Jose Bergamin Quotes

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

It is easy enough to be moral after a good dinner beside a snug coal fire, and with our hearts well warmed with fine old port.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle or a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven, than for a politician to lay aside disguise.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

The affectation of sanctity is a blotch on the face of piety.

The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.

I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

Beware of the virtue which a man boasts is his.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

Many pass for saints on earth whose souls are in hell.

It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

Hypocrisy is oftenest clothed in the garb of religion.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

A preacher who doesn't believe he's that bad will attract people who don't think they're that bad. And that's bad.

Everybody talking 'bout heaven ain't going there!

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

If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

A saint abroad, and a devil at home.

Unsaintly saints are the tragedy of Christianity.