Top 100 Quotes About Piety
#1. My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
#2. 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.
Jean De La Bruyere
#3. A mind full of piety and knowledge is always rich; it is a bank that never fails; it yields a perpetual dividend of happiness. In
Lydia Maria Francis Child
#5. Superabundant piety/righteousness (and its practices) is that form of life that enhances the individual and the community simultaneously.
Michael Joseph Brown
#6. My dear sir," said the sheikh. "God likes catching His servants unprepared. The boy has set down what is obviously the first plate of food he has seen in a long while in order to thank his Creator. There are few acts of piety more honest than that.
G. Willow Wilson
#7. Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude.
Ambrose Bierce
#9. 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
#10. True piety hath in it nothing weak, nothing sad, nothing constrained. It enlarges the heart; it is simple, free, and attractive.
Francois Fenelon
#11. Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
Cynthia Ozick
#12. Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety; it shows itself in acts rather than words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations.
Louisa May Alcott
#13. True piety for the universe but no time for religions made for man's convenience.
Baruch Spinoza
#14. Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discover, and it is a principle even of piety; but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot.
Samuel Horsley
#15. Do not show the face of Islam to others; instead show your face as the follower of true Islam representing character, knowledge, tolerance and piety
Syed Ahmad Khan
#16. The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.
Angela Carter
#17. At all events, it is certain that if any medicinal man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill.
George Eliot
#18. The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.
James Richardson
#19. I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.
George Washington
#20. Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.
N. T. Wright
#21. Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.
Richard M. Weaver
#22. But like the crusaders, who in the name of piety had carried out that dreadful massacre in Jerusalem, there were many citizens who failed to hear in those penitential sermons a call to mend their ways, and instead learnt to hate all those who didn't share their faith.
E.H. Gombrich
#23. Of course, they (i. e., demons) had always been observed with some regularity, but that could usually be ascribed to an overabundance of piety or wine or imagination. Take your pick.
Jack McDevitt
#24. He was what men called a religious man, which in his case meant he was a superstitious man. There was never a man less Christian; there was never one who made a greater show of piety.
Jean Plaidy
#25. The moving hand once having writ moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line.
Omar Khayyam
#26. But that is all prayer requires: faith, hope, and love. Great holiness, or piety, or sanctity are not required. Prayer is a road to holiness.
Peter Kreeft
#27. All creeds are fallible and uncertain evidences of evangelical piety.
Daniel Webster
#28. One of the most repellent spectacles at election times is the pretense of piety on the part of people running for office.
Christopher Hitchens
#29. Love to Jesus is the basis of all true piety, and the intensity of this love will ever be the measure of our zeal for His glory. Let us love Him with all our hearts, and then diligent labor, and consistent living will be sure to follow.
Charles Spurgeon
#30. Patience, piety, and salutary knowledge spring up and ripen under the harrow of affliction; before there is wine or oil, the grape must be trodden and the oil pressed.
Walter Savage Landor
#31. Tulsidas's Ramayana is a notable book because it is informed with the spirit of purity, pity and piety.
Mahatma Gandhi
#32. 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
#33. A Deity believed, is joy begun; A Deity adored, is joy advanced; A Deity beloved, is joy matured. Each branch of piety delight inspires.
Edward Young
#34. Because they were, like me, Irish Catholic, their nuptials were distinguished by mediocre food, free-flowing liquor, pre-Riverdance-style step dancing, and their own peculiar strains of Gaelic piety.
Maureen Corrigan
#35. Since piety has become the fashion at Court, dramatic authors imagine that their pieces would be more welcome if they added in a little devotion. At first their plan succeeded, but now no one can bear their comedies.
Elisabeth Charlotte D'Orleans
#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 Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam
#39. The Greek poets had praised virtue as taking several specific forms: wisdom; courage; moderation; justice; and piety.
Melissa Lane
#41. We must labor unceasingly to render our piety reasonable, and our reason pious.
Sophie Swetchine
#42. 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
#43. Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.
John Denham
#44. Personal piety and formal worship are essential to the Christian life, but they must lead to lives that "act justly and love mercy" (Mic. 6:8).
Steve Corbett
#45. Let sleep itself be an exercise in piety, for such as our life and conduct have been, so also of necessity will be our dreams.
Saint Basil
#46. There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that by the mercy of God they who are endowed with true piety of life if they have the skill for ruling people should also have the power.
Augustine Of Hippo
#47. Nothing can compare in beauty, and wonder, and admirableness, and divinity itself, to the silent work in obscure dwellings of faithful women bringing their children to honor and virtue and piety.
Henry Ward Beecher
#49. You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.
Craig Brown
#50. A true man of piety will consider himself a sinner and, therefore, untouchable.
Mahatma Gandhi
#52. 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
#53. However advanced a man may be in piety or age; he is still in danger of falling.
Charles Simeon
#54. Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.
Jerry Pournelle
#55. Wherever the fear of God rules in the heart, it will appear both in works of charity and piety, and neither will excuse us from the other.
Matthew Henry
#57. Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.
Stephen Young
#58. Piety with some people, but especially with women, is either a passion, or an infirmity of age, or a fashion which must be followed.
Jean De La Bruyere
#60. Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas
stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety.
Aleister Crowley
#61. No degree of speculative knowledge of religion is any certain sign of true piety.
Jonathan Edwards
#62. Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
E. M. Forster
#63. Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God - this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right.
Norman Mailer
#64. It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
George Santayana
#65. For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.
Aristotle.
#66. 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
#67. We must embrace the power of faith, but we must never confuse politics and piety. For me, may I say that it is against my religion to impose my religion.
John Ashcroft
#68. God never intended His Church to be a refrigerator in which to preserve perishable piety. He intended it to be an incubator in which to hatch out converts. - F. LINCICOME
Leonard Ravenhill
#70. In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side, stricken men await the verdict of fate.
Georges Duhamel
#71. [T]he importance of piety and religion; of industry and frugality; of prudence, economy, regularity and an even government; all ... are essential to the well-being of a family.
Samuel Adams
#72. Piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of that state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice.
Joseph Story
#73. The apostle said he was "hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed." He made no attempt to mask his pain in a fraudulent piety. The Christian is not a Stoic. Neither does he flee into a fantasy world that denies the reality of suffering. Paul freely admitted the pressure he experienced.
R.C. Sproul
#74. Kings were wont to honour philosophers, but if I had such I would honour them as angels that should have such piety in them that they would not seek where they are the second to be the first, and where the third to be the second and so forth.
Elizabeth I
#75. My favourite writer is Beckett and I keep going back to wallow in his work like a deep pool of dark humour or like an oxygen tank when you can't breath in a world consumed by piety, hypocrisy and self-satisfaction.
Simon Critchley
#76. 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.
J.C. Ryle
#77. Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.
Thomas Carlyle
#78. Piety and pity were a little to close to each other for my tastes.
Jodi Picoult
#80. Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#81. Being Lutheran is about having the theological roadblocks cleared away. No good works. No law pretending to be Gospel. No popes or piety. No moralism. Just the Gospel loudly and clearly proclaimed.
A. Trevor Sutton
#82. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.
N. T. Wright
#84. We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain De Botton
#85. He who neither drinks, nor smokes, nor dances, he who preaches & even occasionally practice piety, temperance and celibacy, is generally a saint, or a mahatma or more likely a humbug but he certainly won't make a leader or for that matter a good soldier
Sam Manekshaw
#86. [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)
Stephen Batchelor
#87. Piety and holiness of life will propitiate the gods.
[Lat., Deos placatos pietas efficiet et sanctitas.]
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#89. Christian piety annihilates the egoism of the heart; worldly politeness veils and represses it.
Blaise Pascal
#90. The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of their opposite. Fundamentalism and sophistry give piety and philosophy bad reputations with society.
John Mark Reynolds
#91. I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.
Michel De Montaigne
#92. A good Christian cannot be a bad husband or father and, as this is equally true in everything, he who has the most piety will shine the most in all the relationships of life.
John Angell James
#93. We fancy that our afflictions are sent us directly from above; sometimes we think it in piety and contrition, but oftener in moroseness and discontent.
Walter Savage Landor
#94. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.
Henry David Thoreau
#95. It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#96. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can't, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
#97. Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge.
Lord Acton
#98. A hypocrite [is the one who] wants to impress others with an external facade of religious piety that he knows is devoid of internal spiritual substance.
Sam Storms
#99. Where the past is venerated the clean and those who clean things up should be kept out. Piety is never happy without a little dust, dirt, and rubbish.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#100. 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
