“A monster, which the Blatant beast men call,
A dreadfull feend of gods and men ydrad.”
Canto 12, stanza 37
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book V
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Edmund Spenser 53
English poet 1552–1599Related quotes

“Men are beasts and even beasts don't behave as they do.”
“Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters.”
Act III, sc. i.
The Lover's Melancholy (1628)

“Who knows but life be that which men call death,
And death what men call life?”
Phrixus, Frag. 830

“But it would be enough that, when riding beasts, they behave like men and not like beasts.”
Part II

"The Hue and Cry," The Writing on the Wall (1970)
Context: Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils (“a person of inhuman and horrible cruelty or wickedness,” OED, Sense 4). Such an unnatural being is more horrible to contemplate than an Eichmann — that is, aesthetically worse — but morally an Ilse Koch was surely less culpable than Eichmann since she seems to have had no trace of human feeling and therefore was impassable to conscience.

“It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”
Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

“Sin which men account small brings God's great wrath on men.”
Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, 1652