Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

Hell has been evacuated; the demons took the early train to earth. In that one line, Shakespeare doesn’t just reach for a spooky flourish - he flips the moral geography. Evil isn’t an exotic realm “down there,” safely quarantined by theology. It’s local, social, human, and immediate. The sting comes from how casually absolute it sounds: not some devils, not sometimes, but all. The hyperbole is the point. It captures the moment when a character stops believing the world is basically ordered and starts reading every face as a threat.

The line lands in The Tempest, spoken by Ferdinand as he’s swept into a shipwreck and convinced his father has died. Shakespeare uses catastrophe as an accelerant: the ocean wipes away status, law, and ceremony, leaving raw survival and suspicion. That’s the subtext - disaster doesn’t merely reveal character; it rearranges what people think is possible. When institutions fail, cruelty and opportunism feel less like exceptions and more like the new climate.

Its intent is also theatrical: a single sentence that paints an entire stage with dread, turning a storm into a moral panic. The audience is invited to feel how quickly grief converts into paranoia, how fear recruits imagination to justify worst-case interpretations. Shakespeare’s devils aren’t horned monsters; they’re the people around you when you’re vulnerable, when power shifts, when the story you trusted about “civilization” stops holding. The line survives because it names a recurring modern sensation: the suspicion that the real inferno is public life, and we’re already in it.