C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Devil

The devil has his elect.

Carlyle.

Accursed be he who plays with the devil.

Schiller.

Every newspaper editor owes tribute to the devil.

La Fontaine.

He must have a long spoon that eats with the devil.

Marlowe.

He must needs go that the devil drives.

Shakespeare.

The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.

Shakespeare.

The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.

Shakespeare.

The prince of darkness is a gentleman.

Sir John Suckling.

Where God hath a temple, the devil will have a chapel.

Burton.

The devil is an ass, I do acknowledge it.

Ben Jonson.

The devil was sick, the devil a saint would be;
The devil was well, the devil a saint was he.

Rabelais.

For, where God built a church there the devil would also build a chapel. They imitated the Jews also in this, namely, that as the Most Holiest was dark, and had no light, even so and after the same manner did they make their shrines dark where the devil made answer. Thus is the devil ever God’s ape.

Martin Luther.

What, man! defy the devil? Consider, he’s an enemy to mankind.

Shakespeare.

Satan; so call him now, his former name
Is heard no more in heaven.

Milton.

The Devil, my friends, is a woman just now.
’Tis a woman that reigns in Hell.

Lord Lytton.

Go, poor devil, get thee gone; why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.

Sterne.

The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.

Coleridge.

No man means evil but the devil, and we shall know him by his horns.

Shakespeare.

From his brimstone bed, at break of day,
A-walking the Devil is gone,
To look at his little snug farm of the world,
And see how his stock went on.

Southey.

With grave
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seem’d
A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic though in ruin.

Milton.

If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.

Lowell.

Black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seem’d his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand.

Milton.

I call’d the devil, and he came,
And with wonder his form did I closely scan;
He is not ugly, and is not lame,
But really a handsome and charming man.
A man in the prime of life is the devil,
Obliging, a man of the world, and civil;
A diplomatist too, well skill’d in debate,
He talks quite glibly of church and state.

Heine.

Satan is to be punished eternally in the end, but for a while he triumphs.

B. R. Haydon.

The meanest thing in the world is—the devil.

Henry Ward Beecher.

Let me say “amen” betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer.

Shakespeare.

It is Lucifer,
The son of mystery;
And since God suffers him to be,
He, too, is God’s minister,
And labors for some good
By us not understood.

Longfellow.

The devil shall have his bargain; for he was never yet a breaker of proverbs—he will give the devil his due.

Shakespeare.

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