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adjective

Pharisaical, Pharisaic adj.

Of or pertaining to the Pharisees; resembling the Pharisees. "The Pharisaic sect among the Jews."

Hence: Addicted to external forms and ceremonies; making a show of religion without the spirit of it; ceremonial; formal; hypocritical; self-righteous. "Excess of outward and pharisaical holiness." "Pharisaical ostentation."

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Etymology of 'Pharisaical'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Pharisaical" Quotes from Famous Books

... whether the unruly people concerned 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 ...

— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... first time she had ever bowed before the family altar, and, notwithstanding her avowed aversion to "Puritanic ceremonials and Pharisaical practices," she was unexpectedly awed and deeply impressed by the solemnity with which he conducted the brief services; while, despite her prejudice, his grave courtesy toward her, and the subdued tenderness that ...

— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... more of Christianity than Mahomet; and afterwards, with equally characteristic candour, owned that he had been far too severe in his condemnation. Cowper called it 'that repository of self-righteousness and pharisaical lumber.'[809] Berridge equally condemned it. Much more testimony to the same effect might be given. There was, then, ample room for a treatise which should aim at the same purpose as the 'Whole Duty of Man,' but which should enforce its teaching on different ...

— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... 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

... hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less provocation), with the raking up of past histories, about which the opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be pharisaical is strongly divided, and which ...

— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

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