Puritanical Quotes

#1. February ... Now more than ever one must remind oneself that it is wasteful folly to wish that time would pass, or - as the puritanical old saying used to have it - to kill time until it kills you.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#2. The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.

George Orwell

#3. The schoolroom clock was worn raw by stares; and you couldn't look up at the big Puritanical face of it and not feel the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards. It was a dark, old spirit that didn't so much mark time as bequeath it.

Tod Wodicka

#4. We still have this prudish, puritanical culture, but we also have so little exposure to a diversity of bodies. Bodies are beautiful and great and compelling.

Jenji Kohan

#5. The fantasy comes from that, and from a culture that eroticizes violence against women, and leftover puritanical guilt about sex that tells us we're not allowed to choose it and want it for ourselves, and from God only knows where else.

Lilah Pace

#6. Religion provides us with a puritanical dream, which can never be realized because it goes against human nature.

Youssef Ziedan

#7. There may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#8. Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues.

Muriel Spark

#9. I'm cursed with this puritanical streak that makes me want everything to be about something. It's a terrible affliction.

Kenneth Oppel

#10. Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

Mary McCarthy

#11. Abruptly, with the shock of the Conquest, the sober and puritanical man of the Christian Inquisition encountered, through their violent and upsetting nature, peoples who through their rituals were identified with the gods.

Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

#12. You can support trans-positive legislation, tranny artists, and the inclusion of trannies in your neighborhood, schools, place of worship, whatever. For the long term? Join or initiate some good legal battles against the puritanical laws that exist around sex and gender.

Kate Bornstein

#13. I wonder why bigots think their conservative and puritanical version of 'God' made the male body with a prostate gland that also co-incidentally 'just happens' to be a 'g-spot'?

Christina Engela

#14. I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America, I don't believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a Godgiven right. Otherwise it's the end of our species.

Kevin Bacon

#15. Humanity is a cage, and our puritanical sensibilities comprise the bars. We are confined by our own reason and intellect, and yet most of us don't even know it.

Nenia Campbell

#16. We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is.

Mark Ruffalo

#17. How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

May Sarton

#18. I think we're very uptight in America. You have to remember that we're descended from Puritans. Whether or not the country is now composed of immigrants, our culture as American really begins with the landing of the Pilgrims and a puritanical view of things.

Tom Ford

#19. I had a father who was strong and kind and loving beyond ... at the same time who was extremely puritanical, who had been raised in a religion with extensive morality.

Frederick Lenz

#20. The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.

Maureen Howard

#21. Indeed, an ecumenical spirit extending to the worldly, to the flawed, to the politically compromised, and to the sexually stigmatized was what separated Jesus from his rigorously puritanical mentor.

James Carroll

#22. Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.

Jim Crace

#23. I had a strong, really good upbringing, not puritanical.

Tom Selleck

#24. Groundhog Day was pretty clean. It may have to do with some puritanical feeling that comedy is a forbidden pleasure in a certain way. They make you laugh, and laughter is somehow an inferior emotion to tragedy.

Harold Ramis

#25. There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs encouragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-American world.

Camille Paglia

#26. Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

Susan Sontag

#27. Exactly. It all just seems so arbitrary and political and" - come on, Blake, finish strong, puritanical, pathological, perforated, Panamanian - "weird.

Veronica Rossi

#28. The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

Florence King

#29. The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.

Camille Paglia

#30. Not that I don't think irreverent humor and someone being filthy is funny, I just do what I do. Any comedian would admit throwing an f-bomb in there would help get a reaction ... I'm not on a Puritanical pursuit, but when I would curse in a joke, I believe I'm not done writing it.

Jim Gaffigan

#31. American society is still puritanical.

Nick Nolte

#32. But we're still in somewhat a Puritanical society in a lot of ways.

Joe Mantegna

#33. The United States is considered a puritanical society by many Western nations. For example, they can't believe we hassle public servants like General David Petraeus because he had a mistress. In France, if a powerful man doesn't have a mistress, he's considered a wimp.

Bill O'Reilly

#34. Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

Tom Stoppard

#35. Americans had to tie every radical aspiration into a puritanical knot.

Susie Bright

#36. We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.

Kate Millett

#37. I have a weak stomach. My wife is a doctor, so she finds it funny that I actually pass out when I get my blood drawn. I physically can't stand gore on screen. I can't stand blood and guts. Not for any puritanical/moral high-ground reason. I just don't want to black out.

Christopher Denham

#38. Once is orthodox, twice is puritanical.

Lord Melbourne

#39. Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.

James Buchan

#40. People are kinda still a bit puritanical, perhaps. People don't expect a woman to feel so open, in a way, about her sexuality onscreen, and they probably find it fascinating. I think more actors are doing it and being open to that and not being afraid of it, so it's becoming less of a thing.

Maria Bello

#41. Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed.

Tom Robbins

#42. It may be my rather puritanical upbringing at odds with my inborn laziness that makes me feel guilty at the end of the day, unless I am able to point at some achievement. But this need be no more impressive than cooking a meal or going for a long walk.

Ian McKellen

#43. When people accuse us of being retrograde, or medieval, or puritanical - all words rummaged out of the box labeled "Not Progressive" - we should shrug, as if they had accused us of walking on two feet, and

Anthony Esolen

#44. Puritanical attempts to cure society by taking toys away from children are hypocritical and futile.

Brian Sutton-Smith

#45. We come from a somewhat puritanical and chauvinistic point-of-view, so that when we're asked questions about women being empowered by sexuality, we often confuse it with women who are victimized by it.

Amber Heard

#46. My parents were teetotalers and my grandparents were - it's all the way back. It's New English puritanical tradition.

Penn Jillette

#47. It's a cliche, but Americans are puritanical. In their movies, they are scared of sex, but they overindulge in violence. I could have cut a G-rated version of 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' that would have pleased the American ratings board, but it would have been five minutes long.

Alfonso Cuaron

#48. People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

Rachel Kushner

#49. Again, I know that story is suspect in the high precincts of American fiction, but only because it brings entertainment and pleasure, the same responses that have always driven puritanical spirits at the dinner table wild when the talk turns to sexual intercourse and incontinence.

Pat Conroy

#50. Do you think none shall be saved but puritans(89)?

Richard Baxter

#51. [O]ne duty may be said to be too long, when its shuts out another, and then it ceaseth, indeed, to be a duty(274).

Richard Baxter

#52. Remember with whom thou hast to do: what canst thou expect from dust but levity; or from corruption, but defilement(33)?

Richard Baxter

#53. Even innocent Adam is liker to forget God in a paradise, than Joseph in a prison, or Job upon a dunghill(376)[.]

Richard Baxter

#54. The way of painful duty is the way of fullest comfort. Christ carrieth all our comforts in his hand : if we are out of that way where Christ is to be met, we are out of the way where comfort is to be had (312).

Richard Baxter

#55. The true knowing, living Christian complains more frequently and more bitterly of the wants and woes within him, than without him(55).

Richard Baxter

#56. [O]ur applications are quicker about our sufferings, than our sins(77)[.]

Richard Baxter

#57. He that dare not die, dare scarce fight valiantly (475).

Richard Baxter

#58. The falseness of your own hearts, if you look not to them, may undo you(15).

Richard Baxter

#59. As all our senses are the inlets of sin, so they are become the inlets of sorrow (99).

Richard Baxter

#60. So then, let "Deserved" be written on the door of hell, but on the door of Heaven and life, "The free gift" (68).

Richard Baxter

#61. The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.

Ross Douthat

#62. When the world is worth nothing, then heaven is worth something. I leave every Christian to judge by his own experience, whether we do not overlove the world more in prosperity than in adversity (374) [.]

Richard Baxter

#63. O let us not be as the purblind world, that cannot see afar off ; let us never look at the grave, but let us see the resurrection beyond it(42).

Richard Baxter

#64. Seriousness is the very thing wherein consisteth our sincerity. If thou art not serious, thou art not a Christian (279).

Richard Baxter

#65. We will live eternally with Peter, Paul, Austin, Chrysostom, Jerome, Wickliffe, Luther, Zuinglius, Calvin, Beza, Bullinger ... Latimer(69) [.]

Richard Baxter

#66. Oh! what a potent instrument for Satan is a misguided conscience(93)!

Richard Baxter

#67. [I]f thou loiter when thou shouldst labour, thou wilt lose the crown. O fall to work then speedily and seriously, and bless God that thou hast yet time to do it; and though that which is past cannot be recalled, yet redeem the time now by doubling thy diligence (260).

Richard Baxter

#68. [T]his is the strongest encouragement to them in sinning; and we have need to lay all our batteries against this bulwark of presumption (361).

Richard Baxter