Quotes About Piety

Billy ha il sospetto che i suoi connazionali in segreto la sappiano ben più lunga, ma nel paese si è creata una fissazione per il melodramma adolescenziale, per le più teatrali rappresentazioni di innocenza stuprata e i confortanti fanghi termali della pietà autoassolutoria.

There is a thing called the blood feud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a blood feud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.

the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws.

Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed, God's mercies are curiously selective.

I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious--for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: Oh, but you forget the good God. Apparently they conceive of the Deity add a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes.

Bow down to him, for he is your lord. Psalm 45:11

I will look favorably on this kind of person: one who is humble, submissive in spirit, and who trembles at My word. Isaiah 66:2

What husband is he who abandons his wife? What wife is she taken without love? The gods demand of us action and the use of our free will! That is piety, not to buckle beneath necessity's yoke like dumb beasts!

Now the brave man. In dark hours he endures silently, uncomplaining. Reverencing the round of heaven's seasons, he does what must be done, sustaining himself with the certainty that to endure injustice with patience is the mark of piety and wisdom.

self-righteousness flows with great solemnity

Skepticism was a drug for him. Life's vicissitudes had taught him never to be caught without it. A most useful drug, it magically invigorated his heart, transforming opprobrium into piety and ignominy into tolerance.

Let the gods speak softly of us

He who prays as he ought, will endeavor to live as he prays.

Today our churches are filled, but how many are actually practicing Christianity in daily life?

Though the masses may stare at the man who does violence to all his natural instincts, under the name of piety, and rends his flesh to prove the strength of his will, they will never be induced to follow his example.

Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.

When there's wickedness in our hearts, God will wait until that wickedness surfaces. He is capable of applying as much heat as it takes to surface the garbage in our hearts, no matter how much we might try to mask our sinfulness with piety.

Part of all worship is abuse. That's what I've learned. Those who love God the most also fear God the most too. 'God-fearing,' right?

All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess.

True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.

In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.

But however much that virtue may be praised and cried up, which without true piety is the slave of human glory, it is not at all to be compared even to the feeble beginnings of the virtue of the saints, whose hope is placed in the grace and mercy of the true God.

Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts, not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love of intelligible beauty, but by desire of human praise, or, at all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are not indeed yet holy, but only less base.

For hence I believed Evil also to be some such kind of substance, and to have its own foul and hideous bulk; whether gross, which they called earth, or thin and subtile (like the body of the air), which they imagine to be some malignant mind, creeping through that earth. And because a piety, such as it was, constrained me to believe that the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses, contrary to one another, both unbounded, but the evil narrower, the good more expansive.