Piety Quotes

Love of God is not always the same as love of good.

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.

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.

To secure integrity there must a lofty sense of duty and a deep responsibility to future times as well as to God.

Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude.

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.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

If God rewarded the righteous immediately, we would soon be engaged in business, not godliness...we would be pursuing not piety,but profit.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.

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.

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.

Learning without piety produces a proud device; piety without learning produces a useless one.

My value as a woman is not measured by the size of my waist or the number of men who like me. My worth as a human being is measured on a higher scale: a scale of righteousness and piety. And my purpose in life-despite what fashion magazines say-is something more sublime than just looking good for men.

Friendship, love, and piety ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy; they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence, to be mutually understood in silence. Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.

He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries.

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map.

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.

Piety and virtue are not only delightful for the present, but they leave peace and contentment behind them.

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Our piety must be weak and imperfect if it do not conquer our fear of death.

I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time's toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.

We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge.

The whole life of Christians ought to be an exercise of piety, since they are called to sanctification. It is the office of the law to remind them of their duty and thereby to excite them to the pursuit of holiness and integrity. But when their consciences are solicitous how God may be propitiated, what answer they shall make, and on what they shall rest their confidence, if called to his tribunal, there must then be no consideration of the requisitions of the law, but Christ alone must be proposed for righteousness, who exceeds all the perfection of the law.

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.

The gospel chargeth us with piety towards God, and justice and charity to men, and temperance and chastity in reference to ourselves.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

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.

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.

When the Congress first met, Mr. Cushing made a motion that it should be opened with prayer . . . Mr. Samuel Adams arose and said he was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue, who was at the same time a friend to his country. He . . . had heard that Mr. Duche . . . deserved that character and therefore he moved that Mr. Duche . . . might be desired to read prayers to the Congress . . . . After (he read several prayers), Mr. Duche, unexpected to everybody, struck out into an extemporary prayer, which filled the bosom of every man present.

What does this word holiness really mean? Is it a negative kind of piety from which so many people have shied away? No, of course not! Holiness in the Bible means moral wholeness-- a positive quality which actually includes kindness, mercy, purity, moral blamelessness and godliness. It is always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree.

Faith, and hope, and patience and all the strong, beautiful, vital forces of piety are withered and dead in a prayerless life. The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom, and fruitage in prayer.

Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas -- stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety.

A love of flowers would beget early rising, industry, habits of close observation, and of reading. It would incline the mind to notice natural phenomena, and to reason upon them. It would occupy the mind with pure thoughts, and inspire a sweet and gentle enthusiasm; maintain simplicity of taste; and ... unfold in the heart an enlarged, unstraightened, ardent piety.

[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)

The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, whohas; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.

Those who misrepresent the normal experiences of life, who decry being controversial, who shun risk, are the enemies of the American way of life, whatever the piety of their vocal professions and the patriotic flavor of their platitudes.

The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science fiction' by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making, societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God.

Alas, Postumus, the fleeting years slip by, nor will piety give any stay to wrinkles and pressing old age and untamable death.

Jesus is the purest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the pure, who, with his pierced hand has raised empires from their foundations, turned the stream of history from its old channel, and still continues to rule and guide the ages

What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.

Love is the piety of the affections.

We are too ready to imagine that we are religious, because we know something of religion. We appropriate to ourselves the pious sentiments we read, and we talk as if the thoughts of other men's heads were really the feelings of our own hearts. But piety has not its seat in the memory, but in the affections, for which however the memory is an excellent purveyor, though a bad substitute.

Christians often equate holiness with activism and spiritual disciplines. And while it's true that activism is often the outgrowth of holiness and spiritual disciplines are necessary for the cultivation of holiness, the pattern of piety in the Scripture is more explicitly about our character. We put off sin and put on righteousness. We put to death the deeds of the flesh and put on Christ. To use the older language, we pursue mortification of the old man and the vivification of the new.

...a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety. Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination; a scholar with great brilliance of wit; a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.

One who was born in the house of a warrior, regardless of his rank or class, first acquaints himself with a man of military feats and achievements in loyalty....Everyone knows that if a man doesn't hold filial piety toward his own parents he would also neglect his duties toward his lord. Such a neglect means a disloyalty toward humanity. Therefore such a man doesn't deserve to be called 'samurai'.

I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.