"Self-righteousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one occasion we were holding meetings in an eastern city of forty thousand inhabitants; and a lady came and asked us to pray for her husband, whom she purposed bringing into the after meeting. I have traveled a good deal and met many pharisaical men; but this man was so clad in self-righteousness that you could not get the point of the needle of conviction in anywhere. I said to his wife: "I am glad to see your faith; but we cannot get near him; he is the most self-righteous man I ever saw." She said: "You ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... ideal and perfected form.[48] Hence Jesus unfolds its positive content by bringing into prominence the virtues of the godly character as opposed to the pharisaic vices. Modesty and humility are set over against ostentation and self-righteousness.[49] Single-minded sincerity is commended in opposition to hypocrisy.[50] The vice of censoriousness is met by the duty of self-judgment rather than the judgment ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... sinners mistake as to their goodness. They are all "dead in trespasses and sins." They are under condemnation. They are in imminent danger. Any day they may fall into the hands of an angry God. Sinners under conviction see this and feel this. The branch of self-righteousness on which they stand is insufficient to bear them. By-and-by it begins to give way. When the sinner feels this he cries, "What shall I do? ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... Egbert, I will give you my views, and I think they are correct, for I endeavor to take them wholly from the Bible. That which God requires is simplicity itself, and yet it is very much; it is infinite. In the first place, one must give up self-righteousness—not self-respect, mark you—but mere spiritual self-conceit, which is akin to the feeling of some vulgar people who think they are good enough to associate with those who are immeasurably beyond them, but whose superiority they ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... would stand in the door; then he feared the steeple might fall; and the terrors of an untimely death, and his newly-acquired garb of religion, eventually deterred him from this mode of Sabbath-breaking. His next sacrifice made at the shrine of self-righteousness was dancing: this took him one whole year to accomplish, and then he bade farewell to these sports for the rest of his life.[63] We are not to conclude from the example of a man who in after-life proved so great and excellent a character, that, under all circumstances, bell-ringing and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... expressions of brotherly love—the irreverent familiarity with which Scripture was quoted, garbled, and tortured to justify dissent, and render disobedience holy—the daring assumption of inquisitorial privileges, and the scorn, the illiberality and self-righteousness, with which my angry, bigoted, and vulgar questioners decided on the merits of every institution that eschewed their fanciful vagaries and most audacious claims. I do not wonder that, overtaken in a career of misery, the consequence of my own imprudence, I should ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... "dry and unsympathetic." "They contain too much information to be good as letters." Well: there certainly is information in the specimen that follows: whether it is "dry" or not readers must decide. The fact is that Southey, despite occasional touches of self-righteousness and of over-bookishness, was full of humour, extraordinarily affectionate, and extremely natural. There is moreover a great deal of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge: for "lingos" of the kind, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... they ought. The grime that comes through loving service is better than the stainlessness of inactivity; as the poet Spenser puts it, "Entire affection hateth nicer hands." And the emphasis upon freedom from taint of sin tends to produce a scorn of others who do not thus deny themselves, a self-righteousness and Pharisaism, a callousness to others, which distorts the judgment as well as dries ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... these five fetters and will not be reborn on earth or any sensuous heaven but in a Brahma world once only. The fourth route is that of the Arhat who has completed his release by breaking the bonds called love of life, pride, self-righteousness and ignorance and has made an end of all evil and impurity. He attains nirvana here and is no more subject to rebirth. This simple and direct route is the one contemplated in the older discourses but later doctrine and popular feeling came to regard it as more ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... been standing a second ago, was now no more. Before that sentence I had faced a kindly friend, now I faced an offended master. But, though I knew the ruin my words had wrought, I indulged a glow of self-righteousness and was prepared to relate my defiance ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... thriving town, had not yet earned the title "the Liverpool of South Africa." I doubt as to whether its commercial self-righteousness had developed to the extent of adopting the sobriquet "the Honest Port." My most salient memories are of hospitality, wool, hides, pumpkins, and sand. So far as I can recall, neither Main Street nor the Market Square was paved. That useful but ungainly ship ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... between Satan-ruled man and God is one of method; whether it shall be one of self-righteousness and character building: or one of bestowed righteousness and character by the fruit of the Spirit. Will man try to save himself: or humbly submit to being saved by Another? Will he try to conform himself to what little he knows to be good and true: or will he be transformed ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... you ever see anything like that? God, imagine being married to her! Poor Tonet! Swallows everything she hears, and tries to use it to get even! But I guess she got all she wanted from me! That will teach her to come tale-bearing another time. God, what a wench!" And puffing with self-righteousness, he resumed his walk, scarcely noticing that the wash from the surf was now reaching his big ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... heard of Him previously, by the hearing of the ear, and knew GOD by hearsay only; but that now his eye saw Him, and that his acquaintance with GOD had become that which was the result of personal knowledge, and not of mere report. All his self-righteousness was gone: he abhorred himself ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... leaders who proclaimed the rights of the people. The prevalence of mobs; the entrance of the unfranchised populace, by means of "body" meetings and mass meetings, into the political arena; the leveling principles and the smug self-righteousness of the patriot politicians;—all this led many a conservative to consider whether his interest were not more threatened by the insurgence of radicalism in America than by the alleged oppression of British legislation. Boston is indeed mad, Hutchinson writes ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... German Press is to me a revelation of bombast, self-righteousness, falsehood, and hypocrisy. What shocks one most is the familiar and perpetual calling upon God to witness that He alone has led the Germans to victory and blessed their cause. I read a poem yesterday, which began "Du Gott der ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... to hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire series. It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.—["The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine"; Galaxy for February, 1871. The reader will find it complete under Appendix J, at the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... such—to whom, in his character of Mediator between God and man, all may apply, and before whom there need be felt none of that abject prostration of the spirit and understanding which man always experiences when he bends before the merely human priest. Is self-righteousness the besetting infirmity of the religious man?—in the scheme of vicarious righteousness it finds no footing. The self-approving Pharisee must be content to renounce his own merits, ere he can have part or lot in the fund ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... that ends in sophistication. They have fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been "amused and misled" (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is!) "by the false lights" of critical vanity and self-righteousness. They have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done. Especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction they are taught ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... darling without resorting to deception, and even almost robbery. He did not at that minute blame himself in the least for his misadventure with his mining stock. Had not the same relentless Providence driven him to that also? His weary spirit took for the first time a poise of utter self-righteousness in opposition to this Providence, and he blasphemed in his inner closet of self, before the face of the Lord, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
