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Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside.
Sep 29, 2025
Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.
The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.
[P]ride has no intrinsic substance, being no more than the name given to the soul devouring itself. When that loathsome perversion of love has borne its fruit, it has another, more meaningful and weightier name. We call it hatred.
If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who best promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time.
Principle #6: Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.
Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.
With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.
It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.
Then love-devouring Death do what he dare.
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.
Introspection is a devouring monster.
Many of us are hunting mice - while lions devour the land.
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
We have reached a point where the value we do add to our economy is now being outweighed by the value we are removing, not only from future generations in terms of diminished resources, but from ourselves in terms of unlivable cities, deadening jobs, deteriorating health, and rising crime. In biological terms, we have become a parasite and are devouring our host.
All-devouring time, envious age, Nought can escape you, and by slow degrees, Worn by your teeth, all things will lingering die.
Devouring Time and envious Age, all things yield to you; and with lingering death you destroy, step by step, with venomed tooth whatever you attack.
It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.
Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.
In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.
CARNIVOROUS, adj. Addicted to the cruelty of devouring the timorous vegetarian, his heirs and assigns.
The crocodile cannot turn its head. Like all science, it must always go forward with all-devouring jaws.
I was very strict on that point. No devouring classmates." Jeremy rolled his eyes. "Other parents warn their kids not to talk to strangers. I had to warn mine not to eat them.
Among the cancers devouring the American body politic, one of the most virulent involves liberals who play the race card as carelessly as children playing 52 Pickup.
For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.
Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.
Cannibals are devouring senators.
The leviathan state, that monster devouring civilization in this century, is in the throes of death. This is not a wish or a prediction, but a conclusion drawn from a broad look at the trends of the last decade and a half, which, if we take the right steps, can continue on into the next century. What has happened around the world - nations states collapsing, markets outwitting planners, citizens rising up against government masters - can and is happening here at home.
I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.
...one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits of their national character
Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.
Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.
In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known.
I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.
We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.
This world belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?
If you [Americans] behave with disrespect - even just a little bit - [the Iranian people] will punch you in the mouth so hard that all your devouring teeth will fall off.
Do you know, I always imagine that the subway trains are dragons,' Rose said to Bear as they clung to his coat for support in the swaying car. 'Tearing back and forth across the city in their underground caves, devouring people and spitting them out at random destinations.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.
And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures
The Swamp of Despond is that place set before the narrow gate where true and false pilgrims alike are assaulted by their own internal corruption and pollution. The dirt and scum that has attached itself to our hearts and minds is agitated and revealed by both the workings of a guilty conscience and the devouring avarice of the enemy of our souls.The
Awaken your heart to kindness and mercy for the people and love and tenderness for them. Never, never act with them like a predatory beast which seeks to be satiated by devouring them, for the people fall into two categories: they are either your brethren in faith or your kindred in creation.
In Manhattan, marriage is a trend. Couples kiss over their arugula and radicchio salads. They fondle each other's genitals while devouring their pasta puttanesca. By the time the tiramisu arrives, they've slid under the table.
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
See the wild Waste of all-devouring years! How Rome her own sad Sepulchre appears, With nodding arches, broken temples spread! The very Tombs now vanish'd like their dead!
No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times - walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me.
I remember I would not stand still; I would not stop being perplexed by everything that spontaneously attracted me or caught my attention. I would never cease to look around me and observe myself in relation to nature: either crystal clear skies and sun-melting afternoons, or foggy winter days and weirdly tinted nights. I would never cease to dream and stand by the window, ready to let the diversity of life pass freely through my skin; courageous enough to believe I stood a chance in devouring each shade of sensation. Or perhaps, immensely foolish to plainly - believe at all.
I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one.