John Updike Quotes

We are never like angels till our passion dies.

No mortal man has ever served at the same time his passions and his best interests.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.

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.

One of the widest gaps in human experience is the gap between what we say we want to be and our willingness to discipline ourselves to get there.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

What keeps us from abandoning ourselves entirely to one vice, often, is the fact that we have several.

The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.

Humans seem to be programmed to think of ambivalent feelings at the same time. That is the driving force behind human beings: to be the warrant of all things and to control other worlds.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

I think the single most important, fascinating, and complex aspect of human nature is that we all know, deep down, that we are not what we ought to be - or as John Doe says in 'Seven,' 'We are not what was intended.'

You have to be strong for people when you don't wanna be strong. You have to be clean-showered, clean, clean-cut for people. You have to set an example.

Right is what you should do, wrong is what you really want to do.

My whole life, I've been a Temptation.

To call myself a fighter is to be selfish at times. It makes me resent my opponent. That's motivation I can tap into.

Everybody has a hero and a villain within themselves. So it depends upon you to be a hero or a villain. If you show humanity, it will give you satisfaction.

As I heard out people who had done others wrong, I'd often wonder how a human allows his or her better judgement to override their conscience. When I share these feelings with my friends, they say, 'Everyone isn't like you.' But I think it's easy to assert your better feelings and not allow the darker side to dominate your personality.

We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can't make it think.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

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

As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.'

Man liveth from hour to hour, and knoweth not what may happen; Influences circle him on all sides, and yet must he answer for his actions: For the being that is master of himself, bendeth events to his will, But a slave to selfish passions is the wavering creature of circumstance.

Being old enough to know better but still too young to resist mostly sucks.