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Sanctimonious   /sˌæŋktəmˈoʊniəs/   Listen
Sanctimonious

adjective
1.
Excessively or hypocritically pious.  Synonyms: holier-than-thou, pharisaic, pharisaical, pietistic, pietistical, self-righteous.



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"Sanctimonious" Quotes from Famous Books



... frequently happens that the deference of the prince to the wishes of the priests has the effect of alienating the hearts of his most faithful subjects, and brings him that execration which ought in justice to be heaped exclusively upon his sanctimonious instigators. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach

... villainous, lean, crop-haired fellow, with a hang-dog look, and sanctimonious air, upon hearing himself charged with delinquencies, which were notorious to the whole Court, raised to heaven his eyes, which, until now, he had kept fastened on the floor, and, sighing ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... the word, he gave me two or three severe shakes. "Let me catch you sleeping in your watch again, and I'll send you to the cross-trees for four hours on a stretch. I knew I had got a hard bargain when your uncle shoved you upon me, you sneaking, sanctimonious-looking imp of Satan! But mind how you carry your helm, or you will have cause to curse the day when you ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... chapel and half shop. Long had the augur and the priest foretold The sad reverse they doomed it to behold; Long had the school-boy, as he passed it by, And maiden viewed it with presaging eye; Oft had the wealthy deacon with a frown Glared on the pile he longed to batter down, And reckoned oft, with sanctimonious air, What rents 'twould fetch if purified with prayer;[6] While through the green-room whispered rumors went, That heaven and earth ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... satanic-looking people, fed them with a hundred loaves, and induced them, for the good of their health, to make themselves miserably less. We next hear of them in Italy, in 1422. After leaving Asiatic Turkey, and in their wanderings through Russia and Germany, the Asiatic, sanctimonious, religious halo, borrowed from their idolatrous form and notions of the worship of God in the East, had suffered much from exposure to the civilising and Christianising influences of the West; and the result was their leaders ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... fool, my boy. Anybody can see that—after they get to know yo' all. That's what comes of bein' one of them smooth New Yorkers. They 'pear mighty sanctimonious on th' outside, but on th' inside they're ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise

... preaching, sanctimonious Katherine Minturn has influenced you against me," hotly retorted ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... them. I remarked to an old farmer, who was reckoned a very pious man, 'that such conduct, in persons who had just been in a state of despair about their sins, was very inconsistent, to say the least of it;' and he replied, with a sanctimonious smile—'It is only the Lord's lambs, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... if she was very much off key), Sissy, who was the best "speaker" in her class, warbled her part of a sanctimonious little duet in which Heliotrope and Mignonette voiced ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... the priesthood and the military caste interesting and logical? Here the riassa and the censer; there the gold-laced uniform and the clank of arms. Here bigotry, hypocritical humility, sighs and sugary, sanctimonious, unmeaning phrases; there the same odious grimaces, although its method and means are of another kind—swaggering manners, bold and scornful looks—'God help the man who dares to insult me!'—padded shoulders, cock-a-hoop ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... vast apartment. D'Aigrigny and Baron Tripeaud started in indignation. The princess looked angrily at her niece. The doctor raised his eyes to heaven, and clasped his hands over his waistcoat with a sanctimonious sigh. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... with a most sanctimonious look, "I am innocent—innocent, as the child unborn: yet if it so pleaseth Heaven, that I should be immured in a cloister, the Lord's will be done; a convent has no terrors for me; alas! a poor humble ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... brother Joseph, poor, dear fool, should bring it about under the illusion that he was the instrument of Providence: for to employ Dom Diego as go-between were to risk the scenting of his real motive. Then, when the Synagogue had taken him to its sanctimonious arms, Ianthe—overwhelming thought!—would become his wife. He had little doubt of that; her farewell glance, after her father's back was turned, was sweet with promises and beseechments, and a brief note from her early the next morning dissipated ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... of no church, never having felt the need of j'ining, and not being handy where I could tend out. But I ain't ashamed to say here, before witnesses, that I have just been telling God, as best I know how, hoping He'll excuse me if I 'ain't used the sanctimonious way, that I'm going to be a different man after this—different and better, according to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... it really an epigram?" asked Thomas Seymour again. "An epigram on the hypocritical, lustful, and sanctimonious priestly rabble, that with blasphemous hypocrisy fawn about the king, and are ever watchful how they can set a trap for one of us honorable and brave men? Is that what Heaven is ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach

... compatriots were the same three hundred years ago. Will Dona California be pleased to observe that whale spouting in the bay? There is the tree beneath which Junipero Serra said his first mass in this part of the country. What a sanctimonious old fraud he must have been, if he looked anything like his pictures! Did you ever see bay bluer than that? or sand whiter? or a more perfect semicircle of hills than this? or a more straggling town? There is the Custom-house on the rocks. You will go to a ball there ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... ultra-respectable merchants of the time, ranked of high commercial standing and austere social prestige, was, for instance, Marshall O. Roberts. This was the identical Roberts so deeply involved in the great mail-subsidy frauds. This was also the same sanctimonious Roberts, who, as has been brought out in the chapters on the Astor fortune, joined with John Jacob Astor and others in signing a testimonial certifying to the honesty of the Tweed Regime. A select Congressional committee, inquiring into Government ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... Mr. Weld lodged, on principle, in a colored family in New York, even submitting to the inconvenience of having no heat in his room in winter, and bearing with singular charity and patience what Sarah calls the sanctimonious pride and Pharisaical aristocracy of his hosts. He, also, and the sisters when they were in the city, attended a colored church, which, however, became to Sarah, at least, a place of such "spiritual famine" that she gave ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... said mademoiselle from her bed, as the concierge entered her room about eleven o'clock, on his return from the cemetery, with the black coat and the sanctimonious manner suited to ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... snuffle; turn up the whites of the eyes; idolize. Adj. impious; irreligious &c 989; desecrating &c v.; profane, irreverent, sacrilegious, blasphemous. un-hallowed, un-sanctified, un-regenerate; hardened, perverted, reprobate. hypocritical &c (false) 544; canting, pietistical^, sanctimonious, unctuous, pharisaical, overrighteous^, 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... wickedly and wildly, Mr. Hobart. You are criticizing God when you criticize the business conditions he has put into the world. I did not know that you were a socialist, but what you have just said explains your course," the old man reproved sadly and sanctimonious. ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... lake, I beheld a wheeled cavalcade of every conceivable age, sex, and appearance; senile gaffers and baby buntings; multitudinous women, some plump as a duckling, others thin as a paper-thread; aye, and even priests in sanctimonious black and milk-white cravats, rolling swiftly upon two wheels, and all agog to dash through ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... enough for a family) have a kind of brown morocco binding. I must tell you one reason why I fixed upon the pale-blue. You know that aristocratic-looking young man, in white cravat and black pantaloons and waistcoat, whom we saw at Saratoga a year ago, and who always had such a beautiful sanctimonious look, and such small white hands; well, he is a minister, as we supposed, "an unworthy candidate, and unprofitable husbandman," as he calls himself in that delicious voice of his. He has been quite taken up among us. He has been asked ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis

... Wherefore, in a jiff he had abandoned it, and now stood, mentally, as naked as a plucked fowl while he considered what costume he should wear and what character he should choose to interpret. His sense of humor tempted him to the sanctimonious suit of your out-and-out Parliament man; his love for finery and the high horse lured him to lovelocks and feathers. The old piratical instinct which he thought he had put to bed forever was awake in him, too, and asking which side could be made to pay the best for his ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... to Rabelais, so his satirical pencil has been likened to Hogarth's. Boldness, drollery, dramatic spirit, force, and spontaneous satire characterize both artists. He does not mount a pulpit and speak to the erring masses with sanctimonious self-righteousness; but he enters the Ship himself to lead the babbling folk in motley to the land of wisdom. His own folly is that of the student, and he therefore begins ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... and the vulgarity and wickedness of such paragraphs would certainly not commend itself to the best sentiment of the British army. Again and again the Boers are described in the Press as "canting hypocrites" or their thanksgivings to God as "sanctimonious". What right have we as Christians to bring such wholesale charges against our Christian enemies? Several thousand burghers advanced from Jacobsdal to reinforce Cronje, and as it marched the entire force sang the Old Hundredth in unison. There is ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett

... Slavery was to be abolished after a certain future time—just enough time to give their citizens convenient opportunity for selling the slaves to southern planters, putting the money in their pockets, and then sending to us here, on this floor, representatives who flaunt in robes of sanctimonious holiness; who make parade of a cheap philanthropy, exercised at our expense; and who say to all men: "Look ye now, how holy, how pure we are; you are polluted by the touch of slavery; we are ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... and basic biological facts of our nature, not by subscribing to the glittering but false values of any philosophy or program of escape, not by wild Utopian dreams of the brotherhood of men, not by any sanctimonious debauch of sentimentality or religiosity, may we accomplish the first feeble step toward liberation. On the contrary, only by firmly planting our feet on the solid ground of scientific fact may we even stand erect—may we even rise from the servile stooping posture ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... the figures of Alceste and Tartuffe has summarised and embodied all that we need to know of indignant honesty and the false fervour of sanctimonious animalism, so in the person of Sir Willoughby Patterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoism as the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conception and exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two men there is not, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... a caution against the "sanctimonious" attitude and pose assumed by certain "good" people of the churches, who would make a display of their adherence to and observance of forms. Jesus, as a true mystic, detested all religious posing and neglected no opportunities to ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... ruling, and was also more subservient to the king, supporting him in measures which finally undermined his throne; but the purity of Guizot's private life, in an age of corruption, secured for him more respect than popularity, Mr. Fyffe in his late scholarly history sneers at him as a sanctimonious ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... devotion, men were encouraged to obtrude with Cynic impudence all their most scandalous vices on the public eye. Because he had punished illicit love with barbarous severity, virgin purity and conjugal fidelity were made a jest. To that sanctimonious jargon which was his Shibboleth, was opposed another jargon not less absurd and much more odious. As he never opened his mouth except in scriptural phrase, the new breed of wits and fine gentlemen never opened their mouths without uttering ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... that will upset stomachs, frazzle pleasant tempers, cause all sorts of complexion horrors and bring a perfect comet trail of nightmares and dyspepsia! And these same women will wrap themselves in a sanctimonious mantle of economy when the woman next door pays the same sum for a dozen ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans



Words linked to "Sanctimonious" :   sanctimony, pious



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