Temptation Quotes

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.”
― Mae West

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.”
― Mark Twain

“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Self-knowledge is better than self-control any day," Raquel said firmly. "And I know myself well enough to know how I act around cookies.”
― Claudia Gray, Evernight

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“When women go wrong, men go right after them.”
― Mae West

“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Arthur Dent: What happens if I press this button?
Ford Prefect: I wouldn't-
Arthur Dent: Oh.
Ford Prefect: What happened?
Arthur Dent: A sign lit up, saying 'Please do not press this button again.”
― Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

“Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong.”
― Prince

“... the devil doesn't come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you've ever wished for ...”
― Tucker Max, Assholes Finish First

“Power was my weakness and my temptation.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out...”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“The problem with temptation is that you may not get another chance.”
― Laurence Peter

“I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Oh, he did look like a deity – the perfect balance of danger and charm, he was at the same time fascinating and inaccessible, distant because of his demonstrated flawlessness, and possessing such strength of character that he was dismaying and at the same time utterly attractive in an enticing and forbidden way.”
― Simona Panova, Nightmarish Sacrifice

“What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves

“Which of us can resist the temptation of being thought indispensable?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“Get thee behind me, Satan!”
― P.C. Cast, Marked

“Sometimes we have to behave indifferent towards people who proclaim their love to us, just to see if they are really different.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Wine and women make wise men dote and forsake God's law and do wrong."

However, the fault is not in the wine, and often not in the woman. The fault is in the one who misuses the wine or the woman or other of God's crations. Even if you get drunk on the wine and through this greed you lapse into lechery, the wine is not to blame but you are, in being unable or unwilling to discipline yourself. And even if you look at a woman and become caught up in her beauty and assent to sin [= adultery; extramarital sex], the woman is not to blame nor is the beauty given her by God to be disparaged: rather, you are to blame for not keeping your heart more clear of wicked thoughts. ... If you feel yourself tempted by the sight of a woman, control your gaze better ... You are free to leave her. Nothing constrains you to commit lechery but your own lecherous heart.”
― Anonymous, Dives and Pauper

“Temptation is the feeling we get when encountered by an opportunity to do what we innately know we shouldn't.”
― Steve Maraboli

“But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch