Piety Quotes

Piety required us to honour truth above our friends. (Aristotle)
Piety is not an end but a means to attain by the greatest peace of mind the highest degree of culture. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety. View quote
Edmund Burke
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. View quote
George Santayana
Books should to one of these four ends conduce, For wisdom, piety, delight, or use. View quote
John Denham
To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods. View quote
Emmanuel Levinas
Be happy, but be happy through piety. View quote
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona. View quote
Samuel Johnson
Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety. It shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations. View quote
Louisa May Alcott
Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game. (V. S. Pritchett)
Pathos, piety, courage, - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value. View quote
E. M. Forster
When Poetry thus keeps its place as the handmaiden of piety, it shall attain not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away. View quote
John Wesley
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. View quote
William Law
It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism. View quote
Reinhold Niebuhr
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. View quote
John Calvin
My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. View quote
William Wordsworth
The Child is father of the Man And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. View quote
William Wordsworth
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. View quote
Edward FitzGerald (poet)
I bought abandon dear And sold all piety for pleasure. My own free spirit I have followed, And never will I give up lust. View quote
Abu Nuwas
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)
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. View quote
Jack McDevitt
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. View quote
James Branch Cabell
Piety is the tinfoil of pretense. View quote
Elbert Hubbard
The believing man hath the Holy Ghost; and where the Holy Ghost dwelleth, He will not suffer a man to be idle, butstirreth him up to all exercises of piety and godliness, and of true religion, to the love of God, to the patient suffering of afflictions, to prayer, to thanksgiving, and the exercise of charity towards all men. View quote
Martin Luther