
“A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.”
The Consuming Fire
Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867)
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.”
The Consuming Fire
Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867)
“To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.”
The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)
1900s
Source: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
“When a devil, but also a saint, laughs about your poetry, you laugh about his ignorance!”
Donna Giovanna, Act IV, scene iii.
“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.”
This is sometimes attributed to Augustine, but the earliest known occurrence is in Persian Rosary (c. 1929) by Ahmad Sohrab (PDF) http://magshare.net/narchive/NArchive/Misc/Raw_Data/A_Persian_Rosary_by_Mirza_Ahmad_Sohrab.pdf, which probably originates as a paraphrase of a statement in Oscar Wilde's 1893 play A Woman of No Importance: "The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
Misattributed
“Here is the devil-and-all to pay.”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book IV, Ch. 10.
“The bane of all that dread the Devil.”
The Idiot Boy.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)