James Weldon Johnson Quotes

The whole Hollywood conception of Tibet as this peace-loving country denies the complex humanity of the Tibetan people. Their ideas exist in a high degree of tension with impulses toward corruption, toward violence, toward all sorts of things. The Dalai Lama himself would say that he has to fight these impulses himself on a daily basis.

The seed of every sin is in every heart.

Men are victims of their own impulses.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

It's almost as if we each have a vampire inside us. Controlling that beast, that dark side, is what fascinates me.

What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

I try not to do bad, but sometimes it's irresistible.

The inherent corruption of man can often bring down the best system.

Human nature is you get carried away, so we have to protect ourselves from ourselves.

It is only through restraint that man can manage not to suppress himself.

To live is to fight, to preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.

We are all afflicted by original sin; people succumbing to temptations to do and to be.

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

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

Often the best in us springs from the worst in us.

Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?

Evil exists in us all, Torak. Some fight it. Some feed it. That's how it's always been.

I read somewhere, one, that crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion. I think we cry to release the animal parts of us without losing our humanity. Because inside of me is a beast that snarls, and growls, and strains toward freedom, toward Tobias, and, above all, towards life. And as hard as I try, I cannot kill it.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm. Don't scream or cry, don't run to him and throw yourself at his feet, pleading for him to take you in his arms, don't strip off your clothes and run naked to the water, wild with wanting.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

A German philosopher once wrote that he who fights monsters must take care that he doesn't become one himself.