Quotes About Temptation

Show business is and has always been a depraved carnival.

Though inclination be as sharp as will, My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect.

The Devil, it is true, is not exactly a doctor who has taken degrees, but he is very learned, very expert for all that. He has not been carrying on his business during thousands of years for nothing.

Running a casino is like robbing a bank with no cops around. For guys like me, Las Vegas washes away your sins. It's like a morality car wash.

The trouble with addiction is that you can park the car but you can never switch off the engine or stop yourself from hearing the revs.

We all would like to think that we would never, in a million years, have a glass of wine and get behind the wheel of a car, but it could happen, and then you could run a red light.

Temptations, unlike opportunities, will always give you many second chances.

But i was high, when i finally had the chance to see, everything thats pretty aint' always good for me.

Opportunity, after all, is only another word for temptation.

Calm down, she tells herself. Just because this has never happened to you before. Because you have reached the ripe age of thirty-one without knowing this peculiar derangement. For derangement is what it surely is; only by stern physical effort can she keep herself from looking at him, touching him.

It was one of those brief spells of complete happiness that come once in a rare while, an unlooked for gift of God, when the forces of darkness, of sorrow and temptation seem miraculously held back, a breathing space in the battle.

Son, as long as you live, Satan will use what you see and what you hear against you.

Never be curious. It is the path to perdition.

A woman is a deep Ditch, said he, her House inclines to Death and her Paths unto the Devil

No matter what skullduggery and death Fitzy later caused no matter how great a coward & liar he proved himself I still believe he never wanted no more than this in life and when he danced with that bosomy Belinda at Mrs Robinson's there were no malice in him.

Joel was only twenty-six but there was about him the sense of something over-ripe and gone to seed. He was not tall, and not exactly fat. But once noticed, immediately, those large red lips, which hovered on that balancing point where sensuality becomes greed. His fleshy face was a trifle too smooth and the skin glistened like a suspect apple which had been waxed to give it extra sales appeal.

S]ince humans find it hard to give up a pleasure already experienced, such a sacrifice might come easier if another pleasure was offered in replacement.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.

God wants us to worry about our sins before we sin; the devil wants us to worry after we sin. God wants us to feel free after we repent (for we really are free then); the devil is a deceiver). The devil tempts us to cavalier pride before we sin and worrisome despair afterward, since pride and despair both separate us from God, and anything that separates us from God is the devil's friend and our enemy, while anything that brings us close to God is the devil's enemy and our friend.

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can't refuse.

One of the reasons lust is bad (not the only reason) is that it makes you stupid. Like any addiction, it blinds your vision to everything else and focuses it on the one thing that is the object of your addiction.

It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of the imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you.

The perennial temptation is to creep under the angel's flaming sword, to try to create a heaven on earth.

Greed for the things money can buy ("natural wealth") is a bad thing, but it is finite. You can only enjoy a finite amount of food or drink, houses or cars, or even sex. But greed for money ("artificial wealth") is infinite. You can always want more. It's like a drug: you have to have higher and higher doses of it to give you the same "buzz" you used to get from little bits of it. And this never stops. It is Hell's false infinite.