Quotes about Temptation

The temptation to forget is woven into the fabric of these... costumes.

Never mistake a woman as an opportunity for bliss.

You humans are lovers, yes? So you have this awful tendency to reject Him who first loved you and follow after intoxicating sense. Evil is a jealous lover who will try to destroy what it cannot posses.

Temptations are a compliment to our power, not our weakness.

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds... I have fallen victim to what T.S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.

Jesus' first temptation was to be relevant: to turn stones into bread.

I wonder if the greatest temptation is self-rejection. Could it be that beneath all the lures to greed, lust, and success rests a great fear of never being enough or not being lovable?

Why do we children of the light so easily become conspirators with the darkness? The answer is quite simple. Our identity, our sense of self, is at stake.

The great temptation of our lives is to deny our role as chosen people and to allow ourselves to be trapped in the worries of our daily lives. Without the word that keeps lifting us up as God's chosen people, we remain, or become, small people, stuck in the complaints that emerge from our daily struggle to survive.

As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit.