Quotes about ghost
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“My parents ask if I'm alright; I say "I've just been staying up too late.
I need to sleep" I need to do something!
To get this awful weight up off my chest,
keep her pretty ghost from chasing me!”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Insound Tour Support No.12 (2000)

Parent, Sleep

“These are the ghosts I live with and I hate myself for all I became and did. I am not just sorry, I am haunted. I think of all the people I hurt, of all the moments I stole from your lives, and I know I deserve to die.”

Sean Sellers (1969–1999) American murderer

The Confession of My Crimes

Hate, People, Thinking, Hurt

“Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009), afterword to "Kevin Malone", p. 355
Nonfiction

“The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today. …they were being systematically starved into submission—by the White Bureaucracy—on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota. …From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Death, People, Reading, Dance

“I wanted to learn Go, so I paid a go school and started to attend classes once a week with a pro. He was mean, and never let the students win the teaching games. This was frustrating to me, because I was thinking "Why am I paying to lose all the time?" I wished that I had a guardian angel or a ghost that could help me beat him really bad. It was at that moment that Hikaru no Go was born.”

Yumi Hotta (1957) Japanese manga artist

Interview http://tigersmouth.org/articles.php?article_id=50 at the International Go Symposium, 5 August 2012.

School, Angels, Game, Thinking

“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!
Praise Him, all creatures here below!
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host!
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!”

Thomas Ken (1637–1711) Bishop of Bath and Wells

Morning and Evening Hymn.

God, For Father

“Yesterday you were an only child
Now your ghosts have gone away.
You can kill them in the classic style.
Now you, "parlez vous francais"
Don't look for answers
You took your chances
Don't ask my why.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Don't Ask Me Why.
Song lyrics, Glass Houses (1980)

Chance

“By and by an obscure individual, a young man, rose up, and, in the midst of all Christendom, proclaimed the startling news that God had sent an angel to him; that through his faith, prayers, and sincere repentance he had beheld a supernatural vision, that he had seen a pillar of fire descend from Heaven, and saw two glorious personages clothed upon with this pillar of fire, whose countenance shone like the sun at noonday; that he heard one of these personages say, pointing to the other, 'This is my beloved Son, hear ye him.' This occurred before this young man was fifteen years of age; and it was a startling announcement to make in the midst of a generation so completely given up to the traditions of their fathers; and when this was proclaimed by this young, unlettered boy to the priests and the religious societies in the State of New York, they laughed him to scorn. 'What!' said they, "visions and revelations in our day! God speaking to men in our day!" They looked upon him as deluded; they pointed the finger of scorn at him and warned their congregations against him. 'The canon of Scripture is closed up; no more communications are to be expected from Heaven. The ancients saw heavenly visions and personages; they heard the voice of the Lord; they were inspired by the Holy Ghost to receive revelations, but behold no such thing is to be given to man in our day, neither has there been for many generations past.'”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

This was the style of the remarks made by religionists forty years ago. This young man, some four years afterwards, was visited again by a holy angel.
Journal of Discourses 13:65-66 (December 19, 1869).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

Men, God, Age, Faith

“Culture is good, genius is brilliant, civ1lization is a blessing, education is a great pr1vilege; but we may be educated villains.. The thing that we want most of ail is the precious gift of the Holy Ghost.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 320.

Education

“He was pursuing a running debate with his own guilts and ghosts—unless he was spouting proverbs and aphorisms, most of the meanings fairly obvious but a few convolute and obscure. He was particularly fond of “Fortune smiles. And then betrays.” He just could not get into bed comfortably with the truth that he had made that bed himself. He still had difficulty separating “ought to be” from “the way things really are.””

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 8, “Taglios: Trouble Follows” (p. 389)

Truth, Smile, Way

“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. […]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Love, Women, Men, Secret

“War is time that has marched through the mind, and is later presented in
such a way that boots are the be-all and end-all.
Thus it is important to teach the soldier exactly how to treat the ghosts, how
to address the fog, or
how time and space appear on paper to describe absolutely everything.
Do not say that was true in antiquity, as there the same sentence changed
many times, petrified into mountains,
precisely where it was open…”

Paavo Haavikko (1931–2008) Finnish poet and writer from 20th century

Paavo Haavikko, in: John Taylor (2010), Into the Heart of European Poetry. p. 329

War, Way, Mountain, Appearance

“It is the fate of a woman
Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless,
Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Courtship of Miles Standish

Part VI.
The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)

Fate, Question, Silence, Waiting

“I believe that He was made man, joining the human nature with the divine in one person; being conceived by the singular operation of the Holy Ghost, and born of the blessed Virgin Mary, who, as well after as before she brought Him forth, continued a pure and unspotted virgin.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Letter to a Roman Catholic, July 18, 1749, The works of the Rev. John Wesley (1872), London, Wesleyan Conference Office, vol. X, p. 81. https://books.google.com/books?id=TZBKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%22continued+a+pure+and+unspotted+virgin%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn7srt5I_NAhUUU1IKHUlzC-AQ6AEIUTAH#v=onepage&q=%22continued%20a%20pure%20and%20unspotted%20virgin%22&f=false General sources

Nature, Personality

“I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence.”

Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 18 (p. 98)

Thinking

“Paper is poverty,… it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (27 May 1788) ME 7:36
1780s

Money

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Penguin Science Fiction (1961) Introduction

Science

“BE IT KNOWN unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come: That we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken. And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true. And it is marvelous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen. OLIVER COWDERY DAVID WHITMER MARTIN HARRIS”

David Whitmer (1805–1888) Book of Mormon witness

Book of Mormon, 1830 Edition, p. 585 (1830)

Men, God, People, Faith

“Stamping around, waiting, I cursed England aloud, hands dug deep into pockets, dancing to the wind that knocked in vain at the Sunday shops. Cigarette-packets, football fixtures, bus-tickets sailed by in dust-ghosts of Saturday. A woman with a puce face and a blancmange-coloured prayer-book was waiting also for The Priest and Pig, and she looked puce disapproval at me. Twenty minutes late, the bus yawned in from town, near-empty, and it swallowed us in a gape of Sunday ennui. So we sundayed along, rattling and creaking in Sunday hollowness, I upstairs, tearing my elevenpenny ticket while I read the prospectus of Winter Commercial Classes stuck on the window.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Books, Tear, Winter, Waiting

“The second proposition admits and encourages the very practice we censure so justly, for which the saint [ Augustine of Hippo ] was so famous, and by which he contributed so much to promote contentions in his own days, and to perpetuate them to ours. The practice of deducing doctrines from the scriptures that are not evidently contained in them… Who does not see that the direct tendency of this practice is exactly the same as the event has proved it to be? It composes and propagates a religion, seemingly under the authority of God, but really under that of man. The principles of revelation are lost in theology, or disfigured by it: and whilst some men are impudent enough to pretend, others are silly enough to believe, that they adhere to the gospel, and maintain the cause of God against infidels and heretics, when they do nothing better, nor more, than espouse the conceits of men, whom enthusiasm, or the ambition of forming sects, or of making a great figure in them, has inspired. If you ask now what the practice of the christian fathers, and of other divines, should have been, in order to preserve the purity of faith, and to promote peace and charity, the answer is obvious… They should have adhered to the word of God: they should have paid no regard to heathen philosophy, jewish cabala, the sallies of enthusiasm, or the refinements of human ingenuity: they should have embraced, and held fast the articles of faith and doctrine, that were delivered in plain terms, or in unequivocal figures: they should not have been dogmatical where the sense was doubtful, nor have presumed even to guess where the Holy Ghost left the veil of mystery undrawn.”

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) English politician and Viscount

Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophical Works http://books.google.com/books?id=E6ATAAAAQAAJ (1754) Vol.III, Essay IV, Sect XVI

Men, God, Peace, Faith

“It is — last stage of all —
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

" Growing Old" (1867), st. 7

World

“I wanted to go away, in the midst of something entirely different,
I had been there, in the house of torture,
I have seen people being kicked, men’s bodies scorched,
nails pulled out with pliers.
Armed with flame and cudgels, grinning men in shirt sleeves.
Where I could hear my friends being thrown headlong
down the stairs.
Night was as day, and long shrieks wounded me.
In vain I tried to think of wooded lanes and flowers,
a serene life and human words.
The thought seized up, it was as if a wound were opened up
again and again and endlessly searched.
From the mouth struck, teeth and blood came out,
and lamenting moans from the deep throat.
Away, away from that house, from that street and town,
from anything similar to it.
I must save myself, keep up my mind,
that I should not be led to madness by these memories.
Oh, if we could go back to a void, from which a new order,
a maternal opening could come forth,
if I hear a certain tone of voice even in jest, I shudder.
My unhappiness is that I avoid the sight of suffering,
hospitals and prisons.
I have yearned for high solitudes, lands of still sunshine
and sweet shadows,
but I would always be pursued by the ghosts of human beings.
All of a sudden I feel the need of distraction and play,
to lose myself in the noise of the fairground.
I remain with you, but forgive me
if you see me sometimes act like a madman.
I try to heal myself by myself, as an animal,
trusting that the wounds will close.
I stop to listen to the simple conversations of the women
in the marketplace, with their dialectical lilt.
I rejoice at the footsteps of running children,
their overpowering calls.
Because you do not know the absurdity of my dreams,
the fixed expressions, the incomprehensible gestures.
There is turmoil inside me, which seems to ridicule me.
And I cannot cry out, not to be like them.
Tomorrow I will go towards some music, now I am getting ready.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Life, Women, Men, Children

“I think it is more like a ghost
that has been following us both.
Something vague that we're not seeing,
something more like a feeling.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Something Vague
Fevers and Mirrors (2000)

Feeling, Thinking

“Despite a flattering supposition to the contrary, people come readily to terms with power. There is little reason to think that the power of the great bankers, while they were assumed to have it, was much resented. But as the ghosts of numerous tyrants, from Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini will testify, people are very hard on those who, having had power, lose it or are destroyed. Then anger at past arrogance is joined with contempt for the present weakness. The victim or his corpse is made to suffer all available indignities.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section IV, p 115 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

People, Thinking, Suffering, Past

“As to the word itself, it is generally allowed to be of Greek extraction. But whence the Greek word, enthousiasmos, is derived, none has yet been able to show. Some have endeavoured to derive it from en theoi, in God; because all enthusiasm has reference to him. … It is not improbable, that one reason why this uncouth word has been retained in so many languages was, because men were not better agreed concerning the meaning than concerning the derivation of it. They therefore adopted the Greek word, because they did not understand it: they did not translate it into their own tongues, because they knew not how to translate it; it having been always a word of a loose, uncertain sense, to which no determinate meaning was affixed.
It is not, therefore, at all surprising, that it is so variously taken at this day; different persons understanding it in different senses, quite inconsistent with each other. Some take it in a good sense, for a divine impulse or impression, superior to all the natural faculties, and suspending, for the time, either in whole or in part, both the reason and the outward senses. In this meaning of the word, both the Prophets of old, and the Apostles, were proper enthusiasts; being, at divers times, so filled with the Spirit, and so influenced by Him who dwelt in their hearts, that the exercise of their own reason, their senses, and all their natural faculties, being suspended, they were wholly actuated by the power of God, and “spake” only “as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
Others take the word in an indifferent sense, such as is neither morally good nor evil: thus they speak of the enthusiasm of the poets; of Homer and Virgil in particular. And this a late eminent writer extends so far as to assert, there is no man excellent in his profession, whatsoever it be, who has not in his temper a strong tincture of enthusiasm. By enthusiasm these appear to understand, all uncommon vigour of thought, a peculiar fervour of spirit, a vivacity and strength not to be found in common men; elevating the soul to greater and higher things than cool reason could have attained.
But neither of these is the sense wherein the word “enthusiasm” is most usually understood. The generality of men, if no farther agreed, at least agree thus far concerning it, that it is something evil: and this is plainly the sentiment of all those who call the religion of the heart “enthusiasm.” Accordingly, I shall take it in the following pages, as an evil; a misfortune, if not a fault. As to the nature of enthusiasm, it is, undoubtedly a disorder of the mind; and such a disorder as greatly hinders the exercise of reason. Nay, sometimes it wholly sets it aside: it not only dims but shuts the eyes of the understanding. It may, therefore, well be accounted a species of madness; of madness rather than of folly: seeing a fool is properly one who draws wrong conclusions from right premisses; whereas a madman draws right conclusions, but from wrong premisses. And so does an enthusiast suppose his premisses true, and his conclusions would necessarily follow. But here lies his mistake: his premisses are false. He imagines himself to be what he is not: and therefore, setting out wrong, the farther he goes, the more he wanders out of the way.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Sermon 37 "The Nature of Enthusiasm"
Sermons on Several Occasions (1771)

Men, God, Religion, Fools

“I have a message to the neo-Nazis, to the white nationalists, and to the neo-Confederates: Your heroes are losers. You are supporting a lost cause. And believe me, I knew the original Nazis, because you see, I was born in Austria in 1947, shortly after the Second World War. And growing up, I was surrounded by broken men, men who came home from a war filled with shrapnel and guilt, men who were misled into a losing ideology. And I can tell you: that these ghosts you idolize spent the rest of their lives living in shame and right now, they’re resting in hell.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

A message for Donald Trump -, ATTN video https://twitter.com/attn/status/898328098529083394 (August 2017) 2010s

Men, War, World, Home

“This museum is like a ghost train—at every stage you find a surprise. Intuition prepares you for enlightenment, not audio-visual lectures. There's less to read, more to fee.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck cited in: Priscilla Boniface, Peter Jon Fowler (1993) Heritage and Tourism: In the Global Village. p. 161: Starck is talking about the Groninger Museum.

Reading, Training

“Words penetrated the tank from the outer room. They were tantalizing, like those ghosts of meaning in a great symphony—hinting that the composer had caught a glimpse of something notes could only vaguely convey and words could never even approach.”

David Brin book Startide Rising

Source: Startide Rising (1983), Chapter 49 (p. 261)

“When the ghost comes round at midnight
Well you both can have some fun
He can drive you mad, he can make you sad
He can keep you from the sun
When they take him down, he'll be both safe and sound
And the hand does fit the glove
And no matter what they tell you,
There's good and evil in everyone.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Who Was That Masked Man
Song lyrics, Veedon Fleece (1974)

Sadness, Evil, Sun, Madness

“A good yarn, an offbeat tale, a bloodcurdling ghost story -- they need no explanation or excuse for the telling!”

C. B. Colby (1904–1977) American writer

Source: World's Best "True" Ghost Stories, (1988), p. 5

“A human face, a hand, a woman's breast or a manly body, an expression of conflicting joy and pain, the infinite ocean, savage crags, the melancholy speech of black trees against the snow, the fierce power of spring blossoms and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer noon when our old friend Pan is asleep and the ghost of noon are murmuring – all this is enough to make us forget the sorrows of the world, or to give them form. In any case the determination to give form to things brings with it part of the solution for which you are seeking. The path is hard and the goal can never be reached – but it is a path.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Beckmann's lecture 'Drei Briefe an eine Malerin' ('Three letters to a Woman-painter'), New York and Boston, Spring 1948; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 214
1940s

Pain, World, Spring, Tree

“The Almighty Truth of the Trinity is our Father: for He made us and keepeth us in Him; and the deep Wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in Whom we are all enclosed; the high Goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, and in Him we are enclosed, and He in us. We are enclosed in the Father, and we are enclosed in the Son, and we are enclosed in the Holy Ghost. And the Father is enclosed in us, and the Son is enclosed in us, and the Holy Ghost is enclosed in us: Almightiness, All-Wisdom, All-Goodness: one God, one Lord.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 54

Wisdom, God, Truth

“By now the ghosts have gone to bed
Exhaling the last breath of a revolution
Cycling on to the next existence
In the Elemental Evolution”

D. S. Bradford (1982) musician

Elemental Evolution, https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/D-S-Bradford/Elemental-Evolution, chorus Elemental Evolution (2016)

“It is neither possible nor desirable to make all men think alike. Variety is the very basis of harmony; and, in the sphere of ecclesiastical experience, oneness of feeling is vastly preferable to unanimity of belief. The voice of God, however, as uttered in the events and experiences of the past hundred years, enjoins upon the private membership of the church the culture of that "unity of the Spirit " which is begotten of the Holy Ghost, and which derives from its Divine Author the life in which it resides, the elements of which it is composed, and the impulses under which it acts.”

John McClellan Holmes (1834–1911) US Christian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 188.

Life, Men, God, Feeling

“The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment… We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1910s, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 1.

Disappointment, Star, Mathematics, Effort

“I’ve never found anything in occult literature that seemed to have a bearing. You know, the occult—very much like stories of supernatural horror—is a sort of game. Most religions, too. Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you’re after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that’s what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, or an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have inner things of the same general sort. But I’m thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that’s bigger than any game, that’s fettered by no rules, conforms to no man-made theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it’s of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man’s learning tells us nothing.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“A Bit of the Dark World” (pp. 261-262); originally published in Fantastic, February 1962
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

Life, God, World, Religion

““And Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself.”
Acts 26:24.
And so say all the world, the men who know not God, of all that are of Paul’s religion: of every one who is so a follower of him as he was of Christ. It is true, there is a sort of religion, nay, and it is called Christianity too, which may be practised without any such Imputation, which is generally allowed to be consistent with common sense, —that is, a religion of form, a round of outward duties, performed in a decent, regular manner. You may add orthodoxy thereto, a system of right opinions, yea, and some quantity of heathen morality; and yet not many will pronounce, that “much religion hath made you mad.” But if you aim at the religion of the heart, if you talk of “righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,” then it will not be long before your sentence is passed, “Thou art beside thyself.””

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Sermons on Several Occasions (1771) Source: Sermon 37 "The Nature of Enthusiasm" http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/sermons.v.xxxvii.html

Men, God, World, Peace

“A man watches a bird flying, and wishes to fly himself, but he cannot, because he has no wings. Even so the will is present with a man to be pure, and blameless, and without spot, and to have no wickedness in him, but to be always with God; but he has not the power. To fly into the air of God and the liberty of the Holy Ghost may be his wish, but unless wings are given him, he cannot. Let us then beseech God to bestow upon us the wings of a dove, even of the Holy Ghost, that we may fly to Him and be at rest, and that He would separate and make to cease from our souls and bodies, that evil wind, which is the sin that dwelleth in the members of our souls and bodies. None but He can do it.”

Macarius of Egypt (300–391) Egyptian Christian monk and hermit

Homily 2. Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Saint Macarius the Egyptian, trans. Arthur J. Mason.
Disputed

God, Soul, Bird, Evil

“The good he scorn'd
Stalk'd off reluctant, like an ill-used ghost,
Not to return; or if it did, in visits
Like those of angels, short and far between.”

Robert Blair The Grave

Part II, line 586. Compare: "Like angels’ visits, short and bright", John Norris, The Parting.
The Grave (1743)

Angels

“The Cry within me is a call to arms. It shouts: "I, the Cry, am the Lord your God! I am not an asylum. I am not hope and a home. I am not the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Ghost. I am your General!
"You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms!
"Hold courageously the passes which I entrusted to you; do not betray them. You are in duty bound, and you may act heroically by remaining at your own battle station.
"Love danger. What is most difficult? That is what I want! Which road should you take? The most craggy ascent! It is the one I also take: follow me!”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Love, God, Hope, Home

“A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.”

Mary Antin book The Promised Land

Source: The Promised Land (1912), Ch. 10.

“But you can't kill a demon because they're evil spirits, like a ghost.”

Jack T. Chick (1924–2016) Christian comics writer

Chick tracts, " What's Worse? http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1092/1092_01.asp" (2014)

Evil

“Bored in a role, but he can't stopStanding up to sit back down,and lose the one thing found.Spinning the world like a toy top'till there's a ghost in every town.<BR”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

Can't Make A Sound.
Lyrics, Figure 8 (2000)

World

“In 1830… Joseph Smith… prophesied that a New Jerusalem would arise in the wilds… The Mormons sent emissaries to the Indians, whom he renamed the Lamanites, inviting them to join the Mormon colonies and to be baptized. Joseph Smith was also to have prophesied in 1843 that if he… lived until 1890—the messiah would appear in human form. …It was in 1890 that… Wovoka appeared and began teaching the [revitalized] Ghost Dance religion.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Religion, Appearance, Dance

“The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple over the long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and ahead with delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through into their poor starved eyes.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000), Ch. 26 : The Abyss

Children, Age, Hope, Star

“The morning slips away in a Valium haze and catalogues,
And numerous cups of coffee,
In the afternoon the weekly food is put in bags - as you float off down the high street.
The shop windows reflect, play a nameless host to a closet ghost -
A picture of your fantasy, a victim of your misery…”

Paul Weller (singer) (1958) English singer-songwriter, Guitarist

Private Hell, from Setting Sons (1979)

Food, Coffee

“In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Life, Death, Smile, Dreams

“'God!' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.
'God what?' asked the Spirit.
'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost.
'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

God

“Boy dressed as the devil: Everybody's afraid of the devil!
Girl: Not me!
Boy dressed as a ghost: How come?
Girl: Because Jesus loves me and the devil is afraid of Jesus.”

Jack T. Chick (1924–2016) Christian comics writer

Chick tracts, " The Little Ghost http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1010/1010_01.asp" (2001)

Love, Girl, Boy

“The fighting in western Bosnia intensified as the cease-fire approached. (…) Facing the end of the fighting, the Croats and the Bosnians finally buried their differences, if only momentarily, and took Sanski Most and several other smaller towns. But Prijedor still eluded them. For reasons we never fully undestood, they did not capture this important town, a famous symbol of ethnic cleansing.* (*In March 1997, I attended a showing at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York of a powerful documentary film, Calling the ghosts, that recounted the brual treatmen two Bosnian women from Prijedor had suffered during their incarceration at the notorious Omarska prison camp. Following the film, the two women angrily asked me why they were still unable to return to their hometown. I told them we'd repeatedly encouraged an assault on Prijedor. They were stonished; they said General Dudakovic, the Bosnian commander, had told them personally that "Holbrooke would not let us capture Prijedor and Bosanski Novi". I subsequently learned that this story was widely believed in the region. This revisionism was not surprising; it absolved Dudakovic and his associates of responsibility for the failure to take Prijedor. I suspect the truth is that after the disaster at the Una River the Croatians did not want to fight for a town the would have to turn over to the Muslims - and the Bosnians could not capture it unaided.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 206

Women, Truth, Failure, Suffering

“Our good friend LeRoi Moore passed on and gave up his ghost today, and we will miss him forever.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Concert the night of Moore's death. http://www.nme.com/news/dave-matthews-band/39071 (2008)

“But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose.”

Thomas Browne book The Garden of Cyrus

Source: The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Ch. 5

Dreams, Knowledge, Sense, Sleep

“Tumult, weeping, many new ghosts.
Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing
To myself. Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"Snow Storm" (对雪), as translated by Kenneth Rexroth in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1971), p. 6

Men, Age, Singing

“This is a proposal for a show, in which I imagine a Newly Born Limb, the Ghost of A Flea, and an Endless Note Petrified in Stone. I picture two prosthetic arms, one ancient, one modern, reaching out as far as they can, to grasp all that there is in the world.”

Mark Leckey (1964) British artist

"Prop4aShw" (2013)

World, Imagination

“Already the dandelions
Are changed into vanishing ghosts.”

Celia Thaxter (1835–1894) American writer

"Already" in Drift-Weed (1878), p. 103.

Change

“No man has seen her, this pitiful ghost,
And no woman either, but heard her at most,
Sighing and tapping and sighing again,
You have weaned me too soon, you must nurse me again.”

Stevie Smith (1902–1971) poet, novelist, illustrator, performer

"The Wanderer"
Selected Poems (1962)

“Harry Dresden: Tonight you will be visited by three spirits, the ghosts of indictment past, present and future. They will teach you the true meaning of "you are still a scumbag criminal."”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files, White Night (2007)

Past, Future

“(Unless all coup perpetrators) are brought before the courts, Fiji cannot put to rest the ghosts of the coup.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

7 May 2005
On the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, 7 May, 2005

“The ghost of socialism is beginning to show a very earnest face … the Zentrum is a gang of hypocritical blackguards without a Fatherland, intent on the collapse of Germany and the destruction of Prussia.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary c. 1886, quoted in John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his court : Wilhelm II and the government of Germany

“Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?”

Tim Powers (1952) American writer

Part 1, Chapter 4 (p. 71)
Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

Death

“In the Book of Hermes, "Pimander," is enunciated in distinct and unequivocal sentences, the whole trinitarian dogma accepted by the Christians. "The light is me," says Pimander, the DIVINE THOUGHT. "I am the nous or intelligence, and I am thy god, and I am far older than the human principle which escapes from the shadow. I am the germ of thought, the resplendent WORD, the SON of GOD. Think that what thus sees and hears in thee, is the Verbum of the Master, it is the Thought, which is God the Father… The celestial ocean, the AETHER, which flows from east to west, is the Breath of the Father, the life-giving Principle, the HOLY GHOST!"”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

For they are not at all separated and their union is LIFE.
Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter I

Life, God, Books, Intelligence

“Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent… If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose…
Jesus Pietro worried.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 10 : Parlette's Hand

“You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds.”

Plutarch book Moralia

I, 1
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh

People, Soul, Animals, Parting

“Since the abortive coup, Erdogan has been acting like a wounded giant, moving in every direction, hitting everyone in sight and groping for ghosts in the dark. To impose his image as a man of action he has ordered thousands of arrests, massive purges and favor-distribution on a gargantuan scale. He has also put into circulation a dime-a-dozen ideas for constitutional and judicial reform. In the process he has ignored another lesson of Mazrban Nameh: to think as a man of action but to act as a man of thought.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Turkey – Towards a “One and a Half Party” System http://english.aawsat.com/2016/08/article55355819/opinion-turkey-towards-one-half-party-system, Ashraq Al-Awsat (5 Aug, 2016).

Idea, Thinking

“What tongueless ghost of sin crept through my curtains?.
My family don't seem so familiar / And my enemies all know my name.
You better get on your knees and pray / Panic is on the way
My eyes are dead / My throat's like a black hole / And if there's a God / Would he give another chancer / An hour to sing for his soul?”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Gas Panic
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants (2000)

God, Family, Way, Soul

“Nobody likes to see a body, but it's better than seeing a ghost. Bodies just make you doubt the world and the people in it. Ghosts make you doubt everything, and to doubt it in a part of the mind that has no words to answer the question, where the comforting promises you make yourself are neither believed nor even really understood.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Prologue - Yakima
The Lonely Dead (2004)

People, World, Question, Parting

““Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?”

Ian McDonald book Desolation Road

Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 18 (p. 94).

People, Dreams, Communication, Memory

“The wind shrieks, the wind grieves;
It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again;
And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams
And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Pain, Dreams

“Lacan conceives the difference between the two deaths as the difference being real (biological) death and its symbolization, the settling of accounts the accomplishment of symbolic destiny (deathbed confession in Catholicism, for example). This gap can be filled in various ways; it can contain either sublime beauty or fearsome monsters: in Antigone's case, her symbolic death, her exclusion from the symbolic community of the city, precedes her actual death and imbues her character with sublime beauty, whereas the ghost of Hamlet's father represents the opposite case, - actual death unaccompanied by symbolic death, without a settling of accounts - which is why he returns as a frightful apparition until his debt has been repaid. This place between the two deaths, a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic Kernel in the midst of symbolic order.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

150
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Death, Beauty, Way, Communication

“It has been decreed this day by the Council of Two Hundred that the leaders of the Catabaptists shall be cast into the Tower, in which they formerly lay, and be allured by a bread and water diet until they either give up the ghost or surrender. It is also added that they who after this are immersed shall be submerged permanently: this decision is now published. Your father-in-law [Jacon Grebel, father of Conrad], the Senator, in vain imlored mercy [for Conrad, who was one of the prisoners]. The incorrigible audacity of these men at first greatly grieved me, now it as greatly displeases me. I would rather that the newly rising Christianity should not be ushered in with a racket of this sort, but i am not God whom it thus pleases to make provision against evils that are to come, as He did when in olden time He slew with a sudden and fearful death Ananias who lied to Peter, so that He might cast out from us all daring to deceive, though there is nothing of which we are naturally such masters.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter to Vadian, ibid, March 7, 1526, p.252

Death, Men, God, Fear

“Angels are those beings who have been on an earth like this, and have passed through the same ordeals that we are now passing through. They have kept their first estate far enough to preserve themselves in the Priesthood. They did not so violate the law of the Priesthood and condemn themselves to the sin against the Holy Ghost as to be finally lost. They are not crowned with the celestial ones. They are persons who have lived upon an earth, but did not magnify the Priesthood in that high degree that many others have done who have become Gods, even the sons of God. Human beings that pertain to this world, who do not magnify or are not capable of magnifying their high calling in the Priesthood and receive crowns of glory, immortality, and eternal lives, will also, when they again receive their bodies, become angels and will receive a glory. They are single, without families or kingdoms to reign over. All the difference between men and angels is, men are passing through the day of trial that angels have already passed through.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 9:102 (January 5, 1860)
1860s

Men, God, World, Family

“Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.”

T.S. Eliot book Poems

"Gerontion"
Poems (1920)

Housing

“It remains true that Michelangelo's intensely personal use of the nude greatly altered its character. He changed it from a means of embodying ideas to a means of expressing emotions; he transformed it from the world of living to the world of becoming. And he projected his world of the imagination with such unequaled artistic power that its shadow fell on every male nude in art for three hundred and fifty years. Painters either imitated his heroic poses and proportions or they reacted against them self-consciously and sought a new repertoire of attitudes in the art of fifth-century Greece. In the nineteenth century the ghost of Michelangelo was still posing the models in art schools.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

World, School, Art, Imagination

“Also, you can't prove that there isn't a ghost of Bagpuss hovering right behind your head as you read this. He's right there, man! No, he disappeared right after you turned your head. I swear he's there. Look, he's back again now!”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Meet the Crazy Moon Man
Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

Reading

“I had hoped that out of so many stories you would at least have produced one or two, which could hardly be questioned, and which would clearly show that ghosts or spectres exist. The case you relate… seems to me laughable. In like manner it would be tedious here to examine all the stories of people, who have written on these trifles. To be brief, I cite the instance of Julius Caesar, who, as Suetonius testifies, laughed at such things and yet was happy. …And so should all who reflect on the human imagination, and the effects of the emotions, laugh at such notions; whatever Lavater and others, who have gone dreaming with him in the matter, may produce to the contrary.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz1kRKDMbUMC (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).

Happiness, People, Dreams, Hope

“Ye realms, yet unreveal'd to human sight,
Ye gods who rule the regions of the night,
Ye gliding ghosts, permit me to relate
The mystic wonders of your silent state!”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Aeneis, Book VI, lines 374–377.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

God, Night

“Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.8 Reality is a Shared Hallucination

“A ghost, Larry, is someone who hasn't made it -- in other words, who died, and they don't know they're dead. So they keep walking around and thinking that you're inhabiting their -- let's say, their domain. So they're aggravated with you.”

Sylvia Browne (1936–2013) American author

December 5, 2003 Larry King Live, CNN Interview http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0312/05/lkl.00.html

Thinking, Dead

“But now? well now, now I have no fear of Witches, goblins, ghosts, thugs, Giants, ghouls, scallywags, etc, nor any sort of body.”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

letter to his friend Don Martín Zapater https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3915977 and https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Francisco_de_Goya_-_Portrait_of_Mart%C3%ADn_Zapater_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg, Feb. 1784; as quoted in Goya, A life in Letters, edited and introduced by Sarah Simmons; translations by Philip Troutman, London, Pimlico, 2004 The reference to the occult and the world of demons, which then will populate the art of Goya during the 1800's, takes form in a couple of occasions Goya wrote to his friend Martín that he is a painter-demon. http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/09/goya-life-in-letters-edited-and.html 1780s

Fear

“"Curse those two time-ghosts!" he almost shrieked. "They made me quite sure you were the Time Lady! But you're not, are you? I could tell you were a real Twenty Century person with every word you said. Mickey Mouse!" he yelled.”

Diana Wynne Jones book A Tale of Time City

Source: A Tale of Time City (1987), p. 87.

Time, Personality

“The murderer upon the scaffold, with a priest on either side, smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in heaven. The man who has succeeded in making his home a hell, meets death without a quiver, provided he has never expressed any doubt as to the divinity of Christ, or the eternal "procession" of the Holy Ghost. The king who has waged cruel and useless war, who has filled countries with widows and fatherless children, with the maimed and diseased, and who has succeeded in offering to the Moloch of ambition the best and bravest of his subjects, dies like a saint.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The Great Infidels (1881)

Death, War, Children, Disease

“Our high Father, God Almighty, which is Being, He knew and loved us from afore any time: of which knowing, in His marvellous deep charity and the foreseeing counsel of all the blessed Trinity, He willed that the Second Person should become our Mother. Our Father, our Mother worketh, our good Lord the Holy Ghost confirmeth: and therefore it belongeth to us to love our God in whom we have our being: Him reverently thanking and praising for our making, mightily praying to our Mother for mercy and pity, and to our Lord the Holy Ghost for help and grace.
For in these three is all our life: Nature, Mercy, Grace: whereof we have meekness and mildness; patience and pity; and hating of sin and of wickedness, — for it belongeth properly to virtue to hate sin and wickedness. And thus is Jesus our Very Mother in Nature of our first making; and He is our Very Mother in Grace, by taking our nature made. All the fair working, and all the sweet natural office of dearworthy Motherhood is impropriated to the Second Person: for in Him we have this Godly Will whole and safe without end, both in Nature and in Grace, of His own proper Goodness.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 59

Love, Life, God, Hate

“This, think'st thou Dust intomb'd, or Ghosts regard?”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

“It was the spirit world. Vietnam. Ghosts and graveyards. I arrived in-country a year after John Wade, in 1969, and walked exactly the ground he walked, in and around Pinkville, through the villages of Thuan yen and My Khe and Co Luy. I know what happened that day. I know how it happened. I know why. It was the sunlight. It was the wickedness that soaks into your blood and slowly heats up and begins to boil. Frustration, partly. Rage, partly. The enemy was invisible. They were ghosts. (p. 199)”

Tim O'Brien (1946) American novelist

In the Lake of The Woods (1994)

World, Rage, Country

“Achilles Peleus Son's destructive Rage,
Great Goddess, sing, which did the Greeks engage
In many Woes, and mighty Hero's Ghosts
Sent down untimely to the Stygian Coasts:
Devouring Vultures on their Bodies prey'd,
And greedy Dogs, (so was Jove's Will obey'd;)
Because Great Agamemnon fell at odds
With stern Achilles, Off-spring of the Gods.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Book I, opening lines
Homer His Iliads Translated (1660)

God, Dogs, Spring, Rage

“Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories.”

Ian McDonald book Desolation Road

Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 54 (p. 270).

World, Memory

“The Ghost: I'm sorry to haunt you while you're rogering the help.
Pocket: The rogering has not commenced, wisp. I have barely bridled the horse for a moist and bawdy ride. Now, go away!”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Fool (2009)

Help, Horse

“When Machiavelli came to the end of his life, he had a vision shortly before giving up the ghost. He saw a small company of poor scoundrels, all in rags, ill-favoured, famished, and, in short, in as bad plight as possible. He was told that these were the inhabitants of paradise, of whom it is written, Beati pauperes, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.. After this, he was asked to which of the groups he would choose to belong; he answered that he would much rather be in Hell with those great geniuses, to converse with them about affairs of state, than be condemned to the company of the verminous scoundrels that he had first been shown.”

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) Italian politician, Writer and Author

This account of Machiavelli's """"Dream"""" was not published until a century after his death, in Etienne Binet's Du salut d'Origene (1629).
There is an earlier but more oblique reference in a letter written by Giovambattista Busini in 1549: """"Upon falling ill, [Machiavelli] took his usual pills and, becoming weaker as the illness grew worse, told his famous dream to Filippo [Strozzi], Francesco del Nero, Iacopo Nardi and others, and then reluctantly died, telling jokes to the last."""".
The """"Dream"""" is commonly condensed into a more pithy form, such as """"I desire to go to hell, and not to heaven. In the former place I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings, and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks, hermits, and apostles"""".
Disputed

Life, Hell