Piety Quotes - Page 6

• Young men, terminate, I beseech you, in your own experience, the sad divorce which has too often existed between intellect and piety. Take your stand, unswerving, heroic, by the altar of truth; and from that altar let neither sophistry nor ridicule expel you. Let your faith rest with a child's trust, with a martyr's grip, upon the truth as it is in Jesus.

  William Morley Punshon

  Jesus, Children, Divorce

  William Morley Punshon (1857). “John Bunyan, a lecture”, p.24

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• Oh! if people were but acquainted with piety, they would not fear it so much, or give it so unattractive a character; 'tis the balm of life, and perhaps in the world it is believed to consist of bitterness, harshness, uncouthness; but, take my word for it, nothing is more gentle, more yielding, more loving than a pious soul.

  Eugenie de Guerin

  Character, People, Giving

  Eugénie de Guérin (1866). “Letters of Eugénie de Guérin”, p.137

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• I bought abandon dearAnd sold all piety for pleasure.My own free spirit I have followed,And never will I give up lust.

  Abu Nuwas

  Giving Up, Free Spirit, Lust

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• Time is short, your obligations are infinite. Are your houses regulated, your children instructed, the afflicted relieved, the poor visited, the work of piety accomplished?

  Jean Baptiste Massillon

  Children, House, Action

  Jean-Baptiste Massillon (1845). “Sermons of John-Baptist Massillon, Bishop of Clermon, to which is prefixed the life of the author, from the last London edition”, p.122

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• Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.

  Jerry Pournelle

  Warrior, Cities, People

  Reply to reader email on "The View from Chaos Manor" - personal blog, www.jerrypournelle.com. February 21, 2001.

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• Of course, they (i. e., demons) had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.

  Jack McDevitt

  Wine, Imagination, Demon

  "Omega". Book by Jack McDevitt, 2003.

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• Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?

  Simon Blackburn

  Simple, People, Should

  Simon Blackburn (1999). “Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy”, p.132, Oxford University Press

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• What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche's late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist , to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety.

  John Carroll

  Christian, Two, Return

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• The weaker sex, to piety more prone, by rare examples, oft have been renown'd. When many murders were bewail'd by none, an isles whole men in blood by women drown'd.

  William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling

  Sex, Men, Blood

  William Alexander, “Doomes-Day: The Fifth Houre”

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• Not even piety will stay wrinkles, nor the encroachments of age, nor the advance of death, which cannot be resisted.

  Horace

  Wrinkles, Age, Encroachment

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• The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Cities, May, Taste

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• Piety--warm, soft, and passive as the ether round the throne of Grace--is made callous and inactive by kneeling too much.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Grace, Kneeling, Too Much

  Walter Savage Landor (1868). “Indexes. Table of first lines. Imaginary conversations”, p.5

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• Where the past is venerated the clean and those who clean things up should be kept out. Piety is never happy without a little dust, dirt, and rubbish.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Past, Dust, Littles

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• I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Passion, Flattery, Accord

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.323, Stanford University Press

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• We are plated with piety, not alloyed with it.

  Austin O'Malley

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• It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Charity, Significant, Difficult

  Interview with Mike Wallace, ABC TV, www.hrc.utexas.edu. April 27, 1958.

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• Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Hypocrite, Goal, Purpose

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• But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!

  Denis Diderot

  Religious, Men, Blood

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• It is often lamented by the churchmen that Washington and Lincoln possessed little religion except that found in the word 'God.' All that can here be affirmed is that what the religion of those two men lacked in theological details it made up in greatness. Their minds were born with a love of great principles... There are few instances in which a mind great enough to reach great principles in politics has been satisfied with a fanatical religion... It must not be asked for Washington and Lincoln that, having reached greatness in political principles, they should have loved littleness in piety.

  David Swing

  Men, Greatness, Should Have

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• Poor humanity, to saddle the gods with such a responsibility and throw in a vindictive temper. What griefs they hatch for themselves, what festering sores for us, what tears for our prosperity! This is not piety, this oft-repeated show of bowing a veiled head before a graven image; this bustling to every altar; this kow-towing and prostration on the ground with palms outspread before the shrines of the gods; this deluging of vow on vow. True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.

  Lucretius

  Lying, Grief, Responsibility

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• Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

  Ben Lerner

  Cutting, Fog, Feelings

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• I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties--feminism and multi-culturalism--come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

  Theodore Dalrymple

  Two, Silence, Feminist

  Theodore Dalrymple (2005). “Our Culture, What's Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses”, Ivan R Dee

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• Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture? ... I do not mean to imply that the evil are anything other than a small minority among the religious or that the religious motives of most people are in any way spurious. I mean only that evil people tend to gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them.

  Martin Buber

  Christian, Religious, Mean

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• We need to confront the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds. We must stop what they're doing to inspire, because they do nothing to inspire but kill. Religious leaders must make this absolutely clear. Barbarism will deliver you no glory. Piety to evil will bring you no dignity. If you choose the path of terror, your life will be empty, your life will be brief, and your soul will be fully condemned. And political leaders must speak out to affirm the same idea. Heroes don't kill innocents. They save them.

  Donald Trump

  Religious, Hero, Islamic

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

  Stephen Young

  Vanity, Moral, Kind

  Stephen Young (2003). “Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good”, p.9, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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