Devils Inside Us Quotes

But one day, you will be faced with a choice, as we all are. One day you will have to choose between your own desires, your own darkest impulses, and what you know to be right . . . and it will harden you. You will understand that all of us are devils in the skins of men. ~ Samantha Shannon

Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution. ~ Steven Pinker

Monsters will always exist. There's one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

We human beings cause monstrous conditions, but precisely because we cause them we soon learn to adapt ourselves to them. Only if we become such that we can no longer adapt ourselves, only if, deep inside, we rebel against every kind of evil, will we be able to put a stop to it ... while everything within us does not yet scream out in protest, so long will we find ways of adapting ourselves, and the horrors will continue. ~ Etty Hillesum

Jacqueline Carey has created a postmodern fable of enormous scope and force. Santa Olivia is at once a cautionary tale of people caught in a web of lies and creeping terror, and a love song to the beauty and power of being different. At the novel's heart is the kind of grace Carey is known for: an illumination of the strength that lies hidden inside all of us. ~ Eric Van Lustbader

If a person leads an 'active' life, as Wiggs had, if a person has goals, ideals, a cause to fight for, then that person is distracted, temporarily, from paying a whole lot of attention to the heavy scimitar that hangs by a mouse hair just about his or her head. We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss.
Yet, ignore it though we might in our daily toss and tussle, the fact of our impending death is always there, just behind the draperies, or, more accurately, inside our sock, like a burr that we can never quite extract. If one has a religious life, one can rationalize one's slide into the abyss; if one has a sense of humor (and a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised), one can minimalize it through irony and wit. Ah, but the specter is there, night and day, day in and day out, coloring with its chalk of gray almost everything we do. And a lot of what we do is done, subconsciously, indirectly, to avoid the thought of death, or to make ourselves so unexpendable through our accomplishments that death will hesitate to take us, or, when the scimitar finally falls, to insure that we 'live on' in the mem ~ Tom Robbins

Knowledge from experience: the heart goes blind because the need is stronger than anything else. Your ego is blind, your id is eager. It will get to the point of smashing everything. When there is a danger from outside, you bolt, but when the danger comes from inside, how can you bolt? The danger from inside is that complicated thing, the love of the wolf, the complicity that attaches us to that which threatens us. ~ Helene Cixous

It was one of those and so they died/the end stories, that made us demigods feels all warm and fuzzy inside.-Percy ~ Rick Riordan

But I have always believed that stories, too, have a similar effect on us. I am not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake, but when we are inside a good novel we leave our cozy, small apartments behind and, through fictional characters, find ourselves getting to know people we had never met before, and perhaps had even disliked as Our others. ~ Elif Shafak

Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has to two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every single one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are all hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers a sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude, we all try to find out from a stranger whether or not we are related, we all use every long word we know as often as we possibly can, we all go out for a walk in the evening so that we can look over each others' fences, we all think that we are equal to the best. Do you understand?"
The captain was perplexed, "You didn't tell me about the two Greeks inside every Greek."
"I didn't? Well, I must have wandered off the point. ~ Louis De Bernieres

I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality. ~ Jason Bateman

It's time for us to join the line of your madmen all chained together.
Time to be totally free, and estranged.
Time to give up our souls, to set fire to structures and run out in the street.
Time to ferment.
How else can we leave the world-vat and go to the lip?
We must die to become true human beings.
We must turn completely upside down
like a comb in the top of a beautiful woman's hair.
Spread out your wings as a tree lifts in the orchard.
As seed scattered on the road,
as a stone melts to wax,
as a candle becomes the moth.
On a chessboard the king is blessed again with his queen.
With our faces so close to the love mirror, we must not breathe, but change to a cleared place where a building was and feel the treasure hiding inside us.
With no beginning or end,
we live in lovers as a story they know.
If you will be the key, we'll be tumblers in the lock. ~ Rumi

Sometimes a butterfly is not just a butterfly. This is what Oma taught me. You know the worst thing I learned from her? You can be a monster and not even know you are one. They look like us. They think they are us. But really, they've got a monster hiding inside. ~ Jennifer McMahon

Deep inside all of us a huge potential beckons, waiting to open us to the joy, genius, freedom and Love within. ~ Brandon Bays

When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there's your proof. ~ Dennis Cooper

We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, you step beyond who you are and where you are. ~ Robert R. McCammon

The collar had restrained his winds but not killed them. They uncoiled from behind the shadows, ready to surround her, to lift her up, to carry her away with only Ariel's silk-clad arms wrapped about her to keep her from falling.
Spirare, they whispered to her like an incantation. Breathe us in.
Bertie didn't mean to, but she inhaled, and everything inside her was a spring morning, a rose opening its petals to the sun, the light coming through the wavering glass of an old, diamond-paned window.
Tendrils of wind reached for Bertie with a coaxing hand. Release him, and he will love you. ~ Lisa Mantchev

Then when I'd thought nothing else could possibly startle or surprise me, the Lord Master had taken one look at Barrons - and walked away.
That worried me. A lot. If the Lord Master walked away from Barrons, how much danger was I in on a daily basis? I'd been feeling invincible up until those last few moments in the cave. Until one man in the room with me had stripped away my will with mere words, and the other man in the room with me had apparently intimidated that one into leaving. Bad and badder.
I glanced across the front seat at badder. I opened my mouth. He looked at me. I closed it.
I don't know how he continued driving, because we stared at each other for a long time. The night whizzed by, the air inside the speeding car pregnant with all the things we weren't saying. We didn't even have one of our wordless conversations this time; neither of us was willing to betray a single thought or feeling.
We looked at each other like two too-intimate strangers who've woken after the lovemaking and don't know quite what to say to each other, so they say nothing at all and go their separate ways, promising, of course, that they'll call, but each time they look at the phone over the next few days, the discomfort and mild embarrassment of having taken off their clothing in front of someone they didn't really even know rises up, and the phone call never gets made.
Barrons and I had taken our skins off around each other tonight. Shared too many secrets, and n ~ Karen Marie Moning

Nervous sweat gathered on my palms, and for once I was glad I couldn't talk. I swallowed, my throat clenching around the scream scalding me from the inside. The gray haze was darker now, though no thicker. I could see through it easily, yet it tainted everything my terrified gaze landed on , as if the entire gym had been draped in a translucent cloud of smog. And things still moved on the edge of my vision, drawing my eye first in one direction, then another .

I would have given anything to be able to speak in that moment, not just to warn Emma -
because that was evidently a moot point -
but to ask Nash what the hell was going on. Could he see what I saw? More important, could they see us? ~ Rachel Vincent

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either
but right through every human heart
and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All disasters stem from us. Why is there a war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbour. Because I and my neighbour and everyone else do not have enough love. Yet we could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing each day, the love which is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live. ~ Etty Hillesum

Genuine self-love is the most profound experience in the universe. However, it usually takes time, sincere dedication, and discipline to develop. We are surrounded by so many images, beliefs, and behaviors that reinforce the idea of self-hatred every day that it can be extremely difficult for us to connect to the love inside of us. ~ Mateo Sol

We all harbor little pieces of pain that accumulate inside us. Pain we wish we could cast out, but in truth defines us. All we really need is someone to help us bear the hurt. Someone to say I'm right beside you. Someone to say no matter what you're not alone. I want that. I want to be that. For him. ~ Allie Brennan

Inside us there is a place that is our true self. ~ Orson Scott Card

There is NO LIFE if it's a programmed mind. Listen to the struggling kid inside, and follow the innocent unbiased zeal; YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU.
Never fall in to the trap of traditional rationales, which only evaluates in terms of transactions which leads to somebody else's goals someday.
Time is Man-Made, Calendar is Man-Made to help us, not to disturb us, Set your own time, and allow the inner explosion to express itself.
YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU ~ Ansh - The Mystic Rider

Anytime I float by a window, I can tell whether the outside is lit or if it's dark outside. When we're working it's just day for us with the lights on inside. ~ Kevin A. Ford

What I do is based on powers we all have inside us; the ability to endure; the ability to love, to carry on, to make the best of what we have - and you don't have to be a 'Superman' to do it. ~ Christopher Reeve

Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity. ~ Colin Wilson

Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go, of being emptied, of getting in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it merges with the space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into empty. Births happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness ... Let us not fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to penetrate us even as we penetrate it. ~ Matthew Fox

As Marilyn Ferguson observed, No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Isn't it strange that
in order to be happy
we have to ignore
all the sadness in the world
at that moment? That we
have to forget the ballooned
bellies of children that are dark
and empty inside. That not too far
from our homes, women sleep on
cardboard and are grateful for the
bitter wind because at least it's not
rain. That there are teenagers
taught to avoid eye contact
so their fingers are quicker on the trigger
but whose nightmares eventually compel them
to pull the trigger on themselves. That there
are battered dogs with skin taut like a drum,
ribs jutting out, their eyes so beautiful
it makes all the men cry.
Isn't it strange that in order to be happy
we have to unremember a lot of
what we already know?
Yet,
I still don't believe that sadness is our
natural disposition. Because there is
so much to be done. So many to help.
Maybe we aren't meant to be happy
in spite of all the sadness.
Maybe,
it is a call for us to help others
overcome it. ~ Kamand Kojouri

Because each version of us is a unique individual who deserves to be recognized for themselves -- but something deep down inside is always the same. ~ Claudia Gray

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough. ~ Pat Conroy