Top 100 Piety's Quotes
#1. Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.
Archibald MacLeish
#2. There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage.
Moliere
#3. As Catholics, we are free to cultivate a rich life of piety, drawing from the treasures of many lands and many ages.
Scott Hahn
#4. To preach that Jesus is the true King over all kings, the only true Son of God, and therefore the only one worthy of worship is not merely a personal conviction of individual piety but is necessarily a public, political, and polemical proclamation.
Jonathan T. Pennington
#5. I have seen too many of my male friends - no matter whether they're on the football field or inside a church - bash gays and then revel in their machismo or piety.
Cory Booker
#6. It requires all my philosophy, and all my piety' to make peace ...
Sarah Vowell
#7. True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.
Abraham Lincoln
#8. 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.
William Law
#9. Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"
"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.
Roger Zelazny
#10. It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.
Carl Jung
#11. If there is anything I've learned, is that piety is smarter than hate, that mercy is preferable even to justice itself, that if you go around the world with friendly look, one does good friends.
Philip Gibbs
#13. There are three degrees of filial piety. The highest is being a credit to our parents, the second is not disgracing them; the lowest is being able simply to support them.
Confucius
#15. For each person I lost I found a new layer of grief to cover myself with, and each time I tried to bring something of their essence into my own being - be it unconditional love, kindness and piety.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#17. A good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgement upon the pious. An authentic prophet can be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.
James Luther Adams
#18. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.
Frank McCourt
#19. The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.
Edward Gibbon
#20. We may have the best of intentions in trying to discern God's will, but we should really stop putting ourselves through the misery of overspiritualizing every decision. Our misdirected piety makes following God more mysterious than it was meant to be
Kevin DeYoung
#22. A constant attention to the work which God entrusts us with is a mark of solid piety.
John Wesley
#23. A good man regards the root; he fixes the root, and ail else flows out of it. The root is filial piety; the fruit brotherly love.
Confucius
#24. Piety and virtue are not only delightful for the present, but they leave peace and contentment behind them.
John Tillotson
#25. 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
#26. The great reason why we have so little good preaching is that we have so little piety. To be eloquent one must be in earnest; he must not only act as if he were in earnest, or try to be in earnest, but be in earnest.
Charles Spurgeon
#27. True piety for the universe but no time for religions made for man's convenience.
Baruch Spinoza
#28. 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.
Juan Filloy
#29. I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time's toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.
James Branch Cabell
#30. The path of sanctification isn't just about personal piety, it's about God's grand mission to restore all things to Himself. You
Jason M. Garwood
#31. When you are molested for your piety; when your religion brings the trial of cruel mockings upon you, then remember it is not your cross, it is Christ's cross
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#32. There's a fine line between piety and wack-ass obsession, and people have been landing on the wrong side for thousands of years.
Jennifer Traig
#33. No silver saints, by dying misers giv'n, Here brib'd the rage of ill-requited heav'n; But such plain roofs as Piety could raise, And only vocal with the Maker's praise.
Alexander Pope
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Jia Qinglin
#36. Sainthood's piety is made, refined, perfected, by prayer. The gospel moves with slow and timid pace when the saints are not at their prayers early and late and long.
Edward McKendree Bounds
#37. When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear. When the body's intelligence declines, cleverness and knowledge step forth. When there is no peace in the family, filial piety begins. When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born.
Laozi
#38. The saint maintains his piety through the graphic imagination of other people's vices. We thank him for it. The saint's impossible perfection allows us to go on being gargoyles while keeping our faith alive. We admire him for it. The saint's silence covers far more than our interpretations of it.
Ranjit Hoskote
#39. Tulsidas's Ramayana is a notable book because it is informed with the spirit of purity, pity and piety.
Mahatma Gandhi
#40. It is clear before God and man that the entire war on HIV and AIDS has not been waged with any degree of piety, responsibility and care.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi
#41. The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.
H.L. Mencken
#42. I had long ago learned, sometimes to my sorrow, that Scottish piety is accompanied by a complete foreknowledge of sin. That's what we mean by original sin - we don't have to do it to know about it.
Norman Maclean
#43. Oh, do fuck off. You Muslims and your aversion to drink. Fucking slaughter the greater part of the Western fucking world in Allah's name, but someone wants to toast to your health and suddenly it's all piety, prayer, throw out the pork, and let's put draperies around the women.
Christopher Moore
#44. For notwithstanding this rest and cessation from labor which is required on the Lord's day, yet three sorts of works may and ought to be performed ... these are works of piety, works of necessity, and works of charity.
Ezekiel Hopkins
#45. And here, in truth, was the inexperienced youth's great danger - the danger of mistaking in others a mere profession of religion for heart piety, and of being himself led to rest satisfied with a form of godliness.
George E. Sargent
#46. Bring me your Nortons, your Kramdens, your housewives, and sewermen.
Weight my limbs with the nests of your flotsam, that we may chirp in chorus this melancholy anthem.
Mourn with your busdriver piety this sapless husk;
dull with your tender hymn the string of the lumberman's axe.
Daniel Clowes
#47. Earth has nothing more tender than a woman's heart when it is the abode of piety.
Martin Luther
#48. Look into the world
how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose straight heart is open to no man's affliction, taking shelterbehind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have a title to wear.
Laurence Sterne
#49. Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.
Rowan Williams
#50. God is not interested in our public displays of piety. He's not interested in religion in terms of the outward show. He's interested in godliness.
R.C. Sproul
#51. There are who mistake the spirit of pugnacity for the spirit of piety, and thus harbor a devil instead of an angel.
John Lancaster Spalding
#52. Great men are great until they know it. Saints are holy until they know it.
Idries Shah
#53. In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry.
G.K. Chesterton
#54. A contemplative life has more the appearance of a life of piety than any other; but it is the divine plan to bring faith into activity and exercise.
Lord David Cecil
#55. The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
Christopher Hitchens
#57. Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a 'popular piety' claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.
J.I. Packer
#58. The first point of justice ... consists in piety; nothing certainly being so great a debt upon us as to render to the Creator and Preserver those acknowledgments which are due to Him for our being and the hourly protection He affords us.
Samuel
#59. I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'
Friedrich Nietzsche
#60. Therefore the whole apparatus of piety, Hindu and Moslem alike - the temple and mosque, idol and holy water, scriptures and priests - were denounced by this inconveniently clear-sighted poet as mere substitutes for reality; dead things intervening between the soul and its love -
Rabindranath Tagore
#61. Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.
Scott Simon
#62. Your piety is worthless unless it leads you to wish that the same mercy which has been extended to you may bless the whole world.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#63. The hypocrisy and false piety of the deniers aside, the relationships of gays have no effect on heteros. Especially all the heteros who've done such a marvelous job of debasing marriage on their own all these many years.
John Ridley
#64. The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner, beautiful.
Olaf Stapledon
#65. If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny.
Mary Douglas
#66. Alas, Postumus, the fleeting years slip by, nor will piety give any stay to wrinkles and pressing old age and untamable death.
Horace
#67. [W]hoever leads an auspicious life here and governs the commonwealth rightly, as my most noble father did, who promoted all piety and banished all ignorance, has a most certain way to heaven.
Henry VIII Of England
#68. For many, the hijab represents modesty, piety and devotion to God, and I truly respect that. But the hijab should not be used as a means of applying social pressure on people.
Queen Rania Of Jordan
#69. I have never seen either a drop of piety or a grain of truth or ingenuousness - nay, I have never found common sense in any Jew.
John Calvin
#70. Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
Alan Dundes
#71. The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.
D. A. Carson
#72. Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or at the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust Beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face.
James Russell Lowell
#73. The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. Let us unite the two so long divided, knowledge and vital piety.
Charles Wesley
#75. he affected great piety (as became a pilgrim), although unable to read the inspired words of the Prophet.
Jose Conrad
#76. I have now lost my barrier between me and death; God grant I may live to be as well prepared for it, as I confidently believe her to have been! If the way to Heaven be through piety, truth, justice and charity, she is there.
Jonathan Swift
#77. Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.
Eric Metaxas
#78. Government itself, which is the most unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and Mussolini soon discovered; and hence a tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions.
Will Durant
#79. Beauty is like piety
you cannot run and read it; tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.
Herman Melville
#80. It would be bad enough if we were just restless, meandering through life, and a little cowardly. But we've spiritualized restless and meandering cowardice, making it feel like piety instead of passivity.
Kevin DeYoung
#81. The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.
Fisher Ames
#82. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess.
Harper Lee
#83. A child conceived on Christmas Eve is considered unlucky and will later resent his parents for their unholy transgression, their lack of control and piety. The child may be deformed with a harelip or be cursed with the ears and head of a wolf. Or the infant may be born a werewolf.
Jody Shields
#84. Don't look for wealth and beauty as these will last only a short time , and then you'll be left with nothing. Look for piety and faith and you'll get everything including wealth and beauty with it
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed
#85. A magnificent achievement that witnesses powerfully to the rich development, harmony, and piety of the Reformed faith.
Joel Beeke
#86. My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings.
Kathleen Norris
#87. A piety that sees death as the moment of "going home at last," the time when we are "called to God's eternal peace," has no quarrel with power-mongers who want to carve up the world to suit their own ends.
N. T. Wright
#88. A good Christian holds secret communication with heaven. Private prayer keeps up the trade of godliness. When private holiness is laid aside, a stab is given to the heart of piety.
Thomas Watson
#89. Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
Edmund Burke
#90. Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry.
E. M. Bounds
#91. Let the oldest saint look well to the fundamentals of his piety, for grey heads may cover black hearts: and let not the young professor despise the word of warning, for the greenness of youth may be joined to the rottenness of hypocrisy.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#92. Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
Richard Hofstadter
#93. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.
Aristotle.
#95. We may learn by practice such things upon earth as shall be of use to us in heaven. Piety, unostentatious piety, is never out of place.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#96. Where evangelical spiritualities tend to move from the individual to the family to the church, Reformed piety moves in the other direction: from the public means of grace to the family to the individual.
Michael S. Horton
#97. Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.
Samuel Johnson
#98. My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.
Hannah More
#99. The man who contemplates the universe with his eyes wide open is the man with the greatest amount of natural piety; not in the religious sense, but in the sense of an intimate harmony with things.
Adolf Hitler
#100. Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.
Theodore Parker
