George Santayana Quotes

One seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

No one is so good that he is immune from temptation. We will never be entirely free from it. . . . There is no order so holy, no place so secret where there will be no temptation.

The man who has never been tempted doesn't know how dishonest he is.

Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.

Many of us suffer from temptations from which we have no business to suffer.

Temptation is the devil looking through the keyhole. Yielding is opening the door and inviting him in.

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

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

No temptation can gravitate to a man unless there is that is his heart which is capable of responding to it.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Gollum has a weak personality and isn't able to cope with the power of the ring.

It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

We may not have demon fathers dangling offers of infernal power before us, but everyone understands what it means to struggle with temptation or resist the urge to give in to our baser natures.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

Oh, I am an angel, though sometimes I wish I was more of a devil.

Man must choose either of the two courses, the upward or the downward; but as he has the brute in him, he will more easily choose the downward course than the upward, especially when the downward course is presented to him in a beautiful garb. Man easily capitulates when sin is presented in the garb of virtue.

Temptations hurt not, though they have accesse; Satan o'ercomes none but by willingnesse.

Ten thousand million nightmares, temptation by the score, I used to get so high, and still I wanted more. You think my time is wasted in search of who I am, I tried so hard to kill the boy inside the man.

No one is immune to temptation. Not even a hero. Not even a nobody. Not even people like you and me. Lust is never very far away. And just when you least expect it, there it is again.

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

And now, when I have summed up all my store, Thinking (so I myself deceive) So rich a chaplet thence to weave As never yet the King of Glory wore, Alas! I find the serpent old, That, twining in his speckled breast, About the flowers disguised does fold With wreaths of fame and interest.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.