Seneca the Younger Quotes

… vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.

She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell. Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it. And it's delicious.

The devil's main purpose is not to scare us, in a horror-movie way; when we're scared of him, we're alert to him, and that might undermine his plans. Instead, he wants to quietly, subtly lure us into stepping away from God.

Vice is a creature of such hideous mien... that the more you see it the better you like it.

Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.

I felt guilty throughout the whole time, but I was seduced. The power of these drugs, sex, power, and money, was extremely strong for me.

Imagination is a screen onto which the evil spirits can 'project' images, temptations presented as stimulating entertainments, offering us pleasurable rewards if we give in to the temptation.

All things can corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.

Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor.

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

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

You can be enticed by food, wooed by food, sex, money, or instruments.

For Satan always finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.

He that is won with a nut, may be lost with an apple.

Political devicivness is a vice, and like many other vices, it is very attractive.

Power was my weakness and my temptation.

Riches, the incentives to evil, are dug out of the earth.

Satan often paints sin with virtue's colors.

Vice is its own reward.

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.

My soul is to sell. The dark is too hard to beat 'cause they're calling me.

When the devil makes his offer (always open incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos which glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting-houses and the snow-swept corridors of power . . . Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word; with its own mysteries - this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! - and its own sacred texts and scriptures - the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.