It is the most ungodly and dangerous business to abandon the certain and revealed will of God in order to search in to the hidden mysteries of God.
I am not of the opinion that all the arts shall be crushed to earth and perish through the Gospel, as some bigoted persons pretend, but would willingly see them all, and especially music, servants of Him who gave and created them.
The curses of the ungodly are more pleasing to God’s ears than the hallelujahs of the pious.
The state of matrimony is the chief in the world after religion; but people shun it because of its inconveniences, like one who, running out of the rain, falls into the river.
It seems to me that the most delightful walk of life is to be found in a household of moderate means, to live there with an obliging spouse and to be satisfied with little.
Nothing on earth is so well-suited to make the sad merry, the merry sad, to give courage to the despairing, to make the proud humble, to lessen envy and hate, as music.
If I could believe that God was not angry with me, I would stand on my head for joy.
Therefore we Christians, in turn, are obliged not to tolerate their wanton and conscious blasphemy.
Every doer of the law and every moral worker is accursed, for he walketh in the presumption of his own righteousness.
Count it one of the highest virtues upon earth to educate faithfully the children of others, which so few, and scarcely any, do by their own.
I myself saw and touched at Dessay, a child of this sort, which had no human parents, but had proceeded from the Devil. He was twelve years old, and, in outward form, exactly resembled ordinary children.
Many sweat to reconcile St Paul and St James, but in vain. ‘Faith justifies’ and ‘faith does not justify’ contradict each other flatly. If any one can harmonize them I will give him my doctor’s hood and let him call me a fool.
Our bodies are always exposed to Satan. The maladies I suffer are not natural, but Devil’s spells.
The best way to get rid of the Devil, if you cannot kill it with the words of Holy Scripture, is to rail at and mock him. Music, too, is very good; music is hateful to him, and drives him far away.
The Devil, it is true, is not exactly a doctor who has taken degrees, but he is very learned, very expert for all that. He has not been carrying on his business during thousands of years for nothing...
The Devil, too, sometimes steals human children; it is not infrequent for him to carry away infants within the first six weeks after birth, and to substitute in their place imps...
The fact that the biblical book Hebrews is not an epistle of St Paul, or of any other apostle, is proved by what it says in chapter two...
The winds are nothing else but good or bad spirits. Hark! how the Devil is puffing and blowing...
There is no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it must be the whisper of the Holy Ghost, and he himself a prophet.
I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove, as the priest in Kulenberg did.