"Diabolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 cloth ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... could see clear through darkness, you should be told in all the truth of them. But we never can know the truth of Sin; for its nature is to deceive alike on the one side the Sinner, on the other the Judge. Diabolic—betraying whether we yield to it, or condemn: Here is Gibbon's sneer—if you care for it; but I gather first from the confused paragraphs which conduct to it, the sentences of praise, less niggard than the Sage of Lausanne usually grants to any ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... worst species of that diabolic genus I know of. It is at least a month since I sent them a revise of "Evolution" by no means finished, and from that time to this I have ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... was to be asserted, true or false, to blacken the reigning dynasty. . . to find this truly diabolic idea presented to him by a brother of whom he speaks as the partner of all his thoughts, etc., has consumed every spark of favour in which he was held throughout the whole nation, except, perhaps, in those whom party will make deaf and blind for ever to what opposes their own views and schemes. I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... pause in the conversation. Professor Marshall faced the piano again and precipitated himself headlong into the diabolic accelerandos of "The Hall of the Mountain-King." His sister listened with extreme and admiring appreciation of his talent. "Upon my word, Elliott," she said heartily, "under the circumstances it's incredible, but it's true—your touch ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... said, catching the diabolic glances of Miss Ingate and Tommy, "I suppose you know almost more people in ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... after this came a deed which put an end to all this uncertainty. An edict was prepared, ordering the peasants of Little Russia to remain forever on the estates where the day of publication should find them. This was vile; but what followed was diabolic. Court-pets were let into the secret. These, by good promises, enticed hosts of peasants to their estates. The edict was now sprung;—in an hour the courtiers were made rich, the peasants were made serfs, and Catharine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... cold, deadly cold, but correct ever. Fabulous and absurd, delicious and abominable as he may be, his spirit sits critically aloft, never smiling. Impersonal as a toxicologist, he handles his poisonous acids with the gravity of a philosopher and the indifference of a destroying angel. There is a diabolic spleen more strongly developed in Rops than in any of his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Baudelaire, who inspired and spurred him on to astounding atrocities of the needle and acid. This diabolism, this worship ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... his famous "Devil's Sonata," with its double shakes and sinister laugh, a favorite of the violinist, but to the composer ever inferior to the music of his dreams. It is rather curious that anything of a diabolic nature should be associated with this man of amiable and gentle disposition, whose care of his scholars, according to Dr. Burney, was constantly paternal. Nardini, his favorite and most famous pupil, came from ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... was a little man, with sharp black eyes shaded by the 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
... A party of converts were 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 order of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the solemnity of that confidential and conjugal moment which is both the tete-a-tete of wedded life and the secret council of the household—that moment of transformation and magic which is both bourgeois and diabolic, and which reminds one of that story of the woman metamorphosed into a cat. The shadow of the bed falls mysteriously over the wife, and as she lies down there is a sort of charm about her. Something of the bewitchments of a mistress come to her at this ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... yet paid, and the sermon still preached, or has it fallen into disuse now that it is unpopular to believe in witchcraft and diabolic possession? Have any of the sermons ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... suggestion operating upon uninformed minds during an unenlightened age. But communications with spiritual beings rest on no better foundation than communication with Satan. Whether the alleged illumination be diabolic or angelic, the evidence for either, or both, is the same. The testimony of a man like the Rev. R. J. Campbell that he is conscious of a divine influence in his life is of no greater value than that of the medieval peasant who felt himself tormented by Satan. The one person is no better authority ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... was musing painfully, and the time might be within twenty-eight or twenty-five minutes of twelve, when all at once, with a crash, proclaiming some hand of hideous violence, the house-door was suddenly shut and locked. Here, then, beyond all doubt, was the diabolic man, clothed in mystery, from No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway. Yes, that dreadful being, who for twelve days had employed all thoughts and all tongues, was now, too certainly, in this defenceless house, and would, in a few minutes, be face to face with every one of its inmates. A question still lingered ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... world; it might know everything else about him! and once in possession of the property, who would dispute the title? Then again he was not certain that his father had not merely invented a threat! Surely if the fact were such, he would, even in rage diabolic, have kept it ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... rode up to the chief gateway, a grand circular archway, with all the noble though grotesque mouldings, zigzag and cable, dog-tooth and parrot-beak, visages human and diabolic, wherewith the Norman builders loved to surround their doorways. The doors were of solid oak, heavily guarded with iron, and from a little wicket in the midst peered out a cowled head, and instantly ensued ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... exhibited an interesting zoological fact about human beings. We are exactly the sort of creature which evolves such prejudices. Godwin in unwary moments would talk as though aristocracy and positive law had come to us from without, by a sort of diabolic revelation. This, however, is not a criticism which destroys the value of his thinking. His positions required restatement in terms of the idea of development. If he did not anticipate the notion of evolution, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 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 ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... reverence that he influenced his bloodthirsty followers. His chief traits were treachery and cruelty, and his pre-eminence in these qualities commanded their respect. His conduct of the siege of Detroit, as we shall see, was marked by duplicity and diabolic savagery. He has often been extolled for his skill as a military leader, and there is a good deal in his siege of Detroit and in the murderous ingenuity of some of his raids to support this view. But his principal claim to distinction is due to his position as the head of a confederacy —whereas ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... sent for Bemis and tried to talk himself into peace with his friend. He did not speak of the things that were corroding his heart, but he sat by and heard himself chatter his diabolic creed as a drunkard watches his ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... bound from the Antipodes to Old England, chanced to diverge from her true course, and sighted the beacon-fire which Tomlin—on duty at the time—was stirring up to fervent heat. The Captain was not one of those whom Terrence O'Connor credited with diabolic possession. He was a good man; and, knowing that men did not light beacon-fires on lonely islands merely for amusement, he resolved to lay-to till daylight, which was due in about an hour from the time the island was sighted. Meanwhile, he ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... milk is needed for our infant girls and boys; That it aids adult dyspeptics to regain "digestive poise"; But I've never comprehended Why its transport is attended By the maximum of diabolic noise. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... people, too, you find the best enchanters and astrologers that exist in all that quarter of the world; they perform such extraordinary marvels and sorceries by diabolic art, that it astounds one to see or even hear of them. So I will relate none of them in this book of ours; people would be amazed if they heard them, but it would serve no good purpose. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... should say, to the sellers of 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 ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... absolute spirit of "perversity," prompting them to do the very opposite of what reason and mankind pronounce to be right, simply because they do pronounce it to be right. The punishment of this sort of diabolic spirit of perversity, he brings about by a train of circumstances as hideous, incongruous, and absurd, as the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... are the family of Johanna, and her old lover Raimond. Her father Thibaut is also there. He has come to save, if yet possible, his child from perdition, whom he still persists in thinking under the influence of wicked spirits, and to have wrought all her wonders by the aid of diabolic enchantments. Now, therefore, when the king, after his coronation, turns towards Johanna, and, in the presence of all his nobility, addresses her as the deliverer of France, this melancholy father rushes forward to reproach and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... revealed, and the diabolic wickedness of Lady William did not pass unpunished, for she was burnt, and the cook was condemned to stand in boiling lead. A ballad in the Pepys' collection, entitled, "The Lady Isabella's Tragedy, or the Step-mother's Cruelty," records this ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... of more historical accuracy, roundly asserted that Sir 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 rowlocks could be heard muffled and indistinctly during the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... with emotions such as mine, a quiet heart was out of the question. She whom I loved was not only in danger of being lost to me for ever, but in danger of becoming the victim of a dastard coquin—diabolic as dastard! Suffering under the sting of such a fearful apprehension, it required me to exert all the self-restraining power of which I was possessed. Had I but known where to go, I should have rushed to horse, and ridden on upon ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... declared that the Autobiography was going to be something awful—as caustic, fiendish, and devilish as he could make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization or diabolic joke: "Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years after my death." One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in bitter and caustic words, upon a certain strenuous, limelight American politician. I could not resist the temptation to ask him if this, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... drizzle, slow and steady; sky pitch-dark, and I just get a little light by sitting in the bow-window; diabolic clouds over everything: and looking over my kitchen garden yesterday, I found it one miserable mass of weeds gone to seed, the roses in the higher garden putrefied into brown sponges, feeling like dead snails; and the half-ripe strawberries all rotten ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... theology, and English politics and theological disputes did not obviously raise the deeper issues. Even the devil-descended Whig—especially the variety represented by Burke—was as far as possible from representing what he took for the diabolic agency. Burke represents above all things the political application of the historical spirit of the period. His hatred for metaphysics, for discussions of abstract rights instead of practical expediency; his exaltation of 'prescription' ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... of beauty and might. They are aristocrats of intellect and conscience,—the noblest aristocracy, but also the haughtiest and most exclusive. They can sympathize with great energies, whether celestial or diabolic, but their attitude towards the feeble and the low is apt to be that of indifference, or contempt. Milton can do justice to the Devil, though not, like Shakespeare, to "poor devils." But it may be doubted if the wise and good have the right to cut the Providential bond ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... are 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 ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Czech, Serbic, Sclavic,—other hard names I could easily find for it among the tribes of that vehemently heathen old Preussen—"resolutely worshipful of places of oak trees, of wooden or stone idols, of Bangputtis, Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb blocks." Your English "dislike to be interfered with" is in absolute fellowship with these, but only gathers itself in its places of Stalks, or chimneys, instead of oak trees, round its idols of iron, instead of wood, diabolically vocal now; strident, ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... which no man ever returns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard upon fifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly in nature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that it could not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as much oppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, and watching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden, and he ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... English one could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad form. It was like having the mood which the War had left, seated—dark, heavy, smiling, indifferent—in your Empire chair; it was like listening to that mood talking through thick pink lips above a little diabolic beard. It was, as Jack Cardigan expressed it—for the English character at large—"a bit too thick"—for if nothing was really worth getting excited about, there were always games, and one could make it so! Even Winifred, ever a Forsyte at heart, felt ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... material presence already created can be receptive of a disembodied soul, or a soul unattached can have a body built up for it or around it; or, again, whether the body of a dead person can be made seeming quick through some diabolic influence manifested in the present, or an inheritance or result of some baleful use of malefic power in the past. The result is the same in each case, though the ways be widely different: a soul and a body which are not in unity ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... it could never be accomplished by the law of supply and demand, although we were constantly told so. It was a law that had done nothing to settle the feuds of past ages. The fact was that supply and demand had gone into partnership, proposing to swindle the earth. It is a diabolic law which will have to stand aside for a greater law of love, of co-operation, and of kindness. The establishment of a labour exchange, in Brooklyn in 1886, where labourers and capitalists could meet and prepare their plans, was a step ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... grey, rather small, not unpleasant in good-humour, diabolic in a passion, but worst when a little suspicious; then they watch you as though you were a young rattle-snake, to be ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more apparent in his subsequent personation of Medea, in Robert Brough's parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of the abandoned wife of Jason, the diabolic loathing in which she holds Creuesa, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children whom she is afterwards to slay,—all these were portrayed by Robson, through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... in a cloud of smoke, with my dagger in my hand, trying to find my enemy, who seeing me still standing erect, after he had shot at me, thought, no doubt, I had about me some anten-anten—a certain diabolic incantation that, according to the Indian belief, makes a man invulnerable to all sorts of fire-arms. The bandit was frightened, jumped out of a window, and ran away as fast as he could across ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... he pressed forward, regardless of results, 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, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... care of everything. Love is the first house servant in the world, so the table is set with positively diabolic coquetry. There is the white damask cloth, the little blue service, the silver gilt urn, the chiseled milk pitcher, and ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil. They were chemical forces, mostly explosives, which acted and still act as the most violent educators ever known to man, but they were justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may have risked towards the milder teachers of his infancy, he was an abject pupil towards explosives. The Sieur de Joinville left a record of the energy with which the relatively harmless Greek fire educated and enlarged the French mind in a single night ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... joy to us; but we are not to count upon success; or, to put it another way, we are to think of the real success as lying in the dauntless renewal of the effort rather than in the show of outward result. "To have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done right well. To ask to see some fruit of our endeavor is but a transcendental way of serving for reward." This is not pessimism, it is the first step toward a sound and invulnerable optimism. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... North America, duly furnished with his wolf-skin sack; but neither in America nor in Africa is he the genuine European werewolf, inspired by a diabolic frenzy, and ravening for human flesh. The barbaric myths testify to the belief that men can be changed into beasts or have in some cases descended from beast ancestors, but the application of this belief to the ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... whole story, there is not one solitary hint that the destruction of the pigs was intended as a punishment of their owners, or of the swineherds. On the contrary, the concurrent testimony of the three narratives is to the effect that the catastrophe was the consequence of diabolic suggestion. And, indeed, no source could be more appropriate for an act of such ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... 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 world of the good tends to erect man above ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... imaginations to create combinations of wickedness more hideous than civilized men would tolerate, and more unnatural than the human heart could conceive. Let us, by way of example, take a short chapter from the diabolic life of Caligula: In what way did he treat his nearest and tenderest female connections? His mother had been tortured and murdered by another tyrant almost as fiendish as himself. She was happily removed from his cruelty. Disdaining, however, to acknowledge any connection with ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... ambitious to embrace the world in the folding arms of its peace, its communal government and its morality. Pan-Slavism of this nature is the only kind that in truth can ever come from Russia. Pan-Slavism of the military sort, with musketry, bribery and all other diabolic black arts, miscalled government, rests on such a slim foundation that it need be but ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... rebellion have these hated 'poor whites' proved themselves!—their ignorance, their vices, their brutality rendering them all the more appropriate instruments for the work in hand. It would seem, almost, as if a diabolic providence had prepared them for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... confess that curiosity led me long ago to slight experiments in the direction in which you say the diabolic lies, but my mind was never concentrated on any one idea of sufficient interest to command success, until, in some periods of mingled peril and excitement, the memory of Blanche, and the conscious, even startling nearness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... All this was long before the Tsar visited Paris, and our Parisians had never before seen the dashing Spahis, had only heard of them, of their magnificent horses, their turbans and flowing Arab robes, their gorgeous figures, lustrous eyes, and diabolic horsemanship. You know how they ride? No cavalry to touch them—not even the Cossacks! Well, our French friends were struck. The unmarried sister, more especially, was bouleversee by these glorious demons. As they caracoled beneath ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... was by intuition diabolic, I doubt not, that they took that way. Satanas must need help those who serve him; and for my part, I can only attribute (I would the captain here had piety enough to do so) the misfortune which occurred to art-magic. I believe ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... dark relief against the moon and her broomstick cutting a constellation. No undiscovered natural laws, no names of "respectable" witnesses, are invoked to make us feel our presumption in questioning the diabolic intimacies of that obsolete old woman, for it is known now that the undiscovered laws, and the witnesses qualified by the payment of income tax, are all in favor of a different conception—the image of a heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails foreshortened against the cornice. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... me, but I seized upon Cameron's notion. "I accept the arrangement provided you do not hold me responsible for any ill effects," I said. "It's ticklish business. There are many who hold the whole process diabolic." ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... Holy 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, said one, am an election-doubter; I, said another, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a work certain to prove pernicious and abstaining from it, he was free to select a third course and to accomplish it in such a way that the result would not be evil, but unmixed good. In this case it would hardly seem possible to exonerate the doer from a charge of wanton malice, diabolic in degree. And such is the position in which many theologians seem—to those who view things in the light of reason—to have placed God Himself. It was open to Him, they maintain, to create or to refrain from creating. Having ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... transmigration of souls into animals, plants, and other objects. The Tasmanians believed that their souls would ascend to the stars and abide there; and all savages hold the demoniac possession of inspired persons, of madmen, and of the sick, which has led to what may be called a diabolic pathology. The general conception of the world as a living animal, with all the tendencies ascribed to it by Plato, is only the primeval fact of the animation and personification of phenomena applied to the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the sun he never dropped into the sea from Icarian wings. His iconoclasm was the decadence of the social cesspool and the expurgation of money power which he believed was the ne plus ultra of anarchy and the genius of diabolic perfidy. He preached as he felt, tender and terrible, loving and vehement, a strange commingling of Titanic vulgate and cooing peace. Brann was eccentric but all genius must have a certain leeway without being dubbed Quixotic. He ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... all the Wildest West, the Patti of the Plains; I'm a wild Wagnerian opera of diabolic strains; I'm a roaring, ranting orchestra with lunatics be-crammed; I'm a vocalized tornado—I'm the shrieking of ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 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
... of 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 ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... foreign deities to the position of daemons, 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 ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... not cleave, other issues did. The Episcopal Church was cleft into a reform movement (and one unreformable). In his own denomination internal discord raged over such questions as diabolic pleasures and Apostolic music. He saw young people haled before the pulpit as before a tribunal of exact statutes and expelled for moving their feet in certain ways. If in dancing they whirled like a top instead of ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... paused, and finished eating a leg. And then with diabolic art he made a feint at wandering to new fields of anecdote. "Talkin' of senators," he resumed, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... 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 ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... from whatever side, was no less irksome than ignoble. One misfortune was with diabolic ingenuity dovetailed into another. It was bad enough to have killed a man; but the victim was his own uncle, and the father—at least the foster-father—of Gnulemah. And she, forsooth, must idolize the murderer; and, finally, his heart must leap forth in passionate ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... evil is more deeply engraven on the spirit. If a man could but watch over his heart, and observe all the secret reflections of it, all the comparisons it makes, all the desires of applause and favour among men, all the surmises and stirrings of spirit upon any affront, O how would they discover diabolic pride! This sin is the more natural and inbred, for that it is our mother-sin that brought us down from our excellency. This weed grows upon a glass window, and upon a dunghill. It lodges in palaces and cottages. Nay, it will spring and grow out of a pretended humility, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... 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 about us, all by this science and system which ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... had hanged himself. And, anyway, who could have foreseen this woman's "informant" stumbling upon that particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying flame of social revolution? Who could have foreseen? Nobody! "It's a perfect, diabolic surprise," thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna's remarks upon the psychology of "the people," "Oh yes—certainly," rather coldly, but with a nervous ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... upon Gower a glance that she herself would have designated "fell." The effect is, perhaps, a little destroyed by the fact that her big hat has fallen over her left ear, and that she has put on a diabolic grin—meant to be impressive—that gives all the gold with which the dentist has supplied her, to public view. Quite a little fortune ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... in the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil tendencies. This belief lasted even until the present century. Many old women who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were accused of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil, here in the United States, not a century ago. ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... is, at least, irreverence or impertinence. For all men, the chaster a woman is, the more agreeable it is to bring her to the orgasm. That is felt as a triumph of the body over the soul, of sin over virtue, of earth over heaven. There is something diabolic in such pleasure, especially when it is felt by a man intoxicated with love, and full of religious respect for the virgin of his election. This feeling is, from a rational point of view, absurd, and in its tendencies, immoral; but it is delicious in its sacredly voluptuous subtlety. Defloration ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... protective armour of the body politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves. In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and Priestley should ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... immediately a large number of schools, where our writing, language, and literature may be easily and quickly learned, having them abandon their own, which are extremely difficult, so much so that even they cannot understand them while still children. These are a diabolic invention to keep them busy all their lives with their whole minds, so that they can neither go on to other sciences, nor can others teach them, without first ridding them of this hindrance. Once rid of it, not only the children, but even the grown ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... wager after wager. Glenister became conscious of a raging, red fury which he had hard shift to master. It was not his money—what if he did lose? He would stay until he won. He would win. This luck would not, could not, last—and yet with diabolic persistence he continued to choose the losing cards. The other men fared better till be yielded to their judgment, when the dealer took their ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... the 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the human body to learn the nature of disease and its exact seat, and how it might be cured." [22] During the early Middle Ages the Greek medical knowledge practically disappeared, and in its place came the Christian theories of satanic influence, diabolic action, and divine punishment for sin. Correspondingly the cures were prayers at shrines and repositories of sacred relics and images, which were found all over Europe, and to which the injured or fever-stricken peasants hied themselves to make offerings and to pray, and then ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... deep resentment against social injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast.' As a sample of Whiggism Mr. Stephen takes Mackintosh, who, on the subject of the French Revolution, stood half-way between Burke's holy horror of a diabolic outburst and the applause of root-and-branch Radicals. For a type of Conservatism he gives us Robert Southey, whose fortune it was to be fiercely abused by the Utilitarians and ridiculed by the Whigs. Southey, like many others, had been frightened out of early Liberalism into the conviction ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... carved in ebony. Then the night shut down darker than before. As the soundless lightning wavered and brightened, the shadows of the wolves appeared simultaneously to start forward and then retreat, while the noise of their howling carried with it some diabolic suggestion of discordant ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... spite of my grandfather's weighty purse, he could not succeed in prefixing Mister to his name; find he continued for a long time to be known as plain 'Shawn Duffy, of the Devil's Half-acre.' It was undoubtedly a most diabolic address; but Shawn was a man of considerable strength of mind, as well as of muscle, and he resolved to become a juntleman, despite this damning reminiscence. Vulgarity, it is said, sticks to a man like a limpet to a rock. Shawn knew the best way to rub it off would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... laid square, and she commenced to scud dead before the wind towards the mystery of the north. For the first four hours it was doubtful whether the jolly boat, which was in davits across the stern, would last long. Each diabolic lump of water that came galloping along threatened not only the boat but the vessel with sudden destruction. It was very thrilling to witness the tiny brig flying before the ecstasy of the hurricane and fluttering away like a seabird from the mountains that ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Wide and dreary levels of sand, some four or five feet lower than the town, and flooded by high tides; the only vegetation a scanty, dingy gray, brittle, crackling growth,—bitter sandworts and the like; over and through which the abominable tawny sand-crabs are constantly executing diabolic waltzes on the tips of their eight legs, vanishing into the ground like imps as you approach; curlews start from behind the loose drifts of sand and float away with heartbroken cries seaward; little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... table before me sat Mother Borton, contemplating me as calmly as though this meeting were the most commonplace thing in the world. A candle furnished a dim, flickering light that gave to her hard wicked countenance a diabolic leer that struck a chill to ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... All the diabolic inventions of the highwaymen of the Middle Ages to extort gold from their captives were renewed here and there to secure conversions: the feet of the victims were scorched, they were strappadoed, suspended by the feet; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... 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 ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... there came under my observation an incident that will illustrate Lobo's diabolic cunning. These wolves had at least one pursuit which was merely an amusement, it was stampeding and killing sheep, though they rarely ate them. The sheep are usually kept in flocks of from one thousand to three thousand under one or more shepherds. At night they are gathered in the most ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... 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
... that he was happier than those on whom his revenge and perfidy had entailed such a crushing load of misery. It is, indeed, impossible to guess what the nature of that feeling must be which arises from the full gratification of mean and diabolic malignity. Every action of the heart at variance with virtue and truth is forced to keep up so many minute and fearful precautions, all of which are felt to be of vast moment at the time, that we question if ever the greatest glut of vengeance produced, no matter what the ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... sat down on His own footstool. He came from the top of glory to the bottom of humiliation, and changed a circumference seraphic for a circumference diabolic. Once waited on by angels, now hissed at by brigands. From afar and high up He came down; past meteors swifter than they; by starry thrones, Himself more lustrous; past larger worlds to smaller worlds; down stairs of firmaments, and from cloud to cloud, and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... his usual good-nature, took the apologetic side of the dispute. In fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as if it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case, as active verbs; the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... 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
... to enter the Society of Jesus and to 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
... 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, the divine Judge, at whose bidding the cherubs sound their ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... the victim of one of those forms of hypnotism of which there can no longer be any doubt. She could not have gone there without the demoniac influence of a stronger personality. He had charmed her from her home by the exercise of diabolic arts. My fury was entirely for him. I sought him at once, only to learn that he had left the city a few days before, leaving absolutely no trace. I could not give over the hunt, however. If he was on the earth I must find him and be avenged for ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... twice or thrice. But he was on his feet again, 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 almost anyhow; but he gripped the man ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... got to 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 ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... dressing room, that on one of the beds reposed the crowns of all 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
... man's liberty had been rejected in the council of the heavens, and who had been "cast out into the earth", he and all his angels as unbodied spirits, never to be tabernacled in bodies of their own.[39] As an act of diabolic reprisal following his rejection in the council, his defeat by Michael and the heavenly hosts, and his ignominious expulsion from heaven, Satan planned to destroy the bodies in which the faithful spirits—those who had kept their first estate—would be born; and his beguilement of Eve was ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... of the lodge and waited some seconds. Ermolai came out and opened the gate for him. Matrena moved to the threshold of the little sitting-room and watched Natacha's door with horror. She felt her legs give under her, she could not stand up under the diabolic thought of such a crime. Ah, that arm, that arm! reaching out, making its way, with a little shining phial in its hand. Pains of Christ! What could there be in the damnable books over which Natacha and her companions pored that could make such abominable crimes possible? Ah, ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... came Germany with diabolic efficiency, thrusting viciously at the heart of France. Running amuck through St. Quentin and Arras, Soissons fell and Laon. Rheims surrounded, astride the Marne, France awaited her invader. Joffre at the gate! Foch in charge of the defence! On came the Germans! They crushed ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... fifty miles of almost solid ice—ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below—a theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's frozen circle of the Inferno seem ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... an origin, apart from our judgement upon the contents of what claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and wicked thoughts sometimes arise equally unaccountably: the fact that they do so is even now accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct diabolic suggestion. When we have judged the {148} thought to be true or the suggestion to be good, then we, who on other grounds believe in God, may see in it a piece of divine revelation, but not ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... marvellous scientific ingenuity and skill, directed in a kind of diabolic concentration on ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... were almost suffocated, we then threw in a small leather bag of another kind, which flamed like a candle, and following it in, we found there were but four people left, who, it seems, were two men and two women, and, as we supposed, had been about some of their diabolic sacrifices. They appeared, in short, frighted to death, at least so as to sit trembling and stupid, and not able to speak neither, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... It appears that an old long-standing feud between them had broken out afresh, and that the blacksmith had made threats of employing his "hex" (witchcraft) powers on the old farmer. The blacksmith was reputed to be a sort of "hex" or male-witch, and the farmer believed in his diabolic powers and was very much in fear of them. So you see the ideal condition for ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... and milking cows. It made me think even more of the great Australian plains and of the Texas prairie and the round up. Ay de mi, I remember it now, sometimes, and I wish I was on horseback, swinging my whip and uttering diabolic yells, significant of the freedom of the spirit as I rush after the spirit of El Toro. For my pet, my brindled fighter, my own El Toro, whom I combed so delicately with a bent nail, for whom I gathered buckets of bruised but fat Californian ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... encountered at Mindoro. Our mast broke, and a huge wave rushed over our stern so suddenly, so unexpectedly to the pilots and sailors that they, seeing it coming over the sea from a distance, hastily summoned me to exorcise it, which I did. It can assuredly have been of no other than diabolic origin, to declare as the author of so many attacks, hindrances, and contrary circumstances the great devil of Mindanao, whom his Lordship had just so valiantly wrested from ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... when as the camp-fire cast a ruddy, genial flame, He'd bring his tuneful fiddle out and play upon the same; No diabolic engine this—no instrument of sin— No relative at all to that lewd toy, the violin! But a godly hoosier fiddle—a quaint archaic thing Full of all the proper melodies our grandmas used to sing; With "Bonnie Doon," and "Nellie Gray," and ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... freezing, my teeth clinched. I was about to cry out in terror when, by some incomprehensible mysterious attraction, my glance fell below, and I distinguished, confusedly, the old woman crouched at her window in the midst of dark shadows, and contemplating the dead man with an air of diabolic satisfaction. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... for his groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell; in Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world, with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good deal tamed, but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty, and manly Norman, and in many ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... his eyes had this strange, half-diabolic, half-tortured pale gleam, like a goat's, and his mouth was shut almost uglily, his cheeks stern. His moustache was brown, his teeth strong and spaced. The women said it was a ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Trecentisti; and separated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Scott, by its unaccountable affection for "Rokkes blak" and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans, which to Shakespeare were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas and Diabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls to climb, or cross;—all this love of impending mountains, coiled thunder-clouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky, almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Ruy. Steadily in his mind had grown that thought of the parentage of Tahn-te. He was unwilling to think that the native mind could have the keenness and the logic of this barbarian whose eyes were the color of the darkest blue violets, and whose diabolic power made even the Castilians awe-struck, and sent them to prayers more swiftly than did the sermons of the padre. If he only dared hint it to the padre—if by some god-given power he, the insolent Cacique, could ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... as well as skill in practice that threatened his rival's good will. Helen Barton, the doctor's young daughter, perversely kept company with her father's rival. Every one felt sorry for the father but secretly admired Dr. Smelter's diabolic tactics. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... VIRAG: (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the pope's bastard. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... your blushes, and maiden fears, I resorted to these inventions— But, Imposture, begone; and avaunt, Disguise!" And the Devil began to swell and rise To his own diabolic dimensions. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... our parties and sects, and by the suffering and bewildered crowds of the laboring people. Our politics make my heart ache, whenever I think of them. The base selfish frenzies of factions seem to me, at this distance, half diabolic; and I am out of the way of knowing anything that may be quietly a-doing to elevate the standard of wise and temperate manhood in the country, and to diffuse the means of physical and moral well-being among all the people.... ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 is very small. It's so little one could do for her. Still ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... How her face was glowing with delight! How deep a blush was burning on her cheeks! How her eyes were sparkling with diabolic exultation! ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... was diabolic. She could not have kept the sarcasm out of her tone; she did not attempt to keep it out. She cared little if it whipped him to fury. Did he imagine, seriously, that she would be capable of going on her knees ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic attitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which you grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... heard a laugh. A laugh, here in 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 ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... in my paradise, where art thou? Much failing thou wilt not be found, nor much deceived; innocent in any case thou art; but, alas! too surely by this time hapless, and the victim of some diabolic wickedness.' Thus I murmured to myself; thus I ejaculated; thus I apostrophized my Agnes; then again came a stormier mood. I could not sit still; I could not stand in quiet; I threw the book from me with violence against the wall; I began to hurry backwards and forwards in a short ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey |
