"Diabolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Circumlocution Office, not previously mentioned in the present record. When that admirable Department got into trouble, and was, by some infuriated members of Parliament whom the smaller Barnacles almost suspected of labouring under diabolic possession, attacked on the merits of no individual case, but as an Institution wholly abominable and Bedlamite; then the noble or right honourable Barnacle who represented it in the House, would smite that member and cleave him ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... than the lightness of Ariel. But far oftener he is a more potent spirit than any Robin Goodfellow, and as powerful as Ariel and Ariel's master. Trust him wholly you may not; a characteristic often noted in intelligences that are neither exactly human, nor exactly diabolic, nor exactly divine. But he will do great things for you, and a little wit and courage on your part will prevent his doing anything serious against you. To him, with much greater justice than to Hogg, might Wilson have applied the nickname of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... know through the half-caste girl about our ways and doings, and he made a diabolic plot with King Mograbar to get the blacks into the house.... Every living soul was murdered ...surprised in their sleep ... My father ... my mother ... my sisters ... God! ... I can't speak ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... and understand enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indwelling demon Two sources whence better things might have been hoped.—The reasons of their futility The growth of exorcism Use of whipping and torture The part of art and literature in making vivid to the common mind the idea of diabolic activity The effects of religious processions as a cure for mental disease Exorcism of animals possessed of demons Belief in the transformation of human beings into animals The doctrine of demoniacal possession in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... preaching the Evangel to all creatures who were willing or unwilling;—and pressed at last into the Sacred Circuit, the ROMOVA, or Place of Oak-trees, and of Wooden or Stone Idols (Bangputtis, Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb Blocks), which it was death to enter. The Heathen Priests, as we may conceive it, rushed out; beckoned him, with loud unintelligible bullyings and fierce gestures, to begone; hustled, shook him, shoved him, as he did not go; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... instinctive appetites of the brute, but derive from the wreck of his intellectual powers, which he cannot utterly destroy, just so much of a higher nature that they are sins, and not instincts, belonging to the malignity of diabolic nature, rather than to the mere negative evil of ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... relinquish his brilliant position forever. It seemed as if a mysterious force was impelling him thus to expiate the crimes of his house. It is not strange, however, to find a descendant of Alexander VI in the garb of a Jesuit, for the diabolic force of will which had characterized that Borgia lived again in the person of his countryman, Loyola, in another form and directed to another end. The maxims of Macchiavelli's "Prince" thus became part of the political programme ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... War, the doubters having been dispersed, three or four thrust themselves into Mansoul. Now, to whose house should these Diabolic doubters go, but to that of Old Evil-questioning. So he made them welcome. Well, said he, be of what shire yon will, you have the very length of my foot, are one with my heart. So they thanked him. I, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... adversaries." To these words the magistrates all said Amen, and invoked blessings on her Majesty. And most certainly, Elizabeth was sincerely desirous of peace; even at greater sacrifices than the Duke could well have imagined; but there was something almost diabolic in the cold dissimulation by which her honest compassion was mocked, and the tears of a whole people in its agony made the laughingstock of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he seems less an individual than the Pyncheon corpse. In the long chapter which serves as his requiem, and in which there is the suggestion of Dickens not in the best phase of his art, the jubilation is somewhat diabolic; it affects one as if Hawthorne's thoughts were executing a dance upon a grave. The character is too plainly hated by the author, and it fails to carry conviction of its veracity. Yet in certain external touches and aspects it suggests the hypocrite ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... lying within the confines of our existence, just as their bodies formed an entrenched field roundabout the man-made towns. They scrutinized us with arbitrary eyes; they followed us, guiding us with invisible clutch at the slightest indication of deviating from the path; they banded together with diabolic determination to lead the flocks of men who rush after some new and extraordinary ideal, reestablishing with violent reaction, the order of life, which they love, silent and placid, amid rustle of dried grasses and the flutter of butterfly ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... black side of the supernatural his pencil grows more daring and incisive. He has many true inventions in the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised. It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another; the nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket Gate; the scroll of flying horrors that hang over ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attraction, except to a student of literary history who is well out of his novitiate. Such a person should see at once that Chateaubriand's elaborate adoption, from Tasso and Milton, of the system of interspersed scenes of Divine and diabolic conclaves and interferences with the story, is an important, if not a wholly happy, instance of that general Romantic reversion to earlier literary devices, and even atmospheres, of which the still rather enigmatic ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... that I must get away, out of sight of this moveless and diabolic figure, which did not speak, but which made known its commands by means of its eyes alone. "Resign her!" the eyes said. "Tear your love for her out of your heart! Swear that you will never see her again—or I will ruin you utterly, not only ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... admit that money has been lost, I do not think the losses have been heavy. After all, no idolized author and no diabolic agent can force a publisher to pay more than he really wants to pay. And no diabolic agent, having once bitten a publisher, can persuade that publisher to hold out his generous hand to be bitten again. These are truisms. Lastly, I am quite sure that, out of ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... yesterday that I received news from a Carthusian monk,—whom I thought it as well to engage to let me know what is passing,—that there have been debates among some of the higher clergy upon reports received that persons, evidently disguised, call upon me at late hours, and that I practise diabolic arts. A determination has been arrived at that an inquisition shall be made into my doings, my house is to be searched, and myself arrested and tried by the judge for having dealings with the devil. This news much disturbed me; however, when you told me that the Archbishop of Bourges was ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... lively appearance. "In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two years old," he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don't imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies. Now-a-days ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... their derbies, while on the other, neatly laid out, were all the brims. The culprit was never caught. Only the other day one of the long-ago guests was told by the offender that he had been the originator of the diabolic idea. ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more vividly and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the midst of ocean! in the midst of storm! a laugh! Were demons a reality, then? Yes; but the demon he had heard was of his own imagination; it had a face of Medusa sweetness and the laugh—Only Amabel's rang out so thrillingly false, and with such diabolic triumph. Amabel, who might be laughing in her dreams at this very moment of his supreme misery, and who assuredly would laugh if conscious of his suffering and aware of the doom to which his self-sacrifice had brought him. Amabel! the thought of her made ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... actually transport the body of Jesus to some eminence? Probably not. It would not have made the vision of all the kingdoms any more natural if he had. The remarkable language 'showed ... all ... in a moment of time' describes a physical impossibility, and most likely is meant to indicate some sort of diabolic phantasmagoria, flashed before Christ's consciousness, while His eyes were fixed on ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... like a husband. For his cause, his manner could not possibly have been worse. He saw the professor stare at him in surprise and alarm, and felt the excitement of the eight students. These latter were diabolic in the celerity with which they picked out meanings. It was as plain to them as if Nora Black had said: " He is ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... and finished eating a leg. And then with diabolic art he made a feint at wandering to new fields of anecdote. "Talkin' of ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... work at once, and to speak the language of beyond the Rhine, it is the essentially phenomenal hour of the phenomena that we are; everything in us crosses, intermingles, collides, in desperate conflict: it is a time of diabolic or divine excitement. Let a few years pass, and nothing in the world can make us live those hours over again. Where was once a volcano, we perceive only a heap of blackened ashes, and scarcely, at long intervals, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... annihilation for Germany, but better so—and yet I go on as Director of Information; Dr. Zimmern goes on as Chief Eugenist; and you go on seeking to increase the food supply, and so we all go on as part of the diabolic system, because as individuals we cannot destroy it, but must go on or be destroyed by it. We have riches here and privileges. We keep the labourers subdued below us, Royalty enthroned above us, and the World State at bay ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... said, glancing at his last chapter, "to where the alchemic experiments and diabolic evocations have proved unavailing. Prelati, Blanchet, all the sorcerers and sorcerers' helpers whom the Marshal has about him, admit that to bring Satan to him Gilles must make over his soul and body to ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... down the remaining step, beginning to pace back and forth as he always did when approaching the condition he called "going off the hooks." Letty found him a marvelous figure in his scarlet robe, and with his mass of diabolic black hair. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches and beard after the fashion set by the third Napoleon and imitated faithfully by those who sing the part of Mephistopheles in Faust. Hence, his grin was handsomely diabolic. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... afterwards burnt to death in the same place for refusing to apostatize, and their Christian friends crowded to carry off portions of their bodies as holy relics. When these things were reported to Ieyasu, he said, 'Without doubt that must be a diabolic faith which persuades people not only to worship criminals condemned to death for their crimes, but also to honour those who have been burned or cut to pieces by the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... banditti role, very picturesque and barbaric and malevolent. And though he posed heavily, he yet had that Satanic fascination which the beautiful of the masculine and the sinister of the devil cannot help having. His battered magnificence of a charro garb fitted well the diabolic character which Jacqueline assigned him. Spurs as bright as dollars jangled on high russet heels. His breeches closed to the flesh like a glove, so that his limbs were as sleek as some glossy forest animal's. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... racing towards that prone figure. He dropped into the front trench and trod upon a wounded man who screamed beneath his heel, and climbed out on the further side. The air was musical with hooting shell and singing shot and hissing bullet as if a whole diabolic orchestra were fiddling and bugling. Polson found the fallen body of his foe, and hugged it in his arms, and raced back as hard as he could tear. He tumbled into the trench of the first parallel ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... fury. The restlessness of an unsatisfied desire, which, before, had distracted his mind, making work impossible, seemed now to have converted itself into a kind of feverish energy. When it was finished, he told himself, the portrait would be diabolic. He was painting her in the pose she had naturally adopted at the first sitting. Seated sideways, her elbow on the back of the chair, her head and shoulders turned at an angle from the rest of her body, towards the front, she had fallen into an attitude of indolent abandonment. ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the whole affair there was some diabolic intrigue. If Miss Brandon had really procured this order to active service, was it not likely that she would have taken her measures, so that he could not possibly avoid going? Were all these men in citizen's dress whom he saw there really navy officers? The young man who had asked ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... me from my pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God and there's a Saviour too; Once I redemption neither sought or knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, 'Their color is a diabolic dye.' Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain, May be refined, and join th' ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... design which Vigo abetted was nefarious, yes, sir, nefarious! yes, damnable! The same disloyal and turbulent spirit caused the Whiskey Rebellion here in Pennsylvania, which General Dave Morgan, General Neville, and I crushed out. The diabolic sentiment of disunion survives yet; Pittsburg tolerates a set of seditious young men, a nest of vipers ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... you may say, is not a parallel case. No, we grant it is not, for what are these torments to that of a never-ending futurity? They are all as nothing. Therefore every such comparison must utterly fail of doing justice to the diabolic cruelty ascribed to the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... hrrr, hooop, hooop," the diabolic noises came, and Rolf, coming gently forward, caught a glimpse of sable pinions swooping through the ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Hell, struggling into new life from the clinging clay, standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating with lute and viol on the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or clasping "inseparable hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for ever"—these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Dear lady: a parable must not be taken literally. The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher's class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that. Have you ever been in the country ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Griswold seated himself at Edgar Poe's desk a look that was almost diabolic came into his face. The temporary substitution was but a step, he told himself, to permanent succession. As editor of the magazine which under Poe's management had come to dominate thought in America, he could speak to an audience such as he had not had before. He could make or mar literary ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... Francis himself had been little better than a pirate, and had chosen this spot to conceal quantities of ill-gotten booty, taken from neutral bottoms, and had protected his hiding-place by the orthodox means of hellish incantation and diabolic agencies. On moonlight nights a shadowy ship was sometimes seen standing off-and-on, or when fogs encompassed sea and shore the noise of oars rising and falling in their row-locks could be heard muffled ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... invigorating electric belts and to the inventors of patent medicines. But of that last I am not sure, not having carried my investigations so far into the depths. For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic. I shouldn't be surprised. What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc's expression was by ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... unhesitatingly to obey His and His only. "Ad fidem ergo catholicam," he says, "ea solummodo pertinent, quae erga Deum OBEDIENTIA absolute ponit." Consciousness seems to testify to the presence of two mortal foes within us—one Divine and the other diabolic—and perhaps the strongest evidence is not the rebellion of the passions, but the picturing and the mental processes which are almost entirely beyond our control, and often greatly distress us. We look down upon them; they are not ours, and yet they are ours, and we cry out with St. Paul against ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... I wrote a letter which so disturbed the Governor that he immediately set about an informal investigation of some of my charges. Despite its prolixity, its unconventional form and what, under other circumstances, would be characterized as almost diabolic impudence and familiarity, my letter, as he said months later when I talked with him, "rang true." The writing of it was an easy matter; in fact, so easy, because of the pressure of truth under which I was laboring at the time, that it embodied ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... two horns regularly set in, but the five spiky calyx-ends stick out between the petals—sometimes three, sometimes four, it may be all five up and down—and produce variously fanged or forked effects, feebly ophidian or diabolic. On the whole, a plant entirely mismanaging itself,—reprehensible and awkward, with taints of worse than awkwardness; and clearly, no true 'species,' but only a link.[2] And it really is, as you will find presently, a link in two directions; it is half violet, half pansy, a 'cur' ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... the little Erad piano shook with the Grande Valse and the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. The diabolic thing raged through the shut house, knowing that it went unchallenged, that its utmost violence was licensed until the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... what you call dull, Sir John," she protested in her coquettish way. "Nothing but sea, sea, and not even the chance to go on deck. I would sooner have the mutineers. Oh, but it was insensate to leave Europe and France. No, it is a country the most diabolic this side of the ocean. What is there under ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... were in their turn deposed from their high estate, and became the nucleus around which the Christian belief in demonology formed itself. The gods who under the old theologies reigned paramount in the lower regions became pre-eminently diabolic in character in the new system, and it was Hecate who to the last retained her position of active patroness and encourager of witchcraft; a practice which became almost indissolubly connected with her ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... thus disengaged her brother and pushed the poor girl a little further off as it were—isn't women's cleverness perfectly diabolic when they are really put on their mettle?—after having done these things and also made me feel that I was no match for her, she went on scrupulously: "One doesn't like to use that word either. The claim ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... congregation had filed out and gone about its leisurely business, the minister and his wife came forward to greet us. They were a bit nervous, remembering the diabolic uproar about Faith, Hope, and Charity. Mr. Haile was a mild-mannered little man of the saved-sheep type, with box-plaited teeth and a bleating voice. His wife had the worried face and the anxious eyes of the minister's helpmeet, and the painfully ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler |
