"Pharisaical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... divorce—at that time your husband had arranged it completely. And now, I know, he would not refuse it. It is only a matter of writing to him. He said plainly at that time that if she expressed the desire, he would not refuse. Of course," he said gloomily, "it is one of those Pharisaical cruelties of which only such heartless men are capable. He knows what agony any recollection of him must give her, and knowing her, he must have a letter from her. I can understand that it is agony to her. But the matter is of such importance, that ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... 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 ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... of his mother. Then, step by step, he followed his career in Brookville: his smug satisfaction in his own good looks; his shallow pride and vanity over the vapid insincerities he had perpetrated Sunday after Sunday in the shabby pulpit of the Brookville church; his Pharisaical relations with his people; his utter misunderstanding of their needs. All this proved poignant enough to force the big drops to his forehead.... There were other aspects of himself at which he scarcely dared look in his utter abasement of spirit; those ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... "nobody objects to attending class-meeting except those who have no religion." Persons who thus judge of others show more of the Pharisaical, than of the Christian, spirit, and evince but little of the "wisdom that cometh from above" in thus "measuring others by themselves." The following correspondence shows that I am second to none in my appreciation of the value and usefulness of class meetings; but I have had ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... will," said Grace. "Rose and Letitia will, certainly; and the others will follow suit. After all, John, perhaps we old families, as we call ourselves, are a little bit pharisaical and self-righteous, and too apt to thank God that we are not as other men are. It'll do us good to be obliged to come a little out of ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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
... 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 need of a Saviour. ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... the last degree, and seldom awoke a spark of liking but he killed it again, and within five minutes, by doing or saying something odious. He differed from other children, and differed unpleasantly. He had taken the full tinge of his sanctimonious upbringing; he was pharisaical, cruel at times, incurably twisted by his father's creed that wrong becomes right when committed by a pious person from pious motives. (His mother had once destroyed a cat because she found herself ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in a fiery ordeal. It may subject us to insult, outrage, suffering, yea, even death itself. We anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, calumny. Tumults may arise against us. The ungodly and violent, the proud and Pharisaical, the ambitious and tyrannical, principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places, may combine to crush us. So they treated the MESSIAH, whose example we are humbly striving to imitate. If we suffer with him, we ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... trounce you," repeated Shelby, hoarsely, beside himself with the gadfly inquisition of the past few days. "I'm sick of your pharisaical ways. I bottom your lofty motives well enough. Jealousy goaded you into politics. You're a reformer because the heiress wanted none of ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... secretly, though perhaps unwittingly, "rejoice in iniquity." But it is to be feared, if we may judge from the exhibition of the same spirit, that many who make high pretensions to superior sanctity rest their hopes, to a great extent, on a similar foundation. With the Pharisaical Jews, they think if they judge them that do evil, even though they do the same, they shall escape the judgment of God. They are as eager to catch up and proclaim upon the house-top the deficiencies of ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... C. E. Doble shews strong grounds for the belief that the author was Richard Allestree, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford, and Provost of Eton. Cowper spoke of it as 'that repository of self-righteousness and pharisaical lumber;' with which opinion Southey wholly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... false and 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, combined ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... up my mind that when he answered back in his chief-pharisaical way I would gently—but firmly remove him from his seat, shake him vigorously two or three times (men's souls have often been saved with less!), deposit him flat in the aisle, and yes—stand on him while I elucidated the situation to the audience at large. ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... if you are going to live out and out like a Christian man, you will get the old sneers flung at you. You will be 'crotchety,' 'impracticable,' 'spoiling sport,' 'not to be dealt with,' 'a wet blanket,' 'pharisaical,' 'bigoted,' and all the rest of the pretty words which have been so frequently used about the men that try to live like Jesus Christ. Never mind! 'In the world ye have tribulation.' 'I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus,' the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you rich people, who have art galleries of your own to wander through Sundays, and gardens and greenhouses full of beauty and sweetness, and the means to seek out loveliness through the world, and who don't need the soul refreshment these things give—don't you by any Pharisaical law deprive my poor of their part in the feast I have spread for both rich ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... used as a barracks, stared stolidly at the strange ship in the harbour. That every man wore side-arms seemed an indication the rebels were still rampant on the northern coast of Mindanao, and the fact of numberless native boats passing by with a pharisaical lack of interest in our presence ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... 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 ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Scriptures, such denunciations are seldom found. The 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
... hygienic rules of the Mosaic code, may have started as genuine social utilities are maintained because they have become fixed in the religious traditions as enjoined by the Lord. In consequence there may be a Pharisaical insistence on the performance of the letter of the law, long after its practical utility or spiritual significance is forgotten. It is this persistence in the literal fulfillments of religious commands at the expense of the spirit, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... indulged in these 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 ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... not a prodigal; he was a well-behaved youth. He was only proud, only thought much of himself; was only pharisaical, not hypocritical; was only neglectful of those nearest him, always polite to those comparatively nothing to him! Compassionate and generous to necessity, he let his father and his sister-cousin starve for the only real food a man can give, that ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... 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
... the trenches in front of Messines, a member of the Battalion wrote a lengthy and comprehensive criticism of a recent book dealing with the Darwinian theory. About the same time, and from the same place, another member—a brave and sincere man, but a little pharisaical—violated the censorship requirements by criticising the army system generally and his own comrades in particular. His company commander adopted the unusual but effective punishment of reading the letter aloud ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... 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 morsel out ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the House should be satisfied of his real godliness. What were then considered as the signs of real godliness, the sadcoloured dress, the sour look, the straight hair, the nasal whine, the speech interspersed with quaint texts, the Sunday, gloomy as a Pharisaical Sabbath, were easily imitated by men to whom all religions were the same. The sincere Puritans soon found themselves lost in a multitude, not merely of men of the world, but of the very worst sort of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Bob. "Why come you here to bother one? You pharisaical old snob, You're wuss almost than ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... islanders take a sly revenge upon them. Upon entering a dwelling, the kannakippers oftentimes volunteer a pharisaical prayer-meeting: hence, they go in secret by the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... blue' was by the Covenanters in opposition to the scarlet badge of Charles I., and hence it was taken by the troops of Leslie in 1639. The adoption of the colour was one of those religious pedantries in which the Covenanters affected a Pharisaical observance of the scriptural letter and the usages of the Hebrews; and thus, as they named their children Habakkuk and Zerubbabel, and their chapels Zion and Ebenezer, they decorated their persons with blue ribbons because the following sumptuary precept was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... 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 approved ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... it for some time; they will go on saying it probably not only about me but about every other man who won't be dictated to by impractical reformers and pharisaical newspapers. But I must confess that this is rather hard luck!" He held up two of the cuttings. "I've undertaken to do just what papers like the New York 'Evening Post' and the Springfield 'Republican' are forever begging somebody with courage to do—I've been trying to drive a rascal out of politics. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... 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 to have to do with him. Besides ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... 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 life ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... king's mind. They expected to be trampled to death in the hippodrome by furious elephants; but after some delay they were released unhurt. The history of their escape, however, is more melancholy than the history of their danger. No sooner did the persecution cease than they turned with Pharisaical cruelty against their weaker brethren who had yielded to the storm; and they put to death three hundred of their countrymen, who in the hour of danger had yielded to the threats of punishment, and complied with the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... was for lace or tulle or velvet, as the case might be, that their money went. It went, too, for the very elegant and exclusive little dinners to which, on rare occasions, their friends were bidden; and it went for the high place in the synagogue from which they prayed their pharisaical prayers. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... earnestness, came into disuse. Definitions became loose and vague. The Collegia, which had done so much good, now grew formal, cold, and disputatious. The missions, which had begun very auspiciously, dwindled from want of means and men. External life became pharisaical. Great weight was attached to long prayers. A Duke of Coburg required the masters of schools to utter a long prayer in his presence, as a test of fitness for advancement. Pietism grew mystical, ascetic, and superstitious. Some of its advocates and votaries made great pretensions ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... 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 ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... between mere arrogant 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the "Bologna Telegraph," with extracts from this work, in which "there is a long eulogium of" his "poetry, and a great compatimento for" his "misery" on account of his being a skeptic and an unbeliever in Christ; "although," says Mr. Mulock, "his bold skepticism is far preferable to the pharisaical parodists of the religion of the Gospel, who preach and persecute with an ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Grosvenor, 'MS. L'. ('b')] does not bet; but every man who maintains racehorses is a promoter of all the concomitant evils of the turf. Avoiding to bet is a little pharisaical. Is it an exculpation? I think not. I never yet heard a bawd praised for chastity, because 'she ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... at last to be able to get some grip on him; 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
... fully agree with you, you know, Miss Ardea," he said. "Of course, we must not reach down in the Pharisaical sense. But neither must we lower the dignity ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... his 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 going to tell ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... degraded than the more flaunting and luxurious licentiousness of the English Court. Of the fundamental aims of the nation, of the deep-seated traits of their character, he was profoundly ignorant. At once turbulent and mean-spirited, pharisaical and profligate; poverty-stricken and yet proud; bigoted in its beliefs, and yet careless of all the decencies of religion—such is the aspect which Scottish national character bore to Clarendon. To a superficial and distant observer there was not a little which justified such a judgment; and in ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... passed almost in a flash of time—as she stood with her hand on the medieval-looking latch of the gate, and she saw herself in them all as a proud, unmaidenly, pharisaical prig, in love with a man who was not in ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... signs that be Apparent in us—not immediately[78]— How shall my mind's white truth by them be tried? They see idolatrous lovers weep and mourn, And, style blasphemous, conjurors to call On Jesu's name, and pharisaical Dissemblers feign devotioen. Then turn, O pensive soul, to God; for he knows best Thy grief, for he put it into ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... they all have this in common, that their virtues sit easy and natural upon them, as native outgrowths, not as things put on: there is no ambition, no pretension, nothing at all boastful or fictitious or pharisaical or squeamish or egoish in their virtues; we never see the men hanging over them, or nursing and cosseting them, as if they were specially thoughtful and tender of them, and fearful lest they might catch cold. Then too, with all these men, the good ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... That position would be more secure. But He has certainly taken us visibly into His hand, and will not let me fall, even though I sometimes make myself a heavy weight. The interview with Lynar the other day has truly enabled me to cast a grateful (but not pharisaical) glance over the distance which lies between me and my previous unbelief; may it increase continually, until it has attained the proper measure. * * * I am already beginning to look about here for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... 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, not a smug hypocrisy; and though the heathen was dishonest, yet it was not the mathematical ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... the Roman citizen. He professed to think as the State prescribed, for the masters of the world were the slaves of the State in religion as in war. The Romans were more gross in their vices as they were more pharisaical in their profession than the Greeks, whom they conquered and imitated. Neither the sincere worship of ancestors, nor the ceremonies and rites which they observed in honor of their innumerable divinities, softened the severity of their character, or weakened ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... 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 had better ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... 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
... narrow-minded, Major. I 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 Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... seemed so appropriate to the occasion,—how when he was about to offer up Isaac, he saw a little he-goat suggestively nearby fastened among the thorns; and I suggested that instead of sacrificing me he should take the widow Smith's little Johnnie, who shows even at this early Sabbath-school age a pharisaical aptitude for piety. I pointed out that in the sight of heaven one soul is as worthy, as acceptable, as another. Besides, did not Isaac become a righteous man, even if he was not offered up and did live in this world of temptations an unconscionably long ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... middle of August. Such disclosures would have necessitated a moral effort on his part, for which even his friendship for Schrotter could not supply him with sufficient force. He knew that Schrotter's views on morality were neither narrow nor pharisaical, that to him virtue did not consist in the outward observance of social rules, but in self-forgetful, brotherly love and a strict adherence to duty. It would have afforded him unspeakable relief to have been able to pour out his heart to his friend, to give him an insight into his turbid ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... 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 people flocking ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... coats-of-arms of kings and nobles, ending with the blazon of the Elector Palatine. A new morning prayer and lecture was established here by clergymen inclined to Puritanical principles in 1599. The bells began to ring at five in the morning, and were considered Pharisaical and intolerable by all High Churchmen in the neighbourhood. The extreme Geneva party made a point of attending these early prayers. Lilly, the astrologer, went to these lectures when a young man; and Scott makes Mike Lambourne, in "Kenilworth," refer to them. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... consists in his relation to his own smoking and betting and not in his rushing his consistency over into the smoking and betting of other people. Perhaps being consistent does not need to mean being a little pharisaical, or using force, or cutting people off and having no argument with them, in one matter, because one cannot agree with them in another. Of course, I admit it would be better if Mr. Cadbury would publish in a parallel ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... stories of a 'vulgar nature,' 'depicting an individual half-stupid with drink.' Note the hard Pharisaical way in which they gloat over the word 'drink.' Reminds me of the cheap old-fashioned 'temperance' poems. Mrs. Asquith quite properly and honestly called attention to the farce of prohibition laws, and merely voiced the opinion of ninety per cent of all honest people when she decried ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... 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 the fairer side of humanity, and the recollection of those pure and happy days was like ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... Cabal. Cherub. Cinnamon. Hallelujah. Hosannah. Jehovah. Jubilee. Gehenna. Leviathan. Manna. Paschal. Pharisee. Pharisaical. Rabbi. Sabbath. Sadducees. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... my tongue, for it seemed to me that I was pharisaical; and I wondered rather scornfully if I should have been so indignant were the girl not so beautiful, young, and ingenuous. I tried not to think further of the matter, and talked much to Ruth,—Gait Roscoe walked with Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin,—but I found I could not drive it from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... you remember how Saint John, when he was upwards of fourscore years, continually taught this by his constant text, 'Little children, love one another?' Let us allow men to judge us by our works. The labour of Protestantism will not be accomplished by the pharisaical mode of priding ourselves on our faith, and damning that of every one else! Our mission is to preach the Gospel pure and simple. Too much time, too much money, too much of true religion is wasted, in our common ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... rushed into court with her tale of woe or aired her grievance in the public prints. The world thenceforth can give but one thing she wants, and that's an unmarked grave. May God in his mercy shield all such from the parrot criticisms and brutal insults of the fish-blooded, pharisaical female, whose heart never thrilled to love's wild melody, yet who marries for money—puts her frozen charms up at auction for the highest bidder, and having obtained a fair price by false pretenses, imagines herself preeminently respectable! In the name of all the gods at once, which ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that she, like the rest, had assumed a disguise; for she was far too innocent to sustain the deception; and yesterday was fresh in my memory. I was forced to continue turning her assumed character to account; but it would be pharisaical in me to say that I rose to any moral heights in her regard—wine and excitement had deadened my better nature to that extent. I thought she looked prettier than ever, and, as time passed, I fell into a cynical carelessness about her. This glimpse of her home life, and the ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... 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 ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... 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 in ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... against the wrong. Its basal motive was the same as that of the Abolitionists, but its spirit and method were so different from Garrison's that it won response and sympathy where he had roused antagonism. Against pharisaical religion it uses effective satire,—which was intensified in its successor, Dred,—but the Christianity of faith and life is its animating spirit. No book is richer in the gospel of love to man and trust in God. Its rank is high in the new ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... illustrated in an incident related in his autobiography.* At a service on Sunday, November 7, 1841, in Nauvoo, an elder named Clark ventured to reprove the brethren for their lack of sanctity, enjoining them to solemnity and temperance. "I reproved him," says the prophet, "as pharisaical and hypocritical, and not edifying the people, and showed the Saints what temperance, faith, virtue, charity, and truth were. I charged the Saints not to follow the example of the adversary non-ormons in accusing the brethren, and said, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... avarice in one class gave motive and temptation to the grosser forms of evil in another. How gentle, and yet how searching, are his rebukes of self-complacent respectability, holding it responsible, in spite of all its decent seemings, for much of the depravity which it condemned with Pharisaical harshness! In his Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind be dwells with great earnestness upon the importance of possessing "the mind of Christ," which removes from the heart the desire of superiority and worldly honors, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... 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 story of the ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... noise about any good act which they perform appear somewhat pharisaical, but we have no right to condemn them upon that score alone, for it often proceeds from a great desire to do good. You know we are very apt to talk of that which most occupies our thoughts, Harry. But where did Elisha Otis's father get ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... with the principles that are enthroned upon His Cross, and in obedience to the destiny held forth in your high calling, and in faithfulness to the name that He Himself has impressed upon you, then your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the painful and punctilious pharisaical obedience to outward commands, and all things lovely and of good report will spring to life in your hearts and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... or used to be a poem for infant minds of a rather Pharisaical character, which was popular in the nursery when I was a youngster. It ran something ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... are the worst places in the world. We have cleaned house. With but extremely slight exceptions, the blood of the slaughtered innocents is no longer upon our skirts, and on the subject of plumage millinery we have a right to be just as Pharisaical as ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... 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 ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... the levities and excesses of the age of James and Charles, as is usual on these points, vehemently threw themselves into an opposite direction; but they perhaps advanced too far in converting the Sabbath-day into a sullen and gloomy reserve of pharisaical austerity. Adam Smith, and Paley, in his "Moral and Political Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 73, have taken more enlightened views on ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... times?" He would fain have some definite limit set, and he probably considered the tentative suggestion of seven times as a very liberal measure, inasmuch as the rabbis prescribed a triple forgiveness only.[827] He may have chosen seven as the next number above three having a special Pharisaical significance. The Savior's answer was enlightening: "Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven." This reply must have meant to Peter as it means to us, that to forgiveness man may set no bounds; the forgiveness, however, must be merited ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... four-footed toilers, who work for us all their lives, never strike, never think of a pension for old age, and never even dream of a vote. Alas! If only our poor horses could vote, what a different attitude would our pharisaical politicians at once ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... you. Be convinced that the golden link of prayer binds you to that angelic infant, and that it is continually offering its fervent petitions at the throne of God for you, that you may both be reunited in heaven. But I hear men cry out with Pharisaical assurance, "You dishonor God, sir, in praying to the saints. You make void the mediatorship of Jesus Christ. You put the creature above the Creator." How utterly groundless is this objection! We do not dishonor God in praying to the saints. ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... appeal to arms for the settlement of personal quarrels, a custom which is said to have cost the country some nine hundred of its best gentlemen in about as many years; the worship of womanhood, carried to a pharisaical strictness of observance, were conditions, which, though socially disastrous in various ways, exalted the individual worth, power, and majesty of men to the most imposing height, and rendered a corresponding exaltation imperative upon the women, in order to secure that personal predominance ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... reason in all that touches this ignorant, hot-headed, Pharisaical, rather stupid wench! That is droll. But love is a resistless tyrant, and, Mother of God! has there been in my life a day, an hour, a moment when I have not loved her! To see her once was all that I had craved,—as a lost soul might ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... and it was demonstrated that the poor people, 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 ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... upon myself I shall forbear to censure them, and leave them to God's mercy and the King's justice." Yet Laud in the very previous sentence had thanked his colleagues for the "just and honourable censure" they had passed; and when he spoke in this Pharisaical way of God's mercy and the King's justice, he knew that the said justice had condemned Prynne to be fined another L5,000, to be deprived of the remainder of his ears in the pillory, to be branded on both cheeks with "S. L." (Schismatical Libeller), and ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the honor of figuring,—and, far worse than these, the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,—and then recall the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... down, and sank in thought. He had his eye on the conduct of his partner's grandson for forty years, though little did that ostentatious individual suspect that any person saw within his pharisaical exterior, and knew him for the mass of selfishness, falsehood, and meanness, he actually was. Moreover the old gentleman knew that his victim was not so rich as he appeared, and had struggled in vain to better his fortunes by speculations of various kinds, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... hand; if we are full of hard judgments about our neighbours, and doubts about God's good purpose toward the world; in short, if we are not PATIENT, the Bible will teach us little or nothing. It may make us superstitious, bigoted, fanatical, conceited, pharisaical, but like Jesus Christ the Lord it will not make ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... have you agitators? With Pharisaical pretension it is sometimes said it is a moral obligation to agitate, and I suppose they are going through a sort of vicarious repentance for other men's sins. With all due allowance for their zeal, we ask, how do they decide that it is a sin? By what standard do they measure it? Not the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... 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 ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... hardly possible to tackle a mistress and convince her of her faults, so Miss Gibbs's pharisaical tendencies went unchecked. Evidently the only possible method was to dodge her. Whether her suspicions were aroused it is impossible to say, but for several days she neglected her attic sanctum and pervaded the garden during ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... ate very moderately, and when she had finished, rose, and, wrapping her face in the folds of her blanket, bent down her head on her breast in the attitude of prayer. This little act of devotion was performed without the slightest appearance of pharisaical display, but in singleness and simplicity of heart. She then thanked us with a face beaming with smiles and good humour; and, taking little Rachel by the hands, threw her over her shoulder with a peculiar sleight that I feared would ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... could say Jack Robinson. Now, I shimply ask you, d'you call that dentistry?" Fixing his eyes on Shelton's collar, which had the misfortune to be high and clean, he resumed with drunken scorn: "Ut's the same all over this pharisaical counthry. Talk of high morality and Anglo-Shaxon civilisation! The world was never at such low ebb! Phwhat's all this morality? Ut stinks of the shop. Look at the condition of Art in this counthry! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was short-lived. We knew his honesty, the wiles with which he was encompassed, and that age had already begun to relax the firmness of his purposes; and I am convinced he is more deeply seated in the love and gratitude of the republicans, than in the Pharisaical homage of the federal monarchists. For he was no monarchist from preference of his judgment. The soundness of that gave him correct views of the rights of man, and his severe justice devoted him ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... When she read of quarrels in other noble families—and the accounts of such quarrels will sometimes, unfortunately, force themselves upon the attention of unwilling readers—she would hug herself, with a spirit that was almost pharisaical, reflecting that her destiny was not like that of others. Such quarrels and hatreds between fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons, were in her eyes disreputable to all the persons concerned. She had lived happily with her husband, comfortably with her neighbours, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... of 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 historical ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... has been, and still is, stronger than the man, not by virtue of her fascinations, not through her cleverness in performing the same pharisaical semblance of work as man, but because she has not stepped out from under the law that she should undergo that real labor, with danger to her life, with exertion to the last degree, from which the man of the wealthy classes has ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... so profoundly, and that they had to bow to the Emperor of the French! I cannot comprehend why the Lord permits it, and why He does not hurl down His thunderbolts upon the head of this hypocritical French emperor, who throws the firebrand of war into all parts of Europe, who always has pharisaical words of peace in his mouth, and gives himself the appearance of wishing to reconcile all, when he is intent only on setting all at variance. Oh, Conrad, when I think of this Emperor Napoleon, of the innocent ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... Great 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 have ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... blow to the self-righteousness of the Pharisaical "good" people of the sects, creeds and cults of all lands, time and religions. He warns against that "Thank God! I am holier than thou" attitude that so many vain formalists affect in their dealings with other men. In these immortal words Jesus has sent ringing down the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... penitent confessions of a sinful heart, but as generous concessions of a charitable mind. In short, a thorough belief in her own virtuousness and superior excellence was the key-note of her character. The Pharisaical tendency to thank God for not having made her like other people pervades every page of her autobiography, of which Charles Mazade justly ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... strongly impregnated with the free spirit of the gospel to submit to such a prophet as Montanus. He had, however, powerful advocates, and even a Roman bishop at one time gave him countenance. [437:3] Though his discipline commended itself to the morose and pharisaical, it was rejected by those who rightly understood the mystery of godliness. Several councils were held to discuss its merits, and it was emphatically condemned. [438:1] The signal failure of some of the Montanist predictions had greatly lowered the credit of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... those associates by whose presence he was most unspeakably bored. Hazlet mistook his courteous manner for a deferential agreement, and was, too often, in Julian's presence more than usually insufferable in his Pharisaical tendencies. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... for ought I know, the master of them all. "There was a man," saith Luke, "named Zaccheus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich," Luke xix. 2. This man, Christ saith, was a son of Abraham, that is, as other Jews were; for he spake to stop the mouths of their Pharisaical cavillations. Besides, the Publican shewed himself to be such an one, when under a supposition of wronging any man, he had respect to the Jewish law of restoring four-fold; Exod. xxii. 1; 2 Sam. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... one demerit mark. He was on all sides rounded and complete—totus teres atque rotundus. The uniformity of his goodness was sometimes a source of anxiety to me. There was danger of his growing up with a self-satisfied, pharisaical spirit. ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... had 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 Life of Reason • George Santayana
... his own mind. He had of course no grudge against the efficient and strenuous Eliza, for he was perfectly at liberty not to pay money in order to see her. She must be an exceedingly clever woman; and it was not in him to cast stones. Yet, Pharisaical snob, he did most violently resent that she should be opposite his wife in The Sunday Picture.... Eve! Eve! A few short weeks ago, and you made a mock of women who let themselves get into The Daily ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... people's business. Exaggeration, of course, damnable parti pris! When did she ever see Kitty except with a jaundiced eye? "I wonder Kitty condescends to go to the woman's house! She must know that everything she does is seen there en noir. Pharisaical, narrow-minded Philistines!" ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... or even wish, that the 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 deafened with a rant about throwing ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... is in her accomplishments, and whose equal don't walk this planet! I know, sir, YOU don't follow me; I know, Mr. Hathaway, your Puritan prejudices; your Church proclivities, your worldly sense of propriety; and, above all, sir, the blanked hypocritical Pharisaic doctrines of your party—I mean no offense to YOU, sir, personally—blind you to that girl's perfections. She, poor child, herself has seen it and felt it, but never, in her blameless innocence and purity, suspecting the cause, 'There is,' she said to me last night, confidentially, 'something ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... know that I've been horrid to you all my life, critical and pharisaic. You can pay me back for it now. You can refuse to help me if you want to. I shan't blame you. But, oh, dear, let me go away alone, just for a little while anyway. Let nature try ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore—as completely as Jesus did—that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!" When this is the imprecation of a Vehaeren or a Maeterlinck over Belgium and not of a mediaeval Jew over the desolated ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... dumbly by the places where doors have been—doors that lately were tapped at by respectful knuckles; or the places where staircases have been—staircases down whose banisters lately slid little children, laughing. Exposed, humiliated, doomed, the home throws out a hundred pleas to us. And the Pharisaic community passes by on the other side of the way, in fear of a falling brick. Down come the walls of the home, as quickly as pickaxes can send them. Down they crumble, piecemeal, into the foundations, and are carted away. Soon other walls ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... of immortality, for whose recognition the premises and germs existed in the religion of Israel, though not as yet developed. The third party, that of the Essenes, was marked by quiet piety, and in many respects also by excessive asceticism. In the midst of the Pharisaic formalism, the unbelief of the Sadducees, and the pietism of the Essenes, there was yet in Israel a seed of true worshipers, who, though not above the dogmatic prejudices of their time, had heart and mind open for ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... is a true hostel; no one is refused admission and hospitality,—no restrictions on the gentler sex make it impossible for real parties of pleasure to visit its beautiful valley,—no Pharisaic rigidity of self-denial makes it imperative to refuse visitors good cheer, though the community observe their long and trying fasts with a severity which puts to shame abstinence in Catholic countries. (The Greek fasts two hundred and forty-six days out of three hundred and sixty-five, and most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... difficulty disappears, we think, and the true metaphorical force often intended in the word "death" comes to view, through the following conception, occupying the minds of a portion of the Jewish Rabbins, as we are led to believe by the clews furnished in the close connection between the Pharisaic and the Zoroastrian eschatology, by similar hints in various parts of the New Testament, and by some quite explicit declarations in the Talmud itself, which we shall soon cite in a different connection. God at first intended ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... was regarded with mixed feelings. The strongest sentiment was one of horror at the treacherous blow dealt to the Empire while engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a foreign enemy. But, was it unpardonably Pharisaic if there was also some self-glorification in the thought that Ulstermen in this respect were not as other men were? There was also a prevalent feeling that after what had occurred they would hear no more of Home Rule, at any rate during the war. It appeared ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... of the danger Anna would in all probability not have given in: perhaps her consciousness of such cowardly hostility would have driven her to some desperate act of provocation if she had not herself been possessed by the Pharisaic spirit of the society which was so antagonistic to her. Her education had subjugated her nature. It was in vain that she condemned the tyranny and meanness of public opinion: she respected it: she subscribed to its decrees even when they were directed against herself: if they had come ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland |
