Quotes About Temptation

When I was seventeen I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot-potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing in the wrong place. I had legs a hundred miles long and a booty to die for. Adam woulda said to Eve, Eve, I'm leaving you, honey, and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker.

Are you trying to bribe me?" "Only if it works

It's when people are tired that they're the most vulnerable, most open to temptation.

He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare to call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure.

People with good lives are hesitant to jeopardize them. People who have nothing, on the other hand, are often no better than wild animals." She nodded and took

A book collector is mad enough to begin with, Watson; but tempt him with some such bait as this Shakespeare quarto and he is bereft of all sanity.

You shouldn't do this — you shouldn't! was all she found breath to say. He laughed softly, deeply. I'm doing it, though. Want me to stop? Yes Little liar! He took her lips then and Fay was lost. Like a small moth she fluttered in the dark flame of him and it mattered not that destruction might lie beyond the ecstasy he offered now.

The signs of the old flame, I know them well. I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me down or the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades, the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night, before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws.

To what crime do you not drive the hearts of men, accursed hunger for gold?

I want to dip my finger in your pot of honey.

To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood.

The present participle is the Devil himself, she thought, now that we are in the place for believing in Devils.

You can't drive a bayonet through a chap's body in cold blood, he remembered him saying. And you can't go in for an exam. without drinking, said Edward.

All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. Late home-comers could see shadows against the blinds even in the most respectable suburbs. Not a square in snow or fog lacked its amorous couple. All plays turned on the same subject. Bullets went through heads in hotel bedrooms almost nightly on that account.

beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one can count on it or seize it or have it wrapped in paper. Nothing is to be won from the shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sit at home than haunt the plate-glass windows in the hope of lifting the shining green, the glowing ruby, out of them alive.

I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smelt so unpleasant too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets.

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan.

Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.