The happiness promised us in Christ does not consist in outward advantages-such as leading a joyous and peaceful life, having rich possessions, being safe from all harm, and abounding with delights such as the flesh commonly longs after. No, our happiness belongs to the heavenly life!
— John Calvin
Passioned Puritanical quotations
Prayer is my chief work, and it is by means of it that I carry on the rest.
No doctrine is more excellent, or necessary to be preached and studied, than Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
Did Christ finish His work for us? Then there can be no doubt but He will also finish His work in us.
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
The world and you must part, or Christ and you will never meet.
What a mercy was it to us to have parents that prayed for us before they had us, as well as in our infancy when we could not pray for ourselves!
The law sends us to Christ to be justified, and Christ sends us to the law to be regulated.
The knowledge of Christ is profound and large.
All other sciences are but shadows; this is a boundless, bottomless ocean. Though something of Christ be unfolded in one age, and something in another, yet eternity itself cannot full unfold him.
When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified in our worship, then we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us rather than that we had been made for Him.
As God did not at first choose you because you were high, He will not now forsake you because you are low.
The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
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.
The puritan through life's sweet garden goes to pluck the thorn and cast away the rose.
Eternity to the godly is a day that has no sunset;
eternity to the wicked is a night that has no sunrise.
Adoption gives us the privilege of sons, regeneration the nature of sons.
The heart is naturally hard, and grows harder by custom in sin, especially by long abuse of mercy, neglect of the means of grace, and resisteing the spirit of grace.
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.
In the history of extra-biblical study and research tools there has never before been a resource as useful as the Puritan Hard Drive.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
Till men have faith in Christ, their best services are but glorious sins.
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.
The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality - which became America's - was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.
Did you never run for shelter in a storm, and find fruit which you expected not? Did you never go to God for safeguard, driven by outward storms, and there find unexpected fruit?
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.
After all the Puritans came to America to escape from persecution and then turned around and started persecuting other people. So I understand that conflict that we have related to play and pleasure and sexuality. And I think what has made my life worthwhile is trying to deal with some of those questions.
In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy.
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.
Men of New England, I hold you to the doctrines of liberty which ye inherit from your Puritan forefathers.
A man's greatest care should be for that place where he lives longest;
therefore eternity should be his scope.
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.
It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.