Seductive Power Quotes & Sayings

Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it ... or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right from wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster. — Stephen L. Carter

For Milady was well aware that her most seductive power was in her voice, which could run skilfully through the whole scale of tones, from mortal speech, upwards to the language of heaven. — Alexandre Dumas

Her seductive power, however, did not lie in her looks [ ... ]. In reality, Cleopatra was physically unexceptional and had no political power, yet both Caesar and Antony, brave and clever men, saw none of this. What they saw was a woman who constantly transformed herself before their eyes, a one-woman spectacle.
Her dress and makeup changed from day to day, but always gave her a heightened, goddesslike appearance. Her words could be banal enough, but were spoken so sweetly that listeners would find themselves remembering not what she said but how she said it. — Robert Greene

And even though he's the father of capitalism and wrote the most famous and maybe the best book ever on why some nations are rich and others are poor, Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments wrote as eloquently as anyone ever has on the futility of pursuing money with the hope of finding happiness. How do you reconcile that with the fact that no one did more than Adam Smith to make capitalism and self-interest respectable? That is a puzzle I try to unravel toward the end of this book. Besides the emptiness of excessive materialism, Smith understood the potential we have for self-deception, the danger of unintended consequences, the seductive lure of fame and power, the limitations of human reason, and the unseen sources of what makes our lives both so complex and yet at times so orderly. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book of observations about what makes us tick. As a bonus, almost in passing, Smith tells us how to lead the good life in the fullest sense of that phrase. — Russ Roberts

Large scale collective bargaining ... is merely a seductive name for bilateral monopoly, and means either adjudication of conflicts in terms of power, or deadlock and stoppage, usually injuring outside people more than the immediate parties to the dispute. — Frank Knight

If the benevolent ruler stays in power long enough, he eventually concludes that power and wisdom are the same thing. And as he possesses power, he must possess wisdom. He becomes converted to the seductive thesis that election to public office endows the official with both power and wisdom. At this point, he begins to lose his ability to distinguish between what is morally right and what is politically expedient. — Ben Moreell

Her power is seen in the fact that the good news of Coca Cola is more widely proclaimed than the good news of Jesus Christ. Consumerism is making disciples in all nations through its seductive charms. — Iain M. Duguid

Our habitual patterns are, of course, well established, seductive, and comforting. Just wishing for them to be ventilated isn't enough. Mindfulness and awareness are key. Do we see the stories that we're telling ourselves and question their validity? When we are distracted by a strong emotion, do we remember that it is part of our path? Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior. And when we can't practice when distracted but know that we can't, we are still training well. Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what's going on. — Pema Chodron

There is not a little generalship and stratagem required in the managing and marshalling of our pleasures, so that each shall not mutually encroach to the destruction of all. For pleasures are very voracious, too apt to worry one another, and each, like Aaron's serpent, is prone to swallow up the rest. Thus drinking will soon destroy the power, gaming the means, and sensuality the taste, for other pleasures less seductive, but far more salubrious, and permanent as they are pure. — Charles Caleb Colton

All women should feel as Sex Subjects if they want and choose so without fear of repressions, condemnations and put down and without the need to pay them for that.

Being freely a sexy and seductive woman is allowed only for few privileged professions: actresses, dancers, models, singers, prostitutes. They all do it for work. You can pay for them being sexy.

If a sexy woman is openly adored by a man, the woman remains as a woman, she is not turning into a table, a cup or a bill of money. She is still the Subject who knows her power. — Mai Loog

But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel? — Milan Kundera

Fearful is the seductive power of goodness. — Bertolt Brecht

Ranulf had spent much of his life watching those he loved wrestle with the seductive, lethal lure of kingship. It had proved the ruination of his cousin Stephen, a good man who had not made a good king. For his sister Maude, it had been an unrequited love affair, a passion she could neither capture nor renounce. For Hywel, it had been an illusion, a golden glow ever shimmering along the horizon. He believed that his nephew had come the closest to mastery of it, but at what cost? — Sharon Kay Penman

I don't have to go very far to see the power of beauty. Being desired, feeling desired is a very seductive aspect of our being. — Nicolas Winding Refn

Turkish Delight
Turkish delight has had a bad reputation since that man C.S.Lewis - a positive genius in other ways - linked it for ever with one of the most terrifying creations in literature, the White Witch of Narnia, and that naughty, sticky, traitorous Edmund. But with the sensuous pleasure imbued in its melting, gelatinous texture, and, when made in the proper way, delicately perfumed with rose petals, flavoured with oils and dusted with sugar, it reclaims its power as a sweet as seductive as Arabian nights. The fact that it now carries with it a whiff of danger merely adds to its pleasure. It is not, truly, a sweet for children. They simply complain, and get the almonds stuck up their noses, — Jenny Colgan

The magic was a tool, though a natural, mysterious tool. In its awareness of the magic, his human nature had desired to connect with it, to use it. The whisperings were the voice of his own awakening, not the seductive call of a dark power. Using it was not corruption, but a natural extension of his being. And he could control the manner in which he used it. He would. — Derek Donais

We tend to believe that attaining power requires force, deception, manipulation, and coercion. Indeed, we might even assume that positions of power demand this kind of conduct - that to run smoothly, society needs leaders who are willing and able to use power this way. As seductive as these notions are, they are dead wrong. Instead, a new science of power has revealed that power is wielded most effectively when it's used responsibly by people who are attuned to, and engaged with the needs and interests of others. — Dacher Keltner

For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math. — Rachel Hartman

At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be "about" any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could "make" you do such a thing - who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
And it is so very seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining.
At first. — Marya Hornbacher

If the world is an aggregate of relatively independent regions, then any assumption of universal laws is false and a demand for universal norms tyrannical : only brute force (or seductive deception) can then bend the different moralities so that they fit the prescriptions of a single ethical system. And indeed, the idea of universal laws of nature and society arose in connection with a life-and-death battle: the battle that gave Zeus the power over the Titans and all other gods and thus turned his laws into the laws of the universe. — Paul Feyerabend

Jesus was standing on the high place of the stronghold of supernatural evil next to the Prince of the Power of the Air. Belial swiped his hand and the clouds appeared to part, enabling Jesus the ability to see all the known world below and their cities of men. Belial's contempt melted into a seductive whisper in Jesus's ear. Do you see all these kingdoms and their glory? They have been delivered to me, and I give them to whom I will. — Brian Godawa

Cease, stranger, cease those witching notes,
The art of syren choirs;
Hush the seductive voice that floats
Across the trembling wires.
Music's ethereal power was given
Not to dissolve our clay,
But draw Promethean beams from heaven
To purge the dross away. — John Henry Newman

To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: "For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but a disease." In chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck," Melville show us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man. — Nathaniel Philbrick

Predator and prey move in silent gestures, on the seductive dance of death, in the shadows cast by the vultures of the night. — Luis Marques

He was a wanderer by nature, and even if England and the nearer East were closed to him, the world was wide, the sun shone in many places, the stars wheeled over one, books could be read, women had beauty, flowers scent, tobacco its flavour, music its moving power, coffee its fragrance, horses and dogs and birds were the same seductive creatures, — John Galsworthy

"Wait." I grab his tie. Even through his shirt, I feel the strong curve of his collarbone beneath my fingers. It takes me back to how he looked in my bedroom: shirtless and perfect - wings spread high like those of some sort of celestial being - elegant power and pulsing light. Unabashed, unashamed, and confident. All the things that I crave to be.
My pulse beats rapidly against the bite on my neck. "There's something I want you to do, before Jeb wakes enough to know what's going on."
Morpheus kneels again. "What? You want I should kiss your ouchies?" The dark purr of his voice is more teasing than seductive. — A.G. Howard

The most seductive sin, I suppose, is passing judgment on others, and the next must be acting out of one's anger when one has the power to hurt the ones who wound us. — Nell Gavin

The seductive power of sex and money is nothing compared to that of words. — Marty Rubin

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good ... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

It's easy to become a satellite today without even being aware of it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power; the power of the dollar. — Malcolm X

In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. — Henry Kissinger

Terrorism gravely threatens international peace and security, and as a solution, the power and apparent finality of force are seductive. — Charles Kennedy