"Senile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... normally within the reach of, or suited to the taste of, the citizens of an ordered state. It is little wonder that the boy regards the moral law as a nuisance and the state as a suitable refuge for those suffering from senile decay. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... destinies are now inextricably mingled with those of Seneca, was accompanied to the throne by the acclamations of the people. Wearied by the astuteness of an Augustus, the sullen wrath of a Tiberius, the mad ferocity of a Caius, the senile insensibility of a Claudius, they could not but welcome the succession of a bright and beautiful youth, whose fair hair floated over his shoulders, and whose features displayed the finest type of Roman beauty. There was nothing in his antecedents to give a sinister augury to his future development, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... shadowed. Her hair was absolutely black at over seventy; her eyes were black and glowing, and she could read and do coarse crocheting without spectacles. All her skin, especially round about the eyes, was yellowish brown and very deeply wrinkled indeed; a decrepit, senile skin, which seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance. The cast of her features was benign. She had passed through desolating and violent experiences, and then through a long, long period of withdrawn tranquillity; and from ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Knights of the Golden Circle receive the news that the South is surely going out. The dream long dear to the Southern heart! Any attempt of the senile Buchanan to reinforce the garrisons of the national forts will be the signal for the opening roar of the stolen guns. They know that the inauguration of Lincoln on March 4, 1861, means war without debate. He dare not abandon ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... has pleasant things for the eye; and one of the best of them was the face of Mr. GEORGE RELPH as Kara, leader of the Samurai. But there were horrors, too; notably the senile amorousness of Zakkuri and the offensive little figure of It, his shadow—an interpolation in the bill of fare. A properly qualified dwarf I might have welcomed; but this precocious babe with the false ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... buried herself in hopeless disgrace, and for her there can be no resurrection here. If she dreams that I am in my dotage, and may relent, she strangely forgets the nature of the blood she saw fit to cross with that of a beggarly foreign scrub. Go back and tell her, the old man is not yet senile and imbecile; and that the years have only hardened his heart. Tell her, I have almost learned to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the commissioners this chill gust from the North struck so disagreeably that, on January 2, they hastened home to their "independent nation." From this time forth the South covered Mr. Buchanan with contumely and abuse; Mr. Benjamin called him "a senile executive, under the sinister influence of insane counsels;" and the poor old man, really wishing to do right, but stripped of friends and of his familiar advisers, and confounded by the views of new counselors, presented a ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... for the first time,) told me that my Diary stirred up the youth. Oh, if so, then I feel happy. Youth! youth! you are all the promise and the realization! But why do you suffer yourselves to be crushed down by the upper-crust of senile nincompoops? Oh youth, arise, and sun-like penetrate through and through the magnitude of the work to be accomplished, and ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart—to the senile canary. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... but it was the Comedie Francaise that was the loser, not the people, when he sailed away in his balloon, posed, squatting majestically as the god of war above the clouds of battle. And little Thiers, furtive, timid, delighting in senile efforts to stir the ferment of chaos till it boiled, he, too, was there, owl-like, squeaky-voiced, a true "Bombyx a Lunettes." There, too, was Hugo—often ridiculous in his terrible moods, egotistical, sloppy, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... for a journalist who could paint—but even the cousin (who took snuff during the interview) could not tell me what he had been—exactly. He was a universal genius—on that point I agreed with the old chap, who thereupon blew his nose noisily into a large cotton handkerchief and withdrew in senile agitation, bearing off some family letters and memoranda without importance. Ultimately a journalist anxious to know something of the fate of his 'dear colleague' turned up. This visitor informed me Kurtz's proper sphere ought to have been politics 'on the popular side.' ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... 'What do you mean by that senile manner, that tart voice! What a Cassandra-like tone! You disgrace those ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... stubborn, senile, is tottering—the undertaker is at the door. Indeed, the old idea of our orthodox friends that they were preparing to die, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... had one of those unfathomable faces in which nationality is lost, was bald, and so grave that his baldness might have been a tonsure. Every time he passed before the Virgin on the prow, he raised his felt hat, so that you could see the swollen and senile veins of his skull. A sort of full gown, torn and threadbare, of brown Dorchester serge, but half hid his closely fitting coat, tight, compact, and hooked up to the neck like a cassock. His hands inclined ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... clock," Lanyard replied stolidly in French. He turned and faced Bannon squarely, loosing a glance of venomous hatred into the other's eyes. "The longer I have to stop here listening to your senile monologue, the more you'll have to pay. What address, please?" he added, turning back to get a glimpse of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... knock he raised his head, an expression, which was a mixture of fear and senile cunning came into his lined and pallid face, his dull eyes peered from under their lids with a flash of sudden alertness, and with one motion of his long hands he hurriedly folded the deed before him, crammed it, with ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... yet, it is true. I have seen him since; but it was only a senile body, lying on its back, covered to the chin, with open eyes, and so still that you might have said it was breathing no longer. I left him thus, with Antonia kneeling by the side of the bed, just before I came to this Italian's posada, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... A sad, senile smile of hopeless bewilderment crept into his hard mouth; he plucked his limp cap from his head and let it hang submissively in his fingers, as if it were his sole apology. Then he tried to straighten himself, and said, "Naw offins, miss, naw offins! ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... the senile nodding of his head accentuated into pettishness; and Ferdinand stood looking after him for a second or two with a smile, but presently thinking better of it, he hastened after the angry old man ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more than juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he should be guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he would get caught in his indiscretion. And yet the memory of the kiss that Margaret of Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted four hundred ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... last such an individual changes vastly. Under stress and fear of circumstances, under the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, all sorts of acquirements are made. The body becomes vigorous and then feeble, the mind grows mature, and then senile. He or she grows wrinkled and bowed and perhaps very wise, or perhaps much the reverse. Yet no one viewing a baby show, a children's party, or an assembly of adults, of whom he has no previous knowledge, can say which is the child of the youthful ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... many years before he died Newman lived at Weston-super-Mare. But two years before his death, in October, 1897, when he was ninety-two years of age, he found himself, partly owing to senile decay and partly owing to a bad fall he had had in the spring of the year, and also to loss of eyesight, unable to take part in public affairs any longer, nor yet to write as he had ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... as her husband, had sunk exhausted into a chair near her. He took out his gold snuff-box, and refreshed himself with a leisurely pinch of snuff, looking about him curiously all the while, with a senile grin. That flash of passion which for a few minutes had restored him to the full possession of his reason had burnt itself out, and his mind had relapsed into the condition in which it had been when he talked ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the volatile populace the villainy of Umballa and the council, to gain wholly, without reservation, the sympathy of the people, the strongest staff a politician may lean upon. Like a brave and honest man he had cast from his thoughts all hope of power. The king might be old, senile, decrepit, but he was none the less the king. If he had moments of blankness of thought, there were other moments when the old man was keen enough; and keen enough he was to realize in these lucid intervals that Ramabai, among all his people, ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... a boyish vanity in work, this substitution of a senile vanity in indolence, this is the first respect in which the rich Englishman has fallen. He was more of a man when he was at least a master-workman and not merely a master. And the second important ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... be sure! That's correct. (Looking at him with a bitter senile.) Well it did pay for the trouble. You are fit ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... short, senile steps a fat little priest entered, accompanied by his psalm-singer, a dark, gaunt man. With these came Sanine. The priest, coughing slightly, bowed to the doctors and to all present, who acknowledged his greeting with ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... of middle age is to remember names, because these have no real relationship or logical value and must be arbitrarily remembered. The typical senile defect is the dropping out of the recent memories, though the past may be preserved in its entirety. With any disease of the brain, temporary or permanent, amnesia or memory loss may and usually is present (e. g., general paresis, tumor, cerebral arteriosclerosis, etc.). As the result ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... shrink, you know," he added, as if he were not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street, you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean- shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to spare his years the fatigue ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... could, however, be no doubt. The crisis through which he had passed had made him, in appearance, a yet older man; when he declared his happiness tears came into his eyes, and his head shook with a senile tremor. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... any kind; the undershot jaw became more intolerant. The personage made his opinion of the group disconcertingly plain, and the old boys understood that he knew them for a worthless lot of senile loafers, as great a nuisance in his building as was the snow without; and much too evident was his unspoken threat to see that the manager cleared them out ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... eyes were blazing when he cried, furiously: "Cut that 'old' out, or I'll show you something. Your mind's gone— senile decay, they call ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,—that idea, I say, is pretty nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,—as fires come, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... said before, is the voice of palsy, and is not, nor ever was, nor ever will be, the voice of passion. Bless your heart, passion is a manly thing, a womanly thing, a grand thing, not a feeble, quavering, palsied, anile, senile thing. Learn that, ye trembling, quavering ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... common in men than in women. While it usually attacks only one foot, it is not uncommon for the other foot to be affected after an interval, and in some cases it is bilateral from the outset. It must clearly be understood that any form of gangrene may occur in old persons, the term senile being here restricted to that variety ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... Let senile soakers And jaded jokers Their bottle-noses still incarnadine, But we, with Villa, Prefer Vanilla Or Sarsaparilla to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... my expectations altogether disappointed if I had not encountered the fixed countenance and the set stare with which I had come to connect this solitary window. Miss Charity was there, and, though I now knew what underlay her senile, if not utterly mad watch, the impression made upon me by her hopeless countenance was as keen as it had ever been, and lent point and impetus to the task I had ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... whom the town had vaguely heard of as a newspaper man in Chicago and New York but whom it had not seen since, had returned home and taken charge of the Express, which had been willed him by the late editor, his uncle. The Express, which had been a slippered, dozing, senile sheet under old Jimmie Bruce, burst suddenly into a volcanic youth. The new editor used huge, vociferous headlines instead of the mere whispering, timorous types of his uncle; he wrote a rousing, rough-and-ready ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... Many of the very strong things in Chaucer, which you may call coarse and gross if you will, are omitted by Pope, and many softened down; nor is there a single line in which the spirit is not the spirit of satire. The folly of senile dotage is throughout exposed as unsparingly, though with a difference in the imitation, as in the original. Even Joseph Warton and Bowles, affectedly fastidious over-much as both too often are, and culpably prompt to find fault, acknowledge that Pope's versions are blameless. "In the art of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Captain Jenness from the gap in the bulwark, where he stood waiting to descend into the small boat. The old man ran towards him in his senile haste, and stooped to get over the side into ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... exhausting disease. (6) Who are engaged in exciting or exhausting employment, in bad air and surroundings, in work shops and mines. (7) Who are solitary or lonely or require amusement. (8) Who have little self-control either hereditary or acquired. (9) Who suffer from weakness, the result of senile degeneration. (10) Who suffer from organic or functional diseases of the stomach, liver, kidney or heart. (11) ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... for China, it became my duty daily to dress the foot of a patient suffering from senile gangrene. The disease commenced, as usual, insidiously, and the patient had little idea that he was a doomed man, and probably had not long to live. I was not the first to attend to him, but when the case was transferred to me, I naturally became ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... we assert confidently that Browning's dramatic instinct has erred? The pity of it—that his great father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should stand before him an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile greed a gift from his son—the pity of it revives an old weakness, an old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles. He has tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his subjects; he has conciliated ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... silence. Far as Vienna fell short of Northern Germany in intellectual activity, the humiliation inflicted on its best elements by this life-destroying surveillance was keenly felt and bitterly resented. More perhaps by its senile warfare against mental freedom than by any acts of direct political repression, the Government ranged against itself the almost unanimous opinion of the educated classes. Its hold on the affection of the capital was gone. Still ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of the House of Lords, he considered two hours was the minimum which he was entitled to occupy, and though he spoke with wonderful briskness, for an octogenarian, at the beginning of his observations, his voice soon became so exhausted as to be a mere senile and inaudible whisper. Deeper and deeper it descended, and the House was in the blackest depths when the Foreign Secretary rose to speak. Everybody knows how embarrassing and distressing it is to an orator to have to begin by rousing ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... so stiff. But his mind was working well enough to see that Bud rubbed the saddle print off Boise and turned his own horses loose in the pasture, before he let him go on to the house. The last Bud heard from Pop that forenoon was a senile chuckle and a cackling, "Outrun Boise in a quarter dash! Shucks a'mighty! But I knew it—I knew he had the speed—sho! Ye can't ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... war, whose prudence and foresight were unparalleled, whose correctness of judgment was a thing to wonder at. And in contrast to that picture of Germany he pointed to France: the Empire sinking into senile decrepitude, sanctioned by the plebiscite, but rotten at its foundation, destroying liberty, and therein stifling every idea of patriotism, ready to give up the ghost as soon as it should cease to satisfy the unworthy appetites to which it had given ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... work is half dead. We deal in creep-mouse sentiment, and call it love. We write pathetically of our impotence to live, and call it resignation. We who have never been young, compare notes with each other on how to remain senile, and call it ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... crouching all together under the Tarter Wall and tremblingly awaiting with mock assurance the bursting of this storm? If you are so good as to see this you will realise the wonderful stage effects, the fierce Mediaevalism in senile decay, the superb distances, the red dust from the Gobi that has choked up all the drains and tarnished all the magnificence until it is no more magnificence at all—this dust which is such a herald of the coming storm—the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... fists clenched. He leaned across the table. "You still don't believe we're near Sol, do you? You're getting senile, Hugh! You know the mathematics of our position as ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... as far as I am concerned, this is the best thing that could have happened. I have been getting abominably lazy. If I had gone on living my present life for another year or two, why, dash it! I honestly believe I should have succumbed to some sort of senile decay. Positively I should have got fatty degeneration of the brain! This will be ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... Rodgers that his services would not be needed that evening for the marriage, as Colonel Crawford had been called to Albany by telegraph, at a moment's notice, on government business. It seemed idle to attempt, in her father's senile and helpless condition, to make him acquainted with the real circumstances of the case; and so Joe's suggestion was carried much further than she had intended, and the old man and all the household were led to the same understanding, with the additional belief that the Colonel had left so ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... objects, and that though he might be weak he was above all else honest. Minister Adams leaned to Russell personally and thought him true, but officially, in practice, treated him as false. Punch, before 1862, commonly drew Russell as a schoolboy telling lies, and afterwards as prematurely senile, at seventy. Education stopped there. No one, either in or out of England, ever offered a rational ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... incredulity and his confidential finger dropped from my sleeve. "Eh, that's the story. I tell what I've heard. What do I know?" He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. "This is a bad place to stay in—no one comes here. It's too cold. But the gentleman said, I must ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... reading them, perhaps also to use that correspondence as a weapon against the imprudent creature who had signed it. But the marquis's rigid demeanor frightened him. How could he divert his attention, get rid of him? An opportunity presented itself unsought. A tiny sheet, written in a senile, tremulous hand, had found its way between those same letters, and attracted the attention of the charlatan, who said with an ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... "the Royal-Martyr" (III, 32) may be considered a modest clue to Swift's Toryism, and it is associated with the Jacobitism of which his Whiggish enemies accused him. Yet an unusual reading of the Struldbruggs in the third voyage (particularly the controls imposed on the senile creatures in order to prevent their engrossing the civil power) as an attack on the religious dissenters demonstrates that Curll and Swift agreed on the issue of an established church. The clergy who wished to separate state from church, or as ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... hotbeds of expensive obscurantism into free nurseries of humanitarian democracy. It was sad to see such a figure as that of Mr. Chumbleton, genial and hospitable, I admit, but utterly heedless of the trend of the times, hopelessly ignorant of the Progressive program, and deriving a senile satisfaction from memories of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... had been ill with a chronic rheumatism. He grumbled a good deal about the "positively senile" character of his affliction and finally agreed to take to his bed for a few days in the hope of luring nature to a hasty cure. The professor was rather helpless when he was ill; Jane was painfully and triumphantly energetic. One memorable ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... shrivelled to a lean brown husk, legs incredibly meagre and so tottery that they scarcely could bear him about. His head—large and finely shaped—seemed so out of proportion that he looked at a glance senile. But no one who had business dealings with him suspected him of senility or any degree of weakness. He spoke in a thin dry ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... cannot readily impress ninety summers. "Yes, I could have told yer that," assented the sage, with senile complacence. "My wife could have told yer that. Any smart girl could have told ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... in the address sent under the royal sign-manual to Parliament, it was invoked to take measures "for better securing the execution of the laws," and it acquiesced in the suggestion. Just as now, a senile executive, under the sinister influence of insane counsels, is proposing, with your assent, "to secure the better execution of the laws," by blockading ports and turning upon the people of the States the artillery which they provided at their own expense for their own defense, and intrusted to ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... its tributaries, while the land through which they flow has been literally drained to death. Even the tributaries have formed deep lateral canyons that meet the level of the main stream. It staggers the mind to try to grasp the time expressed in countless eons since the youth of this now senile river. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... nose. Then he wiped his beard on the palm of his hand, and his hand on his knee; whereafter, as he stretched forth the pair of senile, dark-coloured hands, and held them over the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... house, where was Valentin's study, he was surprised to meet his daughter, who swept past with a white, scornful face, which was a second enigma. If she had been with O'Brien, where was O'Brien! If she had not been with O'Brien, where had she been? With a sort of senile and passionate suspicion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the mansion, and eventually found a servants' entrance that opened on to the garden. The moon with her scimitar had now ripped ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... standard he had devoted years of hourly, daily effort, in every department of art and science? A sickening revolt seized him, aggravated by the smiles of the old woman, who dipped and courtesied before him in senile delight. She may have divined his feelings, for, drawing him inside, she relieved him of his overcoat, crying all the while, with an extravagant welcome more repulsive than ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... pounds to Fred Ryley, and of the recent conditional revocation of that legacy, which had galled her husband's sensibilities by bringing home to him what he had lost through Aunt Hannah's sudden death and through the senile whim of Uncle Meshach to alter his will. He could well have tolerated Meshach's refusal to distribute Aunt Hannah's savings immediately (Leonora thought), had the old man's original testament remained uncancelled. Once upon a time, Ryley, the despised poor relation, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... deserved it. He, however, was not abashed; but changed the conversation, dashing into city rumours, and legal reforms. The old man from time to time said sharp little things, showing that his intellect was not senile, all of which his son-in-law bore imperturbably. It was not that he liked it, or was indifferent, but that he knew that he could not get the good things which Mr. Wharton could do for him without making some kind of payment. He must take the sharp words of the old man,—and take all that he ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... a long sleep of childishness and ignorance. The next stage is the strong an healthy period of its existence, which England is at present enjoying; and then, after various stages of gradual decline, we come to the senile period of national life, when every energy and faculty, every national feeling and power of invention, are completely exhausted. As an example of this depressing condition, we may mention Turkey and several of the effete States of South ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... women Sakaltaves, homosexuality among Sappho Sapphism Savages, homosexuality among Schools and homosexuality Schopans Seoatra Secondary sexual-characters and inversion Seduction and inversion Senile homosexuality Sex, the theory of Sexo-esthetic inversion Sexual organs Sexual precocity of inverts Shakespeare Society and inversion Sodoma Sodomy, the term Soldiers, homosexuality among Sotadic zone, Burton's Spain, homosexuality among women in Spurious ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... said, gentle once more, "that sounds like senile raving. Pardon me. But while I've waited for the politicians of this State to show some signs of decency, waiting in vain, I've been swallowing back a lot of bitterness. No more of it! To our business ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... with a view to finding out the exact cause of death. Among the 111 cases, there are post-mortem records of cases of gallstones, abscess of the mesentery, thrombosis of the mesenteric veins, several cases of heart disease, senile gangrene and one of cor villosum. From no other book do we get so good an idea of a practitioner's experience at this period; the notes are plain and straightforward, and singularly free from all theoretical ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built his house ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... strength of will nor sinew nor good looks; he is magnificent; he has the fear, the frenzy and the resolution of a splendid animal. We have only cowardice, the unenthusiasm and the indecision of base men. If we had the virtue of Commodus, no Commodus could ever have ruled Rome for half a day. But I am senile. I am sentimental. Rather than betray Marcia—and Pertinax—who would betray me for their own sakes; rather than submit my own old carcass to the slave whom Marcia would send to kill me, I am doing ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... The senile mirth had left the trader's face, and his olive skin was ashen. "Next time," he moaned, "next time, Santa Maria, they will be in force and they—they will take the very horse from ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... to despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to a monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft enough to know that it is quite possible, and indeed much in the ordinary way of the world, for senile avarice and craft to set youth and bravery to work to win empire for it. He knows the pedigree of the child left on his hands, and nurses it ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... and dogs, and children. We ought to have remained indoors. Thither we retired for coffee and cigars and a liqueur, of the last of which my friend refused to partake. He fears and distrusts all liqueurs; it is one of his many senile traits. The stuff proved, to my surprise, to be orthodox Strega, likewise ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... but he had contrived to be present when they entered so as to witness their discomfiture. The sight of their amazement gave him considerable enjoyment. Although he was furious at the way this little beggar girl had imposed, as he thought, upon the senile weakness of an old man, it was at least some compensation to know that the two nephews felt the same astonishment and ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... Governor spoke; and, though his words were seemingly irrelevant, they were to the point. His voice had a note of martyrdom running through its senile quaver. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... its maturity. This toleration and acceptance of unavoidable change need not imply want of discriminative perception. We can apply the evolutionary canon in all strictness without ignoring that adult manhood is preferable to senile decrepitude, that Pheidias surpasses the sculptors of Antinous, that one Madonna of Gian Bellini is worth all the pictures of the younger Palma, and that Dossi's portrait of the Ferrarese jester is better worth ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... children, they joined the march with all the paraphernalia of their household goods. From the first this throng, uniting with the usual horde of stragglers and camp-followers, prevented all rapid movements by the army; in fact, but for them the half-senile Kutusoff would not have been able to show even his van to the French line. Mortier's effort to destroy the Kremlin failed, and served no purpose except to exhibit the thirst for revenge of a savage nature ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats' wings—shook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobsters' claws when they lifted any precious article—an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian crystal. This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and cabalistic ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... before him, a task from which his soul revolted. He refused even to attempt it. He sought forgetfulness in a species of mental intoxication, and countenanced his daughter's love idyll with such apparent approval that Lord Ventnor wondered whether Sir Arthur were not suffering from senile decay. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... Ain't any real difference between triplets and an insurrection Chastity, you can carry it too far Classic: everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read Don't know anything and can't do anything Dwell on the particulars with senile rapture Future great historian is lying—and doubtless will continue to Head is full of history, and some of it is true, too Humor enlivens and enlightens his morality I shall never be as dead again as I was ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Mark Twain • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... her pillow to ease the trembling that seized her. The moon had passed on, and darkness, which is allied to fear, closed her in—the fear of unthinking youth who knows not that the grave is full of peace; the fear of abundant life for senile death; the cold agony that comes in the night watches, when the business of the day is but a dream and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of all who saw it! But he has never played a part that he did not make equally distinct. A painter might fill a gallery with odd, characteristic creations by merely copying his compositions of "make-up." The amiable professor in A Night Off, the senile Gunnion in The Squire, Lissardo in The Wonder, Grumio in The Shrew—those and many more he has made his own; while in the actor's province of making comic characters really comical to others there is no artist who better fulfils the sagacious, comprehensive ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... himself in the moonlight and drank deep of the airs of the forest. America! He had chosen! Her youth called to his. He wanted to forget everything that had gone before, the horrors through which he had passed, both physical and spiritual,—the dying struggles of the senile nation, born in intolerance, grown in ignorance and stupidity which, with a mad gesture, had cast him forth with a curse. He had doffed the empty prerogatives of blood and station and left them in the mire and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... repulsive. It tasted no better than beer did when I was five, than bitter claret did when I was seven. When I was alone, writing or studying, I had no need for it. But—I was growing old, or wise, or both, or senile as an alternative. When I was in company I was less pleased, less excited, with the things said and done. Erstwhile worth-while fun and stunts seemed no longer worth while; and it was a torment to listen to the insipidities and stupidities of women, to the pompous, arrogant ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... and blink under patriotic eloquence for hours. It was their dreadful lot subsequently to eat public dinners in country taverns, which brought their gray hairs down in sorrow and indigestion to the grave. The notion of these senile and patriotic duffers aiding and comforting the rebellion was preposterous. Their eyes purged thick amber and plum-tree gum, and they had no notion of doing anything but drawing their pensions, and getting three meals a day, with a horrible fourth ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... saying "Cric!" and he immediately said "Crac!" and laughed in a touching, senile way—"Cric!—Crac! c'est bien ca!" and then he became quite serious ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of the man with tin pail and overalls, which one often sees in America, are portents that mark disintegrating social bacilli. If the Republic of the United States ever becomes but a memory, like Carthage, Athens and Rome, drifting off into senile decay like Italy and Spain or France, where a man may yet be tried and sentenced without the right of counsel or defense, it will be because ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and muscles ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... at his father, who had seated himself on the side of the bed. He had become almost frightful to look at; old before his time, livid of complexion, his eyes bloodshot, the rebellious lock of hair straggling over his right temple. Nothing was more heartbreaking than his senile smile when he placed his bony trembling hands upon his thighs. Amedee, who knew, alas, why his father had reached such a pass, felt his heart moved with pity ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... cannibal tribes kill those of their members who have reached the stage of senile decay, and make them the substance of a more or less succulent repast. These savages act, no doubt, whether consciously or unconsciously, from some perception of the misery and uselessness of old age, but the Russian peasants cannot ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... to refer to Theodore, you will say? How can one avoid it? His death was the cornerstone of the edifice. If only that senile uncle of mine had become King the path would be clear for the final coup before the year was out. And now where are we? What purpose do we serve by self delusion? Each day's newspaper bears witness to our folly. Alec carries the Assembly by storm; Alec captures a would-be ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... know all about that. Well, now, it happens sometimes —not often, but it does happen—that a very young person for some cause or another suffers from senile decay. Some terrible leakage of youth occurs. It has been cured, though, and I've cured one or two ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... group, a deathly silence, during which the aged Landsturm sentry pulled himself up stiffly at attention, or into the nearest approach to that position to which he could attain, and smiled covertly in the direction of the sergeant who had browbeaten him. Others of those somewhat senile guards, who at the sound of their officer's voice had assumed that position of respect demanded of all German soldiers, also cast swift glances in the same direction, and even went so far—seeing that the snappy little officer's back was turned ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... deceit; that he is really older and has lived before at some remote period, and that his conduct fully justifies his title as A Venerable Impostor. A variety of circumstances corroborate this impression: His tottering walk, which is a senile as well as a juvenile condition; his venerable head, thatched with such imperceptible hair that, at a distance, it looks like a mild aureola, and his imperfect dental exhibition. But beside these physical peculiarities may be observed certain moral symptoms, which go to disprove his assumed ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... author treated at length—one of the most revolting transactions in history, especially as there is some reason to believe that the unfortunate girl was, when it was perpetrated, already attached to one of the sons of the loathsome, senile sensualist. ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... conditions and types of society,—is wonderful. Its dramatic strength is none the less marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it has a far greater merit—utility. I have no sympathy with the flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, "Art for art's sake"; that is the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure; of a popular conscience anaesthetized; the cry of sensualism ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... still dim with sleep. Raffles had an ugly cut from the left nostril to the corner of the mouth; he had washed the blood from his face, but the dark and angry streak remained to heighten his unusual pallor. Levy looked crumpled and debauched, flabbily and feebly senile, yet with his vital forces making a last flicker in his fiery eyes. He was grotesquely swathed in scarlet bunting, from which his doubled fists protruded in handcuffs; a bit of thin rope attached the handcuffs ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... least idea of what it all meant. But, like most fathers of his kind, he made no objection to the man's proposal, and told him his daughter was in the house. As Offitt walked away on the same quest where Bott had so recently come to wreck, Saul sat smiling, and nursing his senile vanity with the thought that there were not many mechanics' daughters in Buffland that could get two offers in one Sunday from "professional men." He sat with the contented inertness of old men on his well-worn bench, waiting to see ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... at these things that he had to interrupt, to make the old man repeat his words, to re-question vaguely, before he was sure of the meaning and folly of what he heard. And his awakening had not been natural! Was that an old man's senile superstition, too, or had it any truth in it? Feeling in the dark corners of his memory, he presently came on something that might conceivably be an impression of some such stimulating effect. It dawned upon him that he had ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... everything in the world vile? He had left a young life swimming hopelessly in the breakers of disaster, buoyed only by faith and love; and at his side sat a man who winked complacently, and beamed upon him with senile admiration ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... fecundity of nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... home his most loving child. On October 3d, Clara went back to Berlin to her mother. Her father moved heaven and earth to make Clara suspect Schumann's fidelity, and he gave the love affair as unpleasant a notoriety as possible. For an instance of senile spite: Clara had always been given a Behrens piano for her concerts in Berlin. Wieck wrote to a friend to go to Behrens, and warn him that he must not lend Clara his pianos, because she was used to the hard English action, and would ruin any others! He wrote that he hoped the honour ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... emerald? My emerald? A High King of Eire gave it to his daughter Who mothered generations of us, the kings of Britain; It has a spiritual influence; its heart Burns when it sees the sun ... Shatter my emerald! Only the fungused brain and carious mouth Of senile things could shape such thought ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... wonder, the senile scholar listened to the broken sobs of the child of Valerie Delavigne. He was astounded at her financial carelessness, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... intrigues against the peace of the d'Esgrignons and the sublime devotion to their interests of the notary Chesnel ('Le Cabinet des antiques'), and finally the ignoble passions that fought themselves out around the senile Jean Jacques Rouget, under the direction of the diabolical ex-soldier Philippe Brideau ('La Rabouilleuse,' sometimes entitled 'Un Menage de Garcon'), form the absorbing central themes of a group of novels—or rather stories, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... forget its dignity; should so far descend from argument, from discussion of law to unseemly banter on the question of sex; that it should so far stoop from a canvass of the most important trial that ever took place, to a senile jest on woman, must be matter of astonishment to every candid mind in the legal fraternity, and certainly has a tendency to convince the female portion of the country that the male man is fast losing his right to the definition of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Montrose rode north, where, in February 1644, old Leslie, with twenty regiments of foot, three thousand horse, and many guns, was besieging Newcastle. With him was the prototype of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty, Sir James Turner, who records examples of Leslie's senile incompetency. Leslie, at least, forced the Marquis of Newcastle to a retreat, and a movement of Montrose on Dumfries was paralysed by the cowardice or imbecility of the Scottish magnates on the western Border. He returned, took Morpeth, was summoned by Prince Rupert, and reached him the day ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... senile fashion at the loose ends which lay nearest her old hand, knotted two tightly together with a bit of rare golden strand she kept tucked ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... questions, orders, instructions, and caustic observations. She had egged him on; she had flattered him; she had used every opportunity to fan the flames of his ridiculous hopes. Owing to this the confidence between the two had grown to considerable proportion; the man's senile madness, born of his love for Eleanore, had even aroused ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... wert then in manhood's prime; But age crept on: one God would not suffice For senile puerility; thou fram'dst A tale to suit thy dotage, and to glut Thy misery-thirsting soul, that the mad fiend Thy wickedness had pictured might afford A plea for sating the unnatural thirst For murder, rapine, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Baldo's friend, is a giant; another friend, Cingar, who delivers him, is Panurge exactly, and quite as much given to practical joking. The women in the senile amour of the old Tognazzo, the judges, and the poor sergeants, are no more gently dealt with by Folengo than by the monk of the Iles d'Hyeres. If Dindenaut's name does not occur, there are the sheep. The tempest is there, and the invocation to all the saints. Rabelais improves all he borrows, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... every year adding to her strength. All that I do argue is that the shooting-up of the German infant does us on the whole no harm, and that there is nothing whatever in the figures of our trade to suggest that full-grown England is approaching senile decay. ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... his ring, and then he broke down pitifully. Doubtless there was good in him, but I saw him only once; and with nothing to contrast against it, I may not now attempt to breathe life into the dust of his senile passion. These were the last words that passed ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... was dragging herself along with the assistance of a stick, and at her side was slung a can full of Lourdes water, which she was taking away with her, in the hope of yet prolonging her old age, in spite of all its frightful decay. For a moment her senile, imbecile mind was quite scared. She stood looking at that outstretched, stiffened man, who was dying. Then a gleam of grandmotherly kindliness appeared in the depths of her dim, vague eyes; and with the sisterly feelings of one who was very aged and suffered very grievously she drew nearer, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... increasing degradation, a mere senseless killing of time until the very unpleasing goal is reached—along with a growing selfishness, and narrowness of outlook; along, possibly, with some development of senile sensuality, the more detestable because it lacks the provocations of hot blood. Oh! Dominic Iglesias, Dominic Iglesias, is that the ugly road you are doomed to travel—a toothless greed for filling your belly with ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... contemplated the reflection of his face in the small oval mirror which hung on the rough gray plaster wall opposite, just over the small, cheap, brown-stained wooden bureau. The sight of his countenance, as is the case with most of us who have not yet entered the limbo of senile decrepitude and still dare look ourselves in the face, was always a source of extreme satisfaction to him. He held it in the highest esteem as though it were the head of some beautiful antique Apollo, and in his, the Colonel's estimation, was the handsomest ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... hold their kings in high, indeed religious reverence and take every precaution against their accidental death, nevertheless they cherish "the conviction that the king must not be allowed to become ill or senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the fields, and man, stricken with disease, should die in ever-increasing numbers." To prevent these calamities ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... few minutes at the edge of this line of works, and an old citizen who had been surveying the scene with senile interest, tottered over to our car to take a look at us. He was a type of the old man of the South of the scanty middle class, the small farmer. Long white hair and beard, spectacles with great round, staring glasses, a broad-brimmed hat of ante-Revolutionary pattern, clothes that ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Joseph's senile raptures were simply tiresome, and had he not been enormously rich she would have thought them a little presumptuous. But there were many ways in which Sir Joseph Bullion's friendship proved useful to her. He was not only a wealthy ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... face was yellow, of an earthy shade; the cheeks were sunken, the back long and narrow, and the hand upon which he leaned his hairy head was so lean and skinny that it was painful to look upon. His hair was already silvering with grey, and no one who glanced at the senile emaciation of the face would have believed that he was only forty years old. On the table, before his bended head, lay a sheet of paper on which something was written in ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... of the long-drawn-out picture of senile decay with the advice to remember the Creator needs no elucidation. That period of failing powers is no time to begin remembering God. How dreary, too, it will be, if God is not the 'strength of the heart,' when 'heart and flesh fail'! Therefore it is plain common sense, in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... senile old dotard! Good Lord, I know colonial law; I've been skating on the edge of it on more planets than you're years old. And I never thought of that; why, of course it would. Where are you now, with the ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an aesthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... themselves poets, on account of the beautiful things that are only reflected into their minds from what is above? Besides the reflections, there were alligators in the bayou, trying to slip away before we could see them, and watching us with their stupid, senile eyes, sometimes from under the thickest, prettiest flowery bowers; and turtles splashing into the water ahead of us; and fish (silver-sided perch), looking like reflections themselves, floating through the flower reflections, nibbling ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... Spencer has made in Justice—(and, let us say between parentheses, this work, together with his "Positive and Negative Beneficence" furnishes sad evidence of the senile mental retrogression that even Herbert Spencer has been unable to escape; moreover its subjective aridity is in strange contrast with the marvelous wealth of scientific evidence poured forth in his earlier works)—is ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... of her former voluptuous ardour but weariness of the flesh and a senile tremor of the hands. She had once loved like a she-wolf, but was now wasted, already sufficiently worn out for the grave. There had been strange workings of her nerves during her long years of chastity. A dissolute life would perhaps have wrecked her ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... eminent mathematicians. He speaks of the administrators or editors as if more than one, and does not mention Warner, or lead us to believe that he was sole editor. Only a small portion of this projected criticism seems ever to have been written. It appears to have been begun in senile peevishness, containing only a few prefatory remarks and discussing some algebraical questions with the fancied errors of the editors. No mention is made of the'Atomic Theory,'as promised on the title-page, which is here done into English, and ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... possesses, which are the best pledge for its being able to resist any new invasion of the East. But why did these centres of civilization, which attempted to answer to deeply-seated needs of human nature, and were so full of life, not live further on? Why were they seized with senile debility in the sixteenth century? and, after having repulsed so many assaults from without, and only borrowed new vigour from their interior struggles, why did they finally ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... them in my mind's eye walking on either side of me, the one short and slim with a spiritual countenance; the other tall, handsome, and impressive-looking. Their main object in life seems to be to help me on with my overcoat, and to guide my senile steps over street-crossings, though Dr. Meredith tells me that I am good for twenty years yet, and that I haven't an unsound organ in my body. They disagree with me in politics so politely that I am fool enough to ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... after all!" he roared. "Those d—d fools out there tried to give me the wrong steer, but I was wise to 'em. You buffaloed Rockamore, and that senile old idiot, Mallowe, but you can't bluff me! I came here to see you, and I usually get what ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander |
