Claude Rains Quotes

What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely.

Just because I don't do bad things doesn't mean I don't have bad thoughts.

Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought.

Your mind is like, oh my God, I know this is wrong, but your body just gives in.

Everyone has a conflict inside of them - the conflict between what you should do and what you want to do.

The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

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.

Everyone deals with temptation. It's just there.

Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. Principle had power only until you found what you had to have.

For want of self-restraint many men are engaged all their lives in fighting with difficulties of their own making.

A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn't want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.

Many people weigh the guilt, they will feel against the pleasure of the forbidden action they want to take.

Men who are addicted to the passions are like the torch-carrier running against the wind; his hands are sure to be burned.

Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest at which I aim - not towards what I understand as evil, but towards what I understand as good.

Fear of my cruel impulses makes me kind.

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.

A man may quarrel with himself alone; that is, by controverting his better instincts and knowledge when brought face to face with temptation.

As a boy, I once saw a cart of melons that sorely tempted me. I sneaked up to the cart and stole a melon. I went into the alley to devour it, but no sooner had I set my teeth into it, than I paused, a strange feeling coming over me. I came to a quick conclusion. Firmly, I walked up to that cart, replaced the melon - and took a ripe one.

The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

During the course of our life we now and then enjoy some pleasures so inviting, and have some encounters of so tender a nature, that though they are forbidden, it is but natural to wish that they were at least allowable. Nothing can be more delightful, except it be to abandon them for virtue's sake.

Staying silent, staying away from him... that was the hardest thing I've ever done.

Temptation is not a sin but playing with temptation invites sin.

I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.

Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong.