“… the devil on my right shoulder must have brutally strangled the angel on my left…”

The Mikado (1885)

The Fudges in England, Letter iii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo [Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue] (1920); Two Mothers

Atlas, on bearing the burden of maintaining the worlds, in Ch. 4
Space Chantey (1968)
Context: I tried to tell you, but words will not convey it. One has to be inside it to comprehend the magnitude. … It was the beginning. It's the only thing there is. But it was haphazard for so many aeons that it spooks me to think about it. There were always three or four maintaining it, but there was no one person strong enough to take it all over. "Somewhere there must be someone strong enough to take it all over," I said to myself in a direful moment, but the strongest person I could think of was myself. I've been doing it ever since. … By my attention I hold it all in being. Nothing exists unless it is perceived. If perception fails for a moment, then that thing fails forever. … I hate to be misjudged. They say that I bear it all on my shoulders, as though I were a stud or a balk. It's not on my great shoulders, it is amazing head on my great shoulders that maintains all.

As quoted in Manipulus Florum (c. 1306), edited by Thomas Hibernicus, Superbia i cum uariis; also in Best Thoughts Of Best Thinkers: Amplified, Classified, Exemplified and Arranged as a Key to unlock the Literature of All Ages (1904) edited by Hialmer Day Gould and Edward Louis Hessenmueller
Disputed

J. C. Ward, Memoirs of a Theoretical Physicist (Optics Journal, Rochester, 2004).

Song lyrics, Los Angeles (1980), The World's A Mess It's In My Kiss

Interview, The New York Times, 1988