Top 100 Quotes About Piety
#1. 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
#2. he affected great piety (as became a pilgrim), although unable to read the inspired words of the Prophet.
Jose Conrad
#3. Let us unite the two so long divided, knowledge and vital piety.
Charles Wesley
#4. The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. [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
#11. Alas, Postumus, the fleeting years slip by, nor will piety give any stay to wrinkles and pressing old age and untamable death.
Horace
#12. Great men are great until they know it. Saints are holy until they know it.
Idries Shah
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.
Christopher Hitchens
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny.
Mary Douglas
#26. Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.
Theodore Parker
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.
Aristotle.
#33. 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
#34. Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
Richard Hofstadter
#35. 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
#36. Short devotions are the bane of deep piety. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry.
E. M. Bounds
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. A magnificent achievement that witnesses powerfully to the rich development, harmony, and piety of the Reformed faith.
Joel Beeke
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess.
Harper Lee
#45. The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.
Fisher Ames
#46. 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
#47. Beauty is like piety
you cannot run and read it; tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.
Herman Melville
#48. 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
#49. Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
Edmund Burke
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Piety and virtue are not only delightful for the present, but they leave peace and contentment behind them.
John Tillotson
#54. 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
#55. A constant attention to the work which God entrusts us with is a mark of solid piety.
John Wesley
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.
Frank McCourt
#60. 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
#62. 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
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.
Abraham Lincoln
#71. It requires all my philosophy, and all my piety' to make peace ...
Sarah Vowell
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage.
Moliere
#75. As Catholics, we are free to cultivate a rich life of piety, drawing from the treasures of many lands and many ages.
Scott Hahn
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Not even piety will stay wrinkles, nor the encroachments of age, nor the advance of death, which cannot be resisted.
Horace
#79. 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
#80. The essential commitment and, above all, the visible grace and source of supernatural strength for the Church as the People of God is to persevere and advance constantly in Eucharistic life and Eucharistic piety and to develop spiritually in the climate of the Eucharist.
Pope John Paul II
#82. Faith is never identical with piety.
Karl Barth
#83. 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
#84. Earth has nothing more tender than a woman's heart when it is the abode of piety.
Martin Luther
#85. In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety.
Christopher Hitchens
#86. A virtuous character is likened to an unblemished flower. Piety is a fadeless bud that half opens on earth and expands through eternity. Sweetness of temper is the odor of fresh blooms, and the amaranth flowers of pure affection open but to bloom forever.
Dorothea Dix
#87. The signal instances of Providential goodness which we have experienced and which have now almost crowned our labors with complete success demand from us in a peculiar manner the warmest returns of gratitude and piety to the Supreme Author of all good.
George Washington
#88. Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
#89. Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#90. An atheist is but a mad, ridiculous derider of piety, but a hypocrite makes a sober jest of God and religion; he finds it easier to be upon his knees than to rise to a good action.
Alexander Pope
#91. Marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship, and there can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity; and he must expect to be wretched, who pays to beauty, riches, or politeness that regard which only virtue and piety can claim.
Samuel Johnson
#92. 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.
Francis Bacon
#93. Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquility of soul. Hence it may be observed that those who set up piety as an end and object are mostly hypocrites.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#94. Piety is the fermentation of the forming mind and the putrefaction of the disintegrating one.
Franz Grillparzer
#95. 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
#96. In the matter of piety, poverty serves us better than wealth, and work better than idleness, especially since wealth becomes an obstacle even for those who do not devote themselves to it.
Saint John Chrysostom
#97. Piety and morality are but the same spirit differently manifested. Piety is religion with its face toward God; morality is religion with its face toward the world.
Tryon Edwards
#98. It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#99. I am sure your piety does you great credit, Margaret. But certainly, if God is speaking to the king, then He has not chosen the best time for this conversation.
Philippa Gregory
#100. Poverty snatches the reins out of the hand of piety.
Saadi
