Quotes About Temptation

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing, only, on the other hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself, and is easily seduced.

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgement of reason, and perverts its liberty.

Sometimes I ask to sneak a closer look, skip to the final chapter of the book

The serving girl—plump, round and rosy-cheeked—moved quickly between the tables. The soldiers smiled at her. She felt torn between the desire to smile back at them, because they were young, and the fear of getting a bad reputation, because they were the enemy—so she frowned and tightly pursed her lips, without, however, quite managing to erase the two dimples on her cheeks which showed her secret pleasure.

Charmaine was Miss Vamp, provocative and come-hithery in floor-length white silk cut clear to her navel; Dave and Shep were provoked and went thither.

The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.

She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.

Sex comes to most of us with a twist.

There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shoulder-shrugging casualness committed at last.

The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. The short path is the only path but it is very steep.

I wonder if it's harder to be good in this age?

She must not be tempted by truthfulness, she must play the game out to the end.

But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.

Christ, I loathe women. But I can't get going on the other tack either. And you needn't blush and look coy, I never fancied you. I know what you got up to with Fritzie Eitel! No—but I'd have had old Wilfred if he'd asked me. What did old Wilfred do for sex? No one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't have any, and if so good on him.

To be good is just never to lose it. How does evil begin in a life? How can it begin? Yet we were there once.

By the time she wrote The Sovereignty of Good in 1970 her criticism had become stringent: 'we are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy'.

Filthy lucre! Filthy lucre!" I could hear Sammy saying, with the voice of a man cursing the woman he has ruined.

By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.

We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.

I can browse indefinitely in a stationer's shop, indeed there is hardly anything in a good stationer's which I do not like and want.

don't let jesus in. AA is just one obsession replaced with another

The pit of melancholy was a bottomless one, and he was descending fast, falling further away from the good times. Such times often seemed tantalisingly within reach; he could see them, going on all around him. His mind was like a cruel prison, giving his captive soul a sight of freedom, but no more.

The trick was to consume as quickly as possible; in doing it this way there was a sense that the body could be cheated.

Ah'm thinking about shoutin 'stop' but ah could never turn away at this point. If smack is as addictive as they say, then ah'm already aw the junky ah'm ever gaunny be.