Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss

I was gripped by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death. The truth … was that this world could not have been the work of an all-loving Being, but rather that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings; to this the data pointed, and the belief that it is so won the upper hand.

"Thus spoke the devil to me, once on a time: "Even God has his hell: it is his love for man". And lately did I hear him say these words: "God is dead: of his pity for man has God died"."

The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.

And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.

He realized what a fool he had been. There could be no tolerating of evil. One stamped it out or the evil grew worse.

Obed agachado à soleira da sua porta, com a ponta do manto sôbre a face, palpava a poeira, lamentava a velhice, ruminava queixumes contra Deus cruel.

"The divine is always abominable.
"Houses Under The Sea

Suppose God should damn to everlasting fire a man so great and good, that he, looking from the abyss of hell, would forgive God, — how would a god feel then?

Now I thought, surely I am possessed of the devil: at other times, again, I thought I should be bereft of my wits; for instead of lauding and magnifying God the Lord, with others, if I have but heard Him spoken of, presently some most horrible blasphemous thought or other would bolt out of my heart against Him; so that whether I did think that God was, or again did think there was no such thing, no love, nor peace, nor gracious disposition could I feel within me.

With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a grey neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.

"Ah!" he said. "Love, that terrible thing!"

Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dream
Is laid upon thee, golden from the fire.
Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleam
The black forge-hammers fall on thy desire.

Demoniac giants round thee seem to loom.
'Tis but the world-smiths heaving to and fro.
Stand like a beaten anvil. Take the doom
Their ponderous weapons deal thee, blow on blow.

Needful to truth as dew-fall to the flower
Is this wild wrath and this implacable scorn.
For every pang, new beauty, and new power,
Burning blood-red shall on thy heart be born.

Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrong
Beat on that iron and ring back in song.

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.