100 Quotes About Purity

You occasionally hear of people who say that they are living a pure life. The question is, what does that mean? Does it mean that you refrain from having sex? That you only drink water and avoid coffee and alcohol? Or that you spend all your time reading the Bible and abstain from talking on your cell phone? Well, if you’re still not sure exactly what it means to be pure, we’ve got a list of quotes about purity for you.

1
I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter. Jonathan Franzen
2
[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. Jonathan Franzen
3
Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgement. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will. Jonathan Franzen
4
[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.] Jonathan Franzen
5
There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust. . Jonathan Franzen
6
It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there... Jonathan Franzen
7
In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable. Jonathan Franzen
8
In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill. Jonathan Franzen
9
The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the “product, ” they didn’t vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn’t make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer. Jonathan Franzen
10
The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Jonathan Franzen
11
Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. Jonathan Franzen
12
He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Ãœbermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar, Jonathan Franzen
13
There was no arguing with blood. Jonathan Franzen