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Pharisaical   Listen
adjective
Pharisaical, Pharisaic  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the Pharisees; resembling the Pharisees. "The Pharisaic sect among the Jews."
2.
Hence: Addicted to external forms and ceremonies; making a show of religion without the spirit of it; ceremonial; formal; hypocritical; self-righteous. "Excess of outward and pharisaical holiness." "Pharisaical ostentation."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pharisaical" Quotes from Famous Books



... to express too much admiration for such men as Sainte-Beuve and Theophile Gautier. Their affectation of immorality prevented me from seeing how incoherent their philosophy was. The fear of appearing pharisaical, the idea, evangelical in itself, that he who is immaculate has the right to be indulgent, and the dread of misleading, if by chance all the doctrines emitted by the professors of philosophy were wrong, made my system of morality appear rather shaky. It is, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... stolidly at the strange ship in the harbour. That every man wore side-arms seemed an indication the rebels were still rampant on the northern coast of Mindanao, and the fact of numberless native boats passing by with a pharisaical lack of interest in our presence spoke insurrection ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... they had to bow to the Emperor of the French! I cannot comprehend why the Lord permits it, and why He does not hurl down His thunderbolts upon the head of this hypocritical French emperor, who throws the firebrand of war into all parts of Europe, who always has pharisaical words of peace in his mouth, and gives himself the appearance of wishing to reconcile all, when he is intent only on setting all at variance. Oh, Conrad, when I think of this Emperor Napoleon, of ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... selfishness! there was no such hard worker at the Pyramids or the wall of China)—between him and his fellow! Hunger will be fed—nakedness will be clothed—and God's image, though stricken with age, and broken with disease, be acknowledged; not in the cut-and-dried Pharisaical phrase of trading Church-goers, as a thing vested with immortality—as a creature fashioned for everlasting solemnities—but practically treated as of the great family of man—a brother, invited with the noblest of the Caesars, to an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... am still past reason in all that touches this ignorant, hot-headed, Pharisaical, rather stupid wench! That is droll. But love is a resistless tyrant, and, Mother of God! has there been in my life a day, an hour, a moment when I have not loved her! To see her once was all that I had craved,—as a lost soul might covet, ere the Pit take ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... however; the most casual observer cannot fail to perceive that it is really and truly impenetrable - so impenetrable, in fact, that it will never be unearthed, not even at the day of judgment. In about ten minutes the priests quit mumbling, bestow a Pharisaical kiss on the tattered coverlet of their Bibles, graciously suffer my jack-booted companion to do likewise, as also two or three ragamuffins who have come sneaking in seemingly for that special purpose, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... related, or of foreign nationality. Instead of a general acceptance of the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce under self-government and sink into deterioration and division under coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superiority in the dominant people, the same attribution of sordid and ugly motives to the leaders of an unruly people, the same vague idealization of the loyalist minority, the same fixed hallucination ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... make a great noise about any good act which they perform appear somewhat pharisaical, but we have no right to condemn them upon that score alone, for it often proceeds from a great desire to do good. You know we are very apt to talk of that which most occupies our thoughts, Harry. But where did Elisha Otis's father get ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester

... for etiquette was absolutely shocked; he held up his hands, began a declamation on the rules of evidence, and uttered so many Pharisaical platitudes that I only escaped annihilation by a hair's-breadth. He ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... corruption in high ones. They did not dare to utter a feeble squeak until some giant had accidentally fallen and they could do so without danger to themselves. Then, O Heavens, the palaver! What beatings of tom-toms! What mouthings of pharisaical moralities—platitudes! Run now, good people, for you may see clearly how evil is dealt with in high places! It made him smile. Such hypocrisy! Such cant! Still, so the world was organized, and it was not for him to set it right. Let it wag as it would. The thing for him to do was to get rich and ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... millinery, and London and Paris are the worst places in the world. We have cleaned house. With but extremely slight exceptions, the blood of the slaughtered innocents is no longer upon our skirts, and on the subject of plumage millinery we have a right to be just as Pharisaical as we choose. ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... such denunciations are seldom found. The story of Absalom's undutifulness and rebellion, of David's adultery and murder, of Herod's tyranny, and all other narratives of crime, are related in a calm, simple, impartial, and forbearing spirit, which leads us to condemn the sins, but not to feel a pharisaical resentment and ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... history is perhaps the greatest menace to such an understanding. To take one instance at random—how many English writers have censured, sometimes in terms of friendly sorrow, sometimes in a manner somewhat pharisaical, the treatment of Negroes in Southern States in all its phases, varying from the provision of separate waiting-rooms to sporadic outbreaks of lynching! How few ever mention, or seem to have even heard the word "Reconstruction"—a ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... to suffer much Pharisaical opposition of this sort. Sometimes political systems, sometimes religious zeal, have excluded it from their programme, thereby making their programme unjust and inadequate. Yet of all premature settlements the most premature is that which the fine arts ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... the bond of iniquity, it signifies not to recall," answered he. "I was then like to Gallio, who cared for none of these things. I doted on creature comforts—I clung to worldly honour and repute—my thoughts were earthward—or those I turned to Heaven were cold, formal, pharisaical meditations—I brought nothing to the altar save straw and stubble. Heaven saw need to chastise me in love—I was stript of all I clung to on earth—my worldly honour was torn from me—I went forth an exile from the home of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... but he killed it again, and within five minutes, by doing or saying something odious. He differed from other children, and differed unpleasantly. He had taken the full tinge of his sanctimonious upbringing; he was pharisaical, cruel at times, incurably twisted by his father's creed that wrong becomes right when committed by a pious person from pious motives. (His mother had once destroyed a cat because she found herself growing fond of it and ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... contact with all phases of life and forms of activity, Christian men are to be sure that they take the leaven with them. There are professing Christians that say: 'Oh! I am not strait-laced and pharisaical. I do not keep myself apart from any movements of humanity. I count nothing that belongs to men alien to a Christian.' All right! but when you go into these movements, when you go into Parliament, when you become a city Councillor, when you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... pharisaical," said I. "The poor girl has acted honorably. Her touch has not defiled ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope

... share. Both conscience and fear advised him to keep the blood-money intact. He carried it with him wherever he went, and became, in time, quite pleased with himself because of his compunctions in doing so. He was even pharisaical about McKee's gambling. No, when his mind had come clear about keeping it, he would make an honest use of it, such as investing it in a saloon in Florence. When, however, he suggested to Polly that dispensing liquors over a bar and running a faro-game on the side ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... admitted that he was wronging the man whom he made his tool; if honesty failed under temptation it was honesty's own look-out. Ten to one he himself would have fallen into such a trap, in similar circumstances; he was quite free from pharisaical prejudice; had he not reckoned on mere human nature in devising his plan? Nor would the result be cruel, for he had it in his power to repay a hundredfold all temporary pain. There were no limits to the kindness he was capable of, when ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... England Magistrate to order a Man to the Whipping Post for daring to ride for a midwife on the Lord's Day"; but in the same manuscript he pays these people of rigid rules the following tribute: "Tho' these People may be ridiculed for some Pharisaical Particularitys in their Worship and Behaviour, yet they were very useful Subjects, as being Frugal and Industrious, giving no Scandal or Bad Example, at least by any Open and Public Vices. By which excellent Qualities they had much the Advantage ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... fig-leaves required in some of these trials was enormous; and, despite all precautions, some details which escaped into the press might well bring a blush to the most hardened American offender. It was both vexatious and comical to see the smug, Pharisaical way in which many journals ignored all these things, and held up their hands in horror at American shortcomings. Some trials, too, which at various times revealed the brutality of sundry military officers toward soldiers, were heartrending; and especially one or two ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... in our country, in two separate and distinct nations, hitherto nominally united under one form of government—nations as distinct as ever were the Roman and the Greek. As the Cavalier of the Cromwellian era was a horror to the pharisaical Puritan, and the Puritan in his turn a contempt and an abomination to the reckless, pleasure-hunting Cavalier, so to-day is the 'psalm-singing, clock-peddling Yankee' a foul odor to the fastidious nostrils of the lordly Southerner, and the reckless prodigal, dissipated ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... case which calls for attention is that of Joseph A. Britton, and it impressively illustrates the evils which will sooner or later come to any people who permit the Pharisaical element to arrogate authority, or who legalize the infringement of liberty by authorizing the establishment of a censorship of morals, especially when power is lodged in the hands of persons who have a penchant for delving in moral sewers, and are not hedged about with restrictions which ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... take a railway journey for the same object, is it not the physical vitality that is deficient? I do not quarrel with the transcendental treatment of love; I only say that if this is accompanied with a burning scorn and contempt for those who cannot pursue it, it becomes at once a pharisaical and bitter thing. No religion was ever propagated by scolding backsliders or contemning the weak; no chivalry was ever worth the name that did not stand for a desire to do battle ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... discrimination. Their beneficial tendency ought to be proven, and they, who enjoin them, ought to observe them also. He had never encouraged a violation of the rules of fasting, but rather advised them to be kept, in order to spare the weak. Yet he esteemed such restraint pharisaical and in conflict with the letter and spirit of the Gospel. Vattli was about to make objections, when Engelhart drew out his Greek Testament, and, having opened it at the beginning of the fourth chapter of the first epistle to Timothy, handed it to ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

... to tackle a mistress and convince her of her faults, so Miss Gibbs's pharisaical tendencies went unchecked. Evidently the only possible method was to dodge her. Whether her suspicions were aroused it is impossible to say, but for several days she neglected her attic sanctum and pervaded the garden during ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... short story is a great factor for good. The world is weary of the bald sermons of the Puritans, and of their endeavor to "point a tale" by every ordinary occurrence; it is rather inclined to a Pharisaical self-righteousness; and needs to have its sins, and the practical benefits of goodness, cunningly insinuated; but it can never fail to admire and strive to emulate the noble deeds of noble men, whether creatures of flesh or phantoms of the ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett

... Hampstead seems to be intellectually intoxicating; at any rate it has a rather stimulating effect on a certain kind of dogmatic mind. This intolerance has been very eloquently rebuked by a distinguished man who is an ornament of the Church of England. It is Dean Farrar who says that these pharisaical attacks on the stage are inspired only by "concentrated malice." Well, the periodical misunderstanding to which the stage is exposed need cause but little disquiet. I have no doubt it will survive its ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... man's consistency consists in his relation to his own smoking and betting and not in his rushing his consistency over into the smoking and betting of other people. Perhaps being consistent does not need to mean being a little pharisaical, or using force, or cutting people off and having no argument with them, in one matter, because one cannot agree with them in another. Of course, I admit it would be better if Mr. Cadbury would ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... Behemoth. Cabal. Cherub. Cinnamon. Hallelujah. Hosannah. Jehovah. Jubilee. Gehenna. Leviathan. Manna. Paschal. Pharisee. Pharisaical. Rabbi. Sabbath. Sadducees. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... light before which even solid gold or blackest marble becomes transparent, so is there a spiritual light before which all veils of falsehood shall shrivel up and perish and cease to hide; so that, in individual character, in the facts of being, in the densest of Pharisaical hypocrisy, there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, nothing hid that shall ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... is to depend upon should harmonize with the interest hitherto prevalent in the County. Every thing short of this leaves them subject to a charge of acting upon false pretences, unless they prefer being accused of harbouring a pharisaical presumption, that would be odious were it not ridiculous. If the state of society in Westmoreland be as corrupt as they describe, what, in the name of wonder, has preserved their purity? Away then with hypocrisy and hollow pretext; let us be no longer deafened with a rant about throwing off intolerable ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... Monarchy in the Minds of Men. Therefore, Atheism did never perturb States; but Superstition hath been the confusion of many. The causes of Superstition are pleasing and sensual rights, and Ceremonies; Excess of Pharisaical and outside holiness, Reverence to Traditions and the stratagems of Prelates for their own Ambition and ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

... his book, firm as a rock, sure of himself, convinced that he was doing the best thing, proud of his strength of mind and his obstinacy, perfectly pharisaical in his contempt of human weakness, persuaded that no power in earth or heaven could force him to do or say anything against his mature judgment. He sat in his deep chair near a window that was half open, his legs stretched straight out before him, his flashing patent leather feet ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... opened, and it was demonstrated that the poor people, the toilers and workers, did want to see such things on Sunday, and now more people visit the Museum on Sunday than on all the other days of the week put together. The same is true of the public libraries. There is something to me infinitely pharisaical, hypocritical and farcical in this Sunday nonsense. The rich people who favor keeping Sunday "holy," have their coachman drive them to church and wait outside until the services end. What do they care about the coachman's soul? While they are at church their cooks are busy at ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... at the bottom "Burn this letter." Fisher had neither written the letter which was requested nor burned Blaine's. Meanwhile it was recalled that Blaine had earlier characterized the reformers as "upstarts, conceited, foolish, vain" and as "noisy but not numerous, pharisaical but not practical, ambitious but not wise," and the already intemperate campaign ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... short prayer with somewhat similar meaning occurred to the minister's son, but he only smiled at the pharisaical egotism of the Fat Woman. After all she had trained the children morally, if not religiously, and this made the teaching of Christian truths far less difficult. Children reared in love are almost always ready to accept the ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz

... Aurelius, as in so many lives, we are able to trace the great law of compensation. His exalted station, during the later years of his life, threw him among many who were false and Pharisaical and base; but his youth had been spent under happier conditions, and this saved him from falling into the sadness of those whom neither man nor woman please. In his earlier years it had been his lot to see the fairer side ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... the tones of a little song by Saint-Saens, so sweet, so sad, and familiar to them both, and concerning which he had once said to her at Villa Diedo that he could never refuse anything to one who prayed thus. Now it was the idea of fleeing far, far away and for ever, from this pagan and pharisaical Rome. Again it was a vision of peace and pure converse with the woman whom he would win over to the faith at last. It was an ardent desire to say to the Lord:—"The world is too sad, let me adore Thee thus." Then there came the thought that in all this there was no sin, there was no ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro

... doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less provocation), with the raking up of past histories, about which the opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be pharisaical is strongly divided, and which ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... insult, outrage, suffering, yea, even death itself. We anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, calumny. Tumults may arise against us. The ungodly and violent, the proud and Pharisaical, the ambitious and tyrannical, principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places, may combine to crush us. So they treated the MESSIAH, whose example we are humbly striving to imitate. If we suffer with him, we know that we shall reign with ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... gratifying it were set on the realization of dreams and fancies, engendered of an unbridled imagination, which an admixture of mysticism further distempered. A false scandal which he took at the discrepancy between the lives and doctrines of the clergy, in his time widely corrupted, heightened by his Pharisaical pride,—which a bodily temperament, naturally disinclined to sensual excess, inflated all the more—as, by means of such bodily temperament, he was enabled with so little merit of his own, to keep up an ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby

... swallow a camel. Could any thing be more true of our churches? They would be shocked at the proposition of fellowshipping a SHEEP-stealer; and at the same time they hug to their communion a MAN-stealer, and brand me with being an infidel, if I find fault with them for it. They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. They are always ready to sacrifice, but seldom to show mercy. They are they who are represented ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... We knew his honesty, the wiles with which he was encompassed, and that age had already begun to relax the firmness of his purposes; and I am convinced he is more deeply seated in the love and gratitude of the republicans, than in the Pharisaical homage of the federal monarchists. For he was no monarchist from preference of his judgment. The soundness of that gave him correct views of the rights of man, and his severe justice devoted him to them. He has often declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... coward! Great God, mother! don't you understand me? I simply long to go. It seems to me as though everything in life worth having depends on my doing what you and others want me to do. But how can I! I hate talking about it, it sounds so pharisaical, but my father wanted me to be a Christian, and you know what Christianity meant to him. As I have said again and again, it comes to this—either war is wrong and hellish, or Christianity is a fable. ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking

... in these rather Pharisaical reflections, Mrs. Nicholson was announced. Merton greeted her, and gave orders that no other client was to be admitted. He was himself rather nervous. Was Mrs. Nicholson in a rage? No, her eyes beamed friendly; geniality ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... said Grace. "Rose and Letitia will, certainly; and the others will follow suit. After all, John, perhaps we old families, as we call ourselves, are a little bit pharisaical and self-righteous, and too apt to thank God that we are not as other men are. It'll do us good to be obliged to come a little out of ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... popular declamation consisted, it seems, in this—to denounce all men and women to destruction, and then hold out hopes to his adherents that they were the chosen few, included in the promises, and who could never fall away. It would appear that this pharisaical doctrine is a very delicious one, and the most grateful of all ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... successful; and the decadence of that empire was the fatal fruit of that day's folly. In like manner we have had the letter of the Constitution thrust between us and victory. The leaders of the Opposition carried it before them, with ostentation and loud pharisaical rant, in the late political battle. But, much as it has embarrassed and retarded our cause, terrifying and bewildering weak minds, the device has not availed in the past, and it shall avail still less in the future. The spirit of the Constitution ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... the false Hugh Peters had indicated, with assassination for its sanction, would be an uncomfortable institution for a "hanging judge" like the Honourable Justice Harbottle. That sarcastic and ferocious administrator of the criminal code of England, at that time a rather pharisaical, bloody and heinous system of justice, had reasons of his own for choosing to try that very Lewis Pyneweck, on whose behalf this audacious trick was devised. Try him he would. No man living should take that morsel out of ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... ought I know, the master of them all. "There was a man," saith Luke, "named Zaccheus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich," Luke xix. 2. This man, Christ saith, was a son of Abraham, that is, as other Jews were; for he spake to stop the mouths of their Pharisaical cavillations. Besides, the Publican shewed himself to be such an one, when under a supposition of wronging any man, he had respect to the Jewish law of restoring four-fold; Exod. xxii. 1; 2 Sam. ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan

... take a sly revenge upon them. Upon entering a dwelling, the kannakippers oftentimes volunteer a pharisaical prayer-meeting: hence, they go in secret by the name of ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... accompanied by their male escorts on pleasure bent: the restaurant, the theatre, and the supper, until the unwelcome cry—that cry which resounds at half-past twelve from end to end of Greater London, "Time, please, ladies and gentlemen. Time!"—the pharisaical decree that further harmless merriment is forbidden. How the foreigner laughs at our childish obedience to the decree of the killjoys. And well he may, especially when we know full well that while the good ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux

... than this of Josephus: I mean, because "Cain was of the evil one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous," 1 John 3:12. Josephus's reason seems to be no better than a pharisaical notion or tradition. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... your pharisaical expression, perhaps," he said good-naturedly. "But never mind! We look at the matter from different points of view. To me it is a greater indiscretion to annoy a helpless prisoner with 'holier-than-thou' questions ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... hath some reflection upon myself I shall forbear to censure them, and leave them to God's mercy and the King's justice." Yet Laud in the very previous sentence had thanked his colleagues for the "just and honourable censure" they had passed; and when he spoke in this Pharisaical way of God's mercy and the King's justice, he knew that the said justice had condemned Prynne to be fined another L5,000, to be deprived of the remainder of his ears in the pillory, to be branded on both cheeks with "S. L." (Schismatical ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer

... Academy, xxii. 348, 364, 382, Mr. C. E. Doble shews strong grounds for the belief that the author was Richard Allestree, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford, and Provost of Eton. Cowper spoke of it as 'that repository of self-righteousness and pharisaical lumber;' with which opinion Southey wholly disagreed. Southey's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... seemed so appropriate to the occasion,—how when he was about to offer up Isaac, he saw a little he-goat suggestively nearby fastened among the thorns; and I suggested that instead of sacrificing me he should take the widow Smith's little Johnnie, who shows even at this early Sabbath-school age a pharisaical aptitude for piety. I pointed out that in the sight of heaven one soul is as worthy, as acceptable, as another. Besides, did not Isaac become a righteous man, even if he was not offered up and did live in this ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... my chances are not improved since yesterday," said Meynell, with a grim shadow of a smile, "supposing that anybody from Upcote has been gossipping at Sandford. It does not exactly add to one's moral influence to be regarded as a Pharisaical humbug." ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... hate that kind of pharisaical bigotry. The fact that Mrs. Lorimer behaved as she did is no reason in the world why you should cut the poor woman. It's a well-known fact that people who are really much worse than she is are freely received into the best society; ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham

... difficult thing in the world to draw a line between mere arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one, it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because he desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, is not that he sought power, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... pharisaical—"Shall we, 'weak, sinful men,'" one says, "perhaps even more sinful than the slaveholder, cry out, No Union with Slaveholders?" Such a course is wanting in ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... my tongue, for it seemed to me that I was pharisaical; and I wondered rather scornfully if I should have been so indignant were the girl not so beautiful, young, and ingenuous. I tried not to think further of the matter, and talked much to Ruth,—Gait Roscoe walked with Mrs. Revel and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... felt for him by the rest of the Grantly faction. She had forgiven him his sermon. She had forgiven him his Low Church tendencies, his Sabbath-schools, and puritanical observances. She had forgiven his pharisaical arrogance, and even his greasy face and oily, vulgar manners. Having agreed to overlook such offences as these, why should she not in time be taught to regard ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... "security and happiness" of their constituents, "would in time have the most destructive influence," and "endanger their very existence." And the king answered them that, "upon pain of his highest displeasure, the importation of slaves should not be in any respect obstructed." "Pharisaical Britain," wrote Franklin in behalf of Virginia, "to pride thyself in setting free a single slave that happened to land on thy coasts, while thy laws continue a traffic whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that is entailed ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft

... Such humble words, however, ought not to be regarded as penitent confessions of a sinful heart, but as generous concessions of a charitable mind. In short, a thorough belief in her own virtuousness and superior excellence was the key-note of her character. The Pharisaical tendency to thank God for not having made her like other people pervades every page of her autobiography, of which Charles Mazade justly says that ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... or aired her grievance in the public prints. The world thenceforth can give but one thing she wants, and that's an unmarked grave. May God in his mercy shield all such from the parrot criticisms and brutal insults of the fish-blooded, pharisaical female, whose heart never thrilled to love's wild melody, yet who marries for money—puts her frozen charms up at auction for the highest bidder, and having obtained a fair price by false pretenses, imagines herself preeminently respectable! In the name of all the gods at once, which is ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Upper Canadian Reformers suffered by their connection with the Lower Canadian party. Complaint was made that the Hon. E. P. Tache had advised Roman Catholics to make common cause with Anglicans in resisting the secularization of the clergy reserves, had described the advocates of secularization as "pharisaical brawlers," and had said that the Church of England need not fear their hostility, because the "contra-balancing power" of the Lower Canadians would be used to protect the Anglican Church. This, said the Globe, ...
— George Brown • John Lewis

... sacrilege. Customs that, like the hygienic rules of the Mosaic code, may have started as genuine social utilities are maintained because they have become fixed in the religious traditions as enjoined by the Lord. In consequence there may be a Pharisaical insistence on the performance of the letter of the law, long after its practical utility or spiritual significance is forgotten. It is this persistence in the literal fulfillments of religious commands at the expense of the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... possibly get. Startled and pleased at first by the salutation which Lord Maxwell and his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had passed his afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it. So these were the terms he was to be on with them—the deuce take them and their pharisaical airs! If all the truth were known, most men would look foolish; and the men who thanked God that they were not as other men, soonest of all. He wished he had not been taken by surprise; he wished he had not answered them; he would show them ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... real godliness. What were then considered as the signs of real godliness, the sadcoloured dress, the sour look, the straight hair, the nasal whine, the speech interspersed with quaint texts, the Sunday, gloomy as a Pharisaical Sabbath, were easily imitated by men to whom all religions were the same. The sincere Puritans soon found themselves lost in a multitude, not merely of men of the world, but of the very worst sort of men of the world. For the most ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... superstition did not stand in the way, clothed in pharisaical assumption and political power, experiments might be made on human beings and animals sufficient to settle most positively all doubt as to transmutation of species by the semi-creative power from the invisible world, combined with ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various

... They expected to be trampled to death in the hippodrome by furious elephants; but after some delay they were released unhurt. The history of their escape, however, is more melancholy than the history of their danger. No sooner did the persecution cease than they turned with Pharisaical cruelty against their weaker brethren who had yielded to the storm; and they put to death three hundred of their countrymen, who in the hour of danger had yielded to the threats of punishment, and complied with the ceremonies ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... degraded than the more flaunting and luxurious licentiousness of the English Court. Of the fundamental aims of the nation, of the deep-seated traits of their character, he was profoundly ignorant. At once turbulent and mean-spirited, pharisaical and profligate; poverty-stricken and yet proud; bigoted in its beliefs, and yet careless of all the decencies of religion—such is the aspect which Scottish national character bore to Clarendon. To a superficial and distant observer there was not a little ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik

... that passed," said Oak, with a pharisaical sense that he was not as other shearers ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... autobiography.* At a service on Sunday, November 7, 1841, in Nauvoo, an elder named Clark ventured to reprove the brethren for their lack of sanctity, enjoining them to solemnity and temperance. "I reproved him," says the prophet, "as pharisaical and hypocritical, and not edifying the people, and showed the Saints what temperance, faith, virtue, charity, and truth were. I charged the Saints not to follow the example of the adversary non-ormons in accusing the brethren, and said, 'If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... his mother. Then, step by step, he followed his career in Brookville: his smug satisfaction in his own good looks; his shallow pride and vanity over the vapid insincerities he had perpetrated Sunday after Sunday in the shabby pulpit of the Brookville church; his Pharisaical relations with his people; his utter misunderstanding of their needs. All this proved poignant enough to force the big drops to his forehead.... There were other aspects of himself at which he scarcely dared look in his utter abasement of spirit; those dark hieroglyphics ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... impregnated with the free spirit of the gospel to submit to such a prophet as Montanus. He had, however, powerful advocates, and even a Roman bishop at one time gave him countenance. [437:3] Though his discipline commended itself to the morose and pharisaical, it was rejected by those who rightly understood the mystery of godliness. Several councils were held to discuss its merits, and it was emphatically condemned. [438:1] The signal failure of some of the Montanist predictions had greatly lowered the credit of the party; Montanus ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... you agitators? With Pharisaical pretension it is sometimes said it is a moral obligation to agitate, and I suppose they are going through a sort of vicarious repentance for other men's sins. With all due allowance for their zeal, we ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... off!" said irritated Bob. "Why come you here to bother one? You pharisaical old snob, You're wuss ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert

... received from you. Be convinced that the golden link of prayer binds you to that angelic infant, and that it is continually offering its fervent petitions at the throne of God for you, that you may both be reunited in heaven. But I hear men cry out with Pharisaical assurance, "You dishonor God, sir, in praying to the saints. You make void the mediatorship of Jesus Christ. You put the creature above the Creator." How utterly groundless is this objection! We do not dishonor God in praying to ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... Brazilian sugar. But we import the accursed thing; we bond it; we employ our skill and machinery to render it more alluring to the eye and to the palate; we export it to Leghorn and Hamburg; we send it to all the coffee houses of Italy and Germany: we pocket a profit on all this; and then we put on a Pharisaical air, and thank God that we are not like those wicked Italians and Germans who have no scruple about swallowing slave grown sugar. Surely this sophistry is worthy only of the worst class of false witnesses. "I perjure myself! Not for the world. I only kissed ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... seems to me that it is very useless to ask whether we are training an inferior stock. There was a time when the Anglo-Saxon stock was far inferior {96} to its present condition. We ourselves are not enough removed from heathenism and barbarism to become very pharisaical. ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various

... account of my holy life? Or on account of my pharisaical religion? Or on account of my prayers, fastings, and works? Never. Well, then, it is certain God did not call me on account of my blasphemies, persecutions, oppressions. What prompted Him to call me? ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther

... exclaimed the man almost angrily. "Abandon you to all this abysmal bigotry and—to this pharisaical web of ugly dogmas! Conscience, you're falling ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... sweater is to spread in our midst? Reduce wages to the point where the laborer has to either remain at the shop or take his work home and work into the night, and drive it on through Sunday as well, and you simply brutalize the workman. It is idle, and pharisaical as well, for us to shrug our shoulders and say this is not a question for the pulpit. So intimate is the relation between the body and the soul, that every question which has to do with the feeding or clothing of a human body is, at the last analysis, ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... said that "nobody objects to attending class-meeting except those who have no religion." Persons who thus judge of others show more of the Pharisaical, than of the Christian, spirit, and evince but little of the "wisdom that cometh from above" in thus "measuring others by themselves." The following correspondence shows that I am second to none in my appreciation of the value and usefulness of class meetings; but I have had too much experience ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... therefore his plea, genuine if ungrammatical, is heard only at second-hand, in a fragmentary and garbled form. Little wonder, then, that such a plea is received with felicitous self-gratulation, or passed with pharisaical disregard, by the silly old world that has still so many lessons to learn— so many lessons which none but that unresisting butt of slender-witted jokers can fitly teach, and which he, the experienced one, is usually precluded from teaching by his inability to spell any word of two syllables. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... curious outbursts—a Hetze of unreasoning, frantic, "stop-thief!" and "mad-dog!" persecution—to which he was liable. "Gorgius" may not have been a hero or a proper moral man: he was certainly "a most expensive Herr", and by no means a pattern husband. But recent and by no means Pharisaical expositions have exhibited his wife as almost infinitely not better than she should be; the allegations of treachery to private friends are, on the whole, Not Proven: if he deserted the Whigs, it was no more than some ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... cleanliness made the surrounding dirt cruelly palpable. The muslin curtains in the parlour windows of No. 15 would not have appeared of such a smoky yellow if the curtains of No. 14 had not been of such a pharisaical whiteness. Mrs. Magson, at No. 13, was a humble letter of lodgings, always more or less in arrear with the demands of quarter-day; and it seemed a hard thing that her door-steps, whereon were expended much labour ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... conventional order of life is useful only in so far as it removes from the mind the necessity of detailed planning, and allows it to flow punctually and mechanically in an ordered course. But if we exalt that order into something sacred and solemn, then we become pharisaical and meticulous, and the savour of ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... chiefly with the shortcomings of the orthodox religious world. Its faults of temper, its repulsive manners, its custom of making home unlovely, its distaste of innocent amusement, its habits of censure, its self-sufficiency and pharisaical character, are touched with a caustic but healing power. Only the hand of a friend could have done this thing. No point of doctrine is questioned, no principle of faith invaded, no charity wounded. She probes in love—her object is cure. This book is fresh ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... said Pleydell, "whom I love for his father's sake and his own, has nothing of the sour or pharisaical pride which has been imputed to some of the early fathers of the Calvinistic Kirk of Scotland. His colleague and he differ, and head different parties in the kirk, about particular points of church discipline; but without ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... one night his sweet humanity, his grand, strong love rose up, battled with him, and conquered. He cast his pharisaical ideas, and the Church's "I am better than thou," aside forever; he would go now, to-night, he would ask her to be his wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson

... probably kill her. When she read of quarrels in other noble families—and the accounts of such quarrels will sometimes, unfortunately, force themselves upon the attention of unwilling readers—she would hug herself, with a spirit that was almost pharisaical, reflecting that her destiny was not like that of others. Such quarrels and hatreds between fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons, were in her eyes disreputable to all the persons concerned. She had lived happily ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... if our minds to these souls be descried By circumstances and by signs that be Apparent in us not immediately, How shall my mind's white truth by them be tried? They see idolatrous lovers weep and mourn, And style blasphemous conjurors to call On Jesus' name, and pharisaical Dissemblers feign devotion. Then turn, O pensive soul! to God, for he knows best Thy grief, for he put it ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... I have divided the various stages of my waterwagoning into these parts: the obsession stage; the caramel stage; the pharisaical stage, and the safe-and-sane stage. I drank my Scotch highball and went over to the club. The crowd was there; I sat down at a table and when somebody asked me what I'd have I took a glass of water. Several of my friends looked inquiringly at me and ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe

... and certainly not so inhuman in their practices, as most of the other islanders in the Pacific, were much degraded both in mind and morals. They are perhaps the finest people in a physical point of view of any, yet they had more pharisaical pride and less consciousness of sin; and this, it is possible, prevented them from adopting some of those cruel ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... felt at the time of the Rousseau centenary; my feeling and imagination are chilled and repelled by those Pharisaical people who think themselves too good to associate ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... into disuse. Definitions became loose and vague. The Collegia, which had done so much good, now grew formal, cold, and disputatious. The missions, which had begun very auspiciously, dwindled from want of means and men. External life became pharisaical. Great weight was attached to long prayers. A Duke of Coburg required the masters of schools to utter a long prayer in his presence, as a test of fitness for advancement. Pietism grew mystical, ascetic, and superstitious. Some of its advocates ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... to these souls be descried By circumstances and by signs that be Apparent in us—not immediately[78]— How shall my mind's white truth by them be tried? They see idolatrous lovers weep and mourn, And, style blasphemous, conjurors to call On Jesu's name, and pharisaical Dissemblers feign devotioen. Then turn, O pensive soul, to God; for he knows best Thy grief, for he put ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... impartially all round. And if the lassie Grant's excellences were somewhat obtrusively contrasted with Baubie's shortcomings, it was because, the two children being of the same age, Mrs. Duncan hoped to rouse thereby a spark of emulation in Baubie. Neither was there any pharisaical self-exaltation on the part of the rival. She was a sandy-haired little girl, an orphan who had been three years in the refuge, and who in her own mind rather deprecated as unfair any comparison drawn between ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... discovered that she, like the rest, had assumed a disguise; for she was far too innocent to sustain the deception; and yesterday was fresh in my memory. I was forced to continue turning her assumed character to account; but it would be pharisaical in me to say that I rose to any moral heights in her regard—wine and excitement had deadened my better nature to that extent. I thought she looked prettier than ever, and, as time passed, I fell into a cynical carelessness about her. This glimpse of her home life, and the desperate ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... found everything so different from what he had imagined in his lonely meditations at Benares! It was the Bible only that saved him from returning to his old religion, and helped him to discern beneath theological futilities, accumulated during nearly two thousand years, beneath pharisaical hypocrisy, infidelity, and want of charity, the buried, but still living seed, committed to the earth by Christ and his Apostles. How can a missionary in such circumstances meet the surprise and questions of his pupils, unless he may point to that seed, and tell them what Christianity ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... they secretly, though perhaps unwittingly, "rejoice in iniquity." But it is to be feared, if we may judge from the exhibition of the same spirit, that many who make high pretensions to superior sanctity rest their hopes, to a great extent, on a similar foundation. With the Pharisaical Jews, they think if they judge them that do evil, even though they do the same, they shall escape the judgment of God. They are as eager to catch up and proclaim upon the house-top the deficiencies of their brethren, as the self-righteous moralist, who prides himself on ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb

... a crime; that it does not reform the criminal but destroys him body and soul; that it does not protect the community but exposes it to incalculable perils; and that the assumption that a criminal class exists among us separate and distinct from any and the best of the rest of us is Pharisaical, false and wicked. The "Subterranean Brotherhood" are our brothers—they are ourselves, unjustly and vainly condemned to serve as scapegoats for the rest. What the criminal instinct or propensity in a man needs ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... middle of August. Such disclosures would have necessitated a moral effort on his part, for which even his friendship for Schrotter could not supply him with sufficient force. He knew that Schrotter's views on morality were neither narrow nor pharisaical, that to him virtue did not consist in the outward observance of social rules, but in self-forgetful, brotherly love and a strict adherence to duty. It would have afforded him unspeakable relief to have been able to pour out his heart to his friend, to give ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... however, gave—how should they fail to give?—a strong handle to the grasp of those who cared for nothing in religion but its respectability—who went to church Sunday after Sunday, "for the sake of example" as they said—the most arrogant of Pharisaical reasons! Many a screeching, dancing fisher lass in the Seaton was far nearer the kingdom of heaven than the most respectable of such respectable people! I would unspeakably rather dance with the wildest of fanatics rejoicing over a change in their own spirits, than sit in the seat ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... for the first time, but I do not think with the most desirable effect. The only immediate result that I can remember of this increase of my Christian profession and privileges was, I am sorry to say, a rigid pharisaical formalism, which I carried so far as to decline accompanying my father and mother to our worthy clergyman's house, one Sunday, when we were invited to spend the evening with him and his family. This sort of acrid fruit is ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... proper fashion. Without having ventured into the field of sentiment, there is no doubt Peter had carried himself in a way to satisfy Mr. Molyneux, and he himself gave such an account of the tea to Mr. McGuffie senior, that night, that the horsedealer, although not given to Pharisaical observance of the Sabbath, attended the little Baptist chapel next day in state, sleeping through the sermon, but putting five shillings in the plate, while Peter, sitting most demurely at his father's side, identified two of his ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren

... but they all have this in common, that their virtues sit easy and natural upon them, as native outgrowths, not as things put on: there is no ambition, no pretension, nothing at all boastful or fictitious or pharisaical or squeamish or egoish in their virtues; we never see the men hanging over them, or nursing and cosseting them, as if they were specially thoughtful and tender of them, and fearful lest they might catch cold. Then too, with all these men, the good they do, in doing ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... problem. But if outspoken sympathy draws them toward one of the belligerent powers, then their judgment is as little objective as that of the belligerents themselves. Their pretended neutrality gives to their expressions a loathsome Pharisaical aspect, because they come to a decision according to their opinions as if they stood on a height above the contestants and, from this lofty standpoint, were holding an anticipated Last Judgment on ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... same Religion in after Ages. And as no Person can doubt, but that the Jewish Religion was much more perfect in the Days of Moses, and those which immediately succeeded him, than in after Times, when it was obscur'd and mudded by Pharisaical Inventions and Traditions: So must it also be confess'd, that the Christian Religion was much more perfect in the Days of the Apostles, and the Ages immediately succeeding them, than since it has been obscur'd ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail

... the case might be, that their money went. It went, too, for the very elegant and exclusive little dinners to which, on rare occasions, their friends were bidden; and it went for the high place in the synagogue from which they prayed their pharisaical prayers. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey

... say, distinctly enough, I believe, that the opponents are merely deliberating upon how to suppress us by force." (175.) July 15: "Repeatedly have I been with certain enemies who belong to that herd of Eck. Words fail me to describe the bitter, Pharisaical hatred I noticed there. They do nothing, they plan nothing else than how they may incite the princes against us, and supply the Emperor with impious weapons." (197.) The implacable theologians also succeeded ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... between you and me, I am just as well satisfied that you did not attach yourself, as I expected you would have done, to our congregation; for, to acknowledge a truth, Darby, which I do in all charity, I tell you, my friend, that they are awfully Pharisaical, and wretchedly deficient in a proper sense of Christian justice; I, Darby, am a proof of it. I mentioned to another person before, Darby, that the Christian devotion of an act I did, would occasion considerable risk to my own reputation, and you see it has done so. I shall bear all ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... he was driven to a wider range. Those higher Pharisees who were above him in his own pharisaical establishment, had interfered with the austerity of his worship. He could not turn against them there, on their own ground. He, of all men, could not be disobedient to official orders. But if he could promote a movement ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... work is the fundamentally and thoroughly un-German civilisation of France, which is aped neither with talent nor with taste, and the imitation of which gives the society, the press, the art, and the literary style of Germany their pharisaical character. Naturally the copy nowhere produces the really artistic effect which the original, grown out of the heart of Roman civilisation, is able to produce almost to this day in France. Let any one who wishes to see ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... is not a little verisimilitude in this conception of America as a sort of central office and a tower of strength in the projected federation of neutral nations, however pharisaical an appearance it may all have in the self-complacent utterances of patriotic Americans. The American republic is, after all, the greatest of the pacific nations of Christendom, in resources, population and industrial capacity; and it is also not to be denied that the temper of this large population ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... probably considered the tentative suggestion of seven times as a very liberal measure, inasmuch as the rabbis prescribed a triple forgiveness only.[827] He may have chosen seven as the next number above three having a special Pharisaical significance. The Savior's answer was enlightening: "Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven." This reply must have meant to Peter as it means to us, that to forgiveness man may set no bounds; the forgiveness, however, must ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... his will. While he was thus doing, the enemy was preparing to take his life. The Sanhedrin was a high tribunal or court composed of seventy-three men, made up of priests, elders, and doctors of the law, Pharisaical hypocrites, the seed of the serpent, blinded to God's purposes. That body was the highest court of Israel and it was the duty of this court to protect the innocent as well as to punish the guilty. They beheld Jesus doing good and the people flocking ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford

... A pharisaical austerity rendered him redoubtable by the license he assumed in his public reprimands, whether to plaintiffs, or defendants, advocates or magistrates; so that there was not a single person who did not tremble to have to do with him. Besides this, sustained in all by the Court (of which he ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... "I'm going to do what any man with an ounce of self-respect would do under the circumstances. I'm going to do what I was a fool not to have done three months ago—what I should have done if it hadn't been for you. If in their contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to forget what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for me. If it's the last act of my life I'm going ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... not a prodigal; he was a well-behaved youth. He was only proud, only thought much of himself; was only pharisaical, not hypocritical; was only neglectful of those nearest him, always polite to those comparatively nothing to him! Compassionate and generous to necessity, he let his father and his sister-cousin starve for the only real food a man can give, that is, himself. As to him ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... disillusioned spectator of the "great mundane movement," yet eternally interested in it; and the man who loves this poor human life of ours, without ever being fooled by it, at least after youth is past, has a rare place among us. We forgive his insight, because there is nothing in it Pharisaical. And the irony he uses on us we know well that he has long since sharpened ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... with other people's business. Exaggeration, of course, damnable parti pris! When did she ever see Kitty except with a jaundiced eye? "I wonder Kitty condescends to go to the woman's house! She must know that everything she does is seen there en noir. Pharisaical, narrow-minded Philistines!" ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... evil in another. How gentle, and yet how searching, are his rebukes of self-complacent respectability, holding it responsible, in spite of all its decent seemings, for much of the depravity which it condemned with Pharisaical harshness! In his Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind be dwells with great earnestness upon the importance of possessing "the mind of Christ," which removes from the heart the desire of superiority and worldly honors, incites attention ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... remember the bitter words I have heard spoken against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the honor of figuring,—and, far worse than these, the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,—and then recall the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... used to be, and as, some day, it will be. But there it is, and if you are going to live out and out like a Christian man, you will get the old sneers flung at you. You will be 'crotchety,' 'impracticable,' 'spoiling sport,' 'not to be dealt with,' 'a wet blanket,' 'pharisaical,' 'bigoted,' and all the rest of the pretty words which have been so frequently used about the men that try to live like Jesus Christ. Never mind! 'In the world ye have tribulation.' 'I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus,' the branding-iron ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... Francis had brought back from the East. After his usual fashion, he mistook his malevolence for virtue, nursed it, as preachers tell us that we ought to nurse our good dispositions, and paraded it, on all occasions, with Pharisaical ostentation. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... another; rather, Understand one another. The oft-quoted sentence of Madame de Stael: "To understand everything means to forgive everything," has never particularly appealed to me; it has the odor of the confessional; to forgive one's fellow-being conveys the idea of pharisaical superiority. To understand one's fellow-being suffices. The admission partly represents the fundamental aspect of my views on the emancipation of woman and its effect ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... expression, or a look which indicated ennui, even to those associates by whose presence he was most unspeakably bored. Hazlet mistook his courteous manner for a deferential agreement, and was, too often, in Julian's presence more than usually insufferable in his Pharisaical tendencies. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... forth a zealous ambassador to publish the glad tidings of salvation to perishing sinners, he will be sure to meet with the fiercest opposition from proud pharisaical professors: so it was from the beginning, and will be to the end of time; but the Lord will work, and none shall hinder. Experimental preaching will always be offensive to the carnal ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... resistance to the authorities, but the bolder members take little pains to conceal their opinions and sentiments, and may be easily recognised by their severe aspect, their Puritanical manner, and their Pharisaical horror of everything which they suppose heretical and unclean. Some of them, it is said, carry this fastidiousness to such an extent that they throw away the handle of a door if it has been ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... brings to her guidance she has picked up helter-skelter. They are the crumbs gathered from the table of the Uneasy Woman, or worse, of the pharisaical and satisfied woman, from good and bad books, from newspaper exploitations of divorce and scandal, from sly gossip with girls whose budget of marital wisdom is as higgledy-piggledy ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... before the march of a barbarous "progress" (erroneously christened) "of intelligence." The hard spirit of money-getting, the harder spirit of education-getting, and the hardest of all spirits, that of pharisaical morality, have divorced our youth, a vinculo, from every species of amusement; and life has come to be a probationary struggle, too fierce to allow a moment's relaxation. The bodies of children are drugged and worried into health, their intellects are stuffed and forced ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... they knew there were no such things; and in like manner, that the Schoolmen had framed a number of subtle and intricate axioms, and theorems, to save the practice of the church. The causes of superstition are: pleasing and sensual rites and ceremonies; excess of outward and pharisaical holiness; overgreat reverence of traditions, which cannot but load the church; the stratagems of prelates, for their own ambition and lucre; the favoring too much of good intentions, which openeth the gate to conceits and novelties; the taking an aim at divine matters, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon

... Cross, and in obedience to the destiny held forth in your high calling, and in faithfulness to the name that He Himself has impressed upon you, then your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the painful and punctilious pharisaical obedience to outward commands, and all things lovely and of good report will spring to life in your hearts and bear ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... you drive to drink and fight and kill by your pharisaical methods. You shut the doors of your theatres and your art galleries, and you set wide the doors of your drinking hells. How you can call yourself a religious ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick



Words linked to "Pharisaical" :   holier-than-thou, pious, sanctimonious, pietistical, pharisee, pharisaic



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