Diabolic Quotes & Sayings

The money one gets for selling one's soul is always spent in deadening one's conscience, so the net gain at the end of a lifetime is no greater than if the diabolic bargain had not been struck. — Thomas A. Edison

People are rarely diabolic or bent enthusiastically on evil. As a rule, they are only weak; they cannot resist temptation and thus give way to their evil drives. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

It's terrifying to realize your own decisions are shaping your destiny. — S.J. Kincaid

In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awake the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women. — Angela Carter

When anaesthetics were invented they were thought to be wicked as being an attempt to thwart God's will. Insanity was thought to be due to diabolic possession, and it was believed that demons inhabiting a madman could be driven out by inflicting pain upon him, and so making them uncomfortable. In pursuit of this opinion, lunatics were treated for years on end with systematic and conscientious brutality. — Bertrand Russell

Everyone believed Diabolics were fearless, but in my earliest years, all I knew was fear. — S.J. Kincaid

She slumped a little when she saw me and shot the wolves a siren grin.
"You're so screwed," she declared.
"My sister is going to kick your asses!" ... .
The wolves hackles collectively rose as they set their diabolic sights on me.
They moved as a single unit away from Taran and toward their newest prey.
Thanks, Taran. — Cecy Robson

People spoke so reverently of affection. For me, it seemed a torment. I couldn't believe people enjoyed these feelings. How could someone relish this excruciating need to secure a claim on another human? — S.J. Kincaid

When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power. — Honore De Balzac

I looked at the stone, fragmented and cratered by my rage and jealousy. So this was a visual representation of a Diabolic's affection, then: an ugly, broken, blood-spattered stone. — S.J. Kincaid

That was when I realized for the first time that Sidonia Impyrean - meek, fearful, shy, and gentle - could be indomitable. — S.J. Kincaid

If he was her murderer, I had a lifetime to figure it out. I could avenge her tomorrow if I learned he'd done it. I could avenge her in ten years if I learned in ten years, and I'd have ten beautiful years before that. I would always mourn Sidonia, but I had survived this loss once and I could survive it again. — S.J. Kincaid

Perhaps scorpions were the only ones who could save each other.
Whatever lay ahead, it would always be the two of us above the rest of the universe, and woe to any who dared step in out path. — S.J. Kincaid

What we call "Higher" behavior is elaborated by our abstract mind to ensure survival by an efficient cohesion of our clan.
What we call "lower" behavior is to ensure survival at the expense of a rival, or to prevent the survival of a rival to be at our expense.
So,
Be they our "higher" and "lower" behavior/selves, our humanity and inhumanity, our "Divine" and "diabolic" trends, or any aspect of our Human Nature,
All are created by our abstract mind to ensure survival in an environment of scarcity.

But of course you can always choose to adopt "revelations" which present human nature as:
A messed up image of a messed up supernatural coexistence between two messed up opposite supernatural entities with a messed up relation.

Ultimately, we all think we choose by what we think we know. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

It is human to sin, but diabolic to persist in sin. — St. Catherine Of Siena

After all, to the truly skeptical mind, diabolic forces are just as reasonable building blocks for the cosmos as mindless electrons. No possibility, however seemingly fantastic, should revolt the truly skeptical mind. — Fritz Leiber

The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality ... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual. [ ... ] One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste ... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff ... — Konrad Lorenz

Therefore, not only are their passions satanic, but their lives are diabolic. So I say to you that these are even worse than murderers, and that it would be better to die than to live in such dishonor. A murderer only separates the soul from the body, whereas these destroy the soul inside the body ... There is nothing, absolutely nothing more mad or damaging than this perversity. — Saint John Chrysostom

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities. — Kate Millett

Some might call us a monstrous pair, and they would be right. Tyrus and I were both scorpions in our way, dangerous creatures crossing the most treacherous of rivers together. Together we might sting - but we also would float. — S.J. Kincaid

I had only two goals going forward: to fool people into thinking I was Sidonia, and of course, to try not to die. — S.J. Kincaid

Bel Air, I am convinced, was laid out by some diabolic sadist who deliberately decided not to use a compass or a surveyor. — Groucho Marx

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it. — Roland Barthes

Our ancestors sought knowledge, but we, their descendants, glorify ignorance. — S.J. Kincaid

When a man receives something Divine, in his heart he rejoices; but when he receives something diabolic, he is disturbed. The Christian heart, when it has received something Divine, does not demand anything else in order to convince it that this is precisely from the Lord; but by that very effect it is convinced that this is heavenly, for it senses within itself spiritual fruits: love, joy, peace, and the rest (cf. Gal. 5:22). — Seraphim Of Sarov

This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries. — Andrzej Stasiuk

Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it's the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries. The only thing that would be still worse would be victory for the Jew through Bolshevism. If Bolshevism triumphed, mankind would lose the gift of laughter and joy. It would become merely a shapeless mass, doomed to grayness and despair. — Adolf Hitler

he was punished by the envy of journalists, and by the malignant pedantry of half-civilised judges. Envy in his case overleaped itself: the hate of his justicers was so diabolic that they have given him to the pity of mankind forever; they it is who have made him eternally interesting to humanity, a tragic figure of imperishable renown. — Oscar Wilde

AFTER HAMILTON'S DEATH, I remained at Richmond Hill for ten days. I confess that I was not prepared for the response to our interview. Apparently no one had ever fought a duel in the whole history of the United States until Aaron Burr invented this diabolic game in order to murder the greatest American that ever lived (after George Washington, of course). Over night the arrogant, mob-detesting Hamilton was metamorphosed into a Christ-like figure with me as the Judas - no, the Caiaphas who so villainously despatched the godhead to its heavenly father (George Washington again) at Weehawk, our new Jerusalem's most unlikely Golgotha. I — Gore Vidal

The terrible, diabolic thing with this disease is that you are always looking behind your shoulder every couple months with the most recent checkup to see whether there is any sign of it, and I thank God to say at this point there is not. — Joe Eszterhas

Dark the sea was: but I saw him,
One great head with goggle eyes,
Like a diabolic cherub
Flying in those fallen skies.

I have heard the hoarse deniers,
I have known the wordy wars;
I have seen a man, by shouting,
Seek to orphan all the stars.

I have seen a fool half-fashioned
Borrow from the heavens a tongue,
So to curse them more at leisure--
--And I trod him not as dung.

For I saw that finny goblin
Hidden in the abyss untrod;
And I knew there can be laughter
On the secret face of God.

Blow the trumpets, crown the sages,
Bring the age by reason fed!
(He that sitteth in the heavens,
'He shall laugh'--the prophet said. — G.K. Chesterton

Russian bolshevism, replacing eastern Christendom by the grim religiosity of Marx, produced a caricature of the evangelical counsels with many a diabolical aspect. There is a good deal of "communism" in monasteries and convents, yet this is based upon a voluntary renunciation of perfect human rights. On account of our free will we can make supreme sacrifices which ennobles our very existence. Bolshevism on the other hand forces us brutally into a parody of monastic life amidst fellow monks and fellow nuns who hate their habit and sigh under the ferocious tyranny of their pseudo-abbot. This evil distortion of an otherwise Christian ideal is more satanic than wanton, a thoroughly pagan and diabolic opposition to Christian existence. This explains also the reason why the Vatican has found stronger words against "altruistic" bolshevism than against egoistic capitalism — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree. — Robert Moor

But then, I've always believed love is the most volatile substance in the universe. It erupts, it incinerates, and then it simply flames out. . . . — S.J. Kincaid

Love. Comfort. I didn't know what those were, but I wanted them. I would have them. I closed the distance and snapped the man's neck.
As the third corpse dropped to the floor at my feet, the Matriarch smiled. — S.J. Kincaid

Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. — Thomas Carlyle

diabolic perseverance — Isaac Asimov

Where are we as a modern civilization if our educational institutions conspire to train only a fraction of our capacities? and if this is all they can really do, then why not acknowledge that fact openly and give legitimacy to the other alternative forms of education that do cultivate those neglected dimensions of personality, instead of pretending that anything lying outside the standards set by the Wester analytic tradition is either inferior, anti-intellectual, or diabolic? (p. 293-294) — Eugene Taylor

My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.
Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry.
... The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life.
It wasn't comforting. — Arthur Nersesian

I realized that healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes, all of creation. In so doing, we become participants in the great battle against the powers of darkness. Our little lives participate in something larger. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Plouton's eyes narrowed coldly, and he grinned because he counted the result of this conversation as a tremendous and absolute victory over his older brother.
Abbadon never saw his younger brother as competition or even as an enemy, but Plouton hated his brother from the bottom of his heart. He was controlled and possessed by his own negative thoughts, that his father, King Apollyon, loved and trusted Abbadon more and that he disliked and rejected him.
Plouton was jealous ... very jealous.
He raised his eyebrows and opened his silvery eyes as wide as they could go. Diabolic sparkles appeared in his eyes. He grinned again when he thought about the Titans, the cave, the iron chains, the vultures, and the unforgiving ocean at the Rock of Mukane. (Maradonia and the Gold of Ophir) — Gloria Tesch

A Diabolic is ruthless. A Diabolic is powerful. A Diabolic has a single task: Kill in order to protect the person you've been created for. — S.J. Kincaid