#temptation

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry. ↗

— Henry A. Kissinger

#believe #foreign #foreign policy #policy #psychiatry

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#account #acquired #brought #call #day

Most dangerous is that temptation that doth goad us on to sin in loving virtue. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#doth #goad #loving #most #sin

Virtue is insufficient temptation. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#temptation #virtue

The temptations to wrong are many; they spring out of a corrupt nature. ↗

— Matthew Simpson

#many #nature #out #spring #temptations

Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning. ↗

— Peter Singer

#complex #decision-making #even #human #long-term

Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#temptation

It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed. ↗

— Anne Rice

#temptation #life

Tilting her face back, he looked into her eyes. They were unfocused, unable to settle on his face. And the same terrifying feeling stole over him once again. An acute fear—a final, painful realization—that her world was one of utter blackness. At last he realized the magnitude of her blindness. He couldn’t imagine never seeing her again. It was like a death, the inevitable conclusion when someone was gone. Why it should hit him now, after all these years, he could not fathom, but it was there, and finally he understood her private hell. He’d told her he would die without sight. Selfish, arrogant bastard, concerned with his own needs, his own perversions to watch himself pleasure her, to study her as she accepted him, to watch their bodies joined. How carelessly he had said that, not thinking of Elizabeth and what she would die for. What she wanted in this life. ↗

— Charlotte Featherstone

#elizabeth #iain #temptation-and-twilight #death

...It’s always only ever been you. And it always will be, Beth. You have my heart. My love. And my regret that I am not the man you deserve. ↗

— Charlotte Featherstone

#iain #temptation-and-twilight #love