Quotes about Self-righteousness

Anger indulged, instead of simply waved off, always has in it an element of self-righteousness and vanity. Find a person who has embraced anger, and you find a person with a wounded ego.

And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils.

Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy.

The Bible—and human life itself—is full of evidence that religion itself can become an idol: what the sentimental call the love of God is nothing if it is short-circuited into private piety or religious self-righteousness and doesn't translate into compassion for others.

The superior types, he points out, are also sinners. Of course, they are nice church members. They don't let all their dirty laundry hang out. No, their sins are vegetarian sins. Compared with the really nasty people, they appear good in their own eyes.

We, like Paul, are aware of two things: We are great sinners and we need a great savior. We, like Peter, are aware of two facts: We are going down and God is standing up. So we … leave behind the Titanic of self-righteousness and stand on the solid path of God's grace.

Never in all of Scripture does Christ resist the repentant sinner. He resisted the proud and the self-righteous religious, but never the humble and repentant.

I won't pretend that I've arrived at humble orthodoxy. When I gain a bit of theological knowledge, I all too frequently get puffed up with pride. But I'll tell you what deflates my arrogance and self-righteousness faster than anything else: trying to live whatever truth I have.

Whenever we are sure that we are among the righteous, we immediately find ourselves among the arrogant.

Our obedience has its origin in God's prior action, and forgetting that truth results in self-righteousness, pride, and despair.

If the church remains self-righteously aloof from failures, irreligious and immoral people, it cannot enter justified into God's kingdom. But if it is constantly aware of its guilt and sin, it can live in joyous awareness of forgiveness. The promise has been given to it that anyone who humbles himself will be exalted.9

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.