Quand il veut, le diable fait tout bien.
Le Doyen de Badajoz. (Ed. 1818, Vol. III., p. 266).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 185.
Source: "An Interview With Fr Gabriele Amorth - The Church's Leading Exorcist" (2001)
“The Devil was sick,—the Devil a monk would be;
The Devil was well,—the devil a monk was he.”
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fourth Book (1548, 1552), Chapter 24.
The Concrete Jungle (p. 305)
The Laundry Files, The Atrocity Archives (2004)
As quoted in A Year with the Saints (1891) by Anonymous, p. 47
On October 27, 1553, Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Geneva, Switzerland. Guillaume Farel —the executioner and vicar of John Calvin— warned the onlookers with these words. Awake! magazine, May 2006; Michael Servetus—A Solitary Quest for the Truth.
“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.
XXIX: "Le Joueur généreux"; The devil describes having heard this statement made by a Parisian preacher
Paraphrased in The Usual Suspects as "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
Le Spleen de Paris (1862)
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: Creation was not successive; it was one instantaneous thought and act, identical with the will, and was complete and unchangeabble from end to end, including time as one of its functions. Thomas was as clear as possible on that point:— "Supposing God wills anything in effect, he cannot will not to will it, because his will cannot change." He wills that some things shall be contingent and others necessary, but he wills in the same act that the contingency shall be necessary. "They are contingent because God has willed them to be so, and with this object has subjected them to causes which are so." In the same way he wills that his creation shall develop itself in time and space and sequence, but he creates these conditions as well as the events. He creates the whole, in one act, complete, unchangeable, and it is then unfolded like a rolling panorama with its predetermined contingencies.Man's free choice — liberum arbitrium — falls easily into place as a predetermined contingency. God is the First Cause, and acts in all Secondary Causes directly; but while he acts mechanically on the rest of creation,— as far as is known,— he acts freely at one point, and this free action remains free as far as it extends on that line. Man's freedom derives from this source, but it is simply apparent, as far as he is a cause; it is a [... ] Reflex Action of the complicated mirror [... ] called Mind, and [... ] an illusion arising from the extreme delicacy of the machine.
