"Demonic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... protagonist of a new cause, but a pioneer who had to cut through the underbrush of opinion a pathway for speculation to follow. So far as England was concerned, Scot found no philosophy of the subject, no systematic defences or assaults upon the loosely constructed theory of demonic agency. It was for him to state in definite terms the beliefs he was seeking to overthrow. The Roman church knew fairly well by this time what it meant by witchcraft, but English theologians and philosophers would hardly have found common ground on any ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... mind that all was vanity. 'He gave himself to wisdom, and madness, and folly'; and in all he found but one result—enormous effort and no profit. There seemed to be a time for everything, and a kind of demonic power in men compelling them to toil as with equal energy, now at building up, and now at destroying. But to every purpose he saw that there was 'time and judgment,' and therefore, 'the misery of man was great upon ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... unbalanced kind is indeed a sort of living sacrifice or victim of self-vivisection, out of whose demonic discoveries—bizarre and fantastic though they may seem to the lower sanity of the mob—the true rhythmic vision of the immortals is made clearer ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... their backs. And she is sly and two-faced. Una doesn't mind, of course. She is willing to do anything that comes to hand and never minds whether she has an office or not. She is just a perfect angel, while I am only angelic in spots and demonic in other spots. I wish Walter would take a fancy to her, but he never seems to think about her in that way, although I heard him say once she was like a tea rose. She is too. And she gets imposed upon, just because she is so sweet and willing; ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... passers-by, one comes to realize that man must have a god. The religious instinct is a part of his nature. It is more than a mere capacity for religion. It is active as well as passive. In some sort the candle is already burning. It burns at certain times and places with a fierce and demonic glow. When I saw in Calcutta, so recently the capital of India, a priestess of the temple of Kali, cutting into bits the flesh and entrails of sheep in order that the poorest worshiper might have for his farthing some bloody fragment to offer at the shrine of that hideous and lustful and cruel ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... the realm of Nature and arbitrary determinism thoroughly disestablished in the realm of ends, the two-fold fatality that crushed man with its oppressive power, automatically disappeared. On the one hand, the world ceased to be haunted by demonic powers; it was no longer a miraculous world subject constantly to capricious perturbations. It was no longer a world alien to man's nature and it therefore ceased to be sheerly brutal to him. For the world is brutal only as long as we do not understand ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... apparition, spirit, shade, shadow, vision; hobglobin, goblin, orc; wraith, spook, boggart^, banshee, loup-garou [Fr.], lemures^; evil eye. merman, mermaid, merfolk^; siren; satyr, faun; manito^, manitou, manitu. possession, demonic possession, diabolic possession; insanity &c 503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed by a demon] demoniac. Adj. demonic, demonical, impish, demoniacal; fiendish, fiend-like; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... probably the same as that with which a Christian priest averts demonic influences from the heads of his congregation in the act of blessing them. The many hands of Zeus Sabazios turned up in ancient excavations observe a similar gesture. All over the earth we meet with such periodically recurrent ceremonies of expelling ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... consciously manipulated by the poetic faculty. A mythology that broods over us in our cradles, that mingles with the lullaby of the nurse and the winter-evening legends of the chimney-corner, that brightens day with the possibility of divine encounters, and darkens night with intimations of demonic ambushes, is of other substance than one which we take down from our bookcase, sapless as the shelf it stood on, and remote from all present sympathy with man or nature as a town history. It is something like the difference between live metaphor and ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell |
