Laurence Sterne Quotes

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

My father was a clergyman and always said: 'Hate the sin but love the sinner.'

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

What do you think Jesus would twitter, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone' or 'Has anyone seen Judas? He was here a minute ago.'

Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.

To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.

Priests will pardon thieves but not philosophers.

Atheists have not produced so much evil as hypocrites have produced, or even simply those who preached God without being prepared for Him, daring to pronounce His name with unsanctified lips.

We eat, drink, and sleep religion, but we do not do good.

I've long been offended by not-so-godly pro football players I've known who showed up for pregame chapel - Sunday-only Christians rubbing the proverbial rabbit's foot - then after victories declared it was 'God's will' that their team won.

My parents are very good examples of Christians. They are big on forgiveness.

Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.

The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our heart upon the black horse of affliction.

Once upon a time, a fisherman went out to sea. He caught many fish and threw them all into a large bucket on his boat. The fish were not yet dead, so the man decided to ease their suffering by killing them swiftly. While he worked, the cold air made his eyes water. One of the wounded fish saw this and said to the other: "What a kind heart this fisherman has- see how he cries for us." The other fish replied: "Ignore his tears and watch what he is doing with his hands.

For man may pious texts repeat, And yet religion have no inward seat

A religion cannot be sustained by the number of its lip-followers denying in their lives its tenets.

Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine.

Indulgence is lovely in the sinless; toleration, adorable in the pious and believing heart.

He that puts on a religious habit abroad to gain himself a great name among men, and at the same time lives like an atheist at home, shall at the last be uncovered by God and presented before all the world for a most outrageous hypocrite.

An atheist is but a mad, ridiculous derider of piety, but a hypocrite makes a sober jest of God and religion; he finds it easier to be upon his knees than to rise to a good action.

... what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.

Whoever is a hypocrite in his religion mocks God, presenting to Him the outside and reserving the inward for his enemy.

We are oft to blame in this, - 'tis too much proved, - that with devotion's visage, and pios action we do sugar o'er the devil himself.