"Impious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed." God will not admit our folly in vowing as a plea for non-performance; He will exact it from us both as a due debt, and as a proper punishment of our impious folly. ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... from such presumptuous, foolish, or impious supplications as are at once repulsed and rebuked by the Divine silence, what are the objects we may lawfully pray for, asking for a response? It must be confessed that with the exception of petitions for spiritual blessings—for a deeper faith, for a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... expostulating, have profaned; I see what's equal with a prodigy, A great, a noble Roman, and an honest, Live an old man!—— Enter LEPIDUS. O Marcus Lepidus, When is our turn to bleed? Thyself and I, Without our boast, are almost all the few Left to be honest in these impious times. ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... of contempt as of dim, vague astonishment. Such words as righteousness and sacrament and Saviour had no place in his speech. Edith had been the holiest thing he knew. She was both shrine and goddess. Now that the shrine had been proven empty, and the goddess irrevocably flown, he got an impious satisfaction from battering down the altars and blaspheming the deity to whom ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... cast her off and railed and raved at her. "I will not go away," he cried in wild passion. "I will not allow my own son to raise an impious ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... there are, or are not, any Gods." This treatment of him, I imagine, restrained many from professing their disbelief of a Deity, since the doubt of it only could not escape punishment. What shall we say of the sacrilegious, the impious, and the perjured? If Tubulus Lucius, Lupus, or Carbo the son of Neptune, as Lucilius says, had believed that there were Gods, would either of them have carried his perjuries and impieties to such excess? Your reasoning, therefore, to confirm your assertion is not so conclusive as you think ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... his wife would give birth to the longed-for son early the next morning. Then he disappeared. The child was born at the appointed time, and grew wonderfully fast, for in five days he was a full-grown youth. But the parents could not but blame themselves for their impious act. They intended to keep the secret from their son; but they could not do so, for the boy was always asking about the nature of his existence. So when Pedro—they called him by this name—knew of his pitiful lot, he decided not to marry until he had succeeded in wresting the golden document from ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... of the Rabbinical exposition of the law was an event more dreadful in the eyes of these narrow pedants; for there was not only reaping, but the analogue of winnowing and grinding, for the grains were rubbed in the disciples' palms. What daring sin! What impious defiance of law! But of what law? Not that of the Fourth Commandment, which simply forbade 'labour,' but that of the doctors' expositions of the commandment, which expended miraculous ingenuity and hair-splitting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... that he should. What he did find was that the Will of God was inscrutable and absolute; that it was man's duty to follow where God's hand led; and, if God's hand led towards violent excitements and extraordinary vicissitudes, that it was not only futile, it was impious to turn another way. Fatalism is always apt to be a double-edged philosophy; for while, on the one hand, it reveals the minutest occurrences as the immutable result of a rigid chain of infinitely predestined causes, on the other, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... general's voice they soon obey'd Innumerable. As when the potent rod Of Amram's son, in Egypt's evil day, Wav'd round the coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind, That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung Like night, and darken'd ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... saints were decapitated and the quiet repose of the dead disturbed by their pure, delicate hands. "Erin's curse be upon them!" exclaimed my man of medicine. "The devil has them by this time," said the purser. "What a set of impious scoundrels," ejaculated the midshipman. "I am afraid," added I, "France has in a great measure brought all her misfortunes on herself. If the King and the nobles had stood firm to their guns and given a more liberal constitution, millions of lives ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... Fra Egidio's monastery was once stolen by an impious butcher, and cut up into the usual joints with a view to a clandestine sale of the meat. The saint discovered the beast's remains, ordered that they should be laid together on the floor in the shape of a living cow, with the entrails, head and so forth in their natural positions; ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... sorcerer and a magician; that he had kept by him a book of magic, and had made use of it to conjure and invoke the evil spirit; that he has been with the said Magdalen to the sabbath, where he had committed an infinite number of scandalous, impious and abominable actions, such as having worshiped Lucifer:—for these causes, the said attorney-general requires that the said Gaufredi be declared attainted and convicted of the circumstances imputed to him, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... he would not have refrained from doing this because he had read in a book that a course of falling off horses often resulted in the birth of a genius. Both Moslem and Christian would have thought such speculations not only impious but utterly unpractical. I quite agree with them; but that is not ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... "owner," aggravates it. If slavery has so palsied his mind and he looks upon himself as a chattel, and consents to be one, actually to hold him as such, falls in with his delusion, and confirms the impious falsehood. These very feelings and convictions of the slave, (if such were possible) increase a hundred fold the guilt of the master in holding him as property, and call upon him in thunder, immediately to recognize him ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... lightning, but which men were not themselves to produce. He who—like the Prometheus of the Greeks—discovers the method of artificially kindling a flame, and communicates this discovery to other men, is impious, has stolen the forbidden fruit from the sacred tree, is accursed, and the wrath of the gods pursues him and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... by impious arms from Latium chas'd, Their ancient bounds the banish'd Muses pass'd; 710 Thence Arts o'er all the northern world advance, But Critic-learning flourish'd most in France: The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys; And Boileau ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... onpouring mass of men in retreat he was wild with rage. "Halt, you infernal cowards!" he yelled. "Halt here and make a stand. We can stop them yet!" But he was overborne by the resistless stream, and with an impious imprecation on his lips he dismounted, near a field-piece, "and seemed resolved to brave the foe alone." One man only, a sergeant, took his stand beside him, but he was soon shot down, and brave Old Put was left without support. "The enemy's bayonets were just upon ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... Santurri, De Angelis, and Latini, forwarded to De Pasqualis an unfounded accusation against them of intriguing for the overthrow of the Republic; and in order to give it a "colour of probability," induced the above-named Anziani to sign it; and that, in order to accomplish his impious design, he wrote a private letter to De Pasqualis, telling him how the arrest of the accused might be effected. Again, I learn that a search, instituted by Salvatori into the priest Santurri's papers, produced no "evidence favourable to his infamous purpose," that ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... therefrom, and following and embracing the errors of heretics, she hath removed the royal council, consisting of the English nobility, and filled it with obscure men, being heretics; hath oppressed the embracers of the Roman faith, hath placed impious preachers, ministers of iniquity, and abolished the sacrifice of the mass, prayers, fastings, distinction of meats, a single life, and the rites and ceremonies; hath commanded books to be read in the whole realm, containing manifest heresy, etc. She hath not only contemned the ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... pietist[obs3], precisian[obs3], religionist, devotee; ranter, fanatic, juramentado[obs3]. the wicked, the evil, the unjust, the reprobate; sons of men, sons of Belial, the wicked one; children of darkness. V. be impious &c. adj., profane, desecrate, blaspheme, revile, scoff; swear &c. (malediction) 908; commit sacrilege. snuffle; turn up the whites of the eyes; idolize. Adj. impious; irreligious &c. 989; desecrating &c.v.; profane, irreverent, sacrilegious, blasphemous. un-hallowed, un-sanctified, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... that War System by which such a duel is authorized and regulated among nations? When will this legalized, organized crime be abolished? When at last will it be confessed that the Law of Right is the same for nations as for individuals, so that, if Trial by Battle be impious for individuals, it is so for nations likewise? Against it are Reason and Humanity, pleading as never before,—Economy, asking for mighty help,—Peace, with softest voice praying for safeguard,—and then the authority of Philosophy, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... marked in these lines: he was an excellent poet, but of abandoned morals, and of the most impious principles; a complete libertine and an avowed atheist. He lost his life in a riotous fray; for, detecting his servant with his mistress, he rushed into the room with a dagger in order to stab him, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... if he place his good in outward things, depending not on the will, he must perforce be subject to hindrance and restraint, the slave of those that have power over the things he desires and fears; he must perforce be impious, as deeming himself injured at the hands of God; he must be unjust, as ever prone to claim more than his due; he must perforce be of ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... douce Jeemsy Todd, rushing from his loom, armed with a bed-post; Lisbeth Whamond, an avenging whirlwind; Neil Haggart, pausing in his thanks-offerings to smite and slay; the impious foe scudding up the bleeding Brae-head with Nemesis at their flashing heels; the minister holding it a nice question whether the carnage was not justified. Then came the two hours' sermons of the following Sabbath, when ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... assume, as the foundation of his reasoning, and as the great argument for immediate treaty, that every effort to overturn the system of the French revolution must be unavailing; and that it would be not only imprudent, but almost impious, to struggle longer against that order of things, which, on I know not what principle of predestination, he appears to consider as immortal. Little as I am inclined to accede to this opinion, I am not sorry that the honourable gentleman has contemplated the subject ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... him). Thou shalt not:—add not impious works to impious Words! let that altar stand—'tis hallowed now By the immortal pleasure of Jehovah, In his acceptance ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... frigid skeptic, therefore, dare To doubt the all-prevailing power of prayer; As if 'twere ours, with impious zeal, to try To shake the purposes of Deity; Pause, cold philosopher, nor snatch away The last, the best, the wretched's surest stay. Look round on life, and trace its checkered plan, The griefs, the joys, the hopes, the fears of man; Tell me, if each deliverance, each success, Each ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... I heard her last sweet sigh, And saw her gently-closing eye, How great was my surprise! Yet have I not, with impious breath, Accused the hard decrees of death, Nor blamed ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... until they shall have carried the blessings of civilization to Mexico, rewarding themselves for their active benevolence by the appropriation of lands so admirably adapted to the labors of the descendants of Ham, whom it would be impious in them to leave unprovided with the best fields to work out their mission,—which is, to produce the greatest possible crops with the least possible expenditure of capital and care, for the good of that superior race which kindly supplies the deficiencies of Heaven with respect to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... things, as stated above (AA. 6, 7). Accordingly if this other thing that we ask for ourselves be not useful for our beatitude, we do not merit it; and sometimes by asking for and desiring such things we lose merit for instance if we ask of God the accomplishment of some sin, which would be an impious prayer. And sometimes it is not necessary for salvation, nor yet manifestly contrary thereto; and then although he who prays may merit eternal life by praying, yet he does not merit to obtain what he asks for. Hence Augustine says (Liber. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... to capture their city. They put the image in the temple of Victoria on the Palatine until such time as its own temple was ready to receive it, and the goddess of Victory seemed to respond to its presence, for did not Hannibal leave Italy the very next year? And who would be so impious as to suggest that to Scipio and not Cybele belonged the glory, and that a strong Roman army in Africa affected Hannibal more than a sacred ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... warning of the Redskin, had landed there, and even dared to build a fire on its shores; but before the sun again set he found an unknown grave in the great lake. Never in the memory of the Indians had such a terrific storm raged as after the perpetration of the impious act. ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... Matilda. She appeared to me the most charming of her sex. Her cheeks had the freshness of the peach, and her lips were roses. Her neck was alabaster, and her eyes sparkled with animation, chastened with the most unrivalled gentleness and delicacy. Her stature, her forehead, her mouth—but ah, impious wretch, how canst thou pretend to trace her from charm to charm! Who can dissect unbounded excellence? Who can coolly and deliberately gaze upon the brightness of the meridian sun? I will say in one word, that her whole figure was enchanting, that all her gestures were dignity, ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... speaks, Gal. 5:4, when they still sought justification by the law of Moses; but the monks endeavor to live more nearly to the Gospel, that theymay merit eternal life. Therefore, the allegations here made against monasticism are impious. Moreover, the malicious charge that is still further added, that those in religious orders claim to be in a state of perfection, has never been heard of by them; for those in these orders claim not for themselves ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... what would happen. It was a fine day, and I gazed up at the slip of white sky above the houses opposite, and expected something to appear in it. God would certainly exhibit his anger in some terrible form, and would chastise my impious and willful action. I was very much alarmed, but still more excited; I breathed the high, sharp air of defiance. But nothing happened; there was not a cloud in the sky, not an unusual sound in the street. Presently, I was ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... by my lord. I claim this place, For I must conquer Caesar too, like him, And win my share of the world.—Hail, you dear relics Of my immortal love! O let no impious hand remove you hence: But rest for ever here! Let Egypt give His death that peace, which it denied his life.— ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... To reassume my wonted Cares and Shame. —I will not speak with him. [Exit Boy. Oh Hippolyta! thou poor lost thing, Hippolyta! How art thou fallen from Honour, and from Virtue, And liv'st in Whoredom with an impious Villain, Who in revenge to me has thus betray'd thee. Keep thy self closer than thou'st done thy Sin; For if I find thee out, by all that's good, Thou hadst more Mercy on thy slaughter'd Honour, Than ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... remainder of life. The distinguished Sauerteig, in his SPRINGWURZELN, has these words: "To burn away, in mad waste, the divine aromas and plainly celestial elements from our existence; to change our holy-of-holies into a place of riot; to make the soul itself hard, impious, barren! Surely a day is coming, when it will be known again what virtue is in purity and continence of life; how divine is the blush of young human cheeks; how high, beneficent, sternly inexorable if forgotten, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... among the important constitutional victories of our century. He published parodies on the Creeds, the Lord's Prayer, the Catechism, etc., with intent to bring the Ministry into contempt: everybody knew that was his purpose. The Government indicted him for impious, profane, blasphemous intent, but not for seditious intent. They hoped to wear him out by proceeding day by day. December 18, 1817, they hid themselves under the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Commandments; December 19, under the Litany; December 20, under the Athanasian Creed, an odd place ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... goddess Pasht, and the mouse, in the hand of a sculptured king, enforce his enduring words "[Greek: es eme tis horeon eusebes esto]"; but the great mimetic instinct underlies all such purpose; and is zooplastic,—life-shaping,—alike in the reverent and the impious. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Peter helped her to clear away the things and insisted on being allowed to help wash the dishes. But to this Beth demurred for they were of Aunt Tillie's blue colonial china set and not to be trusted to impious hands. But she let Peter sit in the kitchen and watch her (which was quite satisfactory) and even spared him a kiss ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... thus demolished; since evolution, if it means anything, means the interposition of natural law between the will of the one Supreme Intelligence and the universe. And on this theory Mr. Wallace's criticisms on Mr. Darwin and others are impious, being criticisms upon parts of the will of the one ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... was to undertake in the region in which his hero strength—so the impious king hoped—would not accompany him. This was a fight with the dark powers of the underworld. He was to bring forth from Hades Cerberus, the dog of Hell. This animal had three heads with frightful jaws, from which incessantly poison flowed. A dragon's ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... heavy hands shaking at the pillow, as they tried mechanically to arrange it; to see her stand, alternately leering and scowling by the bedside, an incarnate blasphemy in the sacred chamber of death, was to behold the most horrible of all mockeries, the most impious of all profanations. No loneliness in the presence of mortal agony could try me to the quick, as the sight of that foul old age of degradation and debauchery, defiling the sick room, now tried me. I determined to wait alone by the bedside ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... has come about through the gradual mental growth and consent of the peoples, rather than through some unique and miraculous event of a rather arbitrary and unexplained character—which indeed might never be repeated, and concerning which it would perhaps be impious to suggest that it SHOULD ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... traditional subjects. Other youths had shown greater aptitude for this kind of eloquence; he did not often carry off a prize; but among his proud recollections was a success he had achieved in the form of a rebuke to an impious voluptuary who set up a statue of Diana in the room which beheld his debauches. Here was the nemesis of a system of education which had aimed solely at the practical, the useful; having always laboured to produce the man perfectly equipped for public affairs, and nothing else whatever. ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... some, under more specious pretenses; and, further, considering the general deluge of error and heresy, that has overrun these lands, and the swarm of erroneous heretics that has overspread the same, making very impious attacks upon the most part of revealed religion, who, notwithstanding, have found such shelter under the wings of a Laodicean church, and almost boundless state toleration, that they walk on without fear in the foresaid broad ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... other to take refuge with the Goths, he slew them with the sword. But the heretic Timotheus, surnamed Kolon and Litroboulos,[55] he gave to the Church as being of one mind with himself and obedient to his counsels. This man called a most impious synod, and lifted up his heel against the holy Council of Chalcedon. In agreement with Severus, they sent their synodical letters together to Jerusalem. These not being received kindled Anastasius to anger. So he banished Elias from the holy city to Evila and put ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... to the contrary, dispute publicly concerning the Christian religion with more zeal than discretion; and with so much heat, that he not only preferred our worship to theirs, but condemned all their rites as profane; and cried out against all that adhered to them, as impious and sacrilegious persons, that were to be damned to everlasting burnings. Upon his having frequently preached in this manner, he was seized, and after trial he was condemned to banishment, not for having disparaged their religion, but for his inflaming the people ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... uncleanness, swearing, drunkenness, and the like filthiness and brutishness, or denying the existence of God, or who shall profess that murder, adultery, incest, fornication, uncleanness, filthy or lascivious speaking, are not wicked, sinful, impious, abominable, and detestable, shall be imprisoned, and, for a second ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... which one special purpose was to lower his kingly pride. You find another (or perhaps the same) agency, made visible to a Christian prophet as an angel standing in the sun, calling to the birds that fly under heaven to come, that they may eat the flesh of kings. Is there anything impious in the thought that the same agency might have been expressed to a Greek king, or Greek seer, by similar visions?—that this figure, standing in the sun, and armed with the sword, or the bow (whose arrows were drunk with blood), and exercising especially its power in the humiliation ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... extinguishable right in the Nabob. He constantly represents the seizing the treasures as a resumption of a right which he could not part with;—as if there were literally something in the Koran, that made it criminal in a true Mussulman to keep his engagements with his relations, and impious in a son to abstain from plundering his mother. I do gravely assure your Lordships that there is no such doctrine in the Koran, and no such principle makes a part in the civil or municipal jurisprudence of that country. Even after these Princesses had been endeavoring to dethrone the Nabob and to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... the Sodomites grew proud, on account of their riches and great wealth; they became unjust towards men, and impious towards God, insomuch that they did not call to mind the advantages they received from him: they hated strangers, and abused themselves with Sodomitical practices. God was therefore much displeased at them, and determined to punish them for their pride, and to overthrow their city, and ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... threw up her hands in horror and cried: "Such an impious civilization must come speedily not only to spiritual ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... look for the ungracious bloom Of rich apparel where it glow'd before,— For Vanity has faded all to gloom, And lofty Pride has stiffen'd to the core, For impious Life to tremble at its doom,— Set for a warning token evermore, Whereon, as now, the giddy and the wise Shall gaze with lifted ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... to respect the being it embellishes and surrounds without touching? What idea can they have of the world? They are like comedians in the greenroom. Who, more than they, is skilled in that research at the bottom of things, in that groping, profound and impious? See how they speak of everything; always in terms the most barren, the most crude and abject; such words appear true to them; all the rest is only parade, convention, prejudice. Let them tell a story, let them recount some experience, they will always use the same ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... not forget that we are watched over in the night season," he said, laying his hand on Low's shoulder, with an illustration of celestial guardianship that would have been impious but for its palpable grotesqueness. "No, sir, we know not what ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... and taking everything for granted that will serve your turn. For you are not ashamed to rob O. Cromwell himself, and make use of his canting assurances from Heaven and answering condescensions: the most impious Mahometan doctrine that ever was vented ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... ransacked closet. If he had fallen in a common slaughter of libellers and blasphemers, I could well believe that nothing more was meant than was pretended. But when I see, that, for years together, full as impious, and perhaps more dangerous writings to religion, and virtue, and order, have not been punished, nor their authors discountenanced; that the most audacious libels on Royal Majesty have passed without notice; that the most treasonable invectives against the laws, liberties, and ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... nobler passage than that in which this accomplished writer appeals to the French sentiment of national unity to justify our Northern people in their mighty struggle to subdue this 'impious revolt.' Americans themselves, though fully imbued with the instinctive feeling which it defends, could not more forcibly have presented the point. And, indeed, if we may believe the statements now prevalent, attributing to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was a turnspit in the household of the Lord Bishop himself. But, whatever the preliminaries, and whether baker, pieman, or turnspit, his final catastrophe was always the same: he was hanged from a bough of the very tree into which, impious and greatly ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... at the same time, and partakes both of existence and of non-existence. Now I would ask my good friend, who denies abstract beauty and justice, and affirms a many beautiful and a many just, whether everything he sees is not in some point of view different—the beautiful ugly, the pious impious, the just unjust? Is not the double also the half, and are not heavy and light relative terms which pass into one another? Everything is and is not, as in the old riddle—'A man and not a man shot and did not shoot ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Divine truths by means of which regeneration is effected, and there the Lord who regenerates is known.{1} Let them know therefore that every child, wherever he is born, whether within the church or outside of it, whether of pious parents or impious, is received when he dies by the Lord and trained up in heaven, and taught in accordance with Divine order, and imbued with affections for what is good, and through these with knowledges of what is true; and afterwards as he is perfected in intelligence and wisdom is introduced into heaven ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... one, the colour of the lover. Affection for it, think they who judge truly, Tempts men to commit that which shall anger their Maker. But for it no thief's right hand were cut off; Nor would tyranny be displayed by the impious; Nor would the niggardly shrink from the night-farer; Nor would the delayed claimant mourn the delay of him that withholds; Nor would men call to God from the envious who casts at them. Moreover the worst quality that it possesses Is ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... corruption of base palliardize,[187] When idiots, witless, travail to be wise. Age barbarous, times impious, men vicious! ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... to elevate woman from the state of degradation to which she had, for ages, been subjected—when we consider not only what it has done, but what it is destined yet to do for her advancement,—it is impossible not to shrink from the presence of an impious, and above all an unprincipled atheistical female, as from an ungrateful and ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... neither waste time in dwelling on the guilt of this man before you, from whose cruelty you have rescued yourselves by force of arms, nor will I suffer him to add impudence to his other crimes in defending himself. Wherefore, Appius Claudius, I pardon you for all the impious and nefarious deeds you have had the effrontery to commit one after another for the last two years; with respect to one charge only, unless you shall choose a judge who shall acquit you that you have not sentenced ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... moral qualities not found in human nature; they transformed it into a race of giants; they represented it as monstrous, hideous, truculent, changing forms at will, blood-thirsty and ravenous, just as the Semites represented the races that opposed them as impious, horrible and of monstrous size. But notwithstanding these mythical exaggerations, which are partly due to the genius of the Aryans so prone to magnify everything without measure, the Ramayan in the course of its epic narration has still preserved and noted here and there some traits and peculiarities ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Vain, impious words! The goddess came In likeness of an ancient crone, With grizzled locks and tottering frame, And spoke with ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... thee profane with impious shag, Nor poison thee with nigger-head and twist, Nor with Kentucky, though the planters brag That it hath virtues all the rest ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... dilating strangely, and the consummate tempter hurried on. He exalted the grandeur of the Emperor's task, yet craftily made success appear simple and easy. The forces of "the arch-rebel Benito Juarez" were concentrated in "a horde of impious thieves calling themselves the Army of the North." But Miramon, His Majesty's own general, was hastening to meet them. One decisive battle, and there would be no more rebels. The nation must then recognize that the Empire had sustained ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... that Model of all perfection. It is not for us to comment on the actions of Him who, as we firmly believe, could not act otherwise than most perfectly. Neither is it for us to dare to say: 'Why hast Thou done thus?' Yet we may well remember His zeal for the salvation of that impious man's soul, and the remonstrances which He deigned to use in order to bring him to repentance. Nay, did He not offer not only His cheek to the smiter, but His whole sacred Body to the cruel scourging which covered Him with wounds from Head ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... of Bacchus; and even before Christ, to say nothing of their subsequent persecutions, they persecuted the Druids and others. Heathenism, therefore, as in other respects erroneous, was erroneous in point of persecution. I do not say every heathen who persecuted was therefore an impious man: I only say he was mistaken, as such a man is now. But, says the honorable gentleman, they did not persecute Epicureans. No: the Epicureans had no quarrel with their religious establishment, nor desired any religion for themselves. It would have been very extraordinary, if irreligious ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sunk and unfrequented, where At fall of eve the fairy people throng, In various game and revelry to pass The summer night, as village stories tell. But far around they wander from the grave Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged Against his own sad breast to life the hand Of impious violence. The lonely tower Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold, So night-struck ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of the caliph was great at this dreadful spectacle. His surprise was instantly changed into passion, and darting an angry look at the vizier, "Thou wretch," said he, "is this your inspection into the actions of my people? Do they commit such impious murders under thy ministry in my capital, and throw my subjects into the Tigris, that they may cry for vengeance against me at the day of judgment? If thou dost not speedily avenge the murder of this woman, by the death of her murderer, I swear by ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... the crimes of this impious race of men, calls a council of the Gods, and determines to destroy ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... avalanche upon the Indian village. In a moment, fateful incident, the Indians came swarming about that heroic band until the very earth seemed to open and let loose the elements of volcanic fury, or like a riot of the fiends of Erebus, blazing with the hot sulphur of their impious dominion. Down from the hillside, up through the valleys, that dreadful torrent of Indian cruelty and massacre poured around the little squad to swallow it up with one grand swoop of fire. But Custer was there at the head, like Spartacus fighting the ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... this, meanly, did I thee upbraid, And basely urg'd an elder brother's right; Then, calling impious passion to my aid, Forc'd thee, unwilling, to ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... of his mother's name, And with an impious hand murders her fame, That wrongs the praise of women; that dares write Libels on saints, or with foul ink requite The milk they lent us. Yours was the nobler birth, For you from man were made—man but of earth— The son ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... thou art worse, if possible, than a Jew; you deserve to be inclosed in a furnace seven times heated; and I have a good mind to lodge an information against you with the governor of Ghent, that you may be apprehended and punished as an impious blasphemer." ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... of lovers!" exclaimed the artist, in a sort of transport, "foolish, absurd, wicked, impious, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... came next in course the BRAZEN AGE; A warlike offspring, prompt to bloody rage, Not impious yet. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... had he sworn, when a creeping chill passed through his frame. His features lost all their animation, and throwing away the book on which the impious oath had been taken, he turned away his face from Matilda, and sinking his head upon his chest, groaned ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and not according to his own good pleasure; and we ought not to encourage you, nor should you allow yourselves to be encouraged, in this habit of perjury—there can be no piety in that. Do not then require me to do what I consider dishonourable and impious and wrong, especially now, when I am being tried for impiety on the indictment of Meletus. For if, O men of Athens, by force of persuasion and entreaty I could overpower your oaths, then I should be teaching ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month. The following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with impartiality all the alleged facts ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and admiration, the manful, cheerful view of pain and death, and indeed of the whole creation, which the Psalmist has, because he has faith. There is in him no sentimentalism, no complaining of God, no impious, or at least weak and peevish, cry of "Why hast Thou made things thus?" He sees the mystery of pain and death. He does not attempt to explain it: but he faces it; faces it cheerfully and manfully, in the strength of his faith, saying—This too, mysterious, painful, terrible as it may seem, is ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... wished me good-bye, as though she had not heard a word of my impious hope; but, in the very doorway, where I attended her, she turned round for an instant, and ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... assert is, that 'each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator.' Just below, the critic says:—'After all these contradictory propoundings concerning God we would remind him of what he lays down on page 23—'of this Godhead in itself he alone is not imbecile—he alone is not impious who propounds nothing. A man who thus conclusively convicts himself of imbecility and impiety needs no further refutation.' Now the sentence, as I wrote it, and as I find it printed on that very page which ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... was all, apparently, that the lady Mary was called upon to undergo. But she had already endured enough to sour her temper, to aggravate with feelings of personal animosity her systematic abhorrence of what she deemed impious heresy, and to bind to her heart by fresh and stronger ties that cherished faith, in defence of which she was proudly conscious of having struggled and suffered with a ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... flinging all I have written into the fire (yet rescuing some of it on second thought), and curse myself as an ingle-nook man, for I see that one can only paint what he himself has felt, and in my passion I wish to have all the vices, even to being an impious man, that I may describe them better. For this may I be pardoned. It comes to nothing in the end, save that ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... leave thee living, I leave thee angry, vengeful, unforgiving; Leave thee, in fact, to be One enemy more (and what an enemy!); Thus equally I grieve thee, Thus evil do whether I take or leave thee; And so 'tis better thus, That I a wretch, cruel and infamous, False, impious, fierce, abandoned, wicked, banned By God and man, should slay thee by my hand, Since buried here, Within the rustic entrails dark and drear Of this rude realm of stone, My worst misfortune shall remain unknown. My fury, too, shall gain ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... of the kind, for the excellent reason, as her husband declared, that no such impious thought had ever crossed his mind, much less ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... believing, that the misconduct of others can bring guilt on them. Guilt to us is an individual taint consequent on choice and cleaving to the chooser. But in early ages the act of one member of the tribe is conceived to make all the tribe impious, to offend its peculiar god, to expose all the tribe to penalties from heaven. There is no 'limited liability' in the political notions of that time. The early tribe or nation is a religious partnership, on which a rash member by a sudden impiety may bring utter ruin. If the state ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... because they do not make use of the light they have received, and do not reason deductively; they have only sought to gratify their curiosity, or to gain credit for their discoveries; and do not some of them lose themselves in their speculations, and become impious, even so as to recognize no other God ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... the community might refuse to look through the telescope, or looking might refuse to see that it was the moon which caused the eclipse, and their deep-seated reverence for the insect, which was the growth of ages, would lead them to regard as impious those individuals who denied its godhead, and might even lead to the physical destruction of the first unbelievers. The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... for it, for Orbajosa's sake," said Dona Perfecta. "This poor city has fallen into misfortune. Do you know if Francisco Acero gave his word to the governor not to trouble the poor soldiers in their abductions, in their impious deeds, in their ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... took possession of Philip. "God is wise," he told himself. "God is merciful. He knows what is best for all of us. What are we poor impotent grasshoppers, that we dare pray to Him to change His great purposes? It is idle. It is impious.... While the child lives there will be security for no one. If it dies, there will be peace and rest and the beginning of content. The mother must be gone already, so the dark chapter of our lives will be closed at last God is all ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... attendant gods behind thy chamber; in gladness are the mariners of thy bark, their heart delighted, Lord of heaven who hast brought joys to the divine chiefs, the lower sky rejoices, gods and men exult applauding Ra on his standard, blest by his mother Nut; their heart is glad. Ra hath quelled his impious foes, heaven rejoices, earth is in delight, gods and goddesses are in festival to make adoration to Ra-Hor, as they see him rise in his bark. He fells the wicked in his season, the abode is inviolate, the diadem mehen in its place, the ...
— Egyptian Literature
... in grotesque pantomime; the awe with which I contemplated the monumental statue on horseback of the murdered commander, gleaming by pale moonlight in the convent cemetery; how my heart quaked as he bowed his marble head, and accepted the impious invitation of Don Juan: how each footfall of the statue smote upon my heart, as I heard it approach, step by step, through the echoing corridor, and beheld it enter, and advance, a moving figure of stone, to the supper table! But then the convivial scene in the charnel-house, where Don ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... maternal devotion. I sometimes think I would rather have never existed, that I could forfeit all the grand privileges of a created being destined for a noble end, rather than have become the mother of impious and ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... Aholibamah are very different characters: Anah is soft, gentle, and submissive; her sister is proud, imperious, and aspiring; the one loving in fear, the other in ambition. She fears that her love makes her "heart grow impious," and that she worships the seraph rather than the Creator.—Ed. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... The Rabbis also say that angels are created out of every word which proceeds from the mouth of God; as it is said, "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth" (Ps. xxxiii. 6). The following story is also told: In the hour when Nimrod, the impious, cast Abraham into the midst of the fiery furnace, Gabriel said before the blessed God, "Lord of the world, I will go down and cool the flame, and deliver the righteous One from the furnace of fire." The blessed God said to him, "I am the ONE in this world, and ...
— Hebrew Literature
... administered to the partisans of those secret societies. They proposed to war against God, to sweep away all salutary checks against the indulgence of passion, to level the alter and the throne, and advocated the claims of those impious theories that in modern times have found their fullest development in Mormonism ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... to an end. One candid youth admitted that all he knew of the matter was that he was very glad Hector was dead, and for this impious irrelevance he was ordered to write an appalling imposition and forfeit several half-holidays. But that, for the time being, was the worst thunderbolt that fell ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... to come their hopes and especially their fears were centered. Miserable sinners, born into total depravity could only employ their brief sojourn on earth in striving to save their souls. Mortifying the flesh and holding all pleasures to be foolish if not impious, they deferred happiness to the realms beyond the skies. To them Here was nothing and Now was nothing. The eternal hereafter was all. Looking at life as merely a preparation for death, their point of view was diametrically opposite to ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... complete series of facts of historical men, to explain time and eternity, such as no other religion has to offer. Even the impious themselves have never dared to deny the sublimity of the gospel. * * * In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections! * * Christ proved that he was the son of the Eternal by his disregard of time. All his doctrines signify one only ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... of being in a passion Mr Sadler will not disclaim. His is a theme, he tells us, on which "it were impious to be calm;" and he boasts that, "instead of conforming to the candour of the present age, he has imitated the honesty of preceding ones, in expressing himself with the utmost plainness and freedom throughout." If Mr Sadler really ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... again to the rescue, and Mr. Seward is so sacrilegious, so impious, as to say that the people is generally slow. He is fast on the ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... ether, but became afraid. Downward the eagle and his burden fell, and in the epic of Gilgamesh we find Etana in the nether world. According to Jastrow, this attempted ascension was an offence against the gods, and his fall was his punishment. We are not told, however, that Etana had the impious desire of Ezekiel's first man, and if he fell, it was through his own timidity (contrast Ezek. xxviii. 16). But certainly the myth does help us to imagine a story in which, for some sin against the gods, some favoured ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... out the impious aspiration as he sorted a judicious modicum of hemp into the canary seed. He spoke in semi-soliloquy, yet quite loud enough to reach the vigilant ear of Mrs. Punt, who was dusting the cages at the other end of the live-stock store. She said nothing in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... Inhabitants what multiple of usefulness shall we give? To be governed on principles fair and rational, that is to say, conformable to Nature's appointment in that respect; and to be governed on principles which contradict the very rules of Cocker, and with impious disbelief of the very Multiplication Table: the one is a perpetual Gospel of Cosmos and Heaven to every unit of the Population; the other a Gospel of Chaos and Beelzebub to every unit of them: there is no multiple to be found in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... of making ourselves seen or heard was now abandoned; the ship flew by, and soon her hull sank below the horizon. Some of the men, on this, gave way to impious exclamations of discontent, but Andrew checked them. "It is God's will that we remain here, mates," he said. "How do we know but that it is for our benefit that we are left where we are? That ship, which we are now so anxious to be on board, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... his boon companions. Of one of these copies the Government obtained possession, through a subordinate agent, and by not very creditable means, and Lord Sandwich holding it forth in his hand with the air of injured innocence, denounced it as not only scandalous and impious, but also as a breach of Privilege against the Bishop as a Peer of Parliament. He likewise complained of another profane parody, written by the same hand, and printed on the same occasion; this last was entitled, "The VENI CREATOR paraphrased." The ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... indifference, and when the emperor suggested his restoration, he very adroitly played the coquette. The emperor at first proposed that his son, the Archduke Ferdinand, should nominally have the command, while Wallenstein should be his executive and advisory general. "I would not serve," said the impious captain, "as second ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... religious deeds! To verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious!" These things, which Milton refused to contemplate as possible when he wrote his "Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth," had actually come to pass. The English nation is to him the enslaved and erring Samson—a Samson, however, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... it seemed to say, "What dost thou here? Leave the forsaken Fauns In peace beneath their trees! Dost thou not know, Poet, that ever it is impious deemed, In desert spots where drowsy shades repose— Though love itself might prompt thee—to shake down The moss that hangs from ruined centuries, And, with the vain noise of throe ill-timed words, To mar the recollections of ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... before she had spoken, the angry murmurs around had swollen to loud protestations. Before the praefect's lictors could intervene the crowd had pushed forward; the men rushed and surrounded the impious creature who had dared to raise her voice against one of the divinities of Rome: ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... wage, stood Sganarelle, And here Don Luis pointed, bent and dim, To show the dead who lined the holes of Hell, This was that impious ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... contested election. Annexation, or peaceful absorption, is the "manifest destiny" of the islands, with the probable result lately most wittily prophesied by Mark Twain in the New York Tribune, but it is impious and impolitic to hasten it. Much as I like America, I shrink from the day when her universal political corruption and her unrivalled political immorality shall be naturalised on Hawaii-nei. . . . Sunday evening. The "Rolling Moses" is in, and Sabbatic quiet has given place to ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... inconstant fair, Blind as inconstant. She rejected me When, as Friar Anselmo teaching music, I offer'd her—'tis true, unholy love; And I by Perez was thrust out with shame, Spurn'd with contumely as the door was closed, With threats if ever I appear'd again, To blazon forth my impious attempt, and— Yet did she cozen me with melting eyes, And first roused up the demon in my breast, Then laugh'd in malice.——I hate her for it! Now as Don Gaspar, I've supplanted him, Pride and revenge, not love, impelling me; These gratified, I would shake off a chain Which now, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... a step toward the church-yard, but D'Effernay clutched his arm, and, with an impious oath, "you shall not stir," he said; "that grave shall ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own need, free ...
— Martin Luther's 95 Theses • Martin Luther
... the descendants of Noah. This patriarch having alone preserved the true name and worship of God amid a race of impious idolaters, the Freemasons claim to be his descendants, because they preserve that pure religion which distinguished this second father of the human race from the rest of the world. (See the author's Lexicon of Freemasonry.) The Tyrian workmen at the temple of Solomon were the descendants of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... mayor; wherever he has lived he has known how to mollify these, and consequently "he is removed from parish to parish,[5242] chosen expressly to be put into those where there are troublesome, wrangling, malevolent, and impious mayors." It is for the good of the service and in the interest of the Church. The bishop subordinates persons to this superior interest. The legislation of 1801 and 1802 has conferred full powers upon him and he exercises them; among ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine |
