14 quotes about Purity

To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Baldwin, James

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.

Bernanos, Georges

By two wings a man is lifted up from things earthly: by simplicity and purity.

Kempis, Thomas

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

Kierkegaard, Soren

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

Levi, Primo

We are not naïve enough to ask for pure men; we ask merely for men whose impurity does not conflict with the obligations of their job.

Rostand, Jean

My strength has the strength of ten because my heart is pure.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Thoreau, Henry David

As pure water poured into pure water becomes the very same, so does the Self of the illumined man or woman verily become one with the Godhead.

Upanishad, Katha

Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.

Warner, Charles Dudley

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

Weil, Simone

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

Weil, Simone

The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.

Wilde, Oscar