Top 100 Quotes About Temptation
#1. What constitutes virtue, Mrs Graham? Is it the circumstance of being able and willing to resist temptation; or that of having no temptations to resist?
Anne Bronte
#2. When temptation comes your way, name that boastful, deceitful giant "Goliath!" and do with it as David did to the Philistine of Gath.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#3. And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.
Donna Tartt
#4. Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profit others and ourselves.
Anne Baxter
#5. The best way to keep yourself from doing something grossly self-destructive and stupid is to avoid the temptation to do it. For example, it is far easier to fend off inappropriate amorous desires if one runs screaming from the room every time a pretty girl comes in.
Jim Butcher
#6. The Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist the temptation to make the most of it.
Edmund Morgan
#7. ...like many another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to parade it,...
W. Somerset Maugham
#8. Every hour of temptation in one's life has origin. Either from the flesh or the devil .
Osunsakin Adewale
#9. I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism. Travelling in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don't want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.
Thomas Piketty
#10. Opportunity may only knock once, but temptation'll knock down the damn door and drag you out by the hair.
Lois Greiman
#11. Too many people try to do the new job, new spouse, new house, new car thing in 18 months. That's a good way to end up broke. We've got to resist the temptation to catch up with our parents in 18 months. Slow down. You have the rest of your life to play catch up. After all, it's just stuff.
Dave Ramsey
#12. [Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?
Frank Harris
#13. Obedience brings peace in decision making. If we have firmly made up our minds to follow the commandments, we will not have to redecide which path to take when temptation comes our way.
James E. Faust
#14. If you Surrender to temptation then
weak is your soul, for you like grass
that alows the wind to be its "control
freak". A strong soul knows what it
wants and adheres to its principles like
a tree that stands still despite the
condition.
Morgan Chabane
#15. A woman flees from temptation, but a man just crawls away from it in the cheerful hope that it may overtake him.
Helen Rowland
#16. The uncut sheets of colored glass are really seductive, awesome, and unarguably lovely things. Naturally, the temptation to cut and damage all that pristine beauty is too much for me to resist.
Judith Schaechter
#17. Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. We have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.
Fulton J. Sheen
#18. When we succumb to temptation, we are failing to believe in that moment that everything we need, in Christ we already have.
Tullian Tchividjian
#19. Magic doesn't mean to earn something or to get something. Magic is the will power. You can grow crops, but you can't create them. Difference is, one is the will power and the other is temptation. Magic selects the eligible but can't give them the proper direction.
Anurag Bhatt
#20. Let love therefore be what it will, my Uncle Toby fell into it - And possibly, gentle reader, with such a temptation so wouldst thou: For never did thy eyes behold, or thy concupiscence covet, anything in this world more concupiscible than widow Wadman.
Laurence Sterne
#22. Ten thousand million nightmares, temptation by the score, I used to get so high, and still I wanted more. You think my time is wasted in search of who I am, I tried so hard to kill the boy inside the man.
Ozzy Osbourne
#23. The best thing there is to do when there is temptation is run.
Johnny Hunt
#24. Gregory's words remain a sharp and timely rebuke to the continuing temptation to practice theology as though we could separate the exercise of our mind from the development of our character.
Christopher A. Hall
#25. Prayer and temptation, the Bible and meditation, make a true minister of the gospel.
J.C. Ryle
#26. I think there's a temptation to try to think of people who don't vaccinate as a homogenous community, but I'm not convinced that's true. I'm not even sure that the word 'community' is totally accurate there, you know.
Eula Biss
#27. I do not have a merchandise line. I don't sell knives or apparel. Though I have been approached to endorse various products from liquor to airlines to automobiles to pharmaceuticals dozens of times, I have managed to resist the temptation.
Anthony Bourdain
#28. You know, there's that temptation in interviews to make yourself sound - well, to give yourself a bit of mystery.
Johnny Vegas
#29. Not a sorrow, not a burden, not a temptation, not a bereavement, not a disappointment, not a care, not a groan or tear, but has its antidote in God's rich and inexhaustible resources.
George C. Lorimer
#30. God watches over every temptation and trial that you will ever face in your life and He will never "allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able.
Robert B. Somerville
#31. So you tell yourself you are pretty find clay To have tricked temptation and turned it away, But wait, my friend, for a different day; Wait till you want to want to!
Edmund Vance Cooke
#32. Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle, but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more, not less, fierce.
N. T. Wright
#33. Most people want to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch.
Robert Orben
#34. Only a strong faith - a faith based on God's Word - will protect us from temptation and doubt.
Billy Graham
#35. These days the temptation to use steroids in sports has become too great for many young athletes.
Jim Sensenbrenner
#36. Few people achieve greatness. One reason is that the opportunity, for the vast majority of us, never even shows up. Another is that if it does, it will inevitably look like a long shot. And the temptation invariably is to play it safe.
Jack McDevitt
#37. Develop discipline of self so that you do not have to decide and re-decide what you will do when you are confronted with the same temptation time and time again. You need only decide some things once.
Spencer W. Kimball
#38. A trustworthy marriage has weathered temptation and anger and jealousy, resentment, self-righteousness and a little bit of selfishness. When you get over and get through that, then maybe you can see the light to love.
Ruby Dee
#39. Temptation requires definite, decisive action.
Billy Graham
#40. Temptation does not make the sin, it lies ready in the heart.
Hannah More
#41. Man has always been dexterous at confusing evil with good. That was Adam's and Eve's problem, and it is our problem today. If evil were not made to appear attractive, there would be no such thing as temptation.
Billy Graham
#42. It was not a safe thing to lead Joe into temptation; he had no resistance to it at all.
John Steinbeck
#43. Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
Oscar Wilde
#44. Give me, instead of beauty's bust,
A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I could trust,
Yet never linked with error find.
George Darley
#45. Temptation and testing (or a trial) are two sides of the same coin. Satan uses an occasion or a person to tempt us to fall; God uses the same to try us and make us stronger.
Ruth Graham
#46. So long as idleness is quite shut out from our lives, all the sins of wantonness, softness, and effeminacy are prevented; and there is but little room for temptation.
Jeremy Taylor
#47. Imagination is a screen onto which the evil spirits can 'project' images, temptations presented as stimulating entertainments, offering us pleasurable rewards if we give in to the temptation.
Michael O'Brien
#48. He should always wear jeans because they make him look hotter than a nebula. Black suits him too. It hugs to his muscular vales and swells, turning temptation into sexy man therapy.
Poppet
#50. Temptation is a dress rehearsal for a karmic experience of negativity.
Gary Zukav
#51. It is like his Father, too, not to withhold good wine because men abuse it. Enforced virtue is unworthy of the name. That men may rise above temptation, it is needful that they should have temptation. It is the will of him who makes the grapes and the wine.
George MacDonald
#52. Why did the stories I knew best never end well?
But why too did I feel at home among them?
I could never give up the myths, the maps, the ship that had shaped me.
Blake's home might be paradise, but my home was the Temptation.
Heidi Heilig
#53. A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
#54. Believe it or not, when you fast in the Spirit, God makes you more equipped to deal with hunger, irritability, and temptation.
Monica Johnson
#55. Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.
Malcolm Turnbull
#56. Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.
P. J. O'Rourke
#57. This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.
C.S. Lewis
#58. Temptation: Recognize it for what it is, and then reject it - immediately and without compromise.
Billy Graham
#59. G Our Father in heaven, h hallowed be i your name. [1] 10 j Your kingdom come, k your will be done, [2] l on earth as it is in heaven. 11 m Give us n this day our daily bread, [3] 12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And o lead us not into temptation,
Anonymous
#60. We should have a strong president. Strong enough to resist the temptation of taking power that a president shouldn't have.
Ron Paul
#61. Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed? Glaucon
Steven D. Levitt
#62. Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy.
Eleanor Perenyi
#63. The very best Labor governments in our nation's history distinguished themselves by thinking big and, wherever possible, resisting the temptation to overemphasise short-term political considerations.
Anthony Albanese
#64. However, there is one great temptation and that is that you can forget that the aim of the writer was to reject all other worlds and to construct one of his own and that the aim of the translator is to re-embody himself into the world of the various writers.
Ventseslav Konstantinov
#65. Resistance to temptation means taking desire seriously. Both Jesus and Satan do.
Russell D. Moore
#66. The temptation to forget is woven into the fabric of these... costumes.
Ted Dekker
#67. The only way to banish temptation is to give in to it, the saying went.
Nikki Sex
#68. There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.
Jeanette Winterson
#69. I'm fighting to save myself, and save myself, I will. Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ
Nikos Kazantzakis
#70. Despite the weight of the world on my shoulders, the temptation to stop and smell the supernatural roses tugged on my sleeves a time or two.
John Corwin
#71. You want this?'
I raised my gaze, gasping at the dark hunger in his expression. My mind blanked. Want his body? How could I not? He was pure temptation.
'I meant this,' he held up my bag, 'but I could easily be persuaded to share anything else my wife might desire.
Kresley Cole
#72. The shoes themselves were light green, with lowish heels (which were very important for comfort and walking; high heels were always a temptation, but, like all temptations, one paid for them later).
Alexander McCall Smith
#73. Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone in debt to us. And do not bring us into temptation. Luke 11:4
Beth Moore
#74. I have more appreciation for why the Bible avoids fuzzy psychologisms and says simply to the stealer, "Steal no more," and to the tempted, "Flee temptation." The Bible challenges us to look upward, not inward, for counsel at moments of crisis.
Philip Yancey
#75. I can resist everything except temptation.
Oscar Wilde
#76. When you really put your heart and soul into something, the temptation is to try to be in control of circumstances, however you can, and looking and seeing how people are responding.
Matt Bomer
#77. In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?
Charles De Gaulle
#78. We may feel that a particular habit 'isn't too bad,'but continually giving in to that habit weakens our wills against the onslaughts of temptation from other directions.
Jerry Bridges
#79. Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all virtues. Be active in business, that temptation may miss her aim; the bird that sits is easily shot.
Benjamin Franklin
#80. Although I am deeply grateful to a great many people, I forgo the temptation of naming them for fear that I might slight any by omission.
Theodore Bikel
#81. Temptation is an opportunity to please God and shame the devil.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#82. No test or temptation that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face. All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he'll never let you be pushed past your limit; he'll always be there to help you come through it.
Anonymous
#83. You've been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation.'
Well, I know I'm not a Christian and I'm beginning to doubt whether I'm a gentleman,' said Philip.
W. Somerset Maugham
#84. Don't savor temptations; don't dwell on them or toy with them or replay them over and over in your mind. The more you think about a particular temptation, the more enticing it becomes.
Billy Graham
#85. Quite the opposite, Miss Bennet; I have been resisting a temptation almost since my first arrival in Hertfordshire.
Pat Santarsiero
#86. Tomorrow's character is made out of today's thoughts. Temptation may come suddenly, but sin does not.
Randy Alcorn
#87. Some people are tempted most strongly at the beginning of their spiritual life, others near the end. Some are troubled all their lives. Still others receive only light temptation. Such things are decided by God, and we can trust his wisdom.
Thomas A Kempis
#88. It was quite impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when your heart's desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven.
Thomas Hardy
#89. I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.
John Polkinghorne
#90. In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known.
Joanne Harris
#91. In the temporal sphere, the temptation to evil inherent in every power is certainly unceasing. Only in God is the conflict between power and good ultimately resolved. But the desire to escape this conflict by rejecting every earthly power would lead to the worst inhumanity.
Carl Schmitt
#92. I am too impatient to wait for temptation to come to me.
Mason Cooley
#93. Original sin - that is to say, the sin of having been born with human nature that contains within it the temptation to evil - will always make a mockery of attempts at perfection based upon manipulation of the environment.
Theodore Dalrymple
#94. The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper.
C.S. Lewis
#96. After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.
Jean Cocteau
#97. We said to him: here is your happiness, here is what you spent your whole youth looking for, here is the girl you saw in all your dreams!
How could anyone, pushed by the shoulders like that, avoid a reaction of indecision, then fear, then dismay--how could he resist the temptation to escape?
Alain-Fournier
#98. I am in the pitiable situation of feeling all the force of temptation without having the strength to succumb to it.
Lord Chesterfield
#99. The righteousness that makes a man visit the sins of a father upon his children, is the righteousness of a devil, not the righteousness of God. When God visits the sins of a father on his children, it is to deliver the child from his own sins through yielding to inherited temptation.
George MacDonald
#100. But precisely this illusion that everything is "clear" is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge.
Thomas Merton
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