Quotes About Piety

I do not doubt but that genuine piety is the spring of peace of mind; it enables us to bear the sorrows of life, and lessens the pangs of death: the same cannot be said of hypocrisy.

I hope all of you will inherit and carry forward the fine traditions of China's religious circle in patriotism and religious piety and in upholding peace.

Everything is possible through complete devotion to the Lord.

What can you give God but bhakti bhava? He owns it all anyway.

Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

When Poetry thus keeps its place as the handmaiden of piety, it shall attain not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away.

Politics, or controversy, or party spirit, or worldliness, have eaten out the heart of lively piety in too many of us. The subject of personal godliness has fallen sadly into the background.

25. Superstition is that whereby undue worship is yielded to God.

It was in such an enfeebled state of the Empire, that there arose a new sort of men, who so far from setting up patterns of piety and virtue, squandered away the lives and properties of the poor with so much barefacedness, that other men, on beholding their conduct, became bolder and bolder, and practised the worst and ugliest action, without fear or remorse. From those men sprung an infinity of evil-doers, who plague the Indian world, and grind the faces of its wretched inhabitants …

India in the 1840s and 1850s was slowly filling with pious British Evangelicals who wanted not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it.

God is very precise in this point; he will say to such as invent ways to worship him of their own, coin means to mortify corruption, obtain comfort in their own mint: 'Who hath required this at your hands?' This is truly to be 'righteous over-much,' as Solomon speaks, when we will pretend to correct God's law, and add supplements of our own to his rule.

Peri clitatur pietas in negotiis—religion never goes in more danger than when in a crowd of worldly busi ness.

He is not a good subject, that is all for what he can get of his prince, but never thinks what he may do for him; nor he the true Christian, whose thoughts dwell more on his own happiness than on the honour of his God.

He is the best student in divinity that studies most upon his knees[26]

Fides pinguescit operibus—'faith fattens or becomes strong on works,' Luther.

That he who means to be a Christian indeed, must endeavour to maintain the power of holiness and righteousness in his life and conversation.

This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.

If, therefore, God be our greatest good; if there can be no good but in His favour, nor any evil but in departing from Him, then it is plain, that he who judges it the best thing he can do to please God to the utmost of his power, who worships and adores Him with all his heart and soul, who would rather have a pious mind than all the dignities and honours in the world, shows himself to be in the highest state of human wisdom.

In the evenings she got on her knees and inflicted her piety on her sister:

God save us from religion.

I'm not so concerned as to whether God is on my side or not, but I am concerned as to whether I'm on God's side or not.

Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience. It is, therefore, not well grounded in reality. Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is dangerous to the soul of anyone—and in spiritual leaders it can also be disastrous for those they lead.

Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is dangerous to the soul of anyone—and in spiritual leaders it can also be disastrous for those they lead.