Quotes about Temptation

The One Forbidden Thing. Remember Bluebeard, who says to his wife, "Don't open that closet"? And then one always disobeys. In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.

And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites.

In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.

The passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.

Minibars are very appealing, especially when someone else is paying.

It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.

We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have.

When Fortune flatters, she does it to betray.

What we learn from the story of Adam and Eve is simple. What we can have is never what we want. And when we can have what we wanted we want something else. It's human nature in a single luminous story. Our sin. Our fall. Our problem.

Just when we think we are the safest, when we feel no need to keep our guard up, to work on our inner integrity, to discipline ourselves for godliness — temptation will come!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the observation that when lust takes control, "At this moment God . . . loses all reality. . . . Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with forgetfulness of God.

Other helpful passages include Job 31:1, Proverbs 6:27, Mark 9:42ff., Ephesians 5:3-7, and 2 Timothy 2:22, some of which are commented upon below.)