Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.
- Emily Dickinson
* * *
"What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times
more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with
it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?"
- Friedrich Nietzsche
* * *
"[The occultist] is brought into intelligent communication with the spirits of the air, and can receive any knowledge which they possess, or any false impression they
choose to impart...the demons seem permitted to do various wonders at their request."
- G.H. Pember, Earth's Earliest Ages and Their Connection with Modern Spiritualism and Theosophy (1876), p. 254
* * *
Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain
unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
* * *
If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal.
Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.
- Dustin Hoffman
* * *
"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say
demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he
finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't
teach it."
- William Faulkner
* * *
"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long,
exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not
driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
- George Orwell
* * *
"The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate."
- Agnes De Mille
* * *
"Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been
there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that
Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it
right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound."
- William Goldman
* * *
"Blanche is written with a terrible authority, the authority that comes from artistic necessity when the writer is
compelled to write by his demon, rather than by his agent or promoter."
- Paul Bailey
* * *
"I have maintained an extreme level of anger and solitude over periods of my life...And in doing so I've developed
into a devil...So in order to know me is to accept an angelic demon."
- Unknown
* * *
"It is better to re-enter hell and become an angel, than to remain in heaven and become a demon."
- Victor Hugo
* * *
"What is Love but the Demon inside or is it an Angel, with play on his mind?"
- Unknown
* * *
“I have become thoroughly convinced that UFOs are real....I believe these beings are not only extraterrestrial but supernatural in origin.
To be blunt, I think they are demons.”
- Hal Lindsey
* * *
"UFO behaviour is more akin to magic than to physics as we know it... the modern UFOnauts and the demons of past days are probably identical."
- Dr. Pierre Guerin, FSR Vol. 25, No. 1
* * *
"Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might even be more than life and death. It might be a struggle for my soul, my essence, or whatever part of me
might have reference to the eternal. There are worse things than death, I suspected... so far the word demon had never been spoken among the scientists and doctors
who were working with me...Alone at night I worried about the legendary cunning of demons...At the very least I was going stark, raving mad."
- Whitley Strieber, "Transformation"
* * *
"I wondered if I might not be in the grip of demons, if they were not making me suffer for their own purposes, or simply for their enjoyment."
- Whitley Strieber, "Transformation"
* * *
"I felt an absolutely indescribable sense of menace. It was hell on earth to be there [in the presence of the entities], and yet I couldn't move, couldn't cry out, couldn't
get away. I'd lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies. Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons.
They had to be. And they were here and I couldn't get away."
- Whitley Strieber, "Transformation"
* * *
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible
is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize
humankind.
- Thomas Paine
* * *
"You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder"
- James 2:19
* * *
"Wherefore to me,- and many others of us, these two seemed not to be human beings, but veritable demons, and what the
poets call vampires: who laid their heads together to see how they could most easily and quickly destroy the race and
deeds of men; and assuming human bodies, became man-demons, and so convulsed the world. And one could find evidence of
this in many things, but especially in the superhuman power with which they worked their will."
- Procopius of Caesarea, The Secret
History, circa 550 CE
* * *
"And they say his mother said to some of her intimates once that not of Sabbatius her husband, nor of any man was Justinian
a son. For when she was about to conceive, there visited a demon, invisible but giving evidence of his presence perceptibly
where man consorts with woman, after which he vanished utterly as in a dream."
- Procopius of Caesarea, The Secret
History, circa 550 CE
* * *
"They also say that a certain monk, very dear to God, at the instance of those who dwelt with him in the desert went to
Constantinople to beg for mercy to his neighbors who had been outraged beyond endurance. And when he arrived there, he
forthwith secured an audience with the Emperor; but just as he was about to enter his apartment, he stopped short as his
feet were on the threshold, and suddenly stepped backward. Whereupon the eunuch escorting him, and others who were present,
importuned him to go ahead. But he answered not a word; and like a man who has had a stroke staggered back to his lodging.
And when some followed to ask why he acted thus, they say he distinctly declared he saw the King of the Devils sitting on
the throne in the palace, and he did not care to meet or ask any favor of him."
- Procopius of Caesarea, The Secret
History, circa 550 CE
* * *
"Indeed, how was this man likely to be anything but an evil spirit, who never knew honest satiety of drink or food or
sleep, but only tasting at random from the meals that were set before him, roamed the palace at unseemly hours of the
night, and was possessed by the quenchless lust of a demon?"
- Procopius of Caesarea, The Secret
History, circa 550 CE
* * *
"Furthermore some of Theodora's lovers, while she was on the stage, say that at night a demon would sometimes descend
upon them and drive them from the room, so that it might spend the night with her"
- Procopius of Caesarea, The Secret
History, circa 550 CE
* * *
"One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward
wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling."
- William James
* * *
"I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion."
- Nicolas Cage
* * *
"The poem is much more about pure good versus pure evil. Whereas the movie, Beowulf goes to take on this troll who they all
perceive as a demon and filthy and ignorant and sadistic, only to discover that that's not actually the case."
- Gerard Butler
* * *
"It did not feel like something that was going to take over my life and destroy it. It felt like a subtle flower instead
of a manipulative demon. That's the mystery of heroin."
- Corey Feldman
* * *
"The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and
sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own
inner logic and wisdom."
- George MacDonald
* * *
"But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there's a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood."
- David Gest
* * *
"Do you know that every unbeliever is filled with a demon spirit?"
- Benny Hinn
* * *
"Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the
guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?"
- George Ryan
* * *
"When you are dining with a demon, you got to have a long spoon."
- Navjot Singh Sidhu
* * *
"Uncertainty! fell demon of our fears! The human soul that can support despair, supports not thee."
- David Mallet
* * *
"How banal, yet irrefutable, is the assertion that [a person] is a mixture of the 'angelic' and the 'demonic.' ... A true
politician... can be neither... 'an angel' nor 'a demon... .' [Politicians] cannot be so if [they are] to... negotiate with
courage and skill on the razor's edge between victory and defeat, life and death."
- Milovan Djilas
* * *
Dr. John Holden: I see you practice white magic as well as black.
Dr. Julian Karswell: Oh yes, I don't think it would be too amusing for the youngsters if I conjured up a demon from hell
for them.
- Night of the Demon (movie) 1967
* * *
"A large number of deaf, crippled and blind people are afflicted solely through the malice of the demon. And one must in
no wise doubt that plagues, fevers and every sort of evil come from him."
- Martin Luther
* * *
"Demons live in many lands, but particularly in Prussia."
- Martin Luther
* * *
"I myself saw and touched at Dessay, a child of this sort, which had no human parents, but had proceeded from the Devil.
He was twelve years old, and, in outward form, exactly resembled ordinary children."
- Martin Luther
* * *
"Many demons are in woods, in waters, in wildernesses, and in dark poolly places ready to hurt...people."
- Martin Luther
* * *
"Snakes and monkeys are subjected to the demon more than other animals. Satan lives in them and possesses them. He uses
them to deceive men and to injure them."
- Martin Luther
* * *
"Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is
the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to
crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again. I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling
in Poetry."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
* * *
"GHOUL, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by
that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefs than to give it anything
good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the
cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads an an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in more than one place
at a time. The good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating"
he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholston relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a
churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. (He appears to think that so distinguished a criminal should have been
ducked in a tank of rosewater.) The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been
bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral
at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix,
entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a
well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen
whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurrence that he never again showed himself in Amiens
and his fate remains a mystery."
- Ambrose Bierce
* * *
"Some on commission, some for the love of learning, Some because they have nothing better to do Or because they hope these
walls of books will deaden The drumming of the demon in their ears"
- Louis MacNiece
* * *
"And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion; for we are many."
- Mark 5:9
* * *
"The angels and the devils are definitely within us, not within the machines we use."
– Michael Dertouzos
* * *
"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."
– Shakespeare
* * *
