Pious Quotes - Page 9

• Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular substitute for religion, hallmark of modern civilization, a priori liberal and cosmopolitan, with authors appearing to implicitly embody such pious ideals - you encounter a less agreeable reality: parochialism, blinkered views, even racial prejudices of the kind the bourgeoisie have held everywhere.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Christian, Past, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• For it is true now, as it always was and always will be, that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and to be magnanimous and brave; and to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave.

  Albert Pike

  Wise, Opposites, Brave

  Albert Pike “Morals and Dogma : Scottish Rite in Freemasonry”, Lulu.com

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• We must labor unceasingly to render our piety reasonable, and our reason pious.

  Sophie Swetchine

  Reason, Piety, Labor

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• Indulgence is lovely in the sinless; toleration, adorable in the pious and believing heart.

  Sophie Swetchine

  Believe, Heart, Adorable

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• [Hawthorne''s] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while.

  D. H. Lawrence

  America, Deceit, Literature

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• Callous greed grows pious very fast.

  Lillian Hellman

  Greed, Callous, Grows

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• Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig, but also to render it invisible.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Men, Pigs, Doctrine

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• We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for private and pious devotions that usually have little power to actually change us or call our ego assumptions into question.

  Richard Rohr

  Temptation, Catholic, Ego

  "Preparing for Christmas" by Fr. Richard Rohr, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 6, 2012.

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• In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded; and, by an infallible connexion, which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed, at least has never yet been enjoyed, but in a free government.

  David Hume

  Ambition, Thinking, Government

  David Hume (2016). “Essays Moral, Political, Literary: Revision of Great Book”, p.50, VM eBooks

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• It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

  Don DeLillo

  Effort, Attention, Happenings

  Don DeLillo (2010). “Point Omega”, p.15, Pan Macmillan

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• Just as the pious man prays without speaking a word and the Almighty hearkens unto him, so the artist with true feelings paints and the sensitive man understands and recognizes it.

  Caspar David Friedrich

  Artist, Men, Sensitive Man

  Quoted in S Hinz Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen (1968).

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• Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter: But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Men, Survival, Unorthodox

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• Exceptions to the traditions of dumpy dignity and fake learnedness in law review writing are as rare as they are beautiful. Once in a while a Thomas Reed Powell gets away with an imaginary judicial opinion that gives a real twist to the lion's tail. Once in a while a Thurman Arnold forgets his footnotes as though to say that if people do not believe or understand him that is their worry and not his. But even such mild breaches of etiquette as these are tolerated gingerly and seldom, and are likely to be looked at a little askance by the writers' more pious brethren.

  Fred Rodell

  Beautiful, Real, Believe

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• The egoist ... destroys the universal importance accorded to moral law by showing that life independent of it is possible. Secondly, and even more intolerably to the pious, he manages to do so with shameless enjoyment.

  John Carroll

  Independent, Law, Moral

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.26, Taylor & Francis

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• Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.

  Simone Weil

  Atheist, Objectivity, Majority

  Simone Weil (1970). “First and last notebooks”

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• In the name of sense, man, if God made fish to be eaten, what difference does it make if I enjoy the killing of them before I eat them? You would have none but a fisherman by trade do it, and then you would have him utter a sigh, a prayer, and a pious ejaculation at each cod or haddock that he killed.

  William Cowper Prime

  Prayer, Men, Differences

  William Cowper Prime (1876). “I Go A-fishing”, p.266

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• Clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Liars, Atheism, Church

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• In Jerusalem, the various modes of worship essentially stood for the same cause but were equally hateful to one another. They never served as a unifying factor. Their adherents were equally manipulated by the clergies to regard the others as wicked infidels or idolaters. The centuries passed in constant pious agitation and in frequent religious wars.

  Amos Elon

  Religious, War, Wicked

  Amos Elon (1995). “Jerusalem, Battlegrounds of Memory”, Kodansha Globe

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• Doth some one say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you. Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words, No undue credence: for I say that kings kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud, And doing thus are happier than those, Who live calm pious lives day after day. All divinity is built-up from our good and evil luck.

  Euripides

  Kings, Cities, Evil

  "Bellerophon". Play by Euripides, estimated between 455 and 425 BCE.

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• I am not religious, but I am a pious man... A religious man has a definite religion. He says "God is there" or "God is there," "God is there." "Your god is not my god, and that's all." But the pious man, he just looks out with awe, and says, "where is God?" And "well, I don't understand it and I would like to know what this creation really means." That is a pious man, who is really touched by the greatness of nature and of the creation.

  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

  Religious, Mean, Greatness

  Television interview clip, profiles.nlm.nih.gov. 1980.

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• If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant.

  William Winwood Reade

  Running, Religious, Men

  William Winwood Reade (1876). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.228

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• I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.

  Mark Twain

  Glasses, Hypocrisy, Giving

  R. Kent Rasmussen, Mark Twain (2013). “Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers”, p.178, Univ of California Press

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• Sugar and sand may be mixed together, but the ant rejects the sand and goes off with the sugar grain; so pious men lift the good from the bad.

  Ramakrishna

  Men, Together, May

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• Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

  Susan Sontag

  Becoming One, Ironic, World

  On Photography "Melancholy Objects" (1977)

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• It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.

  Thomas Paine

  Action, Fraud, Begets

  Thomas Paine (2016). “THOMAS PAINE Ultimate Collection: Political Works, Philosophical Writings, Speeches, Letters & Biography (Including Common Sense, The Rights of Man & The Age of Reason): The American Crisis, The Constitution of 1795, Declaration of Rights, Agrarian Justice, The Republican Proclamation, Anti-Monarchal Essay, Letters to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington…”, p.431, e-artnow

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