Life & Wisdom Quote by Orlando A. Battista

Temptation is patient, even generous; opportunity is stingy. Battista’s line works because it flips a familiar self-help rhythm. We’re used to being told that “opportunities come once” and that failing to seize them is tragic. Here, the tragedy is reframed: what reliably returns in life isn’t your big break, it’s your bad habit with a good memory.

The intent is corrective, almost parental. Battista isn’t moralizing about vice in the abstract; he’s diagnosing human scheduling. Opportunities depend on timing, gatekeepers, and external conditions. Temptations are internally renewable. They don’t require permission, money, or a calendar invite. If you resisted today, they’ll happily try again tomorrow, when you’re tired, lonely, bored, or newly confident in your willpower. That’s the subtext: “second chances” aren’t always grace; sometimes they’re persistence from the things that want to own you.

The quote also smuggles in an uncomfortable critique of our optimism culture. We romanticize second chances as redemptive do-overs, but Battista points out that repetition is morally neutral. The world offers repeats both for growth and for relapse. In that sense, the line is less about temptation than about attentional economics: you have limited focus, and the wrong impulses can outlast the rare openings that could change your life.

Contextually, coming from a mid-20th-century writer, it carries the era’s pragmatic, sobriety-adjacent realism: discipline isn’t a one-time victory; it’s a long game against an opponent that never runs out of rematches.