beside oneself

1. In a state of extreme agitation or excitement, as in She was beside herself when she found she'd lost her ring, or Peter was beside himself with joy—he'd won the poetry award. This phrase appears in the New Testament (Acts 26:24): “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning makes thee mad.” [Late 1400s]

Example Sentences

“Para has the word parallel in it, so it really translates to being beside oneself.”

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We see an earnestness which wore the appearance of being beside oneself; an energy which hardly afforded a moment for rest or refreshment; and a tenderness which could weep over impenitent sinners.

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Everybody talks to you of yourself, ay, and of your wife and your mother, as frankly as though they were characters of the heathen mythology: they treat you like a third party in these discussions, and very likely it was a practice of this kind originally suggested the phrase of being "beside oneself."

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If I may apply an ordinary phrase in an extraordinary way, to be always "beside oneself," always doubting, always wanting, always striving, or to be, in the words of earlier pages, ever and always divided against oneself, is to have enlisted man and nature and God for ever in one's service.

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V. Nor were they less ingenious in calling the state of the soul devoid of the light of the mind, “a being out of one's mind,” “a being beside oneself.”

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