"Pharisaical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still with his book, firm as a rock, sure of himself, convinced that he was doing the best thing, proud of his strength of mind and his obstinacy, perfectly pharisaical in his contempt of human weakness, persuaded that no power in earth or heaven could force him to do or say anything against his mature judgment. He sat in his deep chair near a window that was half open, his legs stretched straight out before him, his flashing patent ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... and vicious conduct of my companions became to me a source of serious reflection. Far from following their example, I felt myself some degrees better than they were; and in the pride of my heart thanked God that I was not like these publicans. My pharisaical arrogance concealed from me the mortifying fact that I was much worse, and with very slight hopes of amendment. Humility had not yet entered my mind; but it was the only basis on which any religious improvement could be created—the ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... came to Europe found everything so 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 them what ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... interest he is to depend upon should harmonize with the interest hitherto prevalent in the County. Every thing short of this leaves them subject to a charge of acting upon false pretences, unless they prefer being accused of harbouring a pharisaical presumption, that would be odious were it not ridiculous. If the state of society in Westmoreland be as corrupt as they describe, what, in the name of wonder, has preserved their purity? Away then with hypocrisy and hollow pretext; let us be no longer ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... incidents of the way. A conventional order of life is useful only in so far as it removes from the mind the necessity of detailed planning, and allows it to flow punctually and mechanically in an ordered course. But if we exalt that order into something sacred and solemn, then we become pharisaical and meticulous, and the savour of ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?" He wanted to have a number specified, beyond which he should not be bound to forgive repeated offences. In suggesting seven he seems to have had in his mind some Pharisaical formula: probably he thought the allowance was liberal, and expected to be ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... fidelity of a poor Highland shepherd's wife, who, by patience and prayer and forgiveness, succeeds in reclaiming her drunken husband, and making a good man of him; and then points his moral by contrasting with this touching picture the cold-hearted pharisaical correctness of ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the dingy thorough-fare. That one spot of cleanliness made the surrounding dirt cruelly palpable. The muslin curtains in the parlour windows of No. 15 would not have appeared of such a smoky yellow if the curtains of No. 14 had not been of such a pharisaical whiteness. Mrs. Magson, at No. 13, was a humble letter of lodgings, always more or less in arrear with the demands of quarter-day; and it seemed a hard thing that her door-steps, whereon were expended much labour and hearthstone—not ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... A pharisaical austerity rendered him redoubtable by the license he assumed in his public reprimands, whether to plaintiffs, or defendants, advocates or magistrates; so that there was not a single person who did not tremble ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... you and me, I am just as well satisfied that you did not attach yourself, as I expected you would have done, to our congregation; for, to acknowledge a truth, Darby, which I do in all charity, I tell you, my friend, that they are awfully Pharisaical, and wretchedly deficient in a proper sense of Christian justice; I, Darby, am a proof of it. I mentioned to another person before, Darby, that the Christian devotion of an act I did, would occasion considerable risk to my own reputation, and you see it has done so. I shall ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... rather Pharisaical reflections, Mrs. Nicholson was announced. Merton greeted her, and gave orders that no other client was to be admitted. He was himself rather nervous. Was Mrs. Nicholson in a rage? No, her eyes beamed friendly; geniality ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... farthing. Virtue, like every thing valuable, must be loved for herself alone; or she will not take up her abode with us. She will not impart that peace, "which passeth understanding," when she is merely made the stilts of reputation and respected with pharisaical exactness, because ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... unreasoning, frantic, "stop-thief!" and "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 very Whigs very shortly afterwards did to their country: ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... story of Absalom's undutifulness and rebellion, of David's adultery and murder, of Herod's tyranny, and all other narratives of crime, are related in a calm, simple, impartial, and forbearing spirit, which leads us to condemn the sins, but not to feel a pharisaical resentment and ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... life of Marcus Aurelius, as in so many lives, we are able to trace the great law of compensation. His exalted station, during the later years of his life, threw him among many who were false and Pharisaical and base; but his youth had been spent under happier conditions, and this saved him from falling into the sadness of those whom neither man nor woman please. In his earlier years it had been his lot to see ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... 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
... 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 that we ought to nurse our good dispositions, and paraded it, on all occasions, with Pharisaical ostentation. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... 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
... distinctly enough, I believe, that the opponents are merely deliberating upon how to suppress us by force." (175.) July 15: "Repeatedly have I been with certain enemies who belong to that herd of Eck. Words fail me to describe the bitter, Pharisaical hatred I noticed there. They do nothing, they plan nothing else than how they may incite the princes against us, and supply the Emperor with impious weapons." (197.) The implacable theologians also succeeded in fanaticizing some of the princes and bishops, who gradually ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... certainly not so inhuman in their practices, as most of the other islanders in the Pacific, were much degraded both in mind and morals. They are perhaps the finest people in a physical point of view of any, yet they had more pharisaical pride and less consciousness of sin; and this, it is possible, prevented them from adopting some of those cruel practices prevalent ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... 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 ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... who has loved the Lord and sought to know and do his will. While he was thus doing, the enemy was preparing to take his life. The Sanhedrin was a high tribunal or court composed of seventy-three men, made up of priests, elders, and doctors of the law, Pharisaical hypocrites, the seed of the serpent, blinded to God's purposes. That body was the highest court of Israel and it was the duty of this court to protect the innocent as well as to punish the guilty. They beheld Jesus doing good and ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... salutation which Lord Maxwell and his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had passed his afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it. So these were the terms he was to be on with them—the deuce take them and their pharisaical airs! If all the truth were known, most men would look foolish; and the men who thanked God that they were not as other men, soonest of all. He wished he had not been taken by surprise; he wished he had not answered them; he would show ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... p. 45. l. 13. In some former life committed. The soul, in its transmigration, expiates the sins committed in a former state of being. This necessary corollary from the doctrine of the metempsychosis appear to have prevailed among the pharisaic Jews in the time of our Saviour: "Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind." ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... that reared hath razed; And as old ANGUS stood amazed At WILTON's shameful tale, So fealty here must bend the brow, And faith, though sorely tried, till now Surviving, faint and fail; As DOUGLAS round him drew his cloak, So, saddened by unknightly stroke, The ancient chief must draw; Nor in mere pharisaic scorn, But in the name of faith ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... in one's family and position appears, and an aristocracy based on the accidents of birth succeeds the democracy of childhood. The girl who was sincerely thankful that she was not as others and assumed Pharisaic superiority because she had been born a Republican, an Allopath and, crown of all, a Baptist, lived in ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... "worship." Chalmers "wales" a psalm, in every sense of the word wail, to the most doleful of dismal tunes; they read a chapter round, and he prays. If his prayer has something of the tone of the imprecatory psalms, he has high authority in his favor; and if there be a tinge of the Pharisaic thanksgiving, it is hardly surprising that he is grateful that he is not as other men are when he contemplates the general godlessness ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... turning out a little too old. Alas! it is not the story of Francis I., but of St. Paul. All the coats of arms that should have been French and Austrian, and that I had a mind to convert into Palatine and Lorrain, are the bearings of Pharisaic nobility. In short, Dr. Percy was here yesterday, and tells me that over Mr. Gough's imaginary Pavia is written Damascus in capital letters. Oh! ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... adventurous life. He could not be said to be obtrusively religious, yet he gave everyone the impression of being a good and earnest worker, and one who practised what he preached, for he neither smoked nor gambled nor drank strong waters. Yet there was nothing Pharisaic ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume |
