SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY

  • “What we’re often really craving is not the thing that we desire, but the reprieve we feel once we have relieved ourselves from the yearning of desire.”

    —Kass Sarll

  • But also because she knows that she and the photographer have already taken each other to the perfect and beautiful world. And that now it’s time to descend to the actual one. If they try to live in that other world for good, it will recede into the distance; it will be as if they’d never been there at all. She says goodbye, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives.

    Bittersweet
    Susan Cain

  • “As with gluttony, the more single-mindedly we pursue something for the pleasure we can get from it, the less likely we are to find our desire for pleasure satisfied.”

    —Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies

  • I always remember an alcoholic friend who expressed to me his frustration at praying daily for God to remove his desire for drink. Was God even listening? Later it dawned on him that the desire for alcohol was the main reason he prayed so diligently. Persistent temptation had compelled persistent prayer.

    Unanswered prayer: God, where are you?

  • “If a man has no sense of meaning, he will numb himself with pleasure.”

    — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
    (via Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy by Donald Miller)

  • The demons generally produce in us the opposite of what has just been said. For when they take possession of the soul and extinguish the light of the mind, then there is no longer in us poor wretches either sobriety, or discernment, or self-knowledge or shame; but there is indifference, lack of perception, want of discernment and blindness. 

    What has just been said is known very vividly by those who have subdued their lust in order to become chaste, who have curbed their freedom of speech and have changed from shamelessness to modesty. They know how after the sobering of the mind, after the ending of its blindness, or rather its maiming, they are inwardly ashamed of themselves for what they said and did before when they were living in blindness.

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • People, who wish to discipline the sexual organs should avoid drinking those artificial concoctions which are called ‘aperitifs’ – presumably because they open a way to the stomach for the vast meal which is to follow. Not only are they harmful to our bodies, but their fraudulent and artificial character greatly offends the conscience wherein God dwells. For what does wine lack that we should sap its healthy vigor by adulterating it with a variety of condiments? 

    —St. Diadochos of Photiki

  • The Bible tells us not to indulge in lusts of the flesh, because God knows how difficult it will be for us to recognize the truth about life if we do.  When people in the Land of Flesh look around, they see nothing but death.  But when people in the Land of the Spirit look around, they see only life—nothing ever dies in the Land of the Spirit.  Then what a foolish thing it is, really, to debate about whether unnecessary physical indulgences are harmful—to wonder whether a little marijuana will do any damage, or whether regular smoking and a little drinking binge now and then is going to matter much.  Every physical indulgence we add to ourselves—and especially the ones that serve mostly to calm our nerves or lift our spirits (things that should never be done by anything material, but only by God)—will just root us all the more inescapably in the Land of Flesh, where there is no life, no kingdom of heaven, no hope in God.

    —Dee Pennock,Who is God? Who Am I? Who Are You?

  • Damage (1992)

  • Parthenope (2024)