Puritans Quotes

“It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.”
― Philip Pullman

“If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.

[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772]”
― ben franklin, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Franklin

“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, Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.”
― H. L. Mencken

“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, The Wordy Shipmates

“Holiness appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader

“Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“There is much in our Lord's pantry that will satisfy his children, and much wine in his cellar that will quench all their thirst. Hunger for him until he fills you. He is pleased with the importunity of hungry souls. If he delays, do not go away, but fall a-swoon at his feet. Every day we may see some new thing in Christ. His love has neither brim nor bottom. How blessed are we to enjoy this invaluable treasure, the love of Christ; or rather allow ourselves to be mastered and subdued in his love, so that Christ is our all, and all other things are nothing. O that we might be ready for the time our Lord's wind and tide call for us! There are infinite plies in his love that the saint will never be able to unfold. I urge upon you a nearer and growing communion with Christ. There are curtains to be drawn back in Christ that we have never seen. There are new foldings of love in him. Dig deep, sweat, labour, and take pains for him, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can; he will be won with labour. Live on Christ's love. Christ's love is so kingly, that it will not wait until tomorrow, it must have a throne all alone in your soul. It is our folly to divide our narrow and little love. It is best to give it all to Christ. Lay no more on the earthly, than it can carry. Lay your soul and your weights upon God; make him your only and best-beloved. Your errand in this life is to make sure an eternity of glory for your soul, and to match your soul with Christ. Your love, if it could be more than all the love of angels in one, would be Christ's due. Look up to him and love him. O, love and live! My counsel is, that you come out and leave the multitude, and let Christ have your company. Let those who love this present world have it, but Christ is a more worthy and noble portion; blessed are those who have him.”
― Samuel Rutherford

“She was, in fact, one of those people of exalted principles; one of those opinionated puritans, of which England produces so many; one of those good and insupportable old maids who haunt the tables d'hôte of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias, their manners of petrified vestals, their indescribable toilets and a certain odor of india-rubber which makes one believe that at night they are slipped into a rubber casing.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Miss Harriet (Folio

“Unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, charity in all things.”
― The Puritans

“A saving, though an immethodical knowledge of Christ, will bring us to heaven, John 17: 2, but a regular and methodical, as well as a saving knowledge of him, will bring heaven into us, Col. 2: 2, 3.”
― John Flavel, The fountain of life opened, or, A display of Christ in his essential and mediatorial glory wherein the impetration of our redemption by Jesus Christ ... finished by his covenant-transaction

“In short, doctrinally, Puritanism was a kind of vigorous Calvinism; experientially, it was warm and contagious; evangelistically, it was aggressive, yet tender; ecclesiastically, it was theocentric and worshipful; and politically, it aimed to be scriptural and balanced.”
― Joel R. Beeke, Church History 101: The Highlights of Twenty Centuries

“The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,
but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“They were a most unusual group of colonists. Instead of noblemen, craftsmen, and servants - the types of people who had founded Jamestown in Virginia - these were, for the most part, families - men, women, and children who were willing to endure almost anything if it meant they could worship as they pleased.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick

“For all they had suffered during those first terrible winters in America, their best years were behind them, in Leiden. Never again would they know the same rapturous sense of divine fellowship that had first launched them on this quest.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

“Puritans don’t laugh—except at the sight of a burning witch.”
― John Derbyshire

“To be humble, and like a little child, afraid of taking a step alone, and so conscious of snares and dangers around us as to cry to Him continually to hold us up that we may be safe, is the sure, the infallible, the only secret of walking closely with Him.”
― John Newton

“It [repentance] is not so much to endear us to Christ as to endear Christ to us. Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.”
― Thomas Watson

“Annie's message is timeless, her shining spirit and healing gift from the Spiritual Universe will capture your heart. She was born with birth defects in a time when special children and their mothers were put to death or banished. But have things changed really that much? Have they changed enough? "No!" Bullying, abuse, ridicule, and inequality thrives in the lives of women and children in our global modern society, just as surely as it did in the mid-1600s Colonial America. Based on factual research.”
― Deborah A.Bowman

“the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“CHR. Then I perceive it is not best to covet things that are now, but to wait for things to come.

INTER. You say the truth: "For the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." [2 Cor. 4:18] But though this be so, yet since things present and our fleshly appetite are such near neighbours one to another; and again, because things to come, and carnal sense, are such strangers one to another; therefore it is, that the first of these so suddenly fall into amity, and that distance is so continued between the second.”
― Bunyan John, The Pilgrim's Progress with Original Illustrations and Reader's Guide

“Foundations totter that are not laid deep enough. The more true light a man hath, the more cause of self-abasement will he find in himself. You can never magnify Christ enough, and you can never debase self enough; and certainly Christ is most exalted when you are most abased, Isa. 2:19. Dagon must fall upon his face if you mean to set up the ark; and if Christ shall be precious to you, you must be vile in your own eyes; none have such true revivings as the humble, Isa. 57:15,16.”
― Thomas Manton, The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, D.D, Vol. 5

“So it is here, grouped on the beach with strangers, that voices begin to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate . . . it's a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The Benedictine is the spiritual reverse of the Puritan.”
― August Adam, The Primacy of Love

“Christian, show yourself to be a member of Christ and a servant of God, not only in the general calling of a Christian, but also in the particular calling in which you are placed. It is not enough for a magistrate to be a Christian man, but he must also be a Christian magistrate. It is not enough for a master of a family to be a Christian man or a Christian in the church, but he must also be a Christian in his family and in the trade which he follows daily. Not everyone who is a common hearer of the Word and a frequenter of the Lord’s Table is therefore a good Christian, unless his conversation in his private house and in his private affairs and dealings be suitable. There is a man to be seen what he is.”
― William Perkins, A graine of musterd-seede: or, The least measure of grace, that is or can be effectuall to saluation

“The map of the Critical Social Justice world is not composed of the coordinate systems of latitude and longitude, but the invisible power structures derived from a Foucaldian understanding of human relations.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World