Self Righteousness In The Bible Quotes

The essential insight and consistent point of view of Islam is tawhid: the fundamental Oneness underlying all of existence. From the perspective of tawhid, everything is emerging from God, being sustained by God, and ultimately returning to God. This has profound significance for all of our experience within this existence. All areas of human knowledge are related to this fundamental, unifying Truth. Sufism is the science, the objective knowledge, of the souls relationship to God. This science describes an Origin, a downward arc of manifestation, and an upward arc of return. In the arc of manifestation, everything is coming down from God into successive levels of ever denser realities. In the arc of return, we recognize our Origin and begin the journey back toward its light. This essentially means that we ourselves must become more conscious of the light within ourselves.

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The arc of return calls us to make a journey from darkness and toward the light. The immediate darkness we face around us is the imaginary world created by human ignorance, fear, self-righteousness, and hatred. We must not succumb to the mass heedlessness and self-hypnotism which presents itself to us, mostly through the mass media, as the so-called real world.
It is our responsibility to find and act upon the knowledge that can guide us in that journey. This means establishing the truth of tawhid within our own minds and hearts.

~ Essays and talks by Kabir Helmins ~ Kabir Edmund Helminski

People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff. ~ Tana French

Alert to the manipulations and machinations of Pharisaical self-righteousness, ragamuffins refuse to surrender control of their lives to rules and regulations. They see that the stale religiosity of legalists, trapped in the fatal narcissism of spiritual perfectionism, obscures the face of the God of Jesus. ~ Brennan Manning

A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle. ~ Paul Tournier

No one is more religious than the Christian who gives grace to everyone except the religious older-brother types. God gives grace to the younger and the older. No one is past redemption. No one is past grace. All God wants is for both the religious and the rebellious to come into the party. We can wallow in self-righteousness, or we can enjoy all that is our Father's. ~ Jefferson Bethke

The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts. Religious addiction is a massive problem in our society. It may be the most pernicious of all addictions because it's so hard for a person to break his delusion and denial. How can anything be wrong with loving God and giving your life for good works and service to mankind? ~ John Bradshaw

For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world. Sacred to three religions, the city has witnessed the worst intolerance and self-righteousness of all of them. ~ William Dalrymple

Our manic accumulation of wealth,' Kuru Qan went on. 'Our headlong progress, as if motion was purpose and purpose inherently virtuous. Our lack of compassion, which we called being realistic. The extremity of our judgements, our self-righteousness - all a flight from death, Brys. All a vast denial smothered in semantics and euphemisms. Bravery and sacrifice, pathos and failure, as if life is a contest to be won or lost. As if death is the arbiter of meaning, the moment of final judgement, and above all else judgement is a thing to be delivered, not delivered unto. ~ Steven Erikson

Pfaff: The riposte of a civilized nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent. Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results. A maddened U.S. response that hurts still others is what they want: It will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness about their criminal acts against the innocent. What the United States needs is cold reconsideration of how it has arrived at this pass. It needs, even more, to foresee disasters that might lie in the future. ~ Gore Vidal

Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton's 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day - think of the children! - was deployed to explain her husband's crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.

You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It's an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it's highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it's a diversion, a ~ Thomas Frank

Self-righteousness is much like a spiritual egocentricity. It constitutes a secular type of love that thrives under conditionality, one in which is only existent after an individual meets the adopted standards of the condemner; oppositely, unconditional love is a holy love. ~ Criss Jami

The Key to Joy And may the God of peace Himself sanctify you through and through [separate you from profane things, make you pure and wholly consecrated to God]; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved sound and complete [and found] blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah). 1 THESSALONIANS 5:23 Righteousness is a key to enjoying every single day of your life. Being in right relationship with God is available to us simply through our faith in Jesus Christ. That security gives us peace through every situation, and having peace brings joy. The Word says to listen with expectancy to what God the Lord will say to you, for He will speak peace to His saints (those who are in right standing with Him), and those who don't turn again to self-confident folly (see Psalm 85:8). Before making plans today, listen for God's voice to make sure you follow His peace for your day. ~ Joyce Meyer

I have spoken to many parents who feared they were producing little hypocrites who were proud and self-righteous. Hypocrisy and self-righteousness is the result of giving children a keepable law and telling them to be good. To the extent they are successful, they become like the Pharisees ... The genius of Phariseeism was that it reduced the law to a keepable standard of externals that any self-disciplined person could do. In their pride and self-righteousness, they rejected Christ. ~ Tedd Tripp

Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting they are part of a civilization. They can then feed on that culture, bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us. ~ David Brin

Living in Atlanta those seven tumultuous years, I learned not to trust the Northern stereotype of white Southerners as incorrigible racists. Yankee self-righteousness ignored the depth of race hatred in places like Boston or New York. ~ Howard Zinn

We can not, therefore, reserve as sacred anything that is not truth and yet we cannot turn from things of truth have inspired us in our everyday lives. We must merely embrace both hard and soft truths that must not be avoided. This does not mean we can reserve for ourselves the right to be self-righteous nor call others self-righteous simply because they disagree with us. ~ Leviak B. Kelly

Ideals without power are simply words - they can come alive only when reinforced by the capacity to act. Reality is understanding how to wield power, but by itself it doesn't guide you toward the ends to which your power should be put. Realism devoid of an understanding of the ends of power is frequently another word for thugishness, which is ultimately unrealistic. Similarly, idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can be corrected only by a profound understanding of power in its complete sense, while realism uncoupled from principle is frequently incompetence masquerading as tough-mindedness. Realism and idealism are not alternatives but necessary complements. Neither can serve as a principle for foreign policy by itself. ~ George Friedman

Sin is not about the personal imperfection of the self. Rather, sin is any act that breaks any of the relationships God declared very good in the beginning. ~ Lisa Sharon Harper

True conversion means turning not only from sin but also from depending on self-made righteousness. Those who trust in their own righteousness for conversion hide behind their own good works. This is the reason that self-righteous people are so angry with gospel preachers, because the gospel does not spare those who will not submit to the righteousness of Jesus Christ! ~ George Whitefield

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this…He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, "Amen I say to you, they have received their reward" (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out…He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody's target, and everybody knew that they were wrong…And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His deat ~ Fulton J. Sheen

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. ~ Azar Nafisi

I'm glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don't stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don't draw equations, our consciences don't have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us. ~ Josiah Bancroft

Self-righteousness ... is the largest idol of the human heart - the idol which man loves most and God hates most. Dearly beloved, you will always be going back to this idol. You are always trying to be something in yourself, to gain God's favour by thinking little of your sin, or by looking to your repentance, tears, prayers ; or by looking to your religious exercises, your frames, etc; or by looking to your graces, the Spirit's work in your heart. Beware of false Christs. Study sanctification to the utmost, but make not a Christ of it. ~ Robert Murray M'Cheyne

The self-righteous person's superfluity of moral credit is the basis of his discourse. He presupposes his own moral values and his own righteousness as a condition of conversation. The effect of this is that anyone talking to a self-righteous person must either agree with his moral values and act equally self-righteous, or face being put in a morally inferior position in the discourse. This is what makes self-righteous people particularly infuriating to talk to. F ~ George Lakoff

The problem with self righteousness is that it seems almost impossible to recognize in ourselves. We will own up to almost any other sin. but not the sin of self-righteousness. When we have this attitude, though, we deprive ourselves of the joy of living in the grace of God. Because you see, grace is only for sinners. ~ Jerry Bridges

When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:
'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?'
'I am sorry ... I fear not.'
'You see where you are now! ~ Charles Ricketts

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton. ~ George Eliot

We must go back again and again to the Gospel of Christ crucified, so that our hearts are more deeply gripped by the reality of what He did and who we are in Him. ~ Timothy Keller

This does not, therefore, mean `the gospel reveals justification by faith as the true scheme of salvation, as opposed to Jewish self-help moralism'. When we unpack it fully, in the light of subsequent passages in the letter, it means:
The gospel - the announcement of the lordship of Jesus the Messiah - reveals God's righteousness, his covenant faithfulness, his dealing with the sin of the world through the fulfilment of his covenant in this Lord Jesus Christ. He has done all this righteously, that is, impartially. He has dealt with sin, and rescued the helpless. He has thereby fulfilled his promises. ~ N. T. Wright

Those who deny guilt and sin are like the Pharisees of old who thought our Saviour had a "guilt complex" because He accused them of being whited sepulchers - outside clean, inside full of dead men's bones. Those who admit that they are guilty are like the public sinners and the publicans of whom Our Lord said, "Amen, I say to you, that the publicans and the harlots shall go into the Kingdom of God before you" (Matt. 21:31). Those who think they are healthy but have a hidden moral cancer are incurable; the sick who want to be healed have a chance. All denial of guilt keeps people out of the area of love and, by inducing self-righteousness, prevents a cure. The two facts of healing in the physical order are these: A physician cannot heal us unless we put ourselves into his hands, and we will not put ourselves into his hands unless we know that we are sick. In like manner, a sinner's awareness of sin is one requisite for his recovery; the other is his longing for God. When we long for God, we do so not as sinners, but as lovers. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Everybody knows basically what is right and what is wrong. Everybody knows better than to hate others. In fact, most people teach against it, and yet we still see it on the daily. But why do you think that is? It is because the problem was never really humans not loving humans enough; the problem was humans not loving righteousness enough. We must empty our own love for the world so that it can be replaced by the love of Christ; only then will we begin to love people as Christ loves people, as He always intended. ~ Criss Jami

My heart, which I thought had been dead, stopped. Of course. I had been betrayed. My ex boyfriend had reneged on his promise to love me, and this odious event had a name: betrayal. Somehow, knowing this calmed me down. And I began to contemplate betrayal. My conclusion? It is the most difficult of all woundings. Betrayal comes in many forms. It's not just about being cheated on or left for another. It's about any promise, overt or implied, that has been broken without your participation in the decision, or even knowing that a decision was on the table. It's about believing something that you later find out is untrue. It's no wonder that the first response to betrayal is likely to be denial. It's an enormous shock to find out that a solid reality is not so solid after all. It can feel like the most deviant form of attack. When betrayal is at the root of your pain, something horrible is unleashed. Different and perhaps more horrible than the pain of disappointment, grief, or anger. With other causes of suffering, you can at least pretend you have some measure of control. You can blame the other person for disappointing you, you can read books that outline and predict the course of grief, and when you're angry you can always fall back on self-righteousness. But when you're betrayed, you have been blindsided and your vulnerability is confirmed. You lose a misplaced innocence that you really can never regain. Your ability to trust is basically obliterated. And not just your trust ~ Susan Piver

Self-righteousness is exactly that - thinking that your righteousness (your standing before God and others) relies only on yourself. You think you can earn it. You think it's about what you do or don't do. Because of this you are driven to act only in ways that continue to prop up how awesome you think you are. It produces a very prideful I-have-all-the-answers-and-you-are-all-idiots type of arrogance. ~ Jefferson Bethke

Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes - so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil - nothing is so self-blinding. ~ B.H. Liddell Hart

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement. ~ John Stuart Mill