Quotes About Temptation

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man's success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. "Don't worry," he yawned. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it." That

Everything proceeds as if of its own accord, and this can all too easily tempt us to relax and let things take their course without troubling over details. Such indifference is the root of all evil.

I've deprived my family in order to buy books. No doubt there is a special punishment in hell for such self-indulgence. Perhaps I shall be struck with blindness among the rarest known to men.

To put it in the contemporary vernacular, Baal and Asherah were in effect the patron saints of sex and guns and rock 'n' roll, promising to deliver a potent mixture of satisfaction to the desires for power, success, and pleasure. This

The true answer to seduction is to open people's eyes to the shallowness of the "beauty" on offer. The

The devil himself can become beauty, so we are told, to corrupt mankind." (Marco)

drunk enough on earth's liquors to relish the prospect of the knife.

Without temptation what value is virtue?

I can't, I can't, I can't help hearing, I can't help seeing. I can't help it unless I run away.

I stared so long that I got to seeing them as being dark, ugly sins in my body, smelling and dirty, but my touch face showed that I didn't give a damn. I was the toughest person in the whole world. And then inside the outline of my body a devil's face slowly took shape. It came to my chest, a dark, ugly thing with big lips that looked hot around yellow pointed teeth, eyeing me in a friednly way, as though it had been feeding on what was inside me and was trying to show how pleased it was.

Sex and drugs and rock and rollIs all my brain and body needSex and drugs and rock and rollIs very good indeed.

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

It's just that I'd rather die of drink than of thirst.

Hold on, I won't have to read anything, will I? I'm not allowed to look at words, reading's sinful.

John Rebus ~ he tried to walk through the isles (of the book shop) without focusing. If he focused he would become interested and if he became interested he would buy. He already had over fifty unread books at home, piled next to his bed

He had to get off the booze. He had to get off the ciggies. They were killing him, yet they were the only things keeping him alive.

Poor girl. She would change. The idealism would vanish once she saw how hypocritical the whole game was, and what luxuries lay outside university. When she left, she'd want it all: the executive job in London, the flat, car, salary, wine-bar. She would chuck it all in for a slice of pie.

Man after the second half of the twentieth century is frustrated. You know that the foundation of all subversiveness is laid on frustration and this frustration keeps finding ways to subversive activities. And you also know that an uncert...ain present has made man pessimistic about future... therefore he runs after anything that glitters, be it fire

He took the bait like a rapist in a nudist colony for the blind.

I was losing, page by page, the fine rules of thought and deed that I had learned in church, from Henry to the Boy Scout Troop in Rockford. I was sopping up the poison off the street like a sponge.

Once I get something going well, I'll risk fucking it up just for the action.

From the time I made my first recording in 1983, I was already telling cats like Spike, "Nah, I ain't hitting that lick." I was already sliding away from it. Then, after nearly losing my life in the car crash, I really couldn't

But there was this one day when I went out to steal a part for my Porsche—

older cats, hustlers down at the pool hall. They'd say, "Don't be like me, youngblood." Even they knew they were doing wrong! They warn you, but you're too intrigued with their jewelry, their Cadillacs, and the fly women getting into their cars. The game sucks you in. The sexiness and swagger of