Top 101 Puritan Quotes & Sayings

If you have beautiful knees, show your knees. I'm not a puritan. I love skin.

We are very puritan in America. We still hold true to these really antiquated values, this idea of the sanctity of marriage.

The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There's something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.

The puritan through life's sweet garden goes to pluck the thorn and cast away the rose.

My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as 'Puritan decadence'. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.

You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.

I was raised not so much in a puritan environment, but for the most part, a pretty healthy one.

A society that is not founded on morality falls apart and becomes easy prey to puritan cults such as Islam that on the surface, promote family values and morality.

In the early days of the New England colonies, no more embarrassing or hampering condition, no greater temporal ill, could befall any adult Puritan than to be unmarried.

People saw the Depression as a necessary thing - a chance to squeeze out the excesses, get back to Puritan morality. That just made things worse.

The Puritan sours his pleasures by disguising them as duties.

When the last Puritan has disappeared from the earth, the man of science will take his place as a killjoy, and we shall be given the same old advice but for different reasons.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

I'm a total puritan, but I found Jacques' adventures amusing. We couldn't be further apart. I am a Calvinist toward myself and totally indulgent toward others.

In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

One of the most persistent images in American urbanism is that of the proverbial city on a hill, as first envisioned on these shores by the Puritan John Winthrop, via the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.

We have the reverse of the Puritan work ethic in America now. No one ever becomes a star by plugging along year after year. What is needed is flair, talent, 'an eye,' contacts, charisma, and, most of all, naturalness.

Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement.

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.

I'm far too outspoken to be a woman in Puritan times.

The result has been that although few conservative Presbyterian churches actually worship in the Puritan way, the Puritan theology of worship remains the standard orthodoxy among them. This discrepancy sometimes leads to guilty consciences.

Liszt was a bit of a rock and roller at heart, but he was a bit of a puritan on his sounds.

My wife is a real Puritan. She thinks licking the stamp on the envelope of a Valentine is foreplay.

To live without that enchantment of beauty is to interpret frugality and simple living with a puritan literalism

When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.

Honestly, because of the way women were treated, I wouldn't want to go back to Puritan times.

Do your duty in all things, like the old Puritan. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.

It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won’t chime.

What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start.

From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.

The summum bonum of this [Puritan] ethic is the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all enjoyment.

With our sympathy for the wrongdoer we need the old Puritan and Quaker hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin.

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing, [the Puritan] sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion ... but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.

We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.

The Puritan has passed; the Catholic remains.

Art is hard for a puritan to understand.

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.

The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme.

The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.

We have, in this country, this Puritan, hypocritical, nonrealistic view of sex that is entirely different than the view, for instance, in Western Europe.

Farewell, I wish our souls may meet with comfort at the journey's end.- The Heavenly Footman: A Puritan's View of How to Get to Heaven.

In the history of extra-biblical study and research tools there has never before been a resource as useful as the Puritan Hard Drive.

If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.

Honestly, because of the way women were treated, I wouldn't want to go back to Puritan times. I'm far too outspoken to be a woman in Puritan times.

My father was the classic Puritan. Hold the emotions in check. Keep up appearances.

There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

Men of New England, I hold you to the doctrines of liberty which ye inherit from your Puritan forefathers.

And my father, being a good Swiss puritan, always really insisted that if I was going to be an actor, I shouldn't just be an actor, I should know about the whole process.