwhile a ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... was her thought. Had we not shared it for forty years? And the moment of its consummation had come at last. So I, too, affected not to recognize my enemy, and, putting on an idiotic senility, I, too, crawled in the dust toward the litter whining for ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way and imminent ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... reveals, in a striking manner, Victoria's tender love for and close sympathy with her mother. It seems that the King's jealous hostility to the Duchess of Kent had grown with his decay, and strengthened with his senility, till at last it culminated in a sort of declaration of war at his own table. The account is given by Greville second-hand, and so, very likely, over-colored, though doubtless true in the main. The King invited the Duchess and Princess to Windsor to join in the celebration of his birthday, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... still mumbling inarticulately and I sat there saddened that a man once alert and vigorous as the general should have come at last to senility and ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... snails. But the sum of them rose by leaps and bounds to an appalling total. Alice found two grey hairs in her red-gold locks. Will had to use glasses for reading fine print at night. From their point of view, decrepitude, senility, dotage stared them in the face, while the bright voyage of life which they were resolved to make only together, was threatened with shipwreck among the ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... nature is hurt; his smothered life seeks to be liberated from the suffocating folds and sensual ties of prosperity. And this is why we find almost everywhere in the world a growing dissatisfaction with the prevalent system of teaching, which betrays the encroachment of senility and worldly ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... Mr. Hinckley's voice, a little infirmity of his chin, which told of advancing years. His ideas were becoming more fixed. It was plain that the notion of Lattimore's continued and uninterrupted progress was one to which he would cling with the mild and unreasoning stubbornness of gentlemanly senility. But Cornish welcomed the discussion with something ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... are well marked. Cancer is emphatically a disease of senility, of age; but, as Roger Williams has pointed out in his admirable monograph, not ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... a simple maiden from innocent Eutopia; she cannot grasp an idea." And yet she was very beautiful, and if she were "petrified," every critic would pronounce her perfection. The boy sighs with that well-known senility of seventeen: ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... as not to think of their own future, so utterly brutalised. He wanted, by the simple force of desire, to seclude and shelter the old man, to protect the old man not only from the insults of stupid and crass bullies, but from the old man himself, from his own fatuous senility. He wanted to restore to him, by a benevolent system of pretences, the dignity and the self-respect which he had innocently lost, and so to keep him decent to the eye, if not to the ear, until death came to repair its omission. And it was for his own sake, for the sake of his own image, as ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... a few days a premature spring came out teasingly. The East Seventeenth Street block, with its rows of houses, going down none too debonairly, from gentility to senility, showing a bud here and there. There even remained one private residence with a polished door bell and name plate and a little cluster of crocuses in an iron jardiniere set out in a front yard about the dimension of an ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... had two hundred dollars in his possession. The glee which he tried to hide, the crafty suspicion that this was not all of it the returning conviction that Bud was actually almost penniless, and the cunning assumption of senility, was pictured on his face. Pop's poor, miserly soul was for a minute shamelessly revealed. Distraught though he was, Bud stared and shuddered a ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... began, history is but the narrative of kingdoms and states progressing to maturity or decay. Man himself is but an epitome of the nations of men. In youth, all energy; in prime of life, all enterprise and vigour; in senility, all weakness and second childhood. Then, England, learn thy fate from the unerring page of time. Sooner or later, it shall arrive that thou shalt be tributary to some nation, hitherto, I trust, unborn; and thy degenerate sons shall read that liberty was once the watchword ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... one nostril, the size of a pea, opened downward, and the other, the size of a robin's egg, tilted upward to the sky. One eye, of normal size, dim-brown and misty, bulged to the verge of popping out, and as if from senility wept copiously and continuously. The other eye, scarcely larger than a squirrel's and as uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy scar of a bone-crushed eyebrow. And he had ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... apart. He is enchanted with thatched cottages which look damp and picturesque. He detests the model dwellings which are built with a too obvious regard for sanitation. He seeks narrow and ill-smelling streets where the houses nod at each other, as if in the last stages of senility, muttering mysterious reminiscences of old tragedies. He frequents scenes of ancient murders, and places where bandits once did congregate. He leaves the railway carriage, to cross a heath where romantic highwaymen used to ask the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... gentleman in black, expounding his views, or narrating his autobiography to the first comer, can expect no such warmth of response as greets the dying speech of the baffled patriot; yet he too may take account of the reasons that prompt speech, may display sympathy and tact, and avoid the faults of senility. The only character that can lend strength to his words is his own, and he sketches it while he states his opinions; the only attitude that can ennoble his sayings is implied in the very arguments he ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... was the wife of Ataulfus, whom she seems really to have loved, became unbearable after the death of Constantius. At the mercy of her brother who was fast sinking, at the age of thirty-nine, into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him; at least we know that he obliged her to receive his obscene kisses, even in public, to the scandal and perhaps the amusement of that corrupt ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... is nothing more than such modulated sounds; it is not in definite words, and hence, is not capable of translation; it is but the expression of feeling through the voice, as is the wail of the infant, the rippling laughter of youth, the crooning of senility, the groans of ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... Were not the mighty men of the great nineteenth century aged men, if we count age only by shadows on the dial? At a time of life when most men are honoured with a natural right to senility, Mr. Gladstone was girding on his armour for one of the biggest conflicts ever waged in the arena of our Parliament. And years after, as the struggle still raged—to see him, almost blind and deaf, looking like so much vitalized ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... no one of them doth agree with another! I could tell thee—but there, what is the use? why rob a fool of his bauble? Let it pass, and I pray, oh Holly, that when thou dost feel old age creeping slowly toward thyself, and the confusion of senility making havoc in thy brain, thou mayest not bitterly regret that thou didst cast away the imperial boon I would have given to thee. But so it hath ever been; man can never be content with that which his hand can pluck. If a lamp be in his reach to light him through the darkness, he ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... of non-accidental disease in which life is saved by the surgeon's knife," and he instances particularly, strangulated hernia and ovarian cyst. And he also calls attention to apoplectic breakdown and premature senility. All these are suggestions of great value for individual conduct, but none of them have that quality of certainty that justifies collective action.] Until great advances are made in anthropology—and at present there are neither men nor endowments to justify the hope that any ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... old man was singular. He had lost a princely property at the play-table, and by a piece of good fortune of rare occurrence to gamesters, and unparalleled generosity, the proprietors of the salon allowed him a pension to support him in his miserable senility, just sufficient to supply him with a wretched lodging—bread, and a change of raiment once in every three or four years! In addition to this he was allowed a supper—which was, in fact, his dinner—at the gaming house, whither he went every night at about eleven o'clock. Till supper-time ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... spiritual air they breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them of all sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... in the course of his life falls away more and more from the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in the course of his short life goes very much farther along the road of degradation and premature senility." (Man and Woman, by Havelock ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... old man's high-pitched voice a good deal of the squeak, but little of the quaver, of senility. ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... published in it a series of articles attacking the rival Democratic candidates in very flashy rhetoric. These were stigmatized as "old fogies," who must give ground to a nominee of "Young America." They were reminded that the party expects a "new man." "Age is to be honored, but senility is pitiable"; "statesmen of a previous generation must get out of the way"; the Democratic party was owned by a set of "old clothes-horses"; "they couldn't pay their political promises in four Democratic administrations"; and the names of Cass and ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the motivating factor in sex misconduct, most careful guidance is necessary, lest the future love life be endangered. After relieving the child of feelings of guilt, the conduct of the older offender must be explained in terms of his senility or his mental state. "He is not normal." "He should be in a hospital." It is important that this person's abnormal conduct does not represent in the child's mind the natural ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... rich man that he is poor! you might as well tell the Archbishop of Granada that his homilies show signs of senility. Mme. la Presidente, proud of her husband's position, of the estate of Marville, and her invitations to court balls, was keenly susceptible on this point; and what was worse, the remark came from a poverty-stricken musician to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... coming here, through sheer contempt. But, sire, I've been on pilgrimage, By vow expressly made, Your royal health to aid, And, on my way, met doctors sage, In skill the wonder of the age, Whom carefully I did consult About that great debility Term'd in the books senility, Of which you fear, with reason, the result. You lack, they say, the vital heat, By age extreme become effete. Drawn from a living wolf, the hide Should warm and smoking be applied. The secret's good, beyond a doubt, For nature's weak, and wearing out. Sir Wolf, here, won't refuse to give His hide ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... to show that even in Mars logic does not always dominate life and prevail over instinct. But what is the most usual cause of death, where neither disease nor senility are ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... are lords of all, and the most durable things come to an end. Celestial and infernal, like earthly, powers are subject to the law of decay. Mutability touches them with her dissolving wand, and strong necessity, the lord of gods and men, brings them to the inevitable stroke of Death. Senility falls on all beings and institutions—if they are allowed to perish naturally; and as our august Monarchy is the joke of wits, and our ancient House of Lords is an object of popular derision, so the high and mighty Devil in his palsied old age is the laughing-stock of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... The Mincopie has a singularly short life; for though he attains puberty at much the same age as ourselves, the twenty-second year brings him to middle life, and the fiftieth, if reached, is a period of extreme senility. Pure in race, ancient in history, and carefully studied, this race deserves some further attention here than can be extended to others with which I have to deal. The moral side of the Mincopies seems to be highly developed; the modesty of the ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... means—namely, the retardation, or solemn knowing drawl—supply the missing spondee with good effect. But I do not believe that in this or any other of the foregoing speeches of Polonius, Shakespeare meant to bring out the senility or weakness of that personage's mind. In the great ever-recurring dangers and duties of life, where to distinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims collected by the experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact, as in the admonitions to his son and daughter, Polonius ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the same sex can complement each other, neither can they long uplift or benefit each other. Usually they deform the mental and spiritual estate. We should have many acquaintances or none. When two men begin to "tell each other everything," they are hiking for senility. There must be a bit of well-defined reserve. We are told that in matter—solid steel for instance—the molecules never touch. They never surrender their individuality. We are all molecules of Divinity, and our personality should not be abandoned. Be yourself, ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... informed me, through Schmick, that he had a child two weeks old that would die before morning if deprived of proper food and nourishment. Somewhat impressed by this pitiful lament, I enquired how his wife was getting along. The ancient, being in a placid state of senility, courteously thanked me for my interest, and answered that she had been dead for forty-nine years, come September. I overlooked ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... exercise of reason beneath the love of a Father who sees with equal eye as God of all. Its isolation nourished a sectarian tendency. Tradition, having no creative power like revelation, had taken the place of it; and it could not ward off the senility of Judaism; for its creations are but feeble echoes of prophetic utterances, weak imitations of poetic inspiration or of fresh wisdom. They are of the understanding rather than the reason. The tradition which Geiger describes as ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... in Paris for Cosette and himself, the necessity of regulating his pace to the pace of the child—all this, without his being aware of it, had altered Jean Valjean's walk, and impressed on his bearing such senility, that the police themselves, incarnate in the person of Javert, might, and did in fact, make a mistake. The impossibility of approaching too close, his costume of an emigre preceptor, the declaration of Thenardier which made a grandfather of him, and, finally, the belief in his death ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... his men, and though his pay was that of a common laborer, his duties had long been of a much higher order. Abraham had made a very good bargain out of the widow's son. Adam knew well that he could not be spared, and pitied the old man's helpless rage. He took his frantic insults as part of his senility, and felt it no unmanliness to appease it by giving his promise that he would speak no more of love to Emmy while he was taking her father's wages. But Emmy did not indorse this promise fully. To her it looked like weakness, and implied a sort of patience which did ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... action toward license after games, spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of the physical side of life, and, in some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth of the accessory motor parts and powers, and erethic diathesis that makes steady and continued mental toil seem ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... in such a condition is, of course, of supreme value on account of its ability to slow the heart. Such irregularity perhaps most frequently occurs with valvular disease, especially mitral stenosis and in the muscular degenerations of senility, as fibrosis. ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... pathless in the heavens. When the sun hath reached the zenith it must descend. Henceforth your path leads downward, for every hour will sap your lusty strength, and every step be weaker than the last, until you sink into senility. Come, my love, you do not know me yet; behold me as I am!" She cast aside her soiled and ragged robe and stood revealed in all her hideousness—a thing of horror. Her breasts distilled a poisonous dew, around her gaunt limbs aspics crawled, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... comparison between a rising and a receding tide; both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only in appearance. It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius. It is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in refinement, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... subject of the money that was demanded of her, and that she could not pay; and the shame felt by that proud creature, perverted by the vile Quartier Saint-Georges, because of her intimacy with low wretches whom she despised; and the lamentable consciousness of the premature senility caused by drunkenness; and the inhuman exactions and brutality of the Alphonses of the gutter; and the temptations to suicide which caused me to pull her away from a window one day, when I found her leaning far out—and lastly all the tears that we believed to be ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... walls: in summer the air is languorous, bringing a desire for rest and contemplation. Storms are impious there: the ancient oaks and birches and chestnuts must wail and protest, like dotards wakened from senility to cruel hours ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... he was sunk in parental partiality; it was not so much love, which should be an active quality, as an apathy and torpor of his other powers; and forgiveness (so to misapply a noble word) flowed from him in sheer weakness, like the tears of senility. Mrs. Henry's was a different case; and Heaven alone knows what he found to say to her, or how he persuaded her from her contempt. It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that which is spoken. But ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. One finds very few professors ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... hear, and mark, if I don't learn—In short this little volume is no discredit to any of your former, and betrays none of the Senility you fear about. Apropos of Van Balen, an artist who painted me lately had painted a Blackamoor praying, and not filling his canvas, stuff'd in his little girl aside of Blacky, gaping at him unmeaningly; and then didn't ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... should trouble our heads over the question whether at the age of seventy-six Wordsworth was a Tory or not. It is only by the grace of God that any man escapes being a Tory long before that. What is of interest to us is his attitude in the days of his vitality, not of his senility. In regard to this, I agree that it would be grossly unfair to accuse him of apostasy, simply because he at first hailed the French Revolution as the return of the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... "The more the natives progress the more nearly they'll equal our abilities. I wouldn't want anything to happen to our overall plans. As it is now, their abilities taper off at sixty and they reach senility at seventy or eighty. I think until the end we should keep ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... very much that year. He showed marked signs of senility by a tendency to fall asleep, forgetfulness of quite recent events, remembrance of remote ones, and the childish vanity with which he accepted the role of head of the Moscow opposition. In spite of this the old man inspired in ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... are suppressed, but never cured, by bromides which benumb and paralyze the brain and nerve centers. All that these sedatives accomplish is to produce in the course of time idiocy and the different forms of paralysis and premature senility. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... many other factors have to enter into the plan. Incomparably small, on the other hand, is the aid which psychotherapy can offer in cases of real destructions in the brain, as in the case of tumors, hemorrhage, paresis or the degeneration by senility. More effective may be its work in concussion of the brain and especially with traumatic neuroses, as in the case when a railroad accident has put the mind-brain ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... reality of representative characters. They are individualities instead of individuals. They do not exhibit an agglomeration of many different but consistent traits rendered unified and single by a dominant and informing characteristic, such as ambition in Macbeth, senility in Lear, or irresoluteness in Hamlet. A great fictitious character must be at once generic and specific; it must give concrete expression to an abstract idea; it must be an individualized representation of the typical ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... Kingdom into a confederacy because Germany, through a clumsy form of confederacy, is growing into a united empire. This counsel confuses the stages of imperfect development with the stage of incipient decay; it ascribes to the childishness of approaching senility the hopes which are proper to the childishness of early youth. The point is worth pressing. The considerations which govern a confederacy as it is developing into a nation are very different from the considerations applicable to a full grown ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this purpling bloom, of Lamb;—in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoues and the orchards of Atlas; and there are volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... the loose wrinkles below. The lower part of the face was covered by a long but sparse moustache, through which at times could be discerned that terrible protrusion of the upper lip that seems the herald of senility. Yet Gustave, Grand Duke of Maasau, was only that day celebrating the completion of his ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... whim prompted, and to lay hands on whatever he coveted. Add to these conditions a nature congenitally without generous instincts, a narrow brain, and a sensual temperament, and we have gone far to account for the phenomenon which Berkeley finally, in his approaching senility, presented. He was the type of the worst traits that caused England ultimately to forfeit America; the concentration of whatever is opposite to popular liberties. His deeds must be execrated; but we cannot put him beyond ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... MORALIST.—In all these sciences at once it is not possible for the moralist to be an adept. The mass of the material they furnish is so vast that the ethical writer who starts out to master it in all its details may well dread that he may be overcome by senility before he is ready to undertake the formulation of an ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... fire, and there, sitting by the fire and grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock Holmes. He made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided into a doddering, loose-lipped senility. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the attorney was to throw her hands into the air, toss her white head to and fro, and give up the battle. The tears came like a gush of blood from a deep wound; they poured through the lean fingers she pressed against her gaunt cheeks, and she shook with the dry, weak weeping of senility and utter desolation. Then her old arms yearned for him as ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... number of their "yes's" would have to be quadrupled, their natures crabbed by twenty years—then they would be no more than obsolete and broken machines, pseudo-wise and valueless, nursed to an utter senility by the women they ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... these cherished bits of landscape had been the old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose of senility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of mortgages that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces of Aunt Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it not sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?—it had faith in the name. But Mary could never remember ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the impatience of youth at the foibles of senility, as exemplified by the doddering Philip Scheikowitz, aged forty-five, and the valetudinarian Marcus Polatkin, whose hair, albeit unfrosted, had been blighted and in part swept away by the vicissitudes ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... process is known as a psychological study. A publisher's note on page five hundred and seventy-three assures us that the author is now at work on Volume Two, dealing with the hero's adult life. A third volume will present his pleasing senility. The whole is known as a trilogy. If the chief character is of the other sex we are dragged through her dreamy girlhood, or hoydenish. We see her in her graduation white, in her bridal finery. By the time she is twenty we ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... walls—some so old and crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely—bear upon them the marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred years. Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you must study the life; and ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... of Moses, was more than three thousand years old. Egypt was then in the first stage of senility, entering upon her decline, for her best people had settled in the cities, and this completes the cycle and spells deterioration. She had passed through the savage, barbaric, nomadic and agricultural stages and was living on her unearned increment, a part of which was Israelitish labor. Moses ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... old age in man and the lower animals, we observe certain features common to both. But often among vertebrates there are found animals whose bodies withstand the ravages of time much better than that of man. I think it a fair inference that senility, that precocious senescence which is one of the greatest sorrows of humanity, is not so profoundly seated in the constitution of the higher animals as has generally been supposed. The first facts which we must accept are that human beings who reach extreme old age may preserve their mental qualities, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... mind, presented many other phases of this new type of tragic theme. Macbeth is destroyed by vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself; Hamlet is ruined by irresoluteness and contemplative procrastination. If Othello were not overtrustful, if Lear were not decadent in senility, they would not be doomed to die in the conflict that confronts them. They fall self-ruined, self-destroyed. This second type of tragedy is less lofty and religious than the first; but it is more human, and therefore, to the spectator, more ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the symbol of the eternal night or darkness of Chaos, which preceded the emanation of light, it was the type of senility and absolute death, the negative and end. It was the nocturnal or hidden sun, as Horus was the rising sun, and Ra the risen sun, proceeding in its course each day through the firmament. Tum was not however considered ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... quality, or flavor, rather, which was delicately discriminated from the courtly refinement of his Sir Peter. There was the essential gentleman in both, but it was the country gentleman in one and the city gentleman in the other. The touch of chuckling senility in Hardcastle's pleasure with Diggory's enjoyment of his stories, and the uxorious fondness of Sir Peter, are both of a kind, but they are not the same, and you feel the difference. Neither of these characters can be dissociated from Gilbert by those who have seen ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... the seventh day, but what is gathered on the sixth keeps two days, while at other times it requires to be eaten quite fresh. This pursuit of a legal object destroys the story and obscures its original meaning, as no one can help seeing. Nor is it any sign of originality, rather of senility, that in the Priestly Code the manna is not eaten raw, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... his senility; then he would begin to break up. A struggle, to show that there was life in the old dog yet, could be seen when the old dog had been out hunting, in Act II., and had shot some strange animal, something between a stag and a dromedary, which no doubt ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... of pitiable senility, sustained throughout the trial, though it imposed on Sir Henry Hawkins, failed to melt his heart. He told Peace that he did not believe his statement that he had fired the pistol merely to frighten the constable; had not Robinson guarded his head ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... N. oldness &c. adj[obs3].; age, antiquity; cobwebs of antiquity. maturity; decline, decay; senility &c. 128. seniority, eldership, primogeniture. archaism &c. (the past) 122; thing of the past, relic of the past; megatherium[obs3]; Sanskrit. tradition, prescription, custom, immemorial usage, common law. V. be old &c. adj.; have had ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... scene. There is only one thing more abominable than war and that is the pacificist doctrine of non-resistance when duty and honor call. Every country, no doubt, has its putrescent spots caused by premature senility, but no country so far has shown itself as wholly crumbling in an age where the world is ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... exaltation of the early twelfth century and the sturdy materialism of the late sixteenth lies the Classical Renaissance. Whatever happened, happened between those dates. And all that did happen was nothing more than a change from late manhood to early senility complicated by a house-moving, bringing with it new hobbies and occupations. The decline from the eleventh to the seventeenth century is continuous and to be foreseen; the change from the world of Aurelian to the world of ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... my own youth is miraculously prolonged; that I have not lost in fire what I have gained in patience and width of view. But he would believe that I have lost the glow, and that what seems to me to be gentle and beautiful experience is but the closing in of weariness and senility. I have often thought myself that an increase of accomplishment goes hand-in-hand with an increased tameness of spirit. And the most pathetic of all writers are, to my mind, those whose mastery of their art grows as the initial impulse declines. But my young friend appeared to me to value ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... beginning to tell, even in the case of their valiant parent. At such times she was, of course, simply dreaming day dreams of the life she could have had if, as "he" had said, she had been twenty now; and the beatific expression that would come into her face was scarcely one of reconciliation to senility. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... from the opening to the closing scene, so plainly exhibited as in the De Vita Propria, almost the last work which came from his pen. It has been asserted that this book, written in the twilight of senility by an old man with his heart cankered by misfortune and ill-usage, and his brain upset by the dread of real or fancied assaults of foes who lay in wait for him at every turn, is no trustworthy guide, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... for her family swept over Laura, and she felt that she could suffer no longer the authority of Mrs. Payne, the senility of Uncle Percival or the sorrows of Angela. As she looked at Mrs. Payne she was struck as if for the first time by her ridiculous grotesqueness, and she experienced a sensation of disgust for the old lady's stony eyes and ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... Fifth: Actual old age, senility, failure of physical and mental power, should be postponed in each case as long as possible by active measures of mental and moral discipline consciously undertaken by personal effort. "The making of ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... so simple and yet so complicated; it sees so much and so little; it loves so many toys and cares for so few necessities; its youth is so young, its age so old, and its youthful yearning for old thought is so disconcerting, like the mysterious senility of the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... neighbour seems to be less grimy with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring pavements, and the reeking odours of ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... pipe, found that it was out, and passed it over to Zilla, who took the sneer at the white man off her lips in order to pucker them about the pipe-stem. Ebbits seemed sinking back into his senility with the tale untold, and ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... El Paso to Fort Benton, men talk of Casey Ryan and smile when they speak his name. Old men with the flat tone of coming senility in their voices will suck at their pipes and cackle reminiscently while they tell you of Casey's tumultuous youth—when he drove the six fastest horses in Colorado on the stage out from Cripple Creek, and whooped past would-be holdups with a grin of derision ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... wonderful it was that they had both been in London forty years, without having ever once met, and both walkers in the street too!' Mr. Edwards, when going away, again recurred to his consciousness of senility, and looking full in Johnson's face, said to him, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... of nations and individuals is the record of their defeat in this struggle to be masters and not slaves of their material and intellectual attainments. Greece, the most intellectual of all nations of all times, died in mental senility of moral paralysis. Of Socrates's and Plato's "following after truth" nothing remained but the gossipy curiosity of a second childhood, living only to tell or to hear some new thing. And the schools of philosophy were closed because they had nothing to tell which was worth the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging, half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be, for ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... own soul I gathered that he had been fifty-six years in gentlemen's service, and never served any but gentlemen until he came to me. He computed his age, I think, at seventy-two, and asked leave to attend the funeral of his grandfather. Sometimes, happily, the Hamal's senility takes the direction of benevolence. Who does not know the benign, stupid old man, with his snowy whiskers and kindly smile, which seems to grow kindlier with every ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... apt to age with extreme rapidity. Among coloured folk' one sometimes encounters women whose faces seem to have been lined by the passage of centuries, yet whose actual tale of years would entitle them to regard themselves, here in England, as in the prime of life. The senility of the fellow's countenance, besides, was contradicted by the juvenescence of his eyes. No really old man could have had eyes like that. They were curiously shaped, reminding me of the elongated, faceted eyes of some queer creature, with whose appearance I was familiar, although I could ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... he took me for my father! and when he discovered his mistake, how composedly he welcomed me in my own person! Was that the extreme of senility? or was it a subtile assertion of the fact, that he who keeps in the vanguard of the age in a certain sense contains his father—the past—within himself, and is a distinct person chiefly by ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... not dwell on that. That portraits were woven at the Gobelins (portraits as such, not the resemblance of one figure out of a mass to some great personage) brings ever a sigh of regret. It is like the evidence of senility in some grand statesman who has outlived his vigour. It is like the portrait of your friend done in butter, or the White House at Washington done in a paste of destroyed banknotes. In other words, there is no excuse for it ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... longer have so many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion," writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep themselves young, why, the world will go far to catching up with itself ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... deal with such as you. To pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. You have elected surcease. Very well. You will become sated with surcease. You say you have escaped satiety! You have merely bartered it for senility. And senility is another name for satiety. It ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... surrounded an ice-cream barrow. Suddenly she recognized this old man. His name was Shushions; he was a familiar figure of the streets of Turnhill, and he had the reputation of being the oldest Sunday School teacher in the Five Towns. He was indeed exceedingly old, foolish, and undignified in senility; and the louts were odiously jeering at his defenceless dotage, and a young policeman was obviously with the louts and against ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... none of the results of his acts which were clear to every one else; granting in short what the English themselves seemed at last to conclude — that Gladstone was not quite sane; that Russell was verging on senility; and that Palmerston had lost his nerve — what sort of education should have been the result of it? How should it have affected one's future ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... with the manifestations of every variety of the human emotions in the various stations of life, from infancy to senility, in health and in disease. Not only does he come into intimate contact with the emotions displayed by the victims of disease and of accidents, but he also observes those manifested by the relatives and friends of the families of his patients. ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... Quick!" he shouted, in the shrill treble of senility, and ran into the corridor that led to the north wing. Waldron, suddenly sobered, followed; and from the offices, where the night-shift of clerks were laboring (or had been, till the first explosion), came crowding pale and frightened men. Not the fighting cast of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... looking back on the pleasures and achievements of the past—when success or failure may seem matters of comparative unimportance. Successful middle-age stands between the two. Its calm is not the result either of senility or failure. It represents that solid success which enables a man to adventure into fresh spheres without any perturbation. New fields call to him—Art, or Letters, or Public Service. Success is already his, and ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... she was convinced of the return of her dead father and husband and son, and at present will not think of giving up her fancied communion, especially as the 'guides' constantly assure her that 'they' will protect the girl. But observe the senility of this note in Randall's diary: 'Martha comes regularly to me now, and I am happy in a renewed sense of her companionship. Indeed, I fancy at times that I can see her. She showed me her hands last night; I could see ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... bones under a yellowish hide with roughened hair that was shedding dreadfully, as Lorraine had discovered to her dismay when she removed her green corduroy skirt after riding him. Yellowjacket's lower lip sagged with senility or lack of spirit, ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the failure of the powers. When the ambition can be satisfied with the less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are preferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... well lost in return for his attention. Joan, like the spirit of spring, had come upon Palgrave at that time of his life when youth had left him and he had stood at the great crossroads, one leading down through a morass of self-indulgence to a hideous senility, the other leading up over the stones of sacrifice and service to a dignified usefulness. Her fresh young beauty and enthusiasm, her golden virginity and unself-consciousness, her unaffected joy in being alive, her superb health and vitality had shattered ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... would vote for me anyway?" Burroughs had lately developed an exasperating desire to believe that some man was his friend with no thought of reward. Mr. Moore, knowing the aspirant's record and reputation, thought that this portended senility. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... passed that point. He waited patiently till he was naked of scalp and deaf of ear. He endured without repining the bent back, the sightless eyes, and the creaking joints incident to over-maturity. But when he saw a man perish of senility, who in infancy had called him "Old Hank," Mr. Wolfe thought patience had ceased to be commendable, and he abandoned his post of duty ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... he never hesitated in the exact expression of his vigorously held opinions and prejudices; he seldom relaxed the critical elevation of his standards. He was, he thought contemptuously, growing soft; senility was diluting his fibre, blurring his ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... his ideal was a lofty one, and though his children, and even his grandchildren, often urged him to make his debut, he was inflexible on the subject. His great-grandchildren, however, were shrewd, and, taking advantage of the aged pianist's increasing senility, they finally succeeded in making him promise to play at a grand concert, to be given at the capital of Laputa, and, despite his many remonstrances, he at ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... glamour of an English twilight, the old moat-house, emerging from the thin mists which veiled the green flats in which it stood, conveyed the impression of a habitation falling into senility, tired with centuries of existence. Houses grow old like the race of men; the process is not less inevitable, though slower; in both, decay is hastened by events as well as by the passage ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees |
