Top 100 Puritan Quotes
#1. The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.
Wendell Phillips
#2. It is a mistake to restrict oneself in one's pleasures,' Ross said. 'One should never risk being thought a Puritan.
Winston Graham
#3. We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.
Theodore Dreiser
#4. The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences.
John Frame
#5. An older, Puritan approach to Scripture tended to prevail in the American South, where the Bible was regarded as a set of definite, positive laws
Mark A. Noll
#7. A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.
H.L. Mencken
#8. In the mid-1600s, Puritan John Gibbon said, "God alone is enough, but without him, nothing [is enough] for thy happiness."[218] Whether or not we're conscious of it, since God is the fountainhead of happiness, the search for happiness is always the search for God.
Randy Alcorn
#9. In the history of extra-biblical study and research tools there has never before been a resource as useful as the Puritan Hard Drive.
Paul Washer
#10. Puritan Thomas Watson said, "Until sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet." I think Scottish minister Thomas Chalmers, who preached on "the expulsive power of a new affection," would have added: Until Christ be sweet, sin will not be bitter.
Gloria Furman
#11. The puritan through life's sweet garden goes to pluck the thorn and cast away the rose.
Kenneth Hare
#12. If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#13. Isn't the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility? Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day? Not all religions claim the direct authority of God speaking to their leader. You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a Puritan atheist.
Dave Foley
#14. A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.
Adam Nicolson
#15. If you have beautiful knees, show your knees. I'm not a puritan. I love skin.
Francisco Costa
#16. The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.
Wendell Phillips
#17. From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life.
Alice Morse Earle
#19. In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.
Damian Lewis
#20. I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life].
Cornel West
#21. It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.
Liam O'Flaherty
#22. A Puritan believed it was necessary to venture back to the absolute beginning of Christianity, before the church had been corrupted by centuries of laxity and abuse, to locate divine truth.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#23. The Puritan divine Richard Steele wrote, God doth call every man and woman ... to serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the common good. ... The Great Governor of the world hath appointed to every man his proper post and province.
Leland Ryken
#24. Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts.
Stephen King
#25. One of the most persistent images in American urbanism is that of the proverbial city on a hill, as first envisioned on these shores by the Puritan John Winthrop, via the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.
Martin Filler
#26. There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as "succesful" and "unsuccesful" to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who "fail" at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompeent incapable even of getting their dying quite right.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#27. When the last Puritan has disappeared from the earth, the man of science will take his place as a killjoy, and we shall be given the same old advice but for different reasons.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#28. Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.
R. H. Tawney
#29. With our sympathy for the wrongdoer we need the old Puritan and Quaker hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#30. You see," said Father Brown in low but easy tone, "Scotch people before Scotland existed were a curious lot. In fact, they're a curious lot still. But in the prehistoric times I fancy they really worshipped demons. That," he added genially, "is why they jumped at the Puritan theology.
G.K. Chesterton
#31. My wife is a real Puritan. She thinks licking the stamp on the envelope of a Valentine is foreplay.
Milton Berle
#32. I wish to Christ I could make up a really great lie. Sometimes, after an interview, I say to myself, 'Man, you were so honest - can't you have some fun? Can't you do some really down and dirty lying?' But the puritan in me thinks that if I tell a lie, I'll be punished.
Willem Dafoe
#33. India is at one with the most puritan faiths of the world in her declaration that progress is from seen to unseen, from the many to the One, from the low to the high, from the form to the formless, and never in the reverse direction. She differs only in having a word of sympathy
Swami Vivekananda
#34. Liszt was a bit of a rock and roller at heart, but he was a bit of a puritan on his sounds.
Rick Wakeman
#35. We have the reverse of the Puritan work ethic in America now. No one ever becomes a star by plugging along year after year. What is needed is flair, talent, 'an eye,' contacts, charisma, and, most of all, naturalness.
Judith Martin
#36. To live without that enchantment of beauty is to interpret frugality and simple living with a puritan literalism
John Lane
#37. We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
John Updike
#38. In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy.
Leland Ryken
#39. To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
D.H. Lawrence
#40. The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn't think Satan was involved.
Thomas C. Foster
#41. My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as 'Puritan decadence'. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.
Stephen Spender
#42. We are very puritan in America. We still hold true to these really antiquated values, this idea of the sanctity of marriage.
Zoe Lister-Jones
#43. In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks.
Paul Monette
#44. What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.
Nancy Gibbs
#45. In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians.
James Baldwin
#46. He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.
Henry James
#47. When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
James Hillman
#48. Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.
J.G. Ballard
#49. It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won't chime.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#51. Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
Gunter Grass
#52. Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells.
Tim Kreider
#53. There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him.
Charles Stross
#54. Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.
H.L. Mencken
#55. Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There's something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
Elinor Wylie
#56. Do your duty in all things, like the old Puritan. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.
Robert E.Lee
#57. It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened.
Phillips Brooks
#58. In the early days of the New England colonies, no more embarrassing or hampering condition, no greater temporal ill, could befall any adult Puritan than to be unmarried.
Alice Morse Earle
#59. Farewell, I wish our souls may meet with comfort at the journey's end.-
The Heavenly Footman: A Puritan's View of How to Get to Heaven.
John Bunyan
#60. The Puritan sours his pleasures by disguising them as duties.
Mason Cooley
#61. I grew up in New England. I think I was brought up with the Puritan ethic: that if you worked really hard in life, then good would come to you. The harder you work, the luckier you get. I've come to believe that it's the smarter you work, the better.
Ken Blanchard
#62. The creator is not puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share - an enormous share - of the sunlight and air.
Annie Dillard
#63. Food critic and writer Waverley Root described the common American near beer as "such a wishy-washy, thin, ill-tasting, discouraging sort of slop that it might have been dreamed up by a Puritan Machiavelli with the intent of disgusting drinkers with genuine beer forever."[21]
Waverly Root
#65. some British settlers of colonial America carried across the sea Puritan, biblical, scientific, and Aristotelian rationalizations of slavery and human hierarchy.
Ibram X. Kendi
#66. Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the seat in which each person should sit during public worship.
Alice Morse Earle
#67. We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.
Laura Kipnis
#68. The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme.
Leland Ryken
#69. It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.
H.P. Lovecraft
#70. You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.
James Young
#71. The Pilgrim and the Puritan whom we honor tonight were men who did a great deal of work in the world. They had their faults and their - shortcomings, but they were not slothful in business and they were most fervent in spirit.
Henry Cabot Lodge
#72. A puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors;
Henry David Thoreau
#73. For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
Howard Nemerov
#74. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.
'It's been fun,' she said.
'Yes,' I said, taking her hand.
She was wearing gloves.
T.C. Boyle
#75. The summum bonum of this [Puritan] ethic is the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all enjoyment.
Max Weber
#76. You know you're a Puritan when you feel that even the Bible needs to be cleaned up.
James Maguire
#77. It wasn't some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not to be blind consumers, and not to be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in fact they were the tools of a previous generation
Kim Gordon
#79. Napping is too luxurious, too sybaritic, too unproductive, and it's free; pleasures for which we don't pay make us anxious. Besides, it seems to be a natural inclination ... Fighting off natural inclinations is a major Puritan virtue, and nothing that feels that good can be respectable.
Barbara Holland
#80. A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.
H.L. Mencken
#81. Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience.
Ross Macdonald
#82. American art in general ... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
#84. And my father, being a good Swiss puritan, always really insisted that if I was going to be an actor, I shouldn't just be an actor, I should know about the whole process.
Rene Auberjonois
#85. Honestly, because of the way women were treated, I wouldn't want to go back to Puritan times. I'm far too outspoken to be a woman in Puritan times.
Janet Montgomery
#86. Men of New England, I hold you to the doctrines of liberty which ye inherit from your Puritan forefathers.
Caleb Cushing
#87. A society that is not founded on morality falls apart and becomes easy prey to puritan cults such as Islam that on the surface, promote family values and morality.
Ali Sina
#88. In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.
Umberto Eco
#89. The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God's help to do just that.
J.I. Packer
#90. They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#91. Don't think I won't know if you're lying, I know how many bases you've been on, you red headed puritan. I will be able to tell fact from fiction.
Quinn Loftis
#92. On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, ... they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.
C.S. Lewis
#93. Wrapped in his sad-colored cloak, the Day, like a Puritan, standeth
Stern in the joyless fields, rebuking the lingering color,
Dying hectic of leaves and the chilly blue of the asters,
Hearing, perchance, the croak of a crow on the desolate tree-top.
Bayard Taylor
#94. People saw the Depression as a necessary thing - a chance to squeeze out the excesses, get back to Puritan morality. That just made things worse.
Ben Bernanke
#95. Hedonism, as any puritan can tell you, never leads to virtue. If we could all set pleasure aside and eat what's good for us, our problems would all go away. (Good luck with that.)
Mark Schatzker
#96. Beware of singing divine psalms for an ordinary recreation, as do men of impure spirits, who sing holy psalms intermingled with profane ballads: They are God's word: take them not in thy mouth in vain.
Lewis Bayly
#98. Oh, remember this, the sweetness of religion is incomparably more than all the pleasures of sense.
William Bates
#99. Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you.
Mignon McLaughlin
#100. Puritans, like poachers, shoot to kill your inner bonobo
Susan Block
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