Temptation Quotes

Remove yourself from temptation. Don't even look at something if you know you shouldn't have it.

~ Lucy Diamond

It made me feel as if I was taking back some control over my life when everything else had been shaken up so frighteningly.

~ Lucy Diamond

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down

~ Edith Wharton

Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.

~ Martin Luther

Their glee was greater glee in the fact that he was a good man, than he was any off-the-street kind of a guy who did this sort of thing without needing temptation...They delighted in the pain in the pain this would cause his wife and family..

~ John Pontius

To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

One year Halloween came on October 24, three hours after midnight. At that time, James Nightshade of 97 Oak Street was thirteen years, eleven months, twenty-three days old. Next door, William Halloway was thirteen years, eleven months, and twenty-four days old. Both touched toward fourteen; it almost trembled in their hands. And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young any more...

~ Ray Bradbury

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

A line from The Picture of Dorian Gray kept running through my head- a line which, I thought, might have been written by the Devil himself:The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

~ Syrie James

[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

Sexual temptations are lurking around every corner in our lives today! Resisting the temptation to gratify the flesh is a full-time job.

~ Gary Rohrmayer

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

~ Terry Pratchett

Resist the temptation to see yourself as a victim.

~ James C. Dobson

Attraction isn't wrong. People can’t help who they are drawn to and they certainly can’t control affinity, as uncommon as it is. What is wrong is acting on inclination if it hurts someone else, namely a significant other.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

Being around her now was nine parts bliss and one part torment. And he wanted it to last as long as possible.

~ Molly Ringle

We haven’t talked since the café, and he’s dead wrong if he thinks I’m caving. I don’t care how many wicked smiles he flashes in my direction or how many times he “mistakenly” brushes his hand against my cheek or thigh. He can make my head spin and my blood run hot, but I’m strong enough to resist his every temptation.

~ Katie Mcgarry

I should have shouted No and left him. But at least said Satan in the deeps of my mind, know what the temptation is before you do anything hastily.

~ Lord Dunsany

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

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I can resist everything except temptation.

~ Oscar Wilde

Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is we'll find it.

~ Sam Levenson

Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.

~ Anthony Trollope

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