Quotes About Piety

Concerning the harsh treatment of the body for our Lord's sake, I would say, avoid anything that would cause the shedding even of a drop of blood.

For Plato, the quickening of the heart that occurred when a person saw his or her loved one was just a step in the ascent to true love, which could happen only in the mind, after the lover comprehended what was eternally true and beautiful in the beloved. Platonic love existed beyond all the blood and heat contained in the heart. This split between passion and piety, between lust and love, would resonate throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and it continues up to the present day.

Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

We seem especially susceptible to this pitting of spirituality against theology in American evangelical contexts. Perhaps we can chalk this up to the influence of pietism, which courses through the veins of many evangelicals. Pietism should not be confused with piety. Piety means simply the spiritual practices of praying, Bible reading and meditation, fasting, and gifts of charity.

piety went public in postwar politics: "under God" was written into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and "In God We Trust" became the nation's official motto in 1956.

Any instruction which convince people that religious belief alone, without morality, suffices to satisfy God's justice is destructive of all government and is far more harmful than is ingenious and subtle. Men's practices reveal an extraordinary distinction between devotion and sense of right and wrong.

I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is also castrating our disorderly appetites, to blunt that cupidity that pricks us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned.

Without holiness you cannot talk of God.

He does much who loves God much, and he does much who does his deed well.

He does much who loves God much, and he does much who does his deed well, and he does his deed well who does it rather for the common good than for his own will.

In manustuas, Domine!

Escapist piety that has humans exploit and dominate this earth only to be whisked off to some otherworldly heaven has no support from an integral reading of the Bible.[217]

You were apt to go from one extreme to the other, in a truly pious environment; which is why ministers' sons in that day were more less expected to become loose livers when they grew up.

Even the blind and meek and voiceless have gods.

Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings.

I've been following the noble profession of hermiting here for nigh on fifty-seven years, practising piety, sobriety, celibacy and the pursuit of true wisdom in the tradition of my father and grandfather and great-grandfather before me.

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.

Faith is never identical with piety.

Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone. Piety is the possibility of the removal of the last traces of a firm foundation upon which we can erect a system of thought.

Faith is never identical with "piety" even if it were the purest and finest.

We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell. Only if we give up our authoritarian attitude in the realm of opinion, only if we establish the attitude of give and take, of readiness to learn from other people, can we hope to control acts of violence inspired by piety and duty.

The Curé Noive had a sister who acted as his housekeeper, a lady with a moustache, whose piety was astringent, and who fostered a splenetic God in a heart which was outraged at anything gracious, tender, or lovable that life might offer. There are such cross-grained natures, made spiteful and furious by anything that looks like happiness.

O ye gods, grant me this in return for my piety.

Despise evil and embrace everything that is good and virtuous.