Pious Quotes - Page 2

The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

Aleister Crowley

Evil, Vagueness, Doe

"The Confessions of Aleister Crowley". Book by Aleister Crowley. Chapter 33, 1969.

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The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Jesus, Winning, Unique

Dorothy L. Sayers (2015). “The Mind of the Maker”, p.58, Open Road Media

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In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past

Henri Frederic Amiel

Past, Priestesses

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For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Thomas Mann

Foundation, Flow, Timeless

Thomas Mann (1999). “Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger, and Other Writings”, p.290, A&C Black

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See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.

Wole Soyinka

Strong, Men, World

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A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.

Jean de la Bruyere

Atheist, Kings, Men

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The pious ones of Plymouth who, reaching the Rock, first fell upon their own knees and then upon the aborigines.

William M. Evarts

Rocks, Plymouth, Knees

Quoted in Louisville Courier-Journal, 4 July 1913.

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No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.

Hu Shih

Religious, Europe, Chinese

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I am calling attention just to the main points of these tremendously important matters, which can be understood better by pious meditation than explained by human language.

Martin Chemnitz

Meditation, Important, Attention

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It is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth -- whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from wha.

Galileo Galilei

Bible, Believe, Prudent

Galileo Galilei, Raymond John Seeger (1966). “Men of physics: Galileo Galilei, his life and his works”

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Your meditations may be as profound, as exalted, as devout as you like; you may practise every pious exercise you can manage, but all this is as nothing in comparison with the Blessed Sacrament. What we do may be godly, but this sacrament is God Himself!

Johannes Tauler

Blessed, Godly, Exercise

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People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all -- we were wet.

Frank McCourt

Mother, Bullying, Father

Frank McCourt (1999). “Angela's Ashes: A Memoir”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

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...ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot.

Russell Kirk

Beautiful, Ambition, Men

Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.35, Regnery Publishing

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Like Andy Warhol and unlike God Almighty, Larry King does not presume to judge; all celebrities are equal in his eyes, saints and sinners alike sharing the same 'Love Boat' voyage into the dark beyond, a former sitcom star as deserving of pious send-off as Princess Diana.

James Wolcott

Kings, Stars, Princess

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Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputation bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.

John F. Kerry

Country, Real, War

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A thing can only live through a pious illusion.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Illusion

Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “The Essential Nietzsche”, p.76, Courier Corporation

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God intends us to penetrate the world. Christian salt has no business to remain snugly in elegant little ecclesiastical salt cellars; our place is to be rubbed into the secular community, as salt is rubbed into meat, to stop it going bad. And when society does go bad, we Christians tend to throw up our hands in pious horror and reproach the non-Christian world; but should we not rather reproach ourselves? One can hardly blame unsalted meat for going bad. It cannot do anything else. The real question to ask is: Where is the salt?

John Stott

Christian, Real, Hands

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The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.

Ludwig von Mises

Community, Deception, Rooms

Ludwig Von Mises (1985). “Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War”, Libertarian Press

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Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

Anton Chekhov

Canaries

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Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Petrarch

Book, Jewels, Purple

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Truth usually makes no sense. If your desire is for everything to make perfect sense, then you should take refuge in fiction. In fiction, all threads tie together in a neat bow and everything moves smoothly from one point to the next to the next. In real life, though... nothing makes sense. Bad things happen to good people. The pious die young while the wicked live until old age. War, famine, pestilence, death all occur randomly and senselessly and leave us more often than not scratching our heads and hurling the question 'why?' into a void that provides no answers.

Peter David

Real, War, Moving

Peter David (2008). “Tigerheart”, p.85, Del Rey

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He (Intellectuals) claims that label to compensate for his own inadequacies. It's as old as that saying: tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as excessively devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant and the feeble-minded as intellectual.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Humble, Intellectual, Experts

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While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Real, People, Evil

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Until the building of Solomons temple the unity of worship according to it had, properly speaking, never had any existence; and, moreover, it is easy to read between the lines that even after that date it was more a pious wish than a practical demand.

Julius Wellhausen

Unity, Wish, Read Between The Lines

Julius Wellhausen (2013). “Prolegomena to the History of Israel: With a Reprint of the Article 'Israel' from the Encyclopaedia Britannica”, p.36, Cambridge University Press

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... I am not afraid of priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself.

Thomas Jefferson

Religious, Lying, Father

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