Ellis Peters Quotes

"Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart."

Everybody is God. Everybody is the devil. And if you don't realize you have both parts, that's what really causes problems.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

If you scratch some saints you will find the devil.

Beelzebub is the isolated part of the human being. This part or this real human being has been obscured by religious structures.

You've got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven... I have the devil in me! If I didn't have, I'd be Christian!

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

If you look at life with any honesty and intelligence, it's clear that human nature is dark, vile, selfish, and despondent. But I also see a force in human nature, namely grace, that sometimes works against our natural moral entropy.

We are perfect. According to God, we are perfect, yet we know that we are sinners. We believe in the fact that we are both saints and sinners at the same time as we live in this world.

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.

God is in my head, but the devil is in my pants.

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was 'sublime and beautiful,'the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad --- I see it in myself. I know what I'm capable of. Good and bad. It's very imnportant that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn't mean tjat I don't know it's there. (Bono)

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

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.

There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.

Left to himself, man is half beast and half devil.

Ah! devout though I may be, I am no less a man!

I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice... No one can live in the light all the time.

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reigns.