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In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy. -- Leland Ryken
Men of New England, I hold you to the doctrines of liberty which ye inherit from your Puritan forefathers. -- Caleb Cushing
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. -- Leland Ryken
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. -- James Hillman
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. -- Umberto Eco
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. -- Howard Nemerov
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To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says. -- D. H. Lawrence
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
In the history of extra-biblical study and research tools there has never before been a resource as useful as the Puritan Hard Drive. -- Paul Washer
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Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. -- Richard Hofstadter
The Puritan sours his pleasures by disguising them as duties. -- Mason Cooley
I'm far too outspoken to be a woman in Puritan times. -- Janet Montgomery
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted. -- Wendell Phillips
The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business. -- Wendell Phillips
Honestly, because of the way women were treated, I wouldn't want to go back to Puritan times. -- Janet Montgomery
A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time. -- H. L. Mencken
My wife is a real Puritan. She thinks licking the stamp on the envelope of a Valentine is foreplay. -- Milton Berle
What cultural DNA remains from those first Puritan forays onto American soil may be our love of a fresh start. -- Nancy Gibbs
From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life. -- Alice Morse Earle
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won't chime. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt. -- R. H. Tawney
The summum bonum of this [Puritan] ethic is the earning of more and more money combined with the strict avoidance of all enjoyment. -- Max Weber
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. -- John Updike
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. -- John Bunyan
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. -- Alice Morse Earle
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. -- Janet Montgomery
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. -- Elinor Wylie
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. -- John Greenleaf Whittier
He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures. -- Henry James
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. -- Robert Staughton Lynd
Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war. -- H. L. Mencken
They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
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. -- John Frame
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. -- James Young
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. -- Martin Filler
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It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened. -- Phillips Brooks
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. -- H. P. Lovecraft
Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts. -- Stephen King
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. -- Judith Martin
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. -- Kay Redfield Jamison
The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn't think Satan was involved." -- Thomas C. Foster
Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the seat in which each person should sit during public worship. -- Alice Morse Earle
The Pilgrim and the Puritan whom we honor tonight were men who did a great deal of work in the world. They had their faults and their - shortcomings, but they were not slothful in business and they were most fervent in spirit. -- Henry Cabot Lodge
The Pilgrim and the Puritan whom we honor tonight were men who did a great deal of work in the world. They had their faults and their - shortcomings, but they were not slothful in business and they were most fervent in spirit. -- Henry Cabot Lodge
Wrapped in his sad-colored cloak, the Day, like a Puritan, standeth Stern in the joyless fields, rebuking the lingering color,-- Dying hectic of leaves and the chilly blue of the asters,-- Hearing, perchance, the croak of a crow on the desolate tree-top. -- Bayard Taylor
The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God's help to do just that. -- J. I. Packer
Napping is too luxurious, too sybaritic, too unproductive, and it's free; pleasures for which we don't pay make us anxious. Besides, it seems to be a natural inclination. ... Fighting off natural inclinations is a major Puritan virtue, and nothing that feels that good can be respectable. -- Barbara Holland
On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally. -- C. S. Lewis
I'm always disappointed when I see the word 'Puritan' tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to Hell. -- Sarah Vowell
Isn't the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility? Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day? Not all religions claim the direct authority of God speaking to their leader. You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a Puritan atheist. -- Dave Foley
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. -- Stephen Spender
I wish to Christ I could make up a really great lie. Sometimes, after an interview, I say to myself, 'Man, you were so honest - can't you have some fun? Can't you do some really down and dirty lying?' But the puritan in me thinks that if I tell a lie, I'll be punished. -- Willem Dafoe
The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth. -- Leland Ryken
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action. -- Wendell Phillips
Till men have faith in Christ, their best services are but glorious sins. -- Thomas Brooks
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. -- H. L. Mencken
The puritan through life's sweet garden goes to pluck the thorn and cast away the rose. -- Kenneth Hare
It [Thanksgiving] was founded by the Puritans to give thanks for bein' preserved from the Indians, an' we keep it to give thanks we are preserved from the Puritans. -- Finley Peter Dunne
We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done. -- Barbara Jordan
As God delights in his own beauty, he must necessarily delight in the creature's holiness which is a conformity to and participation of it, as truly as [the] brightness of a jewel, held in the sun's beams, is a participation or derivation of the sun's brightness, though immensely less in degree. -- Jonathan Edwards
If you have beautiful knees, show your knees. I'm not a puritan. I love skin. -- Francisco Costa
The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. -- Thomas Babington Macaulay
We are very puritan in America. We still hold true to these really antiquated values, this idea of the sanctity of marriage. -- Zoe Lister-Jones
In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level. -- Damian Lewis
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. -- John Updike
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. -- Rene Auberjonois
Art is hard for a puritan to understand. -- Gunter Grass
Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
To live without that enchantment of beauty is to interpret frugality and simple living with a puritan literalism -- John Lane
A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart. -- Adam Nicolson
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand. -- Gunter Grass
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. -- J. G. Ballard
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. -- Ali Sina
I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life]. -- Cornel West

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