Top 86 Quotes About Puritans
#1. The Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist the temptation to make the most of it.
Edmund Morgan
#2. It [Thanksgiving] was founded by the Puritans to give thanks for bein' preserved from the Indians, an' we keep it to give thanks we are preserved from the Puritans.
Finley Peter Dunne
#3. The Puritans made me aware that all theology is also spirituality.
J.I. Packer
#4. Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.
Richard Rohr
#5. The Puritans gave thanks for being preserved from the Indians, and we give thanks for being preserved from the Puritans.
Finley Peter Dunne
#6. 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
#7. Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.
Hugh Hefner
#8. Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans.
Esther Perel
#9. 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
#10. I don't mind plain women being puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain.
Oscar Wilde
#11. The best of men are only men at their very best. Patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, - martyrs, fathers, reformers, puritans, - all are sinners, who need a Savior: holy, useful, honorable in their place - but sinners after all.
J.C. Ryle
#12. He stopped trying hard when she praised him, she had noticed. Puritans understand the value of delayed gratification.
Lauren Groff
#13. Happy St George's Day. Now kiss my beggar arse, you Puritans!
Jez Butterworth
#14. The Puritans were accustomed to explain faith by the word 'recumbency.' It meant leaning upon a thing. Lean with all your weight upon Christ. It would be a better illustration still if I said, fall at full length, and lie on the Rock of Ages.
Charles Spurgeon
#15. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it.
Bill Bryson
#16. Only Puritans think of the Devil as the most fascinating figure in the universe.
Heywood Broun
#17. The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
H.L. Mencken
#18. In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.
C.S. Lewis
#19. How come we got the grumpy boat of bandy-legged Puritans? How come we didn't get the Italian party boat with the cappuccino makers and the gelato machine? That was the sexy boat, man.
Greg Proops
#20. We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them.
Carlisle Floyd
#21. Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
Cynthia Ozick
#22. The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.
Leland Ryken
#23. My parents were, had a marriage of passion, and the passion was about their religious beliefs. They were both immigrant families that - well, my father's family came as Puritans to Massachusetts.
Phil Jackson
#24. 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
#25. Do you think none shall be saved but puritans(89)?
Richard Baxter
#26. ... he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#27. FEW PEOPLE in American history have been as consistently disliked as the Puritans.
Jim Cullen
#28. Why are there so many puritans in this country, and why can't the rest of us make them go away?!
Bill Maher
#29. Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#30. The God of the Puritans ... was a monster too horrible to contemplate.
John Burroughs
#32. 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
#33. The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans' vision of themselves as God's chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire.
Sarah Vowell
#35. The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality
which became America's
was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.
Hugh Hefner
#36. It's not a performance to impress the Puritans
Martin Tyler
#37. Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled "the meanest and worst of all forms of Government." For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.
Nancy Isenberg
#38. Those Puritans would spice the Gallic stew of upper Maine for years, causing no end of trouble to Agnes, who, to be fair, was a witch and a succubus and everything else they ever called her, but that's no excuse for being such poor neighbors, when you think about it.
Catherynne M Valente
#39. Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#40. The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#41. 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
#42. The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
H.L. Mencken
#43. The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
Gore Vidal
#44. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Tim Kreider
#45. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.
C.S. Lewis
#46. Puritans, like poachers, shoot to kill your inner bonobo
Susan Block
#47. Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
Edmund Morgan
#48. Underlying the preaching of the Puritans are three basic axioms: 1. The unique place of preaching is to convert, feed and sustain, 2. The life of the preacher must radiate the reality of what he preaches, 3. Prayer and solid Bible study are basic to effective preaching.
J.I. Packer
#49. Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you.
Mignon McLaughlin
#50. Like the Puritans, live in terms of the settled judgement that the joy of heaven will make amends of any losses and crosses, strains and pains that we must endure on earth if we are going to follow Christ faithfully. Regard preparedness to die as the first step in learning to live.
Joel Beeke
#51. Rhode Island, a colony that the mainstream Puritans denounced as "a cesspool of vile heresies and irreligion,
Bernard Bailyn
#52. The proper worldview context for interpreting the Bible is not evangelicalism, Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation, the Puritans - or even the modern world. The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context in which it was written - that of the ancient biblical writers.
Michael S. Heiser
#53. We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.
Barbara Jordan
#54. The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes.
Leland Ryken
#55. Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.
Thomas Pynchon
#56. If God rewards us on earth for good deeds - the Old Testament suggests it's so, and the Puritans certainly believed it - then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.
Stephen King
#57. America was first colonized by Puritans. Most of our earliest immigrants, and many since, have come here in order to practice their religious beliefs as they please. Our culture has always been, and will most likely always be, profoundly influenced by religion.
James Frey
#59. The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
Rebecca West
#60. The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
Margaret Atwood
#61. It is true that the Puritans banned all recreation on Sundays and all games of chance, gambling, bear baiting, horse racing, and bowling in or around taverns at all times. They did so, not because they were opposed to fun, but because they judged these activities to be inherently harmful or immoral.
Leland Ryken
#62. That stern and rockbound coast felt like an amateur when it saw how grim the puritans that landed on it were.
Don Marquis
#63. The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.
Artemas Ward
#64. The Puritans came to America to worship in their way and to force everybody else to do the same thing.
Sam Levenson
#65. No son of mine should ever take the side of the Puritans: that is always an error.
Oscar Wilde
#66. By all means read the Puritans, they are worth more than all the modern stuff put together.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#67. My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.
Garrison Keillor
#68. I have spent enough time around Puritans in general, and Boston Puritans in particular, to know what these people will tell her: lock up the library! Or
Neal Stephenson
#69. It annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it. In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I
George Bernard Shaw
#70. The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#71. The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.
James Russell Lowell
#72. The Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#73. For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.
Leland Ryken
#74. When teenagers aren't turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they're as stiff as Puritans.
Stephen King
#75. If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.
Henry David Thoreau
#76. Democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.
Anne Stevenson
#77. What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
Wendell Phillips
#78. The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.
Edmund Morgan
#79. Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans' error.
Tim Powers
#80. He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.
Louis Kronenberger
#81. No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.
Leland Ryken
#82. A saving, though an immethodical knowledge of Christ, will bring us to heaven, John 17: 2, but a regular and methodical, as well as a saving knowledge of him, will bring heaven into us, Col. 2: 2, 3.
John Flavel
#83. A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.
Adam Nicolson
#84. Holiness appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul.
Jonathan Edwards
#85. Teach me the happy art of attending to things temporal with a mind intent on things eternal.
Various Puritans
#86. 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
