Boris Pasternak Quotes

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

L'homme n'est ni ange ni be" te, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l'ange fait la be" te. Man is neither angel nor beast.Unfortunately, he who wants to act the angel often acts the beast.

Temptation turns you. It makes you into something you never dreamed, it presses you to give up everything you ever loved, it calls you to sell your soul for one, fleeting moment.

Temptation is a dress rehearsal for a karmic experience of negativity.

The shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.

The devil on my right shoulder must have brutally strangled the angel on my left.

Temptation is a fearful word. It indicates the beginning of a possible series of infinite evils. It is the ringing of an alarm bell, whose melancholy sounds may reverberate through eternity. Like the sudden, sharp cry of "Fire!" under our windows by night, it should rouse us to instantaneous action, and brace every muscle to its highest tension.

I felt for the tormented whirlwinds Damned for their carnal sins Committed when they let their passions rule their reason.

The Devil is easy to identify. He appears when you're terribly tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn't grant.

The very first temptation in the history of mankind was the temptation to be discontent...that is exactly what discontent(ment ) is - a questioning of the goodness of God.

She's staring down her desires, while they're staring down her dress.

Then as now, evil begins its courtship cloaked in light. And the heart embraces what is should flee. Forgetting it once had a true lover. Love will prove greater than lust. Sacrifice will overcome seduction. And blood will flow.

Let no man pretend to fear sin that does not fear temptation also! These two are too closely united to be separated. He does not truly hate the fruit who delights in the root.

People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before. Your desire for the illusory is a wing, by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality. When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame and that fantasy flees. Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust, so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise. People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.

I've got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don't give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I'm no saint, the way you kid about. But I've always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It's a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You're always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don't just step off and walk in the cool grass.

Be killing sin or it will be killing you.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

Lust is a captivity of the reason and an enraging of the passions. It hinders business and distracts counsel. It sins against the body and weakens the soul.

Sin is the Monster we love to deny. It is crouching at the door and it wants you, but you must overcome it.

[Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.

To tempt, and to be tempted, are things very nearly allied, and, in spite of the finest maxims of morality impressed upon the mind, whenever feeling has anything to do in the matter, no sooner is it excited than we have already gone vastly farther than we are aware of, and I have yet to learn how it is possible to prevent its being excited.

For as men in battle are continually in the way of shot, so we, in this world, are ever within the reach of Temptation.

Let heaven-eyed Prudence battle with Desire.