"Pharisee" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It was during the early weeks or months of our Lord's public ministry that he came to Jesus for the first time. It is specially mentioned that he came by night. Nicodemus also was a man of distinction,—a member of the Sanhedrin and a Pharisee, belonging thus to the class highest in rank ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... and you listen to every damned slander that any villain, to whose vices and idleness you pander with what you call your alms, may be pleased to invent, and you deem yourself charitable; save us from such charity! Charitable, and you refuse to deliver my miserable message: hard-hearted Pharisee!' ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... because a man has published a volume or a picture, he has published himself, excommunicated his soul from the sanctuary of privacy, and made his life as common as a tavern-threshold to every blockhead in the parish,—or that any Pharisee who kept carefully to windward of his virtues, out of the way of infection, has thereby earned the right to mismoralize his failings after he is dumbly defenceless. The moral compasses that are too short for the aberration may be, must be, unequal to the orbit. We would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... think to regenerate the world by radiating amenity are the choice accomplices of the villains. They keep everything quiet, hush up incipient disturbances, and mislead the police. No Pharisee shall be called a Devil's child, if they can help it: they say "Fie!" to the scourge of knotted cord in the temple, or eagerly explain that it was used only upon the cattle, who cannot, of course, rebel. "These people who give the fine name of prudence to their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... "is the needle-point of the whole business. He has fallen in love with just the wrong sort of woman. Very pretty, very good, a demure puritanical little Pharisee, clever enough, too, to see Lewie's merits, too weak to hope to remedy them, and too full of prejudice to accept them. There you have the makings of a very ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... loved me, and gave himself for me." There was something of the apostle that was crucified. It was the same as he speaks of in Rom. 6:6, "our old man." That depraved, carnal self, the proud, haughty Pharisee, the great Saul of Tarsus who considered himself of such importance among men. This was the I that was crucified; but there was an I who still lived. This was the humble, sanctified Paul, the servant ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers
... brother? The son of a Sanhedrin Pharisee be the disciple of a Galilean?" and there was consternation in the ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... question him. Her eyes fell thoughtfully on the gaunt face, and for the first time she appreciated to the full what was great and generous in the nature she had condemned all too often as narrow and unbending. Whatever else he was, this man was no Pharisee. If he was narrow, he allowed himself no license; if unbending, he was at least least of all relenting toward his own conduct. She pitied him and she respected him, even though she could not understand ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... his decease, the successor designated by the Bill of Rights and the Act of Succession should receive the homage of the Estates of the Realm, and be publicly proclaimed in the Council: and the most rigid Pharisee in the Society for the Reformation of Manners could hardly deny that it was lawful to save the state, even ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... doubtful. She did not want to take any strange young women into her confidence until she had seen them. More than one good Pharisee had burned her face with a look of scornful contempt ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... overdrawn this picture, either. Don't turn up your noses, my dears, because this girl came from a very humble and unpretentious Irish family. I tell you, genius has a way of its own, and there is no accounting for it. It was a good while ago that a conservative old Pharisee thought that he had forever silenced the followers of the greatest Genius the world ever saw by putting at them the conundrum, "Can any good come out of Nazareth?" But good did come out of that barren country in spite of the conundrum! And so it keeps on doing, constantly. ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... commentators pass by the difficulty of clearly understanding the periods indicated in St. John's account of it. It seems that Christ must have risen while they were still eating, must have washed their feet as they sate or reclined at the table, just as the Magdalen had washed His own feet in the Pharisee's house; that, this done, He returned to the table, and the disciples continuing to eat, presently gave the sop to Judas. For St. John says, that he having received the sop, went immediately ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... dear, you beautiful dear," Faircloth cried, brokenly, as in pain, somewhat indeed beside himself. "Before God, I come near blessing that blatant young fool and pharisee of a parson since he has ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... from heaven upon his adversaries as Elijah did, and gained the rebuke: "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of," to the mature and supremely calm and simple experience which is reflected in the Gospel and Epistles. It is easy to trace the development of the impulsive, zealous Pharisee that Paul of Tarsus was, through all the stages of spiritual growth that are reflected in his Letters, till he is Paul the aged waiting to depart and be with Christ "which is far better." You can study it in the confessions of S. Augustine in its first stage and follow it ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... regular attendance at church, where she recited the Creeds in a rich voice that almost drowned her husband's, turning punctually to the East and bowing at the Sacred Name. That she was a hypocrite trying to save her face was, of course, obvious to every Scribe and Pharisee in the county. But the poor of Deadborough preferred her hypocrisy to the virtuous simplicity ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... having his head clear of officious sentiment. I don't believe in disinterested service; and Theodore is too desperately bent on preserving his disinterestedness. With me it's different. I am perfectly free to love the bonhomme—for a fool. I'm neither a scribe nor a Pharisee; I am simply a student ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... over whose chapel they hang. Well, although they are abominable superstitions, yet these queer little offerings seem to me to be a great deal more pious than Rubens's big pictures; just as is the widow with her poor little mite compared to the swelling Pharisee who flings his purse of gold ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... So called either because Nicanor, a Pharisee, had the gate made in Alexandria, and though it was thrown overboard from a ship in a storm, it yet came safe to land; or because Nicanor, a Greek prince, was slain there in the time ...
— Hebrew Literature
... the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this "kingdom of God." It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master—he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their revenge took ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... the subdivision of the poultry-run that we call England, the proportion of the others to the complete male-bird spirit, who, of course, is not infrequently a woman, is ninety-nine to one; and with every Island Pharisee, when he or she starts out in life, the interesting question ought to be, "Am I that one?" Ninety very soon find out that they are not, and, having found it out, lest others should discover, they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had become Grand Preceptress in one lodge, Worthy Matron in another, Senior Vice Commander in a third, and Worshipful Benefactress in a fourth, to say nothing of positions as corresponding secretary, delegate to the state convention, Keeper of the Records and Seals, Scribe,—and perhaps Pharisee,—in half a dozen others, all in the interests of her husband's political future; and with such obvious devotion before him, it is small wonder after ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... entered upon a role I had never filled before, or had any ambition for—I "entered society," and for ten days I was in it from before breakfast till after midnight; and I prayed the prayer of the Pharisee—I thanked the Lord that I was not as other women are who have to go into society all the time. I had thought that traveling up and down the country with gripsack in hand was hard enough; but it is child's play to hand-shaking and hob-nobbing with duchesses and countesses. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and to make us feel the presence of the Divine creative Spirit in every separate human life; and till we feel this personal illumination we have not realised the manifestation of the Son of God. But the Pharisee with his continual reference to tradition, his multiplication of external observances, and elaborate ritual, his reliance upon usage and external authority, knows little or nothing of the personal illumination by the direct influence ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... "Out of danger?" Can the slighted Dame Or canting Pharisee no more defame? Will Treachery caress my hand no more, Nor Hatred He alurk about my door?— Ingratitude, with benefits dismissed, Not close the loaded palm to make a fist? Will Envy henceforth not retaliate For virtues it were vain to emulate? Will ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... Lorne "that there's not a pin to choose between Winter's political honesty and my own. I'm no Pharisee, but I don't think I can sit down under that. I can't impair my possible usefulness by accepting a slur upon my reputation at ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... similar case is tied by a thong to the left arm; the borders of his robe are decorated with deep fringe; and by such signs—the phylacteries, the enlarged borders of the garment, and the savor of intense holiness pervading the whole man—we know him to be a Pharisee, one of an organization (in religion a sect, in politics a party) whose bigotry and power will shortly ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... execrable. And what is that sneer? Materially it is an acrid saliva, withering where it drops; in the way of fellowship it is a corpse-emanation. As to wit, the sneer is the cloak of clumsiness; it is the Pharisee's incense, the hypocrite's pity, the post of exaltation of the fat citizen, etc.; but, said M. Livret, the people using it should have a care that they keep powerful: they make no friends. He terminated with this warning to a nation not devoid of superior merit. M. d'Orbec ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus. We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely, because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of Jerusalem. The way ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Syria. The storm broke out in Galilee, whose mountain fastnesses were intrusted by the Jews to Joseph, the son of Matthias—lineally descended from an illustrious priestly family, with the blood of the Asmonaean running in his veins—a man of culture and learning—a Pharisee who had at first opposed the insurrection, but drawn into it after the defeat of Certius. He is better known to us as the historian Josephus. His measures of defence were prudent and vigorous, and he endeavored to unite the various parties in the contest which he knew was desperate. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... said the Countess, earnestly. "Don't think that I mean to turn away from you or to push you away. There is nothing of the Pharisee in me. I would gladly trust you with what I have. I will consult you and advise ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... scornful reviewer have passed clear, refined, free from stain,—with a soul that has never in all its agonies cried "lama sabachthani,"—still, even then let him pray with the Publican rather than judge with the Pharisee. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Don't frown, Anne; ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have lost theirs; and you'll say so if ever I give you the details. Of course blame attached to me; to me, and not to her. Though at the time I mentally gave her, I assure you, her full share, somewhat after the manner of the Pharisee condemning the publican. That also has come home to me: she believed herself to be legally my wife; I never gave a thought to that evening's farce, and should have supposed its bearing any meaning ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Pharisee stepped out from the crowd, wrapped his cloak round him with much dignity, and uttered the saying of a Jewish scholar: "Only the righteous ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... eat his breakfast overnight; but he did it, at least to his own satisfaction. Whereon a certain great divine, and a very clever divine was he, called him a regular Sadducee; and probably he was quite right. Whereon the professor, in return, called him a regular Pharisee; and probably he was quite right too. But they did not quarrel in the least; for, when men are men of the world, hard words run off them like water off a duck's back. So the professor and the divine met at dinner that ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... angels have any patience with a fool, and it is the deed of a fool to cultivate occasions of folly. One serves best by making the most of one's faculties, not by choosing a life where one's disabilities have full play, in order to correct them. I might as well tell the Pharisee, who bids me let myself go, to take to drink, in order that he may learn moral humility, or to do dishonest things for the discipline of reprobation. I do not think so ill of God as not to believe that he is trying to help me; as the old poet said, "The Gods give to each man whatever ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fallacy: that's the word he said. I says to him, "It's a Pharisee I'm thinking you mean, sir; but you can keep your dirty money that your king grudges a poor old widow; and please God the English will be got yet for the deadly sin of oppressing the poor;" and with that I shut the door ...
— O'Flaherty V. C. • George Bernard Shaw
... times, are surely elevating, and honorable presences, the recollections which lead us to them are holy and imperishable, as is the devotion which bows the knee before them. But a repugnant sight is the home of the Pharisee, who surrounds himself with holy images that ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... meaning of man's response. Religious dogma is sometimes used to shackle human creativity, and the form of belief is allowed to stifle the vitality of faith. Similarly, religion disappears when the address to God and the response of God are eliminated. The Pharisee in Jesus' parable had lost the dialogical quality of his prayer because he "stood and prayed thus with himself...."[6] He was not speaking to God and he expected no response, with the result that his religion lost its dialogical quality since he was separated from God by his self-righteousness. ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... slave that crawls bore not a spirit more humbled, fallen, or subdued! He who had looked with haughty eyes on the infirmities of others, who had disdained to serve his race because of their human follies and partial frailties,—he, even he, the Pharisee of Genius,—had but escaped by a chance, and by the hand of the man he suspected and despised, from a crime at which nature herself recoils,—which all law, social and divine, stigmatizes as inexpiable, which ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... went further, boldly declaring that it was not simply an error but a heresy to exclude devotion from any calling whatever, provided it be a just and legitimate one. This shows the mistake of those who imagine that we cannot save our souls in the world, as if salvation were only for the Pharisee, and not for the Publican, nor for the house of Zaccheus. This error which approaches very nearly to that of Pelagius, makes salvation to be dependent on certain callings, as though the saving of our souls were the work of ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... burden to you, if I were! I'd learn you to ill-use a woman! I'd give it you, you white-livered dotipole [cowardly simpleton] of a Pharisee! Never ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... colleague, who was a little uneasy at some line I took upon this question or that, comforted himself by saying. "Well, well, the ship (speaking of me) swings on the tide, but the anchor holds." Yes, gentlemen, I am no Pharisee, but I do believe that my anchor holds, and your cheers show that you believe ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... but spoilt in the using, gold may turn to good or ill: Health may kick, like fat Jeshurun in his wantonness; Power may change from beneficence to tyranny; Learning may grow critical in motes until it overlooks the sunbeam; Love may be degraded to an instinct; Zaccheus may turn Pharisee; Religion may cant into the hypocrite, or dogmatize to theologic hate. Even so it is with money: its power of doing good has no other equivalent in this world than its power of doing evil: it is like fire—used for hospitable ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... named, was born at Tarsus, a city of Cilicia, about the fourth year of our era. His father was a Jew, a pharisee, and a man of respectable social position. In some way not explained, he was able to transmit to his son the rights of Roman citizenship,—a valuable inheritance, as it proved. He took great pains in the education of his gifted son, who early gave promise of great ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... persuading himself that now he must be fair for heaven, and thinks besides that he serveth God as well as any man: but all this while he is as ignorant of Christ as the stool he sits on, and no nearer heaven than was the blind Pharisee, only he has got in a cleaner way to hell than the ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... upon their outward civility and morality, or negative holiness. They cannot be challenged for gross faults, and that is all the way they have to rest in: Alas! could not a wicked Pharisee say as much as they, viz. "That he was no extortioner, unjust person, or an adulterer, nor such as the publican was," Luke xviii. 11. How many heathens, as to this, shall outstrip such as profess themselves Christians? and yet they lived and died strangers to the right way to happiness. See what ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... world is sick with hate, And who shall heal it, friend o' mine? And who is friend? And who shall stand Since hireling tongue and alien hand Kill nobleness in all this land? Judas and Pharisee combine To plunder and ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... is a window of three lights (by Hardman) in memory of Rev. C.W. Grove, who presented most of the modern glass in the church. The subject is the Pharisee and the Publican. It is not known whether the Pharisee is intended to be a portrait of any one, but the Publican's face is said to be an excellent portrait of Mr. Grove, and the portrait of the lady in the top ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... Himself to life; and His apostles healed the lame, cast out a spirit of divination, gave the Holy Ghost, restored the dead to life, etc. Every ingenuous mind must see in these all the characters of real miracles. Ponder Matt. xi. 2-6; and John xiv. 11. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and ruler among the Jews, was so struck with the extraordinary character of our Lord's miracles that he came to Him, saying, "Rabbi," excellent master, "we know that Thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... something portentous, which refuses to be reconciled with any canons of rationality. But it exists—that is the astonishing fact about it; and it found its almost perfect expression and embodiment in the normal and average Pharisee of our Lord's time. There are three characteristic features about a dead religion, and all of them receive a perfect illustration in the well-known picture in the gospels of ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... came from Sissy as the bits fluttered to the floor. "You're such a nice father!" she murmured happily, and fell asleep, a blissful bankrupt instead of a Pharisee. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... sleep is calm; There, with rapture sorrow leaves the breast,— Man's afflictions there no longer harm. Slander now may wildly rave o'er thee, And temptation vomit poison fell, O'er the wrangle on the Pharisee, Murderous bigots banish thee to hell! Rogues beneath apostle-masks may leer, And the bastard child of justice play, As it were with dice, with mankind here, And so on, until ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... very imperfectly disciplined by education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began to be fearfully disordered. In outward things he soon became a strict Pharisee. He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons. His favorite amusements were, one after another, relinquished, though not without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at tip-cat he paused, and stood staring wildly upward with his stick in his hand. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... time and place and form apart, Its holy ground the human heart, Nor ritual-bound nor templeward Walks the free spirit of the Lord! Our common Master did not pen His followers up from other men; His service liberty indeed, He built no church, He framed no creed; But while the saintly Pharisee Made broader his phylactery, As from the synagogue was seen The dusty-sandalled Nazarene Through ripening cornfields lead the way Upon the awful Sabbath day, His sermons were the healthful talk That shorter made ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the texts and grounds of the Holy Scriptures I dazzled, astonished, and overcame all my adversaries; for they approach dreamingly and lazily; they teach and write according to their natural sense, reason, and understanding, and they think the Holy Scripture is a slight and a simple thing; like the Pharisee, who thought a business soon done when our Saviour Christ said unto him, "Do that, and thou shalt live." The sectaries and seducing spirits understand nothing in the Scriptures; but with their fickle, inconstant, and uncertain books which they have devised, ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... friend, the unclean spirit, the rich fool, the barren fig-tree, the lost sheep, the lost pieces of silver, the prodigal son, the unfaithful steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the unjust judge, the Pharisee and publican. While the attentive reader perceives the very near relationship of the third gospel to the first and second, he notices also the fact that it differs from both of them more than they do from ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the Puritan military newsmen was curiously at fault; they evidently confounded Moses with Hezekiah, unless they substituted the lawgiver for the king, because they thought it unwise to represent the King as the foe of idolatry. The traditional scorn of the Pharisee for the common people which know not the law comes out in the ironical passage with which the 'martiall' organ concludes its reference to the distressing social symptom; 'Sure if there were an ordinance for recreation and ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... matrimony or other ordinance before the good of man and the plain exigence of charity, let him profess Papist or Protestant or what he will, he is no better than a pharisee, and understands not the gospel; whom, as a misinterpreter of Christ, I openly protest against." And, in another passage, he rebukes those who would rest "in the mere element of the text," as favoring "the policy of the Devil to make that gracious ordinance (of marriage) ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... had gradually become more suave. He realized that these Fenleys were queer folk. Like the Pharisee, "they were not as other men," but whether the difference between them and the ordinary mortal arose from pride or folly or fear it ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... the Johannine writings, are fully understandable only as posterior to St. Paul—the most enthusiastic and influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert, from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in a substantially pneumatic ...
— Progress and History • Various
... reported. There are two miracles, that of healing ten lepers and the blind man of Jericho. The following show how large a place is given to teaching: (a) Concerning the coming of the kingdom; (b) concerning prayer, illustrated by the importunate widow and the Pharisee and publican; (c) Concerning divorce; (d) the blessing of little children; (e) the ambitions of James and John; (g) the visit to Zachaeus; (h) the parable of the pounds and the anointing ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... her oot o' yir Bible. Waes me if oor Father had blotted out oor names frae the Book o' Life when we left His hoose. But He sent His ain Son to seek us, an' a weary road He cam. A' tell ye, a man wudna leave a sheep tae perish as ye hae cast aff yir ain bairn. Yir worse than Simon the Pharisee, for Mary was nae kin tae him. Puir Flora, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... they had weighed anchor, began to make acquaintance with him, and grew familiar to that degree, that the rest of the soldiers, who were less debauched, could not sufficiently admire it; and some of them said of Xavier, what a Pharisee said formerly of our Lord, "If this man were indeed a prophet, he would discern what manner of man he was, in whom he takes ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... and he that was born blind beheld his Redeemer. But miracles, even those of the Redeemer himself, could not open the eyes of the self-blinded, of the Sadducean sensualist, or the self- righteous Pharisee—while to have said, I SAW THEE UNDER THE FIG- TREE, sufficed to ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the new Pharisee.] Boniface VIII. whose enmity to the family of Colonna prompted him to destroy their houses near the Lateran. Wishing to obtain possession of their other seat, Penestrino, he consulted with Guido da Montefeltro how he might accomplish his purpose, offering him at the same time ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... that she and her husband were doing their best to keep it up to the standard. I had read, in books by English writers, of the British middle-class Pharisee. I judged the Crippses to ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to the confessors of the middle ages. When the art of writing became familiar to experts, the natural and primitive desire of the Roman to have exactness in the spoken word affected him also in his relations with the word as written. The scribe and the Pharisee found their opportunity. The whole public religion of the State, and to some extent also the private religion of the family, became a mass of forms and formulae, and never succeeded in freeing ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... cruel-minded young dog he is! See how he swaggers and struts—he looks very like the Pharisee's head, on old Coming Sir, honest Dick Tipple's sign, I think—No, now I look at him good, he's the very moral ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... the Jewish nation. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were constituted largely from the common people; they were believers in, and strict observers of, the traditional laws, and were ardent nationalists. The bitter attack of Jesus on them, which has resulted in making the word "Pharisee" synonymous with "hypocrite" and "self-righteous person," was, to say the least, unjust, as Herford has so lucidly pointed out in his sympathetic study of the Pharisees. Herford, though not a Jew, has taken up the cudgels most ably in defence of this sect, ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... she's so good as thou say'st, she'll have pity on such as my Lizzie. If she has no pity for such, she's a cruel Pharisee, and thou'rt ...
— Lizzie Leigh • Elizabeth Gaskell
... looked earnestly at him and said: "Edi, Edi, I hope you will try not to be a Pharisee. It is a bad sign for the boy Erick that he has joined the fighters, moreover, and that he has made friends with the very worst rowdy. But, dear Sally, you need not knock your potatoes so roughly about your plate as if they were ...
— Erick and Sally • Johanna Spyri
... without forgiving me. You have no pity; you have no sense of your own imperfection and your own sins. It is a sin to be hard; it is not fitting for a mortal, for a Christian. You are nothing but a Pharisee. You thank God for nothing but your own virtues; you think they are great enough to win you everything else. You have not even a vision of feelings by the side of which your ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... capable of a good deal of heart, such as the pew-haunting Pharisee knows not of. Perhaps he was not in love: at all events ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... you to read for me that tale of the Pharisee and the woman who was a sinner. For my sake, mind you, as well as for yours, for I was wrong, too, on this matter. I confess I hated him, for I cannot help thinking that he has done me a great wrongs and I have found it hard enough to say the Lord's Prayer. Perhaps ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... Pharisees, viz, these:—(1.) The shoulder Pharisee, i.e., he who, as it were, shoulders his good works to be seen of men. (2.) The time-gaining Pharisee, he who says, "Wait a while; let me first perform this or that good work." (3.) The compounding Pharisee, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... him, and least of all the artist who works for the theatre,—for here loneliness is lacking; everything perfect does not suffer a witness.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, electing cattle, patron, idiot—Wagnerite: there, the most personal conscience is bound to submit to the levelling charm of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... mercy, that will be heard. The ways of Providence are not to be judged by men—'Many are called, but few chosen.' It is easier to talk of humility than to feel it. Are you so humble, vile worm, as to wish to glorify God by your own damnation? If not, away with you for a publican and a Pharisee!" ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... had been long taught in the schools of Babylon, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. A Pagan declared to the Pharisee HILLEL, that he was ready to embrace the Jewish religion, if he could make known to him in a few words a summary of the whole law of Moses. "That which thou likest not done to thyself," said Hillel, "do it not unto thy neighbor. Therein is all the law: the rest is ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... I was perhaps five years old, I was, in my own estimation, intrusted with the family-dignity, when I was deposited for the day at the house of a lordly Pharisee of the parish, with solemnly repeated instructions in table-manners and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... dismissed." I gave the views of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees as detailed by Josephus, and then quoted Luke in the Acts of Apostles: "The Sadducees say there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess both." And Paul says, "Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee." So I also say, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee, and hold to the existence of human and ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... A second Pharisee added complacently: "The enthusiasm of his hangers-on will soon cool down when he who has promised them freedom is himself ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... your breast. Whenever such notions rise again, endeavour to suppress them. We should always be in no other than the state of a penitent, because the most righteous of us is no better than a sinner. Read the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who prayed in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the foolish virgins, the great mass of the professing church. God forbid that we should be negligent in discharging this duty. Away with the miserable sectarian spirit which takes the skirts together, like the Pharisee of old and says, "I am holier than thou," and refuses to go to those who need the truth and the Gospel. We have a debt to pay; we are debtors to all. As long as the Bridegroom tarries let us go to those who are Christians ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... group over Ghiberti's first doors, representing John the Baptist preaching between a Pharisee and a Levite, are the work (either alone or assisted by his master Leonardo da Vinci) of an interesting Florentine sculptor, Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474-1554), who was remarkable among the artists of his time in being what we should call an amateur, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? So much good has not been done by one effort in all past time as, in the providence of God, it is now your high privilege to do. May the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... a Pharisee,' he thought; 'I did not become a priest only to associate with the nobility, but to serve ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... were to come from the hands of a friend! Was it wonderful that parsons should be seen about Westminster in flocks with "Et tu, Brute" written on their faces as plainly as the law on the brows of a Pharisee? ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... imaginary speech which Mr. Asquith put into the mouth of Mr. Morley, he recurred again and again to the phrase, "I pray God," there was just the least lifting of the eyes and lowering of the voice to the sanctimonious level of the Pharisee which made this part of the speech not merely a fine piece of oratory, but a splendid bit of acting. Mr. Balfour's appearance during this portion of Mr. Asquith's speech was pitiable. His face, with its pallor—look of abashed ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... the sanest moral judgment the world has ever known, held deliberately that the open and acknowledged sinner, just because he was aware of his condition, was in a more hopeful spiritual state than the man who through ignorance of his own shortcomings believed himself to be righteous. The Pharisee, who compared himself with others to his own advantage, was condemned in the sight of GOD. The Publican, who would not so much as lift up his eyes unto heaven, but judging himself and his deeds by the standard of GOD'S holiness acknowledged himself a sinner, went away justified ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... boy who is not a goody-goody, a prig, or a little Pharisee, but just healthy, happy, and ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... laughter that I love. It's all of you: heart, mind, body: the whole lovely trinity of yourself. I mean to wage unabated war against all these forces that are trying to stifle your laughter into the pious smirk of the pharisee. There's more of what God wants the world to feel in one peal of your laughter than in all the psalms that this whole people ever whined through their noses. You're one of the rare few who can go through life being yourself—not ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... prostitutions of individuals is more apparent than real. I admit that the kinds of vice and crime I tolerated are far more harmful than the other sorts which are petty and make loathed outcasts of their wretched practitioners. Still, I was snob or Pharisee or Puritan enough to feel and to act upon the imaginary distinction. And so, I had left the city bosses locally independent—for, without the revenues and other aids from vice and crime, what city political machine could be ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... things, touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant. Why should the cloth—as it is so ingenuously called—be touched with delicate hands, unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties; he typifies the conventional righteousness ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Pharisee, The publican, the sinner, all were there, The doubting, sneering, questioning Sadducee, Just risen from his ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... verdict might have been. Who then would have said that he was a villain? Certainly not yonder sleek minister of Christ who was humming a psalm tune a moment ago, and paused to whisper, "Be sure your sin will find you out." The black-coated Pharisee was handing a lady into a ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... their cooks if they are women, and their digestions if they are men; but all the time I am inwardly lifting up my eyes, and patting myself on the back, and thanking heaven that I am not as they are, and generally out-Phariseeing the veriest Pharisee that ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... after year in my father's time. When I spoke to the keeper, I found it had been allowed to lapse. Your uncle let the shooting go to rack and ruin after Harold's death. It gave me something to write about, and I was determined to know where I stood—Well! the old Pharisee can go his ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... seems to have been the prevailing sin among these degenerate professors. Like the Pharisee, they would boast of their riches, the spiritual gifts which they possessed, by which they flattered themselves that "they were not as other men." Possibly they might excel in knowledge, that "knowledge which puffeth up;" in utterance,—"great swelling words of vanity," ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... words of the New Testament were written, not as we should have supposed by one of the twelve apostles, or by some one who had loved and followed the Lord Jesus Christ when He was upon earth. They are written by a Pharisee who had been one of Christ's ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... remember the story in the Gospel, of the different treatment which our Lord met with in the same house, from the Pharisee, who had invited him into it, and from the woman who came in and knelt at his feet, and kissed them, and bathed them with her tears. Our Lord accounted for the difference in these words, "To whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little;" which means to speak of the sense or feeling ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... Then he adds, 'Do you see those three hundred men who have just walked out? you may change places if you like, they're sighing to come in on any terms, for they're starving.' The men feel it, and are crushed. Ah! you Manchester liberal! Pharisee of politics! those men are listening—have I got you now? But the evil stops not yet. Those men, driven from their own trade, seek employment in others, when they swell the surplus and bring ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... late and goes early. His Protestant fellow in his private judgment finds more scope: "Let the women go listen to the parson." This is the sort of saying gives him such a conceit of himself. We have the type on both sides, so all can see it. Now it is not in the way of the Pharisee we come to note them, but to note that, strange as it may appear, either or both together will come to applaud the denouncing of the atheist. We gather such into our religious societies, and flatter ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... himself with probing further the grained spot in his superior. "My promise then stands in bad case, which I made to the Rhine-daughters when they turned to me in their trouble." Wotan, with the coldness of the Pharisee's "Look thou to that," replies, "Your promise does not bind me. The ring, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... sternest and deepest feeling, after all, when a man will not "unpack his heart with words"? Something of this kind we find in the Gospels. There is not a word of condemnation for Herod or Pilate, for priest or Pharisee; not a touch of sympathy as the nails are driven through those hands; a blunt phrase about the soldiers, "And sitting down they watched him there" (Matt. 26:36)—that is all. (From a literary point of view, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... struggles between the ludicrous and the pitiful.... The faith of this class seems to be fastened nowhere so strongly as upon Mrs. Griffing. Salutations follow her along the streets, enough to satisfy the proudest Pharisee, and it provokes one between a smile and a tear, to see the women waiting timidly, yet eagerly, for a word from her, to set their faces all aglow. They used to say, persistently, 'We belongs to you,' and no efforts could induce them to change that phrase. 'Who has we but the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the penny bearing Caesar's head and answers them in the words of the text, 'Render unto Caesar, therefore, the things which are Caesar's.' He returns the penny. I wonder where that little coin is to-day? It has gone, but the lesson it read remains forever; nor even today is the Pharisee gone with his invidious temptations. You are to-day obeying a greater than Caesar. You are meeting the material obligations of a day of discouragement—and for some ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... multiplies, without a shadow of a reason, the mala prohibita, if by correctness be meant a strict attention to certain ceremonious observances, which are no more essential to poetry than etiquette to good government, or than the washings of a Pharisee to devotion, then, assuredly, Pope may be a more correct poet than Shakspeare; and, if the code were a little altered, Colley Cibber might be a more correct poet than Pope. But it may well be doubted whether ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... content in that phase of the situation, feeling that mere personal inquisitiveness was dignified in this case under the aegis of law and authority. It was exactly this view of the matter that most disturbed Cap'n Aaron Sproul, for that hateful Pharisee, Squire Reeves, had supplied the law to compel his ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... child! Though I ain't on very good terms with the Lord, I ain't a Pharisee, and after what I saw of you that night, I am proud to speak to you and do anything I can for you. It does seem too bad that poor young things like you two should be so burdened. I should think you had enough before without your mother gettin' sick. I don't understand the Lord, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... that yonder Pharisee Thanks God that he is not like me; In my humiliation dressed, I only stand and beat my breast, And pray ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... her wash thy dainty feet With such salt things as tears, or with rude hair Dry them, soft Pharisee, that sit'st at meat With him who made her such, and speak'st him fair. 340 Leaving God's wandering lamb the while to bleat Unheeded, shivering in the pitiless air: Thou hast made prisoned virtue show more wan And haggard than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... out easily the Deacon, the Old Lady Who Brought Flowers, the President of the Sewing Circle, and, above all, the Chief Pharisee, sitting in his high place. The Chief Pharisee—his name I learned was Nash, Mr. J. H. Nash (I did not know then that I was soon to make his acquaintance)—the Chief Pharisee looked as hard as nails, a middle-aged man with stiff chin-whiskers, small ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... forgiven that we may obey. Have we read the Gospels, and have we forgotten all the instances in which Jesus said, "Thy sins are forgiven thee," before there had been any change of conduct, or reform of character? and have we forgotten the memorable passage in which he explains to the captious Pharisee why he does this (Luke 7:36-50),—on the principle that the one to whom the most is forgiven will love ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... nature, since she had observed that those who lacked these, possessed others, which to her robust womanhood seemed far worse, such as meanness and avarice and backbiting, and all the other qualities of the Pharisee. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... first. No matter. Love she possessed, and love she desired to lavish on some object worthy of her regard. That object she discovered in Jesus. She took her alabaster-box of precious ointment, and went after him. She enters the Pharisee's house; it may have been the house where she had fallen. The Pharisee seemed to know her character, and so he said, "This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him, for she is a sinner." Christ ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... photograph is the card of a strong-willed, self-righteous young Pharisee, who had no use for religion in peace time, but who was driven to God by his awful conflict with sin in this war. Next comes the card of a young man who formerly had lived a proper conventional life without bad habits. The war taught him to drink and he finally became a drunkard, but in his ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... elect; that is, to those who imagine themselves to be so. But what if they are mistaken? What if a man, yea a fancied saint, may be damned without knowing it? God Almighty has not published lists of the Sect. Many a Calvinistic Pharisee is perhaps a self-elected saint after all, and at the finish of his journey may find that he has been walking ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the fanatic's delight, Who Gregory Greybeard and Meroz did write, You may see who are saints in a pharisee's sight. The Assembly of the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... and sentences, but still it was there, that all the respectable, all the family and religious circumstances of her life, would hedge her in, and guard her from ever encountering the great shock of coming face to face with vice. Without being pharisaical in her estimation of herself, she had all a Pharisee's dread of publicans and sinners, and all a child's cowardliness—that cowardliness which prompts it to shut its eyes against the object of terror, rather than acknowledge its existence with brave faith. Her father's ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of things. I'll be asking this night for grace to live with, and then I'll get grace to die with when my hour comes. You needn't fash your heart about me. Sleeping or waking, I am in His charge. Nor about Jamie; he'll be all right the morn. Nor about Andrew, for I'll tell him not to make a Pharisee of himself—he has his own failing, and ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... Science encompassing the universe and man"; evening "the mistiness of mortal thought"; flesh "an error, a physical belief"; Ham (Noah's son) is "corporeal belief"; Jerusalem "mortal belief and knowledge obtained from the five corporeal senses"; night, "darkness; doubt; fear"; a Pharisee, "corporeal and sensuous belief"; river is "a channel of thought"; a rock is "a spiritual foundation"; sheep are "innocence"; a sword "the ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... and pretentious persons whatsoever: but he was too much inclined to draw between the two classes one of those strong lines of demarcation which exist only in the fancies of the human brain; for sins, like all diseased matters, are complicated and confused matters; many a seeming Pharisee is at heart a self-condemned publican, and ought to be comforted, and not cursed; while many a publican is, in the midst of all his foul sins, a thorough exclusive and self-complacent Pharisee, and needs not the right hand of mercy, but the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... but when the heart is once steeled with infidelity, infidelity confirmed by carnal wisdom, an exuberance of the grace of God is required to melt it, which is seldom manifested; for we read in the blessed book that the Pharisee and the wizard became receptacles of grace, but where is there mention made of the conversion of the sneering Sadducee, and is the modern infidel aught but a ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... happiness from the knowledge that there were such sinks of iniquity as the Internal Navigation. To be widely different from others was Mr. Hardlines' glory. He was, perhaps, something of a Civil Service Pharisee, and wore on his forehead a broad phylactery, stamped with the mark of Crown property. He thanked God that he was not as those publicans at Somerset House, and took glory to himself in paying ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Christian century. It was clearly in the minds of Jesus' disciples when he made his last journey to Jerusalem. It was both the background and the barrier to all his work. It is the key to the interpretation of Paul's conception of the Christ, or the Messiah, for he had been educated a Pharisee. This apocalyptic type of messianic hope powerfully influenced the life and thought of the early Christian Church and even permeated the Gospel narratives. The question of how far Jesus himself was influenced ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent |
