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Pharisee

noun
1.
A self-righteous or sanctimonious person.
2.
A member of an ancient Jewish sect noted for strict obedience to Jewish traditions.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Pharisee" Quotes from Famous Books



... used to condemning the proud self-righteous attitude of the Pharisee in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican,[footnote1:Luke 18:9-14] that we can hardly believe that the picture of him there is meant to apply to us—which only shows how much like him we ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession

... beautiful dear," Faircloth cried, brokenly, as in pain, somewhat indeed beside himself. "Before God, I come near blessing that blatant young fool and pharisee of a parson since he has ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... finest senses of his art with him, and least of all the artist who works for the theatre,—for here loneliness is lacking; everything perfect does not suffer a witness.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, electing cattle, patron, idiot—Wagnerite: there, the most personal conscience is bound to submit to the levelling charm of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules, there one ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... direct revelation of the Spirit of God in man. He comes to reveal the Father to each of us, and to make us feel the presence of the Divine creative Spirit in every separate human life; and till we feel this personal illumination we have not realised the manifestation of the Son of God. But the Pharisee with his continual reference to tradition, his multiplication of external observances, and elaborate ritual, his reliance upon usage and external authority, knows little or nothing of the personal illumination by the direct influence ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival

... fastnesses were intrusted by the Jews to Joseph, the son of Matthias—lineally descended from an illustrious priestly family, with the blood of the Asmonaean running in his veins—a man of culture and learning—a Pharisee who had at first opposed the insurrection, but drawn into it after the defeat of Certius. He is better known to us as the historian Josephus. His measures of defence were prudent and vigorous, and he endeavored to unite the various parties in the contest which he knew was desperate. He raised ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... time is undoubtedly given, that the canon was then complete and sacred. The decision proceeded from that part of the nation who ruled both over school and people, and regained supremacy after the destruction of the temple; i.e., from the Pharisee-sect to which Josephus belonged. It was a conclusion of orthodox Judaism. With true critical instinct, Spinoza says that the canon was the work of the Pharisees. The third collection was undoubtedly made ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson

... dying Christians have repeated His great prayer. On the Church's very birthday, when St. Peter preached the first Christian sermon, he had three texts and two of them were from the Psalms (Acts II.). To an educated and rigid Pharisee like St. Paul they were a treasure house of teaching. To the early Christians the Psalms were a prayer book, for there was no Christian literature. It was twenty-five years after the Ascension before the first books of the New ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... fellow in his private judgment finds more scope: "Let the women go listen to the parson." This is the sort of saying gives him such a conceit of himself. We have the type on both sides, so all can see it. Now it is not in the way of the Pharisee we come to note them, but to note that, strange as it may appear, either or both together will come to applaud the denouncing of the atheist. We gather such into our religious societies, and flatter ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... farther yet and say that not merely is this book written for the cause of Jesus, but it is written in the manner of Jesus. We read his bitter railings at the Pharisees, and miss the point entirely, because the word Pharisee has become to us a word of reproach. But this is due solely to Jesus; in his time the word was a holy word, it meant the most orthodox and respectable, the ultra high-church devotees of Jerusalem. The way to get the spirit of the tirades of Jesus is to do with him what we did with the early church ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... teacher as Jesus—a spiritual messiah—should arise to be the deliverer not of one people only, but of the world itself. Among the Jewish doctors when Jesus was a child was at least one wise and liberal rabbi, Hillel, a Pharisee, the great reformer of his time, and "the most eminent Jew of the generation before the birth of Jesus." At his feet the boy Jesus may have sat and learned lessons of wisdom and liberality. It gives ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... went on, "you are a thoughtful young man—how do you account for the fact that Christ, Himself, attended social functions? He was not a recluse. He was at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, at a dinner in the house of Simon the Pharisee, at a feast in Bethany, and I do not know at how many other social gatherings. Indeed it was charged against Him that He received sinners and ate with them. What do ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock

... Royal City.—Origen on the other hand says that she who, in S. Matthew and S. Mark, poured the ointment in the house of Simon the leper was a different person from the sinner whom S. Luke writes about who poured the ointment on His feet in the house of the Pharisee.—Apolinarius(528) and Theodorus say that all the Evangelists mention one and the same person; but that John rehearses the story more accurately than the others. It is plain, however, that Matthew, Mark, ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon

... he sternly, "you speak like a Pharisee. One of the fathers, as amiable as he was austere, has said: 'Turn your eyes on yourself and take care not to judge the doings of others. Judging others is an idle labour; usually one is erring, often sinning, by so doing, but ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France

... crieth out for mercy, that will be heard. The ways of Providence are not to be judged by men—'Many are called, but few chosen.' It is easier to talk of humility than to feel it. Are you so humble, vile worm, as to wish to glorify God by your own damnation? If not, away with you for a publican and a Pharisee!" ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... digestions if they are men; but all the time I am inwardly lifting up my eyes, and patting myself on the back, and thanking heaven that I am not as they are, and generally out-Phariseeing the veriest Pharisee ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... Lady Annes and Cressidas, polished and refined externally, whom chance and vanity keep right, whom chance and vanity lead wrong, just as it may happen. When we read in history of the enormities of certain women, perfect scarecrows and ogresses, we can safely, like the Pharisee in Scripture, hug ourselves in our secure virtue, and thank God that we are not as others are—but the wicked women in Shakspeare are portrayed with such perfect consistency and truth, that they leave us no such resource—they frighten us into reflection—they make us believe and tremble. On ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... Payne, "and they are not two sorts really, but one. They are the people without imagination. It is that which destroys social life, the lack of imagination. The Pharisee is the cad ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... before he understood the doctrine of a free salvation, attempted to earn a title to heaven by the austerities of monastic discipline, so Paul in early life was "taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers," [59:4] and "after the strictest sect of his religion lived a Pharisee." [59:5] His zeal led him to become a persecutor; and when Stephen was stoned, the witnesses, who were required to take part in the execution, prepared themselves for the work of death, by laying down their upper garments at the feet of the "young man" Saul. [59:6] ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... A second Pharisee added complacently: "The enthusiasm of his hangers-on will soon cool down when he who has promised them ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead

... 1. The Pharisee thanked God that he was not like other men. 2. Vesuvius threw its lava so far that Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried. 3. The smith plunges his red-hot iron into water that he may harden the metal. 4. Socrates said that he who might be better employed was idle. 5. We never tell our ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... Himself to life; and His apostles healed the lame, cast out a spirit of divination, gave the Holy Ghost, restored the dead to life, etc. Every ingenuous mind must see in these all the characters of real miracles. Ponder Matt. xi. 2-6; and John xiv. 11. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and ruler among the Jews, was so struck with the extraordinary character of our Lord's miracles that he came to Him, saying, "Rabbi," excellent master, "we know that Thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... liberty. About that time the Jews were divided into two classes, the Pharisees and Sadducees. Those who adopted the religious ideas of the Parsees were called Pharisees (according to some authorities the word Pharisee was the Hebrew form of Parsee), and those who followed strictly the Jewish ideas, ceremonies, rituals and beliefs were called Sadducees. The former were sharply opposed to the latter in their doctrinal beliefs. They believed in angels and spirits, they expected the resurrection ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda

... inexorable and supercilious, eminent and arrogant worship: though indeed they be far before him. Only wise, only rich, only fortunate, valorous, and fair, puffed up with this tympany of self-conceit; [1918]as that proud Pharisee, they are not (as they suppose) "like other men," of a purer and more precious metal: [1919]Soli rei gerendi sunt efficaces, which that wise Periander held of such: [1920]meditantur omne qui prius negotium, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... "Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup and of the platter, that the outside may be clean also" ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg

... they evidently confounded Moses with Hezekiah, unless they substituted the lawgiver for the king, because they thought it unwise to represent the King as the foe of idolatry. The traditional scorn of the Pharisee for the common people which know not the law comes out in the ironical passage with which the 'martiall' organ concludes its reference to the distressing social symptom; 'Sure if there were an ordinance for recreation and labour upon the Lord's Day, or Sabbath (like the prelatical ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... own ease. Worse still, he, of all men in the world, had dared to set himself up as too virtuous forsooth to have anything to do with an atheist. Was that the mind which was in Christ? Was He a strait-laced, self-righteous Pharisee, too good, too religious to have anything to say to those who disagreed with Him? Did He not live and die for those who are yet enemies to God? Was not the work of reconciliation the work he came for? Did He calculate the loss to Himself, the risk of failure? Ah, no, those who would ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... conceived a very strong friendship for me, and I certainly was equally pleased with him; for he is full of talent, although he is revengeful, proud of his lineage, and holding to the tenets of his faith with all the obstinacy of a Pharisee. Indeed, it is strange that he could ever become so partial to a Christian, respecting as he does the rabbinical doctrines held forth to the Jewish people, and which it must be admitted have been inculcated, in consequence of the unwearied ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... expect, for the honour of the school, that you will do your best. And one thing I must ask of you—it is this. Meg feels herself very superior, with the superiority of the Pharisee. Most of the girls in the school will hate her for what she said to-day; but I want you, as a dear friend, to ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade

... the hint, and, moving off, folded his arms on the taffrail, and, looking idly astern, fell into a reverie. Like the Pharisee, he felt thankful that he was not as other men, and dimly pitied the skipper and his prosaic entanglements, as he thought of Poppy. He looked behind at the dark and silent city, and felt a new affection for it, as he reflected that she was ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... signs of the times. I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? So much good has not been done by one effort in all past time as, in the providence of God, it is now your high privilege to do. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of any William and his spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the Successful Merchant! The best of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all their lives, and for want of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... always observed to be just what true converts among ourselves are; differing from us only in this, that they cherish that desire for the conversion of Israel, which we ought also to cherish, and of which Paul has left so splendid an example. Half-converted men, in whom the carnal pride of the old Pharisee has never been broken down by a divinely wrought sense of the guilt of unbelief in Christ, who, when they were baptized, thought they did Christ and his people an honor; these, of course, never fail to consider themselves ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson

... reason, the mala prohibita, if by correctness be meant a strict attention to certain ceremonious observances, which are no more essential to poetry than etiquette to good government, or than the washings of a Pharisee to devotion, then, assuredly, Pope may be a more correct poet than Shakspeare; and, if the code were a little altered, Colley Cibber might be a more correct poet than Pope. But it may well be doubted whether this kind of correctness be a merit, nay, whether ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... plunder and the pickings and stealings and prostitutions of individuals is more apparent than real. I admit that the kinds of vice and crime I tolerated are far more harmful than the other sorts which are petty and make loathed outcasts of their wretched practitioners. Still, I was snob or Pharisee or Puritan enough to feel and to act upon the imaginary distinction. And so, I had left the city bosses locally independent—for, without the revenues and other aids from vice and crime, what city political machine could be ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... himself to be what he really was in the sight of God, a guilty, hell-deserving sinner—lost, ruined, and undone. He had never believed it before, and the prayers which he had occasionally offered up had been very much in the spirit of the Pharisee's, "God, I thank thee that I am ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley

... dreaded that. Yet he felt that something should be said. So, lawyer-like, he puts the case abstractly. "Hmm—does our law judge a man without giving him a fair hearing?" That sounds fair, though it does seem rather feeble in face of their determined opposition. But near by sits a burly Pharisee, who turns sharply around and, glaring savagely at Nicodemus, says sneeringly: "Who are you? Do you come from Galilee, too? Look and see! No prophet comes out of Galilee"—with intensest contempt in the tone with which he pronounces the word Galilee. And poor Nicodemus seems to shrink back ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon

... No matter. Love she possessed, and love she desired to lavish on some object worthy of her regard. That object she discovered in Jesus. She took her alabaster-box of precious ointment, and went after him. She enters the Pharisee's house; it may have been the house where she had fallen. The Pharisee seemed to know her character, and so he said, "This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him, for she is a sinner." Christ did not at once recognize the suspicion, but ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... anoints his feet, Zaccheus, the penitent thief, the parable of the Pharisee and the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... upon any section of the population of Jerusalem. In the capital He had always found the soil very unreceptive. Jerusalem was the headquarters of rabbinic learning and priestly arrogance—the home of the Pharisee and the Sadducee, who guided public opinion; and there, from first to last, He had made few adherents. It was in the provinces, especially in Galilee, that He had been the idol of the populace. It was by the Galilean pilgrims to the Passover that He was convoyed into the capital with shouts of Hosanna; ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... both of these poets ministered to a certain love of freedom, of beauty, of outdoor spaces that was ineradicably a part of his nature. The essence of vagabondage is the spirit of romance. One may tour every corner of the earth and still be a respectable Pharisee. One may never move a dozen miles from the village of his birth and yet be of the happy company of romantics. Jeff could find in a sunset, in a stretch of windswept plain, in the sight of water through leafless trees, something that filled his ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... has formed of the works of his own devising, in which he perhaps praises himself more than God, or takes more pleasure in them than he does in God; and thus with his good works he storms against the Second Commandment and its works. Of all this we have an illustration in the case of the Pharisee and the Publican in the Gospel. For the sinner calls upon God in his sins, and praises Him, and so has hit upon the two highest Commandments, faith and God's honor. The hypocrite misses both and struts about with other good works by which he praises himself and ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther

... Then a Pharisee stepped out from the crowd, wrapped his cloak round him with much dignity, and uttered the saying of a Jewish scholar: "Only the righteous man shall stand ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger

... and when they had weighed anchor, began to make acquaintance with him, and grew familiar to that degree, that the rest of the soldiers, who were less debauched, could not sufficiently admire it; and some of them said of Xavier, what a Pharisee said formerly of our Lord, "If this man were indeed a prophet, he would discern what manner of man he was, in whom he takes ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden

... out oor names frae the Book o' Life when we left His hoose. But He sent His ain Son to seek us, an' a weary road He cam. A' tell ye, a man wudna leave a sheep tae perish as ye hae cast aff yir ain bairn. Yir worse than Simon the Pharisee, for Mary was nae kin tae him. Puir Flora, tae ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... insinuate that what he relates of the particular circumstance which happened to him on his way to Damascus was a mere reverie. But you make no attempt to show how such a reverie could produce in this learned pharisee a belief that Jesus, who was crucified had actually arose from the dead, when there were not even the shadow of evidence existing to prove such an improbable fact. You are inclined to this notion of a reverie on account of some experience of your own, which ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou

... and human, am I a Christian man or am I not?' Rufus says, 'You are a Christian, fayther.' Then says I, 'What is the praycher, Rufus, my boy?' and Rufus, that uses tobackka in no shape nor form, says, 'He's a consayted, ignerant, bigitted bladderskite of a Pharisee!' Sir, I was proud of ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... world has but dim and inadequate conceptions of what righteousness is. A Pharisee is its type, or a man that keeps a clean life in regard to great transgressions; a whited sepulchre of some sort or other. The world apart from Christ has but languid desires after even the poor righteousness that it understands, and the world apart from Christ is afflicted by a despairing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... beauty fed my sight, And whilst I lived in what she said, Accordant airs, like all delight Most sweet when noted least, were play'd; And was it like the Pharisee If I in secret bow'd my face With joyful thanks that I should be, Not as were many, but with grace And fortune of well-nurtured youth, And days no sordid pains defile, And thoughts accustom'd to the truth, Made capable of ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore

... is just as conclusive. As the Saviour was reclining at meat in the house of Simon the Pharisee, a woman, noted as a sinner, came in and stood behind him weeping. "And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace."—Luke 7:50. The Saviour said the woman was saved, yet she was of notorious ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin

... motives which we have been talking about. They all began within the precincts of universities. Moreover, the Lord Jesus, consummate mystic, incomparable artist, was such partly because He was a great theologian as well. His dealings with scribe and Pharisee furnish some of the world's best examples of acute and courageous dialectics. His theological method differed markedly from the academicians of His day. Nevertheless it was noted that He spoke with an extraordinary authority. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... the eating tribe, Both a Pharisee and a Scribe, And hath learn'd the snivelling tone Of a flux'd devotion; Cursing from his sweating tub The Cavaliers ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... asks for the penny bearing Caesar's head and answers them in the words of the text, 'Render unto Caesar, therefore, the things which are Caesar's.' He returns the penny. I wonder where that little coin is to-day? It has gone, but the lesson it read remains forever; nor even today is the Pharisee gone with his invidious temptations. You are to-day obeying a greater than Caesar. You are meeting the material obligations of a day of discouragement—and for some ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... Stuttgart. Martyrdom of St. Stephen. Venice. Academy: The History of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins; Presentation in the Temple. Museo Correr: Visitation; Two Courtesans. S. Giorgio degli Schiavone: History of SS. George and Tryphonius; Agony in the Garden; Christ in the House of the Pharisee; History of St. Jerome. S. Vitale: Altarpiece to S. Vitale. Lady Layard. Death of the Virgin; St. Ursula taking leave of her Father. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... world: it exists, in all its awfulness and power, only embodied no longer in a redeeming individual, but in a redeeming church. The word of inspiration, the deed of miracle, the authority to condemn and to forgive, remain as when Christ taught in the temple, walked on the sea, denounced the Pharisee, and accepted the penitent. These functions, as exercised by him, were only in their incipient stage; he came,—to exemplify them indeed, but chiefly to incorporate them in a body which should hold and transmit ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... billy-goat off to his doom: On every hand a reverend band, Prophets and preachers and elders stand And the oldest rabbi, with a tear in his eye, Delivers a sermon to all standing by. (We haven't his name—whether Cohen or Harris, he No doubt was the "poisonest" kind of a Pharisee.) The sermon was marked by a deal of humility And pointed the fact, with no end of ability, That being a Gentile's no mark of gentility, And, according to Samuel, would certainly d—n you well. Then, ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson

... sinners in the fight, and though they may pray for us, they do not carp at our imperfections—and occasionally they get hit by the Pharisees just as we do, being rather whiter than we and therefore offering a more tempting mark for a jagged stone or a handful of pious mud. You may know the Pharisee by his intimate knowledge of the sins he ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford

... which they had had no control, had placed them out of the temptations that had overcome their penitent school-fellow, did not esteem themselves better than he, and look scornfully upon him, as though they would say with the proud Pharisee of old, "Stand by, for I am holier than thou!" And is it not the case around us generally? Alas! how apt we are all to condemn our fellow-creatures; forgetting that, had we been throughout similarly situated, our course might have been the same, or even worse. "Who is it ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May

... telling him how clean he is compared with those against whose vices he is contending; and unless he is very strong in Christian humility, he will soon learn this oft-repeated lesson, and will go about the world with the spirit of the Pharisee's prayer ever in his heart,—"God, I thank thee that I am not as other men, intemperate, a slaveholder, a contemner of the rights of the weak. I am not, like many men, contented with fulfilling the common, every-day duties ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler

... spiritual religion is imperilled the moment that you insist upon an unspiritual people observing outward forms which are to them the essence of the new teaching. Anything better than turning heathens into Pharisees! What did our Lord call the proselytes of the Pharisee and the Scribe? ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... better for having his head clear of officious sentiment. I don't believe in disinterested service; and Theodore is too desperately bent on preserving his disinterestedness. With me it's different. I am perfectly free to love the bonhomme—for a fool. I'm neither a scribe nor a Pharisee; I am simply a student of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... highest, kind. Though never an austere man, he upholds propriety of conduct both by example and precept. He is generous to the poor, and hospitable to the rich; in matters of religion he is sincere, and yet no Pharisee; he is in earnest, and yet no fanatic. On the whole, the Archdeacon of Barchester is a man doing more good than harm,—a man to be furthered and supported, though perhaps also to be controlled; and it is matter of regret to us that the course of our narrative has required that we should ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... mind. The general more remarkably so. He felt more self-satisfaction than the others; because the course of proceeding was so new to him that he imagined it to be very particularly meritorious. A bit of a pharisee you will think—but not the least of that, I assure you. Only people, at their first trying of such paths, do often find them most peculiarly paths of pleasantness and ways of peace; and, this sort of peace, this being at ease with the conscience, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... to dine with him: and he went in, and sat down to meat. And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner. And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd

... to have been the prevailing sin among these degenerate professors. Like the Pharisee, they would boast of their riches, the spiritual gifts which they possessed, by which they flattered themselves that "they were not as other men." Possibly they might excel in knowledge, that "knowledge which puffeth ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... that a shame? They would have Jesus as bad as themselves. We shall have somebody writing a book next to prove that after all Jesus was a Pharisee." ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... just like a horse—"I declare, Mrs. Roane, I hate to tell you, I really do. But Pinkie Moore wouldn't do for adoption. She has a terrible temper, and she's so slow nobody would keep her. And then, too"—her voice was the Pharisee kind that the Lord must hate worse than all others—"and then, too, I am sorry to say Pinkie is not truthful, and has been caught taking things from the girls. I hope none of you will mention this, as I trust by watching over her to correct these faults. She ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher

... I shall beg leave to discourse a little of the wonderful excellency of negative religion and negative virtue. The latter sets out, like the Pharisee, with, God, I thank thee; it is a piece of religious pageantry, the hypocrite's hope: and, in a word, it is positive vice: for it is either a mask to deceive others, or a mist to deceive ourselves. A man that is clothed with negatives, thus argues: I am not such a drunkard as my landlord, ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... Lord Jesus said to Simon the Pharisee, "Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee;" he answered, "Master, say on!" When God was going to speak to Samuel, he said, "Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth." Has the Lord Jesus said anything like ...
— Morning Bells • Frances Ridley Havergal

... they were brothers. Jack was the cleaner man and the better dressed of the two. I admit that, at the outset. It is, perhaps, one of my failings to push justice and impartiality to their utmost limits. I am no Pharisee; and where Vice has its redeeming point, I say, let Vice have its due—yes, yes, by all manner of means, let ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins

... roared the Devil in fiendish glee. "'Tis a silver crown I win! Thrice have you fallen! 0 Pharisee, You have sinned your darling sin!" "But, nay," said I; "and I scorn your lure. I have sinned no sin, and my heart is pure. Come, show me a sign of the sin you see!" But the Devil was gone . . . and the ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis

... to stretch the strings of the most capacious, widened soul that breatheth on this side glory, be they notwithstanding exceedingly enlarged by revelation. Paul, when he was caught up to heaven, saw that which was unlawful, because impossible, for man to utter. And saith Christ to the reasoning Pharisee, "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall you believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" It is great lewdness, and also insufferable arrogancy, to come to the Word of God, as conceiting already that whatever thou readest ...
— Miscellaneous Pieces • John Bunyan

... the close of the seventeenth century, a priest of God and a bishop, one who preached a gospel of love and mercy so infinite that he dared believe by its lights no man to have been damned, came to disturb the dust of Cesare Borgia. This Bishop of Calahorra—lineal descendant in soul of that Pharisee who exalted himself in God's House, thrilled with titillations of delicious horror at the desecrating presence of the base publican—had his pietist's eyes offended by the slab that marked ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... for it. From the pit of hell it cries out. So long as there is that which can sin, it is a man. And the prayer of misery carries its own justification, when the sober petitions of the self-righteous and the unkind are rejected. He who forgives not is not forgiven, and the prayer of the Pharisee is as the weary beating of the surf of hell, while the cry of a soul out of its fire sets the heart-strings of love trembling. There are sins which men must leave behind them, and sins which they must carry with them. Society ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... case is by no means so extravagant as Mr. Rogers would have us suppose. There is no reason for believing that Paul's character was essentially different afterwards from what it had been before. The very fervour which caused him, as a Pharisee, to exclude all but orthodox Jews from the hope of salvation, would lead him, as a Christian, to carry the Christian idea to its extreme development, and admit all persons whatever to the privileges of the Church. The same zeal for the truth which had urged him to persecute the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... &c (deceive) &c 545; dissembler, hypocrite; sophist, Pharisee, Jesuit, Mawworm^, Pecksniff, Joseph Surface, Tartufe^, Janus; serpent, snake in the grass, cockatrice, Judas, wolf in sheep's clothing; jilt; shuffler^, stool pigeon. liar &c (lie) &c 544; story-teller, perjurer, false witness, menteur a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... foolish enough to—nonsense—and for the sake of the man she is to marry." Then the grief of his life seemed to come back to him in a flood, and he continued almost bitterly: "I don't believe I have led an evil life. I don't want to feel like a Pharisee; but I don't recollect having injured any man or woman in the whole course of my miserable existence, yet I have missed all that is best in life. Even when I have not suffered, my life has been a pale, tasteless blank with nothing but a little poor music and worse philosophy to break the ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a Publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself; God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the Publican, ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan

... rock on which her life had been shipwrecked. She had failed to mark it on her chart, and was now a derelict. A jealous pang went through her and she remarked with a tinge of spite, "In fact, Miss Bright is so good that, like the Pharisee of old, she thanks God she is not as ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... any more than his primary desire was to a relieve suffering. To turn an interesting thief into a tedious honest man was not his aim. He would have thought little of the Prisoners' Aid Society and other modern movements of the kind. The conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great achievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde

... easily the Deacon, the Old Lady Who Brought Flowers, the President of the Sewing Circle, and, above all, the Chief Pharisee, sitting in his high place. The Chief Pharisee—his name I learned was Nash, Mr. J. H. Nash (I did not know then that I was soon to make his acquaintance)—the Chief Pharisee looked as hard as nails, a middle-aged ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... have for a friend the most thorough-paced scamp, with a generous heart, than the most respectable, canting, whining, Pharisee. ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt

... you in a sentence," he said. "I that speak with you am the cause. I am he that has preached law and the gospel—for twenty years covering my sin with the Pharisee's strictness of observance. I am he that was false friend but never false lover— that married without kirk or blessing. I am the man that clasped a dead woman's hand whom I never owned as wife, and watched afar off the babe that I ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... miraculous? Miracles could open the eyes of the body; and he that was born blind beheld his Redeemer. But miracles, even those of the Redeemer himself, could not open the eyes of the self-blinded, of the Sadducean sensualist, or the self- righteous Pharisee—while to have said, I SAW THEE UNDER THE FIG- TREE, sufficed to make ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled Cruikshank's pictures ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... self-applauding bird, the peacock see:— Mark what a sumptuous pharisee is he! Meridian sun-beams tempt him to unfold His radiant glories, azure, green, and gold: He treads as if, some solemn music near, His measured step were governed by his ear: And seems to say—'Ye meaner fowl, give place, I am all splendour, dignity, and grace!' Not ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... inclined to suggest that there need be no more difficulty in living on seven hundred a year than seven thousand, if you knew you had to do it. Then she rebuked herself fiercely for a prig—"You just try it!—you Pharisee, you!" And she thought of her own dressmakers' and milliners' bills, and became in the end quite pitiful over Aunt Ellen's moderation. After all it might have been two thousand instead of one! Of course it was all Aunt Ellen's muddling, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... slouch and slink of the derelict and the pompous strut of the pharisee, or the swagger of the bully or the dandy, there is the golden mean in posture, which stands for self-respect and self-confidence, combined with courtesy ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His flesh is angels' flesh, all alive.—All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... you to read for me that tale of the Pharisee and the woman who was a sinner. For my sake, mind you, as well as for yours, for I was wrong, too, on this matter. I confess I hated him, for I cannot help thinking that he has done me a great wrongs and I have found it hard enough to say the Lord's ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor

... to practise it, has never been more eloquently extolled; but it is accompanied by a fulsome flattery which has in it something painfully grotesque as addressed by a philosopher to one whom he knew to have been guilty, that very year, of an inhuman fratricide. Imagine some Jewish Pharisee,—a Nicodemus or a Gamaliel—pronouncing an eulogy on the tenderness of a Herod, and you have some picture of the appearance which Seneca's consistency must have worn in the ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... lose it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... fearing temporal ruin and imprisonment for life, conformed, and then fell into the most awful state of despair, suffering such agonies of conscience, that, to get rid of present trouble, he hurried himself into eternity. Probably Bunyan alludes to this awful instance of fell despair in his Publican and Pharisee: 'Sin, when appearing in its monstrous shape and hue, frighteth all mortals out of their wits, away from God; and if he stops them not, also out of the world.'[111] To arm Bunyan against being overcome by a fear of the lions in the way to the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... you, and I would that you had trusted me—had trusted me enough—" His voice was not quite steady. "Ah, my dear," said Ormskirk, "you should have confided all to me this afternoon. It hurts me that you did not, for I am no Pharisee and—God knows!—my own past is not immaculate. I would have understood, I think. Yet as it is, take back your letters, child,—nay, in Heaven's name, take them in pledge of an old man's ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... these; persuading himself that now he must be fair for heaven, and thinks besides that he serveth God as well as any man: but all this while he is as ignorant of Christ as the stool he sits on, and no nearer heaven than was the blind Pharisee, only he has got in a cleaner way to hell than the ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... Christ's morality not less has it been shocked at the quality of His mercy. His gentleness to the sensual sinner has been compared, with amazement, to the sternness of His attitude to the sins of the spirit. Not the profligate or the harlot but the Pharisee and the scribe were those who provoked His sternest rebukes. And perhaps the most characteristic of all His dealings with such matters was that incident of the woman taken in adultery, when He at once reaffirmed the ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... the Johannine writings, are fully understandable only as posterior to St. Paul—the most enthusiastic and influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert, from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in a substantially ...
— Progress and History • Various

... in rebellion, but in doing right. But he has sterner words. Pharisees, the separatists, the religious men, who think themselves holier than any one else; and Sadducees, materialist men of the world, who sneer at the unseen, the unknown, the heroic, come to him. And for Pharisee and Sadducee—for the man who prides himself on believing more than his neighbours, and for the man who prides himself on believing less—he has the same answer. Both are exclusives, inhuman, while they are pretending to be more than human. He knew them well, for he was born ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... was the parable of the unforgiving debtor and the parallel passage containing the matchless story of the sinful woman and the proud Pharisee. In the reading of these lessons the voice, which had hitherto carried the strident note of nervousness, mellowed into rich and subduing fulness. The men listened with that hushed attention that they ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... consciousness gave vent to many exclamations such as these: "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Again: "For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, there dwelleth no good thing." On the other hand, the Pharisee, who stood praying in the temple was righteous in his own view of himself, and "thanked God that he was not as other men"—a sinner like unto them, he meant, of course. This line of ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... with all their unexhausted force, vitality and enthusiasm; a man of simple aims and honest ways; as chivalrous and high-minded as any knight of old; as pure in life as a woman; at once gentle and brave, strong and sweet, just and loving; upright, but no Pharisee; earnest, but never sanctimonious; who took his work as a pleasure, and his pleasure as an innocent joy; a friend to be coveted; a disciple such as the Saviour must have loved; a true son of God, who ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby

... love, do you think I cannot pity this injured lady? Do you think I am likely to play the Pharisee, and be eager to bespatter the grave of this poor sufferer? I can almost guess the story which you shrink from telling me—it is one of those sad histories so often acted, so often told. Your aunt loved a person called Montagu Kingdon—her superior ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... consider my labours as a legacy bequeathed to my countrymen at a most critical time when England the puissantest of Moslem powers is called upon, without adequate knowledge of the Moslem's inner life, to administer Egypt as well as to rule India. And while Pharisee and Philister may be or may pretend to be "shocked" and "horrified" by my pages, the sound common sense of a public, which is slowly but surely emancipating itself from the prudish and prurient reticences and the immodest and immoral modesties of the early xixth century, will ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... Babylonia, where Saadia was the head of the academy, was the chief centre of Jewish learning, and Saadia was the heir in the main line of Jewish development as it passed through the hands of lawgiver and prophet, scribe and Pharisee, Tanna and Amora, Saburai and Gaon. As the head of the Sura academy he was the intellectual representative of the Jewry and Judaism of his day. His time was a period of agitation and strife, not only in Judaism but also in Islam, in whose lands the Jews lived and to whose temporal rulers ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... good deal of heart, such as the pew-haunting Pharisee knows not of. Perhaps he was not in love: at all ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... 'Now I reduce your wages.' The men demur. Then he adds, 'Do you see those three hundred men who have just walked out? you may change places if you like, they're sighing to come in on any terms, for they're starving.' The men feel it, and are crushed. Ah! you Manchester liberal! Pharisee of politics! those men are listening—have I got you now? But the evil stops not yet. Those men, driven from their own trade, seek employment in others, when they swell the surplus ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... of degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of this statement, if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count himself to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his spiritual achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has closed his ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... nothing of its own, and only finds fault with what is done by others, grows very fast if it is allowed to take hold, and produces a mental habit of merely destructive criticism or perpetual scolding. Safe in attempting nothing itself, unassailable and self-righteous as a Pharisee, this spirit can only pull down but not build up again. In children it is often the outcome of a little jealousy and want of personal courage; they can be helped to overcome it, but if it is allowed to grow up, dissatisfaction ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... words of the New Testament were written, not as we should have supposed by one of the twelve apostles, or by some one who had loved and followed the Lord Jesus Christ when He was upon earth. They are written by a Pharisee who had been one of Christ's ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff

... self-righteous. A religion designed to prompt the utterance of the greatest of its prophets: "Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips," now prompted the utterance of the Pharisee: "I thank Thee that I am not as other ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... "Can't you see that it's false economy to risk a break-down even if you use yourself purely for others? You're looking far from well. You are overtaxing human strength. Come now, admit my sermon is just. Remember I speak not as a Pharisee, but as one who made the mistake herself—a fellow-sinner." She turned her dark eyes ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Thunder, the Lord only rebuked the Pharisees?" continued the prostrate man. "Though the Pharisee triumphs after all! But it was the stroller I wanted, not ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... holy saints who kneel before the Mother of all Mothers, take the transgression of her guilty child to Him who—long ago in the house of the self-righteous Pharisee—said to the woman who was a sinner and yet loved much—the woman who had washed His feet with her tears and dried them with the hair of her head—"Thy ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... this world, amongst the Jews and Pharisees, there was a great Pharisee whose name was Simon: this Pharisee desired Christ on a time to dine with him, thinking in himself that he was able and worthy to give Christ a dinner. Christ refused not his dinner, but came unto him. In time of their dinner it chanced there came into the house a great and a common ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer



Words linked to "Pharisee" :   Jew, Hebrew, pharisaic, Joseph ben Matthias, pharisaical, disagreeable person, unpleasant person, Israelite, Josephus, Flavius Josephus



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