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diabolical
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  • A mention of a girl who went "mad as a hatter" after some mysterious involvement in a "diabolical occult ring."   (source)
    diabolical = evil
  • And lo and behold, my diabolical plan is working.   (source)
    diabolical = evil and clever
  • He was a kind of elemental force, a primitive scourge and a raw challenge that summoned diabolic violence from every horse he rode.   (source)
    diabolic = devilish
  • He smiled, such a soft, smooth, diabolical smile that I knew there was some trick behind his smoothness.   (source)
    diabolical = evil (and perhaps clever)
  • The hiding place seemed diabolically simple.†   (source)
  • I knew every inch of my grandmother's house, and Noah and Simon knew almost everything about Hester's diabolical mind; but we couldn't find him.†   (source)
  • He has constructed a prototype of their transceiver and tests fuses and valves and handsets and plugs—but even in those late hours, it is as if the sky has dimmed and the school has become a darker, ever more diabolical place.†   (source)
  • That's friggin' diabolical.†   (source)
  • Even on my hands and knees the effort is exhausting, and I lie down on the ground, shaking, as the room continues to rock back and forth like some diabolical seesaw.†   (source)
  • Adah I T WAS NEITHER DIABOLICAL NOR divine; it but shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.†   (source)
  • We were connected now, the Aurora and this diabolical little ship.†   (source)
  • She's diabolical," Emmett chuckled.†   (source)
  • The pain was becoming diabolical, but in a way I was relieved I still had feeling in that left leg.†   (source)
  • Diabolical celebrations.†   (source)
  • What other diabolical things have they devised?†   (source)
  • It is the matrix; a diabolical scheme in which you are hopelessly trapped even while completely unaware of its existence.†   (source)
  • Leona Cassiani had a diabolical talent for handling secrets, and she always knew how to be where she had to be at the right time.†   (source)
  • It's clever, diabolical.†   (source)
  • Diabolical and self-serving logic.†   (source)
  • He seemed positively diabolic in his enjoyment of our discomfort.†   (source)
  • I am so cunning, crafty and clever, so filled with deceit, guile and chicanery, such a knave, so shrewd, cagey as well as calculating, as diabolical as I am vulpine, as tricky as I am untrustworthy …. well, I told you there were not words invented yet to explain how great my brain is, but let me put it this way: the world is several million years old and several billion people have at one time or another trod upon it, but I, Vizzini the Sicilian, am, speaking with pure candor and…†   (source)
  • Was Moody going to succeed with his diabolical plan?†   (source)
  • The often haphazard segregation of the past three hundred years was to be consolidated into a monolithic system that was diabolical in its detail, inescapable in its reach, andoverwhelming in its power.†   (source)
  • In his white tuxedo, with his wild eyes and brilliant smile, he looked like a diabolical maitre d' seating parties at Chez Mass Murder.†   (source)
  • He taught them about the different grasses and herbs that grew in the fields, and made them smell them and taste them, even caress them, until they were able to identify them one by one according to their healing properties: this one to calm the mind, that one to get rid of diabolic influence, this one to make the eyes shine, that one to strengthen the stomach, this to stimulate the flow of blood.†   (source)
  • There was a sinister and unlikely coincidence exposed that was too diabolical in implication to be anything less than the most hideous of omens.†   (source)
  • That was his diabolical secret.†   (source)
  • He had to make Woref believe that he was playing his diabolical game.†   (source)
  • The attack was decried as an outrage, "proof of the diabolical designs" of the administration in London, as Washington said.†   (source)
  • With all her diabolical, scheming tactics, she would know how to deal with Father's situation.†   (source)
  • Some met Max's expectations—powerful, diabolic figures with curving tusks and fearsome, militant faces.†   (source)
  • But now, serene with Hoagland's method, my memory is fantastic, near diabolic.†   (source)
  • Bren throws back her head and laughs, kind of diabolically.†   (source)
  • There's no mystique, no diabolical universities where we were trained, no driving compulsion to destroy.†   (source)
  • What if he should knock me in the head—or worse; he sounded diabolic.†   (source)
  • I was in the grip of a nameless and diabolical paralysis.†   (source)
  • Carol sat in the middle of the floor, her eyes blazing at an imaginary cauldron, her lips quivering as she summoned double the toil and stinking trouble, and her hands worked diabolically as she bent over her fire on the schoolroom floor.†   (source)
  • Who but the chosen one could have survived that diabolical explosion?   (source)
    diabolical = very bad
  • As time passed, he cast off his diabolical countenance for a new face …. the face of pure reason.   (source)
    diabolical = evil
  • The Illuminati Diamond …. unveiled in its diabolical genius ….   (source)
    diabolical = evil and clever
  • Or perhaps, even now, some diabolical plan is at work, and we are at its mercy.   (source)
  • The tutor had always viewed Redd's fall into the diabolical as his fault, a failure in her education.   (source)
    diabolical = evil or cruel nature
  • The camerlegno had always believed the words "father" and "son" were religious tradition, but now he knew the diabolical truth-the words had been literal.   (source)
    diabolical = evil
  • The blow was a powerful one; only the diabolical quickness of the Count's leap back saved him.   (source)
  • Besides, he called the Count 'lord and master', and he may want to get out to help him in some diabolical way.   (source)
  • It gave me almost a turn to see again one of the letters which I had seen on the Count's table before I knew of his diabolical plans.   (source)
    diabolical = evil (and perhaps clever)
  • There was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great enough for the Count, and as the last chance I cried out, "Shut the door!"   (source)
    diabolical = evil
  • The north and west were surely never meant to be left out of his diabolical scheme, let alone the City itself and the very heart of fashionable London in the south-west and west.   (source)
  • All this without that diabolic aid which is surely to him. For it have to yield to the powers that come from, and are, symbolic of good.   (source)
  • Everything else that is diabolical comes from it.†   (source)
  • This was, like, a seventeen on a diabolical scale of one to ten.†   (source)
  • Between that and the newly sawed-off snout, he looked like a diabolical version of Porky Pig.†   (source)
  • What's diabolical is that someone received money for this rubbish.†   (source)
  • Langdon, as a child, had been terrified when he saw Michelangelo's diabolical "horned Moses"—the centerpiece of Rome's Basilica of St. Peter in Chains.†   (source)
  • L'ingéniosité diabolique de la nature a atteint avec ce serpent le plus haut degré de perfection, the experts claim in the library book of snakes: In this serpent the diabolic genius of nature has attained the highest degree of perfection.†   (source)
  • I suppose the village children once played football there, but these days it's the scene of Capricorn's diabolical celebrations: bonfires, brandy, a few shots fired into the air, fireworks, blackened faces — that's their idea of fun.†   (source)
  • It was during his closing argument, in the final moments of the trial, that Lawton introduced a new and diabolical element into the state's theory of what had really happened.†   (source)
  • Four days since Gazzy and Iggy had blown a hole in the side of the Itex headquarters, thus springing us from our latest diabolical incarceration.†   (source)
  • His grin was diabolical.†   (source)
  • Always didactic, he went into a learned exposition of the diabolical properties of cinnabar, but Ursula paid no attention to him, although she took the children off to pray.†   (source)
  • It had been folded up with almost diabolical cleverness inside the acorn, and it had taken ages, and Ty's skilled fingers, to get it extricated.†   (source)
  • This is diabolical.†   (source)
  • The campfire's light glinted within several eyes and gave a diabolical cast to the giant's grotesque features.†   (source)
  • If nothing else could "satisfy a tyrant and his diabolical ministry," he wrote to Joseph Reed, "we were determined to shake off all connections with a state so unjust and unnatural.†   (source)
  • This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man reminded Nately of his father because the two were nothing at all alike.†   (source)
  • Ursula, for her part, thanked God for having awarded the family with a creature of exceptional purity, but at the same time she was disturbed by her beauty, for it seemed a contradictory virtue to her, a diabolical trap at the center of her innocence.†   (source)
  • During this small hiatus Sophie, almost breathless, continued to focus upon the image of Jan, his mouth slightly parted beneath snub nose and blue eyes as his gaze shifted from the Commandant (pacing the office, as was so often his restless habit) to the possessor of this disembodied baritone voice—no longer the diabolical marauder of her dream, but simply the remembered stranger who had enchanted her with promises of trips to Leipzig, Hamburg, Bayreuth, Bonn.†   (source)
  • At this moment there was a piercing yell upstairs, followed by a long peal of diabolical laughter.†   (source)
  • There was a diabolic gleam in his eyes as if something amused him greatly.†   (source)
  • At any rate, the man, my diabolically distorted double, had his wolf marvelously broken.†   (source)
  • Number XVII appears to have been composed before rationing became serious; but in general the diabolical method of dating seems to bear no relation to terrestrial time and I have not attempted to reproduce it.†   (source)
  • For centuries Daedalus has represented the type of the artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bounds of social judgment, dedicated to the morals not of his time but of his art.†   (source)
  • I thought of her as I had seen her last night, watching me through the open door to the west wing, and that diabolical smile on her white skull's face, and I remembered that she was a living breathing woman like myself, she was made of flesh and blood.†   (source)
  • Diabolical!†   (source)
  • Like a priest of diabolic mysteries, he drew out the blackened blood with a pipette.†   (source)
  • The man must have had diabolically acute hearing.†   (source)
  • It's a touch—of the diabolical, in fact."†   (source)
  • All of this might seem diabolical, but the saloon-keeper was in no wise to blame for it.†   (source)
  • The use of artificial means to make the creature diabolical was a flash of genius upon his part.†   (source)
  • The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament.†   (source)
  • The infantry have two most diabolical upward cuts, which we are too humane to use.†   (source)
  • 'My amiable lady!' he interrupted, with an almost diabolical sneer on his face.†   (source)
  • There was something quite diabolical in not leaving him a farthing after all.†   (source)
  • By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought into court.†   (source)
  • 'Nothing, I suppose?' said Squeers, with a diabolical grin.†   (source)
  • Never mind me, Mum, returned that diabolical cornchandler.†   (source)
  • Both the drivers again laughed their diabolical laugh.†   (source)
  • That is the most diabolical deed that ever you did.†   (source)
  • He flies into diabolical passions sometimes.†   (source)
  • 'Ain't you!' retorted Squeers, with a diabolical look.†   (source)
  • He no doubt feared that by this opening she might still by some diabolical means corrupt her guards.†   (source)
  • Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much?†   (source)
  • It hardly was credible that such a heavenly light could be the parent of such a diabolical sound.†   (source)
  • And, truly, it appeared as if the lad WERE possessed of something diabolical at that period.†   (source)
  • On one point they will show diabolical cunning, while another will escape them altogether.†   (source)
  • I just hope, I pray, that he may forget his diabolical prudence and kill me!†   (source)
  • At this diabolical violence I rushed on him furiously.†   (source)
  • I could find no trace in her of the theatrical appearance which I admired in photographs of actresses, nothing of the diabolical expression which would have been in keeping with the life she must lead.†   (source)
  • That was a diabolical joke.†   (source)
  • The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison-house of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.†   (source)
  • He took part calmly in a number of political assassinations; and he turned his diabolical inventive powers against the Emir of Afghanistan, who was at war with the Persian empire.†   (source)
  • It seemed as though his features had frozen into a diabolical grin at the world he had left and outwitted.†   (source)
  • —the kind of thing that by devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the sight of me for their infernal confidences; as though, forsooth, I had no confidences to make to myself, as though—God help me!†   (source)
  • On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions.†   (source)
  • But no matter how Spitz circled, Joe whirled around on his heels to face him, mane bristling, ears laid back, lips writhing and snarling, jaws clipping together as fast as he could snap, and eyes diabolically gleaming—the incarnation of belligerent fear.†   (source)
  • You were insatiably curious as to what a boy might be capable of, and diabolically clever at getting through his guard and surprising his inmost secrets.†   (source)
  • But now lying between the two guns, as nipped in the vice of fate, Billy's agony, mainly proceeding from a generous young heart's virgin experience of the diabolical incarnate and effective in some men—the tension of that agony was over now.†   (source)
  • Tom elected to remain in camp with those who stayed behind; he felt that he had seen enough diabolical work of the Comanches.†   (source)
  • But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.†   (source)
  • …by creatures otherwise than himself … there had now suddenly appeared, as the genie at the accidental rubbing of Aladdin's lamp—as the efrit emerging as smoke from the mystic jar in the net of the fisherman—the very substance of some leering and diabolic wish or wisdom concealed in his own nature, and that now abhorrent and yet compelling, leering and yet intriguing, friendly and yet cruel, offered him a choice between an evil which threatened to destroy him (and against his deepest…†   (source)
  • "The original hound was material enough to tug a man's throat out, and yet he was diabolical as well."†   (source)
  • But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past, now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an obscene form, with individual and diabolical features.†   (source)
  • And indeed Naphta was clever at making his points, turning a hymn of praise into something diabolic and presenting himself as the incarnation of abiding, disciplined love, so that once again it had become a pure impossibility to decide where God and the Devil, life and death, were to be found.†   (source)
  • The gas crept up through it, colorless, diabolic, and suddenly a buzzard circling above the roof tilted forward, fell slantwise, and lay dead among the watchers.†   (source)
  • Leach and Johnson were the two particular victims of Wolf Larsen's diabolic temper, and the look of profound melancholy which had settled on Johnson's face and in his eyes made my heart bleed.†   (source)
  • And as, every time that she indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts such as, ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil.†   (source)
  • Were they realities, you would have to plead guilty to my indictment; but fortunately for your self-respect, my diabolical friend, they are not realities.†   (source)
  • In your opinion there is a diabolical agency which makes Dartmoor an unsafe abode for a Baskerville—that is your opinion?†   (source)
  • But tonight, in detestation of such literary playboys as Brumfit, he exalted Gottlieb's long, lonely, failure-burdened effort to synthesize antitoxin, and his diabolic pleasure in disproving his own contentions as he would those of Ehrlich or Sir Almroth Wright.†   (source)
  • And whereas Settembrini had spoken behind Naphta's back in tones of pathos-laden admonition about the Jesuit, as if he were somehow diabolic, Naphta made unperturbed fun of the other man and the sphere he came from, suggesting that the whole thing was terribly old-fashioned and backward, an attempt at bourgeois enlightenment perpetrated by yesterday's freethinkers, when in fact it was nothing more than a wretched intellectual mirage, which its self-deluded adherents ludicrously…†   (source)
  • There may have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gottlieb a diabolic insensibility to divine pity, to suffering humankind; there may have been mere resentment of the doctors who considered his science of value only as it was handy to advertising their business of healing; there may have been the obscure and passionate and unscrupulous demand of genius for privacy.†   (source)
  • Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation.†   (source)
  • There was something diabolically sweet in her tones, something of the tinkling of glass when struck, which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another.†   (source)
  • That I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!†   (source)
  • He conveyed it to them with so much meaning, and he had such a diabolical persistency in him, that at length, Mrs Gowan rose to depart.†   (source)
  • Asmodeus—that diabolical personage, who would have been created by every fertile imagination if Le Sage had not acquired the priority in his great masterpiece—would have enjoyed a singular spectacle, if he had lifted up the roof of the little house in the Rue Saint-Germain-des-Pres, while Debray was casting up his figures.†   (source)
  • I do not doubt that she had a choice pleasure in exhibiting what she called her self-command, and her firmness, and her strength of mind, and her common sense, and the whole diabolical catalogue of her unamiable qualities, on such an occasion.†   (source)
  • He tried hard to put on an innocent little expression of simplicity; but it looked like a diabolical grin.†   (source)
  • Men have committed murder for jealousy's sake, and anger's sake, and hatred's sake, and selfishness' sake, and spiritual pride's sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity's sake.†   (source)
  • This diabolical agent had the Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman's intimacy, and plot against his soul.†   (source)
  • At the same time, the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that looked handsomely diabolic.†   (source)
  • We find in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety.†   (source)
  • This was strangely heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of.†   (source)
  • It was not without a leaping of the heart that she caught sight of a small pair of bare legs sticking up, feet uppermost, by the side of a hillock; they seemed something hideously preternatural,—a diabolical kind of fungus; for she was too much agitated at the first glance to see the ragged clothes and the dark shaggy head attached to them.†   (source)
  • Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the waterline, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie?†   (source)
  • "What diabolical villainy you have performed here," said Porthos, when the officer had rejoined his companions and the four friends found themselves alone.†   (source)
  • If the curses he muttered half aloud when he was alone had had no other object than Dunstan's diabolical cunning, he might have shrunk less from the consequences of avowal.†   (source)
  • —He paused, and there was an expression of diabolical passion in the constrained laugh with which he at length broke in on their conversation.†   (source)
  • Meanwhile, he heard the dreadful peal above his head, the diabolical laughter of the vagabonds, and the voice of Trouillefou saying,— "Pick me up that knave, and hang him without ceremony."†   (source)
  • "My mind," Sir Leicester adds with a generous warmth, "has not, as may be easily supposed, recovered its tone since the late diabolical occurrence.†   (source)
  • It not only divided States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.†   (source)
  • …sentiments towards her, not perfectly reconcilable with — in fact with — the domestic hearth; or in taking any advantage of her father's being a machine, or of her brother's being a whelp, or of her husband's being a bear; I beg to be allowed to assure you that I have had no particularly evil intentions, but have glided on from one step to another with a smoothness so perfectly diabolical, that I had not the slightest idea the catalogue was half so long until I began to turn it over.†   (source)
  • Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Brooke might have got along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the remotest seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the enemy.†   (source)
  • If you had listened to the voice of conscience and heeded the stings of remorse before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.†   (source)
  • Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter between them, the last three on one side of the table: on the opposite side sat Mr Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman, travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest—nobody, herself…†   (source)
  • Maggie thought it very likely that the round house had snakes on the floor, and bats in the bedroom; for she had seen Bob take off his cap to show Tom a little snake that was inside it, and another time he had a handful of young bats: altogether, he was an irregular character, perhaps even slightly diabolical, judging from his intimacy with snakes and bats; and to crown all, when Tom had Bob for a companion, he didn't mind about Maggie, and would never let her go with him.†   (source)
  • I tell thee, the fiend can impose diseases for the very purpose of removing them, in order to bring into credit some diabolical fashion of cure.†   (source)
  • In whatever capacity you ask after my employer, I beg, without offence to you, to limit my reply to this — that whatever his state of health may be, his appearance is foxy: not to say diabolical.†   (source)
  • As I stood idle by Mr. Jaggers's fire, its rising and falling flame made the two casts on the shelf look as if they were playing a diabolical game at bo-peep with me; while the pair of coarse, fat office candles that dimly lighted Mr. Jaggers as he wrote in a corner were decorated with dirty winding-sheets, as if in remembrance of a host of hanged clients.†   (source)
  • Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of "Candide" in spite of this, and in spite of this, he is, among all the men who have followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one who has best possessed the diabolical laugh.†   (source)
  • "Ho, ho! haw! haw! haw!" laughed both the sooty wretches; and the diabolical sounds seemed, in truth, a not unapt expression of the fiendish character which Legree gave them.†   (source)
  • Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose.†   (source)
  • He met his eyes directly; and on the instant of their fixing one another, the visitor, with that ugly play of nose and moustache, laughed (as he had done at every similar moment since they left Mrs Clennam's chamber) a diabolically silent laugh.†   (source)
  • There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at himself, he represented to himself la Esmeralda as he had seen her on that first day, lively, careless, joyous, gayly attired, dancing, winged, harmonious, and la Esmeralda of the last day, in her scanty shift, with a rope about her neck, mounting slowly with her bare feet, the angular ladder of the gallows; he figured to himself this double picture in such a manner . that he gave vent to a terrible cry.†   (source)
  • Beside this deadly apparatus stood four black slaves, whose colour and African features, then so little known in England, appalled the multitude, who gazed on them as on demons employed about their own diabolical exercises.†   (source)
  • This was the proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for what appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming, among other things, that he had launched Mr. Peggotty's house on a piratical expedition, with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the inscription 'Tidd's Practice', under which diabolical ensign he was carrying me and little Em'ly to the Spanish Main, to be drowned.†   (source)
  • "Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap.†   (source)
  • The queen cast a glance around her, and saw the cardinal behind, with a diabolical smile on his countenance.†   (source)
  • It is clear that the irascible miller was a man to interpret any chance-shot that grazed him as an attempt on his own life, and was liable to entanglements in this puzzling world, which, due consideration had to his own infallibility, required the hypothesis of a very active diabolical agency to explain them.†   (source)
  • 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 member and cleave him asunder, with a statement of the quantity of business (for the prevention of business)…†   (source)
  • Ah, he likes being always surrounded with company, and he likes to tell his companions everything, even his most diabolical and dangerous ideas; he likes to share every thought with others, and expects, for some reason, that those he confides in will meet him with perfect sympathy, enter into all his troubles and anxieties, take his part and not oppose him in anything.†   (source)
  • He would not have believed that two sentiments so opposite could dwell in the same heart, and by their union constitute a passion so strange, and as it were, diabolical.†   (source)
  • Thou art condemned to die not a sudden and easy death, such as misery chooses, and despair welcomes, but a slow, wretched, protracted course of torture, suited to what the diabolical bigotry of these men calls thy crime.†   (source)
  • 'Master Linton,' I cried, seeing we were regularly imprisoned, 'you know what your diabolical father is after, and you shall tell us, or I'll box your ears, as he has done your cousin's.'†   (source)
  • 'No, it was not because I disliked Mr. Heathcliff, but because Mr. Heathcliff dislikes me; and is a most diabolical man, delighting to wrong and ruin those he hates, if they give him the slightest opportunity.†   (source)
  • His forehead, that I once thought so manly, and that I now think so diabolical, was shaded with a heavy cloud; his basilisk eyes were nearly quenched by sleeplessness, and weeping, perhaps, for the lashes were wet then: his lips devoid of their ferocious sneer, and sealed in an expression of unspeakable sadness.†   (source)
  • "I do not know," said he, after a pause of expectation on her side, and thoughtfulness on his own,—"how YOU may have accounted for my behaviour to your sister, or what diabolical motive you may have imputed to me.†   (source)
  • They looked repulsive, filthy, diabolical.†   (source)
  • VIRAG: (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward.†   (source)
  • "It is true," said Candide; "there is something diabolical in this affair."†   (source)
  • This young fellow, among many other tolerable bad qualities, had one very diabolical.†   (source)
  • We may therefore believe, without any hesitation, that since, as you say, sir knight, everything in this castle goes and is brought about by means of enchantment, Sancho, I say, may possibly have seen, through this diabolical medium, what he says he saw so much to the detriment of my modesty.†   (source)
  • Had not my hand been withheld from due correction, I had scourged much of this diabolical spirit out of a boy, of whom from his infancy I discovered the devil had taken such entire possession.†   (source)
  • For as men of a benign disposition enjoy their own acts of beneficence equally with those to whom they are done, so there are scarce any natures so entirely diabolical, as to be capable of doing injuries, without paying themselves some pangs for the ruin which they bring on their fellow-creatures.†   (source)
  • I now began to argue very seriously with him, in opposition to this heathenish, or indeed diabolical, principle of the lawfulness of self-murder; and said everything which occurred to me on the subject; but, to my great concern, it seemed to have very little effect on him.†   (source)
  • Whether the captain acted by this maxim, I will not positively determine: so far we may confidently say, that his actions may be fairly derived from this diabolical principle; and indeed it is difficult to assign any other motive to them: for no sooner was he possessed of Miss Bridget, and reconciled to Allworthy, than he began to show a coldness to his brother which increased daily; till at length it grew into rudeness, and became very visible to every one.†   (source)
  • …bad enough to verify that _——nulla virtute redemptum A vitiis_——[*] [*] Whose vices are not allayed with a single virtue in Juvenal; nor do I, indeed, conceive the good purposes served by inserting characters of such angelic perfection, or such diabolical depravity, in any work of invention; since, from contemplating either, the mind of man is more likely to be overwhelmed with sorrow and shame than to draw any good uses from such patterns; for in the former instance he may be both…†   (source)
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