“It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.”

“"Shall we fight or shall we fly?
Good Sir Richard, tell us now,
For to fight is but to die!
There'll be little of us left by the time this sun be set."
And Sir Richard said again: "We be all good English men.
Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,
For I never turn'd my back upon Don or devil yet."”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

“Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

“Men, said the Devil,
are good to their brothers:
they don’t want to mend
their own ways, but each other's.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

“Good at a fight, but better at a play;
Godlike in giving, but the devil to pay.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

“Because God and the devil could be one and the same thing, and everybody understood it in his own way.”

Arturo Pérez-Reverte book The Club Dumas

“Man provides his own goods and his own evils, neither God nor the Devil has anything to do with it.”

Diana Norman (1933–2011) British author and journalist

“Good thing he's dead," Lula said, "or that would have hurt like the devil.”

Janet Evanovich book Hot Six

“No man is a devil in his own mind.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

“The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration.”

Sarah Dunant book The Birth of Venus