"Pharisaical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... every member (if she ever gets as far as this) of every ladies' club will here draw her pharisaical skirts about her and ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... ones here and there, whose hearts God will touch; but you will find that the greater part of the children will not be made better at all; you will find that the cleverer, and more tender-hearted will be made conceited, Pharisaical, self-deceiving (for children are as ready to deceive themselves, and play the hypocrite to their own consciences, as grown people are); they will catch up cant words and phrases, or little outward forms of reverence, and make a religion ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... lapse of years nor change of scene had mitigated the enmities which Francis had brought back from the East. After his usual fashion, he mistook his malevolence for virtue, nursed it, as preachers tell us we ought to nurse our good dispositions, and paraded it, on all occasions, with Pharisaical ostentation." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to corruption in high ones. They did not dare to utter a feeble squeak until some giant had accidentally fallen and they could do so without danger to themselves. Then, O Heavens, the palaver! What beatings of tom-toms! What mouthings of pharisaical moralities—platitudes! Run now, good people, for you may see clearly how evil is dealt with in high places! It made him smile. Such hypocrisy! Such cant! Still, so the world was organized, and it was not for him to ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... unintentionally, the short story is a great factor for good. The world is weary of the bald sermons of the Puritans, and of their endeavor to "point a tale" by every ordinary occurrence; it is rather inclined to a Pharisaical self-righteousness; and needs to have its sins, and the practical benefits of goodness, cunningly insinuated; but it can never fail to admire and strive to emulate the noble deeds of noble men, whether creatures of flesh or phantoms of the brain. To be sure, many of our best short stories deal with ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Year 1728: "Nor would I care, like a certain New England Magistrate to order a Man to the Whipping Post for daring to ride for a midwife on the Lord's Day"; but in the same manuscript he pays these people of rigid rules the following tribute: "Tho' these People may be ridiculed for some Pharisaical Particularitys in their Worship and Behaviour, yet they were very useful Subjects, as being Frugal and Industrious, giving no Scandal or Bad Example, at least by any Open and Public Vices. By which excellent Qualities they had much the Advantage of the Southern Colony, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... out of a Pharisaical notion of our own righteousness, and it is an invariable mark of a Pharisee to oppose the humiliating doctrine of equal guilt and equal grace. No man ever hated Christ who felt the weight of his own sins and the ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... "mad-dog!" persecution—to which he was liable. "Gorgius" may not have been a hero or a proper moral man: he was certainly "a most expensive Herr", and by no means a pattern husband. But recent and by no means Pharisaical expositions have exhibited his wife as almost infinitely not better than she should be; the allegations of treachery to private friends are, on the whole, Not Proven: if he deserted the Whigs, it was no more than some of these ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hate that kind of pharisaical bigotry. The fact that Mrs. Lorimer behaved as she did is no reason in the world why you should cut the poor woman. It's a well-known fact that people who are really much worse than she is are freely received into the best society; and, in any case, the latest systems of morality are quite ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... of fig-leaves required in some of these trials was enormous; and, despite all precautions, some details which escaped into the press might well bring a blush to the most hardened American offender. It was both vexatious and comical to see the smug, Pharisaical way in which many journals ignored all these things, and held up their hands in horror at American shortcomings. Some trials, too, which at various times revealed the brutality of sundry military officers toward soldiers, were heartrending; and especially one or two duels, which occurred during ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... better than this of Josephus: I mean, because "Cain was of the evil one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous," 1 John 3:12. Josephus's reason seems to be no better than a pharisaical notion or tradition. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... is right after all and practises the true philosophy of life. This has led me to express too much admiration for such men as Sainte-Beuve and Theophile Gautier. Their affectation of immorality prevented me from seeing how incoherent their philosophy was. The fear of appearing pharisaical, the idea, evangelical in itself, that he who is immaculate has the right to be indulgent, and the dread of misleading, if by chance all the doctrines emitted by the professors of philosophy were wrong, made my system of morality appear rather shaky. It is, in reality, as solid ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... ashamed of you! Eva may well say that churchgoing does not seem to make people better. What right have you to set yourself up to judge other people in that pharisaical manner? It is a most unchristian spirit. I know I am not a very good example, for I am not at all humble; but I think if we want Eva to go to church and be better we shall only do it by being very nice to her, and not by treating her unkindly and making her feel that we think ourselves ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... happiness" of their constituents, "would in time have the most destructive influence," and "endanger their very existence." And the king answered them that, "upon pain of his highest displeasure, the importation of slaves should not be in any respect obstructed." "Pharisaical Britain," wrote Franklin in behalf of Virginia, "to pride thyself in setting free a single slave that happened to land on thy coasts, while thy laws continue a traffic whereby so many hundreds of thousands are ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... though no doubt my chances are not improved since yesterday," said Meynell, with a grim shadow of a smile, "supposing that anybody from Upcote has been gossipping at Sandford. It does not exactly add to one's moral influence to be regarded as a Pharisaical humbug." ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... indicated, with assassination for its sanction, would be an uncomfortable institution for a "hanging judge" like the Honourable Justice Harbottle. That sarcastic and ferocious administrator of the criminal code of England, at that time a rather pharisaical, bloody and heinous system of justice, had reasons of his own for choosing to try that very Lewis Pyneweck, on whose behalf this audacious trick was devised. Try him he would. No man living should take that ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the adversaries would follow, the churches would be tranquil and the state have peace. For these tumults would be quieted if the adversaries would not insist with too much bitterness [from sheer vengeful spite and pharisaical envy, against the truth which they have perceived] upon certain traditions, useless for godliness, most of which not even those very persons observe who most earnestly defend them. But they easily forgive themselves, and yet do not likewise forgive others, according to the passage in the poet: ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... government is pharisaical—"Shall we, 'weak, sinful men,'" one says, "perhaps even more sinful than the slaveholder, cry out, No Union with Slaveholders?" Such a course is wanting ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... gentleman," said Pleydell, "whom I love for his father's sake and his own, has nothing of the sour or pharisaical pride which has been imputed to some of the early fathers of the Calvinistic Kirk of Scotland. His colleague and he differ, and head different parties in the kirk, about particular points of church discipline; but without for a moment losing personal regard or respect for each ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... sick of the damned Mersey fog, and he was sick of the drunkenness of Scotland Road, and he was sick of the sleet lashing Hoylake links. He was sick of Pharisaical importers who did the heathen in the eye on Saturday and on Sunday in their blasted conventicles thumped their black-covered craws in respectable humility.... In Little Asia religion was a passion, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... intellectually intoxicating; at any rate it has a rather stimulating effect on a certain kind of dogmatic mind. This intolerance has been very eloquently rebuked by a distinguished man who is an ornament of the Church of England. It is Dean Farrar who says that these pharisaical attacks on the stage are inspired only by "concentrated malice." Well, the periodical misunderstanding to which the stage is exposed need cause but little disquiet. I have no doubt it will survive its many adventures, and that it will owe ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... outspoken sympathy draws them toward one of the belligerent powers, then their judgment is as little objective as that of the belligerents themselves. Their pretended neutrality gives to their expressions a loathsome Pharisaical aspect, because they come to a decision according to their opinions as if they stood on a height above the contestants and, from this lofty standpoint, were holding an anticipated Last ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... the toilers and workers, did want to see such things on Sunday, and now more people visit the Museum on Sunday than on all the other days of the week put together. The same is true of the public libraries. There is something to me infinitely pharisaical, hypocritical and farcical in this Sunday nonsense. The rich people who favor keeping Sunday "holy," have their coachman drive them to church and wait outside until the services end. What do they care about the coachman's soul? While they ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to suffer much Pharisaical opposition of this sort. Sometimes political systems, sometimes religious zeal, have excluded it from their programme, thereby making their programme unjust and inadequate. Yet of all premature settlements the most ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and phases of ministerial sentiments were expressed, and whatever was grand and Christ-like sprang up as dainty, fragrant blossoms amid the wayside weeds of falsity and Pharisaical bigotry. ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... villager's attitude towards drink and temperance is not that of an unrepentant or rebellious sinner; rather, it is the attitude of a man who has sound reasons for adhering to his own point of view. If he grows restive under the admonitions of the pharisaical, if he meets them defiantly, or if he merely laughs, as often as not it is because he feels that his mentors do not understand the situation so well as he does. How should they, who see it wholly from the outside—they who never go near the public-house; they who have no experience either ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... brutal superstition did not stand in the way, clothed in pharisaical assumption and political power, experiments might be made on human beings and animals sufficient to settle most positively all doubt as to transmutation of species by the semi-creative power from the invisible world, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one, it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because he desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, is not that he sought power, but that he sought it in the interests of a coarse, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... with unwonted severity, "I cannot allow you to talk in that way. Lulu's faults are different from yours, but perhaps no worse; for while she is passionate and not sufficiently amenable to authority, you are showing yourself both uncharitable and Pharisaical." ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... each other's history is perhaps the greatest menace to such an understanding. To take one instance at random—how many English writers have censured, sometimes in terms of friendly sorrow, sometimes in a manner somewhat pharisaical, the treatment of Negroes in Southern States in all its phases, varying from the provision of separate waiting-rooms to sporadic outbreaks of lynching! How few ever mention, or seem to have even heard the word "Reconstruction"—a word which, in its ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... and it is immensely strengthened by the influence of love. Whatever, therefore, a mother wishes her child to be—whether a sincere, honest Christian, submissive to God's will and conscientious in the discharge of every duty, or proud, vain, deceitful, hypocritical, and pharisaical—she has only to be either the one or the other herself, and without any special teaching her child will be pretty sure to be a good copy ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... Reduced to Pharisaical tricks, they took to expounding her speeches. Whatever she uttered in a mystic sense they feigned to accept in its material hardness. To free herself from such snares she displayed, what they had least expected, very great ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... above brief survey the special office of the epistle to the Romans is manifest. In no book of the New Testament is the great doctrine of justification by faith so fully unfolded. The apostle sets it in vivid contrast with the Pharisaical idea of justification by the Mosaic law, and, by parity of reason, of justification by every other system of legalism; showing that it is only by grace through Christ that men can be delivered from either the guilt of sin or its reigning ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... one night his sweet humanity, his grand, strong love rose up, battled with him, and conquered. He cast his pharisaical ideas, and the Church's "I am better than thou," aside forever; he would go now, to-night, he would ask her to be his wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... irreverent, sacrilegious, blasphemous. un-hallowed, un-sanctified, un-regenerate; hardened, perverted, reprobate. hypocritical &c. (false) 544; canting, pietistical[obs3], sanctimonious, unctuous, pharisaical, overrighteous[obs3], righteous over much. bigoted, fanatical; priest-ridden. Adv. under the mask of religion, under the cloak of religion, under the pretense of religion, under the form of religion, under the guise of religion. Phr. giovane ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... prayer with somewhat similar meaning occurred to the minister's son, but he only smiled at the pharisaical egotism of the Fat Woman. After all she had trained the children morally, if not religiously, and this made the teaching of Christian truths far less difficult. Children reared in love are almost always ready to accept the ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... are absolutely consanguineous, closely related, or of foreign nationality. Instead of a general acceptance of the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce under self-government and sink into deterioration and division under coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superiority in the dominant people, the same attribution of sordid and ugly motives to the leaders of an unruly people, the same vague idealization of the loyalist minority, the same fixed hallucination that the majority does not want what by all the constitutional means in its ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... and the taboo on man's dress for females). The popular magazines and the "great moral shows" religiously respect the standards of the crowd. That which is broad is funny, but there is always a limit of toleration. What is prudish, puritanical, fastidious, affected, pharisaical, etc.? These adjectives are in use, and they apply to things which are beyond a line which is undefined and indefinable. It depends on the codes and standards of the group. Realism presents everyday experience, no humbug, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... different from what he had imagined in his lonely meditations at Benares! It was the Bible only that saved him from returning to his old religion, and helped him to discern beneath theological futilities, accumulated during nearly two thousand years, beneath pharisaical hypocrisy, infidelity, and want of charity, the buried, but still living seed, committed to the earth by Christ and his Apostles. How can a missionary in such circumstances meet the surprise and questions of his pupils, unless he may point to that seed, and tell ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... himself either of the right or the advisability of spending his share. Both conscience and fear advised him to keep the blood-money intact. He carried it with him wherever he went, and became, in time, quite pleased with himself because of his compunctions in doing so. He was even pharisaical about McKee's gambling. No, when his mind had come clear about keeping it, he would make an honest use of it, such as investing it in a saloon in Florence. When, however, he suggested to Polly that dispensing liquors ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... off!" said irritated Bob. "Why come you here to bother one? You pharisaical old snob, You're wuss ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... chair and facing her, "I'm going to do what any man with an ounce of self-respect would do under the circumstances. I'm going to do what I was a fool not to have done three months ago—what I should have done if it hadn't been for you. If in their contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to forget what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for me. If it's the last act of my life I'm ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... God, mother! don't you understand me? I simply long to go. It seems to me as though everything in life worth having depends on my doing what you and others want me to do. But how can I! I hate talking about it, it sounds so pharisaical, but my father wanted me to be a Christian, and you know what Christianity meant to him. As I have said again and again, it comes to this—either war is wrong and hellish, or Christianity is a fable. Both cannot be right. And if I went as a soldier I should ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... to a wider range. Those higher Pharisees who were above him in his own pharisaical establishment, had interfered with the austerity of his worship. He could not turn against them there, on their own ground. He, of all men, could not be disobedient to official orders. But if he could promote a movement beyond ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... selfishness! there was no such hard worker at the Pyramids or the wall of China)—between him and his fellow! Hunger will be fed—nakedness will be clothed—and God's image, though stricken with age, and broken with disease, be acknowledged; not in the cut-and-dried Pharisaical phrase of trading Church-goers, as a thing vested with immortality—as a creature fashioned for everlasting solemnities—but practically treated as of the great family of man—a brother, invited with the noblest of the Caesars, to an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various |
