A Quote by Anna Quindlen

Life is so messy that the temptation to straighten it up is very strong. And the results always illusory.

Anna Quindlen

Quote Topics

Always Illusory Life Life Is Messy Results Straighten Strong Temptation Up Very Very Strong

Quote Author

Anna Quindlen
American - Journalist
Born: July 8, 1953

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.

C. S. Lewis

Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.

John Green

Power was my weakness and my temptation. And Miguel Sano is very tempting. But he is not weak. He is very, very strong.

J. K. Rowling

Changing the world is like trying to straighten a dog's tail. However much you may try, you won't succeed. But although the tail won't straighten, if you keep trying every day, at least you will put on some muscle. Similarly, even though it is difficult to make a change, our effort to do so in itself brings positive results. It will help us change. Without waiting for others to change,if we change ourselves first, that will make a difference. Instead of worrying about results, focus on doing our best in what we are engaged in.

Mata Amritanandamayi

Love yourself and watch - Today, tomorrow, always. To straighten the crooked You must first do a harder thing - Straighten yourself.

Gautama Buddha

One of the things that I loved about when I met my husband was that he picked me up and he paid - I know that sounds old-fashioned but for me, most of my life, I always would split the bill or would always pay, or I would be very assertive about my independence and my financial responsibility. And I am a very strong woman and very strong-willed - but there was something really great about him taking care of me and treating me and opening the door and driving, and I am perfectly OK with that. And he still does it to this day.

Sutton Foster

The culinary tradition in my family is very strong. My mother, a very wise woman, spent the better part of her life in a kitchen. It's a very strong part of her identity. I grew up there next to the fire.

Laura Esquivel

Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.

Malcolm Turnbull

The way we live ought to manifest the truth of what we believe. A messy life speaks of a messy and incoherent faith.

Elisabeth Elliot

I feel very grateful for the way I was brought up. I did not realise it then, but as I grew older and started writing and realised the material that was there was very strong, I felt very grateful that my life was complicated and that my identity was never clear but put me in a position that was always questioned.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Temptations are as thick as the leaves of the forest, and no one can be out of the reach of temptation unless he is dead. The great thing is to make people intelligent enough and strong enough, not to keep away from temptation, but to resist it.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

C. S. Lewis

Today it may seem that your anger is very strong, how can meditation break it? But it breaks - it has always broken. Rock is very strong and meditation is very delicate, but this is the mystery of life - the continuity of the delicate can break the strongest and the hardest.

Rajneesh

I've done my share of reading about Abraham Lincoln, throughout my life, and he wasn't always carved in stone. He was a human being. He was a very thoughtful, self-educated, complex, magnanimous human being, who was very, very strong, very smart and very canny, with a very strong sense of what was right and what was wrong. Through all that, he's become an icon, over the years, and some of his warmth and humanity has been lost. You don't tend to think of Lincoln as this warm, funny person, but he was.

Billy Campbell

I think the big danger of madness is not madness itself, but the habit of madness. What I discovered during the time I spent in the asylum is that I could choose madness and spend my whole life without working, doing nothing, pretending to be mad. It was a very strong temptation.