Satan Quotes

“The devil is a created being. He is therefore not self-existent nor eternal, but limited and finite.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“We are apt to think that Satan is most powerful in crowded thoroughfares. It is a mistake. I believe the temptations of life are always most dangerous in the wilderness. I have been struck with that fact in Bible history. It is not in their most public moments that the great men of the past have fallen; it has been in their quiet hours. Moses never stumbled when he stood before Pharaoh, or while he was flying from Pharaoh; it was when he got into the desert that his patience began to fail. David never stumbled while he was fighting his way through imposing armies; it was when the fight was over, when he was resting quietly under his own vine and fig tree that he put forth his hand to steal. The sorest temptations are not those spoken but those echoed. It is easier to lay aside your besetting sin amid a cloud of witnesses than in the solitude of your own room. The sin that besets you is never so besetting as when you are alone. –George Matheson.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“unforgiving spirit is not only Satan’s widest door into our hearts, but it is the strongest imitation and warmest welcome. St. Paul not only urges a spirit of forgiveness as a bar to the devil’s ingress, but hastens to close the door by his own readiness to forgive even in advance. “To whom ye forgive anything, I forgive also; for if I forgave anything, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ. Lest Satan should get an advantage of us; for we are not ignorant of his devices.” A lofty spirit, ready and compliant with the spirit of forgiveness, free from all bitterness, revenge or retaliation, has freed itself from the conditions which invite Satan, and has effectually locked and barred his entrance. The readiest way to keep Satan out is to keep the spirit of forgiveness in. The devil is never deeper in hell nor farther removed from us than when we can pray, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“The Bible is a revelation, not a philosophy nor a poem, not a science. It reveals things and persons as they are, living and acting outside the range of earthly vision or natural discovery.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“God is revealed not by argument but by work. We learn what He is from what He does.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Washington, Ga, July 1, 1912: Pray more and more; keep at the four a.m. hour. God will be for it; the devil against it. Press on, you can’t pray too much, you may pray too little. The devil will compromise with you to pray as the common standard, on going to bed, and a little prayer in the monring. Hell will be full if we don’t do better for God than that. Pray, pray, pray, pray always, rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“The world is one of the enemies which must be fought and conquered on the way to heaven.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“To save the world and ignore the individual is not only Utopian, but every way damaging.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“He is always at church before the preacher is in the pulpit or a member in the pew, to hinder the sower, to impoverish the soil, or to blast the seed, that is, when courage and faith are in the pulpit, and zeal and prayer in the pew. But if dead orthodoxy or live heterodoxy are in the pulpit, he then puts in his time elsewhere at some point of danger.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“A spiritual character can work through agencies or directly on the spirit. He infuses thoughts makes suggestions and does it so deftly that we do not know their paternity. He tempted Eve to take the forbidden fruit. He put it into David’s mind to number Israel, thereby provoking the wrath of God. He influenced Ananias and Sapphira to lie to God. Peter’s yielding to presumption was at his instance. Judas’ betrayal was from the same baneful source. The temptation of Christ was a typical and masterpiece of his business in seeking to seduce our Lord from God, showing his power to array agencies and pleas, and to back these by all forms of sanctity and persuasiveness. He is blasphemous, arrogant and presumptuous. He slanders God to men and infuses into men hard thoughts of God. He intensifies their enmity and inflames their prejudice against Him. He leads them to deny His existence and to traduce His character, thereby destroying the foundations of faith and all true worship. He does all he can by insinuation and charges to blacken saintly character and lower God’s estimate of the good. He is the vilest of calumniators, the most malignant and artful of slanderers.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Men don’t believe in a devil now,   As their fathers used to do; They’ve forced the door of the broadest creed   To let his majesty through; There isn’t a print of his cloven foot;   Or a fiery dart from his bow, To be found in earth or air to-day,   For the world has voted so. But who is mixing the fatal draft   That palsies heart and brain, And loads the earth of each passing year   With ten hundred thousand slain? Who blights the bloom of the land to-day   With the fiery breath of hell, If the devil isn’t and never was?   Won’t somebody rise and tell?      –Alfred J. Hough.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“When collecting money, building churches, and statistical columns are to stand as evidences of real church prosperity, then the world has a strong lodgment, and Satan has gained his end.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“The Gospel is represented as a training school in which to deny worldly desires is one part of its curriculum.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Ye adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore would be the friend of the world maketh himself an enemy of God” (R. V. James 4:4). Nothing is more explicit than this, nothing is more commanding, authoritative and more exacting. “Love not the world.” Nothing is more offensive to God, nothing is more criminal, more abominable, violative of the most sacred relationship of the soul with God. “Adulteresses”—purity gone and shame and illicit intercourse exist. Friendship for the world is Heaven’s greatest crime and God’s greatest enemy. The”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Fight the devil and overcome him, is John’s process of becoming fathers in spiritual power, rooted, grounded and perfected. Overcoming the devil, is with John the presage of overcoming the world.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Paul’s marvellous career was simple, not complex. He sums it up in fighting, running, watching, the three elements of continuous advance.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Satan has all the vantage ground when we do not maintain the aggressive.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“A spiritual growth, constant and sure spiritual development, is the surest safeguard against Satan’s wiles, assaults and surprises. Constant growth is all eyes and all strength. Satan never finds it asleep, drowsy nor weak. Onward, upward, is the great battle cry. Constant advance is the steel armour in the fight with the devil.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“It is on the field of low aims and satisfied results, that the devil wins his chief victories.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“To escape his snare, we must not only have a strong faith in the fact that Satan is, but also must have a most intimate knowledge of him and of his plans and many-sided ways.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Nothing advances Satan’s work with more skilful and readier hands than to be ignorant of Satan and his ways.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“The great power and malignity of Satan is seen in that among the most distressing cases were those who were not noted for great sins, but the young and comparative innocent ones were the victims of his dread power.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“To “overcome the wicked one,” the world, its love and its things must be abjured. There stands at the threshold of many a church door these words, which in spirit belong to the sacred honour of every soul’s true espousal to Christ: “Dost thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow or be led by them?” “I renounce them all,” was the answer solemnly said in the serious hour, and the preacher and the people and our own hearts, if true, said, “Amen.” And Amen let it be now and forever.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“It is not by positive, conspicuous evil that Satan perverts the Church, but by quiet displacement and by unnoticed substitution. The higher is being retired, the spiritual gives place to the social, and the divine is eliminated, because it is made secondary.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“One of these taking, man-savouring, Satanic devices is to pervert the aims of the Church after this manner of statement and effort, that the main object of the Church to-day is not so much to save individuals out of society, as to save society, not to save souls so much as to save the bodies of men, not to save men out of a community so much as to save men and manhood in the community. The world, not the individual, is the subject of redemption.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“True strength lies in the vital godliness of the people. The aggregate of the personal holiness of the members of each church is the only true measure of strength. Any other test offends God, dishonours Christ, grieves the Holy Spirit, and degrades religion.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“No more fatal or deadly symptom can be seen in a church than this transference of its strength from spiritual to material forces, from the Holy Ghost to the world. The power of God in the Church is the measure of its strength and is the estimate which God puts on it, and not the estimate the world puts on it.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“That is the devil’s main business—to materialize, earthlyize religion, to get man to live for bread alone, to make earth bigger than heaven.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“Now the kingdom of power, glory experienced by the Church and Christ is the more endeared and enriched to us by our rescue from the empire of Satan and the world whose domain is the air and will end with the air, whereas ours are in heavenly places. —Thomas Goodwin.”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow

“The defense of Christ against the Pharisaic charge of violating the Sabbath puts the devil conspicuous in his work of evil; “And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?”
― E.M. Bounds, Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow