Mal

“ Our vanity, our pride, our malice, our impurity, our deceit, our every evil passion, has free play, and shows us its finished result, and in so vivid and true though caricatured a form that we are startled and withdrawn from our purpose. The evil thought we have suffered to creep about our heart seems in our dreams to become a deed, and we wake in horror and thank God we can yet refrain. ”

“ What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. ”

“ Toobad. Evil and mischief, and misery, and confusion, and vanity, and vexation of spirit, and death, and disease, and assassination, and war, and poverty, and pestilence, and famine, and avarice, and selfishness, and rancour, and jealousy, and spleen, and malevolence, and the disappointments of philanthropy, and the faithlessness of friendship, and the crosses of love,—all prove the accuracy of your views, and the truth of your system ”

“ And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.'
'But shouldn't we experience a certain horror—a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang—in the mere presence of an evil man?'
'We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. ”

“ Your pride, malice, hatred, anger, revenge, lust. Think of your sinful nature, totally alienated from the life of God. How is your whole soul prone to evil, void of good, corrupt, full of all abominations! Feel, that your carnal mind is enmity against God. ”

“ For who, when he has heard those brief and acute arguments of yours which, as you say, give you so much pleasure, can ever have his opinion changed by them? For when men fix their attention on them, and wish to hear why pain is not an evil, they tell him that to be in pain is a bitter, annoying, odious, unnatural condition, and one difficult to be borne; but, because there is in pain no fraud, or dishonesty, or malice, or fault, or baseness, therefore it is not an evil. ”

“ The covetousness or the malignity which saddens me when I ascribe it to society, is my own. ”

“ On the other hand, those evil spirits, who by long custom, have contracted in the body, habits of lust, sensuality, malice and revenge, an aversion to every thing that is good, just, or laudable, are naturally seasoned and prepared for pain and misery. Their torments have already taken root in them; they cannot be happy when divested of the body, unless we may suppose, that Providence will in a manner create them anew, and work a miracle in the rectification of their faculties. ”

“ In the same way painfulness is translated into malice or wickedness, terror into hate, and every felt tertiary quality into whatever tertiary quality is in experience its more quiescent or potential form. ”

“ Thus error partakes of its own evil, and utters its Amen. If we regard mind as both good and evil, every supposed material pain and pleasure seems normal, a portion of God's plan of creation, and weighs against our course Spiritward. ”

“ Pride, lust, anger, impatience, malice, envy, gluttony, drunkenness, concupiscence, robbery, lying, perjury, idle talking, scurrility, ignorance, negligence, and other pests have overthrown me, and all the vices like ravening beasts have devoured my soul. ”

“ Before acquiescing in your desire, however, I will explain part of the experiences through which you have recently passed. You have been in the control of an evil spirit, and have been deceived. The grotesque figures, the abnormal beings about you, exist only in your disordered imagination. ”

“ Not only the conscience, but the sense of shame or honour, or pride and vanity act powerfully and instantaneously as present motives without necessary reference to any future results. The knowledge that I am giving pain or causing future pain is intrinsically and immediately painful to the normal human being, and the supposed 'analysis' is throughout a fiction. ”

“ This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness. ”

“ If to raise malicious smiles at the infirmities or misfortunes of those who have never injured us be the province of wit or Humour, Heaven grant me a double Portion of Dullness— SURFACE.
Yet they appear more ill-natured than they are—they have no malice at heart— MARIA.
Then is their conduct still more contemptible [;] ”

“ In the abyss of evil into which I am plunged, I feel the blows reach me, without perceiving the hand by which they are directed or the means it employs. Shame and misfortune seem of themselves to fall upon me. ”

“ But I did feel that if at that moment any of those faults had been brought before me which sometimes occur among us; had I heard that any of you had been guilty of falsehood, or of drunkenness, or of any other such sin; had I heard from any quarter the language of profaneness, or of unkindness, or of indecency; had I heard or seen any signs of that wretched folly which courts the laugh of fools by affecting not to dread evil and not to care for good, then the unsuitableness of any of these things with the scene I had just quitted would indeed have been most intensely painful. And why? ”

“ But I realized that the evil, or the good—for why call love an evil?—had penetrated into the most remote regions of my being, and I realized the energy of my struggle like a person entombed who tries to extricate himself. ”

“ Where are the disturbing emotions which are in passion, and the profane thought, and every thing which is evil? Where are envy, and hatred, and contentiousness? Where are wrath and wickedness? Where are pride of heart and the words which are cruel? ”

“ If, however, I can, by lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sorrow; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good humor with his fellow beings and himself, surely, surely, I shall not then have written entirely in vain. ”

“ This evil thing winds through all the inlets of the senses, moulds itself in forms, blends with colors, weds with sounds, lurks in anger and guileful speech, clothes itself in scents, transfuses itself in savors, and by a flood of troublous movement obscures the mind with evil desires, and fills with vapor the channels of the understanding, through which the soul's ray might shed the light of reason. ”

“ The outward covering of infantile and childish innocence, with which those passions and propensities were enveloped, is broken through; those hidden evils, coming forth, cast off their gilded covering, and, with it, also, the beauty and the joy which it communicated. And then the anxieties and pains which evil and sin always bring in their train, nay, which belong to their very nature and are inseparable from them, begin to be felt. ”

“ I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body. ”

“ Certain spirits, by permission, ascended from hell, and said to me, ‘You have written a great deal from the Lord, write something also from us.’ I replied, ‘What shall I write?’ They said, ‘Write that every spirit, whether he be good or evil, is in his own delight, — the good in the delight of his good, and the evil in the delight of his evil.’ I asked them, ‘What may your delight be?’ They said that it was the delight of committing adultery, stealing, defrauding, and lying. ”

“ With the devils of human nature—the vanities, the greeds, the follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas—how do you see such a world...? ”

“ It was a strange life, dark and tortured, in which men and women showed to remorseless eyes the evil that was in their hearts: a fair face concealed a depraved mind; the virtuous used virtue as a mask to hide their secret vice, the seeming-strong fainted within with their weakness ”

“ Men have been thy victims: now take the due reward of all thy wickedness. What art thou, that I should have idolized and gazed with rapture on that form?—something even more treacherous and perverted than myself. ”

“ Let loose the wildest imagination into the realms of wildest wickedness, and yet they dared not, as they feared God, to credit for a moment the union of such appalling and such paltry guilt, in that man who now trembled not before them, but who seemed cut off from all the sensibilities of this life by the scythe of Misery that had shorn him down! ”

“ Returning now to speak of that second evil, which contains within itself innumerable other evils, it is impossible to describe with the pen or to express in words the lengths to which it can go, but this is not unknown or secret, nor is the extent of the misery that arises from the setting of our rejoicing on natural beauty and graces. ”

“ All the petty annoyances of life—a sudden fall, an unlucky [pg 103] word, a headache, a paltry quarrel—were set down to the agency of fiends; and all the fierce emotions that rend the mind—love, hate, jealousy, and madness—were equally the work of these invisible tormentors. Men and women stood in constant danger of them. ”

“ Since we approached that world from without, and never felt the pulse of its heart's blood, we had nothing but doubt after doubt when we contemplated the evil that seemed to be in it. Our efforts to explain evil seemed hollow and worthless. ”

“ When I look strictly into my deceitful and wicked heart, I find it so full of this abominable vice, that I regard myself with horror and amazement; and yet perhaps the next moment, indulge in airy schemes and self-complacency. Sure there is not in the whole universe, so vain and sinful a wretch as I am! ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ This irrepressible delight and interest in the active life of the world, what could it be but the tendency to evil, most strongly developed? These heart-burnings whenever she witnessed men and women rejoicing in the exercise of their natural affections, what could that be but the proneness to evil in its grossest form? ”

“ The follies and the vices, the weariness and the sadness, the discontent and the moroseness of life, all spring from the want of a just conception of its relations and its value, such as can be attained only by calm, deliberate reflection, out of which wise opinions evolve, and are gradually shaped into a creed such as forms the bone and muscle of a wise and noble Character.
Evil is ever the result of the abuse of some good; for nothing was created evil. ”

“ Our original corruptions are the sickness and disease of the soul, an habitual indisposition; our actual transgressions are the wounds of the soul, which put conscience to pain, if it be not seared and senseless. ”

“ The meadows broad From ferns and grapes and from the folded flowers Sent a nocturnal fragrance; harlot flies Flashed their small fires in air, or held their court In fairy groves of herds-grass. He lives not who can refuse me; All my force saith, Come and use me: A gleam of sun, a summer rain, And all the zone is green again. Seems, though the soft sheen all enchants, Cheers the rough crag and mournful dell, As if on such stern forms and haunts A wintry storm more fitly fell. Put in, drive home the sightless wedges And split to flakes the crystal ledges. ”

“ Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. ”

“ Thou who dost blame injustice in mankind, 'Tis but the image of thine own dark mind; In them reflected clear thy nature is With all its angles and obliquities. Around thyself thyself the noose hast thrown, Like that mad beast precipitate and prone ”

“ And then the soul is led into the paradise of endless light. But the soul of the wicked one is met by a hideous old woman, “uglier than the ugliest thing,” who is his own conscience. She says to him: “I am thy bad actions, O youth of evil thoughts, of evil words, of evil deeds, of evil religion. ”

“ But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. ”

“ Their eyes are forever open to human misery. They walk amid desecrated affections, insulted virtue, and blasted hopes. They have grown intimate with vice and blood; they gloat over the wildest illustrations of their soul-damning and earth-polluting business, and are moral pests. ”

“ To reason, justify, to apotheosize evil, to establish its ritual, to show the excellence of it—is this not worse than to commit it? To adore the demon, or love evil, the abstract or the concrete term of one and the same fact. ”

“ If such habits became fixed, through one's own frailty, or the wiles of the devil, or the many impulses that shake the heart like winds, then the soul ought to ascend the seat of its conscience, and reason with itself, and let nothing pass without punishment and chastisement, hatred and distaste for itself. ”

“ In brief, every time we are weak, downcast, horror-stricken, alone with our sin, the victims of evil fortune or of our own baseness, we stand, as we all know, not only in presence of agonising fragmentary experiences, but in presence of besetting problems, which in fact constitute the very heart of our calamity. ”