Temptation Quotes
-
We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to dwell in a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent External. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.
Helen Keller
-
If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own . . . how much kinder, how much gentler he would be.
William Allen White
-
Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.
C. S. Lewis
-
Thou shalt abstain, Renounce, refrain.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
History shows us a lot of things. It shows why the Lord's Prayer includes the supplication: "And lead us not into temptation." In my day, dissertations were still written by hand, or drummed out with a typewriter. In the past, you had to round up the literature, find the books and find the passages. Nowadays you click on Wikipedia or Google and you have everything you need. This probably makes it more difficult to resist temptation.
Wolfgang Schauble
-
There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.
Jeanette Winterson
-
A man may quarrel with himself alone; that is, by controverting his better instincts and knowledge when brought face to face with temptation.
William Ellery Channing
-
Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.
Hannah Arendt
-
I ain't no drinking man, but temptation got the best of me.
Jimmy Buffett
-
...in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.
W. E. B. Du Bois
-
When you're a child actor and play the precocious kid, the temptation is to wear leather pants or a cutoff shirt to redefine yourself. But I never felt the need to randomly reshuffle the deck and say, 'Don't call me Peter. Call me Pete.' I just figured you evolve naturally, and you'll be recognized for what your successes are.
Peter Billingsley
-
Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.
Catherynne M. Valente
-
My back and hip situation is well-documented. Last Friday, the pain was so bad that I took a lot of pain pills. But that didn't seem to work, so I succumbed to temptation and went and bought a bottle. ... I have a problem with alcohol.
Eddie Sutton
-
Only strong characters can resist the temptation of superficial analysis.
Albert Einstein
-
Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the instruments of love.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
-
When there is no desire for fruit, there is also no temptation for untruth or himsa.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
At 'GQ,' there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
-
For as men in battle are continually in the way of shot, so we, in this world, are ever within the reach of Temptation.
William Penn
-
Knowledge of God's Word is a bulwark against deception, temptation, accusation, even persecution.
Edwin Louis Cole
-
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Gaston Bachelard
-
As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation "intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all: that's forgetfulness.
J. Budziszewski
-
That acknowledgment of weakness which we make in imploring to be relieved from hunger and from temptation is surely wisely put in our daily prayer. Think of it, you who are rich, and take heed how you turn a beggar away.
William Makepeace Thackeray