Robert Mapplethorpe Quotes

'Tis no sin to cheat the devil.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

You have more real truth to draw from if you are playing evil. We see so much of it around us in our culture, and we also have so much of it in our nature, which we are always warring against, as it were.

Hell is both sides of the tomb, and a devil may be respectable and wear good clothes.

When you have a dark side, nothing is ever as good as it seems.

I think there's a bit of the devil in everybody. There's a bit of a priest in everybody, too, but I enjoyed playing the devil more. He was more fun.

I did spend a lot of time as a child very confused about whether I had a devil in me, or whether I was in a state of grace. I mean, these ideas are so potent to anybody with half an imagination.

The better day, the worse deed.

We both can be the most beautiful and benevolent creatures on the planet, but then there's another side that can be as harsh and as ugly as the darkest thing you could imagine seeing.

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

One of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force.

The more sin is rationalized, the greater the possibility of destruction by Satan's wolves.

Oh, I am an angel, though sometimes I wish I was more of a devil.

There is good and evil in each of us, and you can easily be led to the dark side.

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.

Sometimes The Devil is a gentleman.

Sadness came into the world with Satan - that world our Saviour never prayed for, the world you say I do not know. Oh, it is not so difficult to recognize: it is the world that prefers cold to warmth! What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline towards sadness and turn instinctively towards the night?

The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

This world is half the devil's and my own, Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl and curling round the bud that forks her eye.

Got demons on both shoulders.

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.