"What makes resisting temptation difficult for many people is they don't want to discourage it completely"
About this Quote
Resisting temptation, Jones suggests, isn’t a heroic battle between virtue and vice so much as a negotiation with one’s own loopholes. The joke lands because it flips the expected moral frame: the problem isn’t that temptation is too strong, it’s that the tempted are quietly rooting for it. “Resist” becomes a kind of performance - a little struggle staged for self-respect, reputation, or plausible deniability - while the real goal is to keep the door cracked open.
The line’s specific intent is to puncture self-flattering narratives. People like to cast themselves as principled actors besieged by external forces (“I couldn’t help it”). Jones reroutes blame inward, toward the cozy complicity we maintain with our vices. The phrasing “discourage it completely” is doing sly work: it frames temptation as something that can be managed like an unwanted admirer or a pushy salesman. Not eliminated, just kept interested but at arm’s length.
As a mid-century American journalist and humorist, Jones wrote in an era that prized outward respectability while advertising and consumer culture perfected the art of engineered desire. The quote sits neatly in that context: temptation isn’t merely personal weakness; it’s a constant hum of invitation - and many of us don’t actually want silence. The subtext is modern and a little bleak: self-control fails not because we lack willpower, but because we’ve already decided we’d miss the thing we claim to be rejecting.
The line’s specific intent is to puncture self-flattering narratives. People like to cast themselves as principled actors besieged by external forces (“I couldn’t help it”). Jones reroutes blame inward, toward the cozy complicity we maintain with our vices. The phrasing “discourage it completely” is doing sly work: it frames temptation as something that can be managed like an unwanted admirer or a pushy salesman. Not eliminated, just kept interested but at arm’s length.
As a mid-century American journalist and humorist, Jones wrote in an era that prized outward respectability while advertising and consumer culture perfected the art of engineered desire. The quote sits neatly in that context: temptation isn’t merely personal weakness; it’s a constant hum of invitation - and many of us don’t actually want silence. The subtext is modern and a little bleak: self-control fails not because we lack willpower, but because we’ve already decided we’d miss the thing we claim to be rejecting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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