Quotes about Temptation

Once you have grace, I said to him, you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do.

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.

We must return from the desert like Jesus or St. John, with our capacity for feeling expanded and deepened, strengthened against the appeals of falsity, warned against temptation, great, noble and pure.

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

One of the ways the devil has deceived us and controlled our finances is through debt.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

Alcohol is the reduced form of spirit. Therefore, many people, lacking spirit, take to drink. They fill themselves with alcohol.

An institution which is populare because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.

The love of money is the root of all virtue.