Quotes About Temptation

On writing Jeeves and Wooster stories]: You tell yourself that you can take Jeeves stories or leave them alone, that one more can't possibly hurt you, because you know you can pull up whenever you feel like it, but it is merely wish-full thinking. The craving has gripped you and there is no resisting it. You have passed the point of no return.

There is nothing an author today has to guard himself more carefully against than the Saga Habit. The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him.

A man thinks he is being chilled steel – or adamant, if you prefer the expression – and suddenly the mists clear away and he finds that he has allowed a girl to talk him into something frightful. Samson had the same experience with Delilah.

Nobody ever wants to do anything except what they are not allowed to do.

There are moments in the life of every man when the impulse attacks him to sacrifice his future to the alluring gratification of the present.

Ask the first lion cub you meet, and it will tell you that, once you've tasted blood, there is no pulling up, and it's the same with opening telegrams.

He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting.

Scrubby, impecunious men drift to and fro there, waiting for the gods to provide something easy; and the prudent man, conscious of the possession of loose change, whizzes through the danger zone at his best speed, 'like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head, because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.

Do you not see a threat in the bloody silk of the poppy? No ves en la seda sangrienta de la amapola una amenaza?

The story is even Bill Wilson, a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, couldn't overcome the sex monkey on his back, and spent his sober life cheating on his wife and filled with guilt.

Bit it was her scent that just about killed him. Clean skin. Woman. And something more—something that made him feel like dispensing with five thousand years of civilization, dragging her off to a cave somewhere, and filling her with babies.

Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face

Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face," he told the disciples. "How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavours escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.

How easy it is for the majority of people to be tempted materially, to languish spiritually and do the very things that will hurt themselves.

God is pulling man and maya is pulling man, and man is free to move toward either.

sadly I wondered how one with the power to win a master's love could readily respond to worldly allures. Enjoyments of wine and sex are rooted in the natural man; to appreciate them one requires no delicacy of perception. Sense wiles are comparable to the evergreen oleander, fragrant with its rosy-colored flowers: every part of the plant is poisonous.20 The land of healing lies within, radiant with the happiness that is blindly sought in a thousand outer directions.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.

Oh, yes. He felt the pearls brush down his face again. Dory turned: he met her eyes and let her see the new pearls forming. Anything that beautiful is terrible. Because it's outside of you. It's not you. You'll do anything to make it part of you. You'd eat it, drown in it, kill it, let it kill you. Anything to stop it from not being you.

Once the back of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese's skin there felt seperately alive and rather burning. There could not understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her face that was somewhat turned away, and again she knew that instant of half-recognition. And knew, too, that it was not to be believed. She had never seen the woman before. If she had, could she had forgotten?

For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means. He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love.

It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn't remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump.

Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese's skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning.

Ayer, se dijo, o se dejó entender, que el camino que he escogido me llevaría a hundirme en las profundidades del vicio y la degeneración humanas. Sí, me he hundido bastante desde que me apartaron de ti