# Purity

Purity is the state or degree of being pure, lacking contaminants or impediments to virtue.

## Quotes

* Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
** James Baldwin "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" in Esquire (May 1961) republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
* To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.
** Gautama Buddha, in the Dhammapada, Verse 183.
* Men and women grow older in this world of ours, and as the years advance they change. Of all the changes that they undergo those of their moral natures are the most painful to watch. The boy changes into the man, and there is something lost which never seems to come back again. It is like the first glow of the morning that passes away — like the bloom on the blossom that never is restored. Your grown-up boy is wise in bad things which he used to know nothing about. His life no longer sounds with a perfectly clear ring, or shines with a perfectly white lustre. He is no longer unspotted. ...The worst thing about all this staining power of the world is the way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. ... It is not true. ... Social life is lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes of many a pure man or woman who walks through its very midst. ... When a man comes not merely to tolerate, but to boast of the stains that the world has flung upon him; when he wears his spots as if they were jewels; when he flaunts his unscrupulousness, and his cynicism and his disbelief and his hard-heartedness in your face as the signs and badges of his superiority; when to be innocent and unsuspicious and sensitive seems to be ridiculous and weak; when it is reputable to show that we are men of the world by exhibiting the stains that the world has left upon our reputation, our conduct, and our heart, then we understand how flagrant is the danger; then we see how hard it must be to keep ourselves unspotted from the world.
** Phillips Brooks, "Unspotted from the World", commentary on James 1:27 (below)
* θρησκεία καθαρὰ καὶ ἀμίαντος παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ καὶ Πατρὶ αὕτη ἐστίν, ἐπισκέπτεσθαι ὀρφανοὺς καὶ χήρας ἐν τῇ θλίψει αὐτῶν, ἄσπιλον ἑαυτὸν τηρεῖν ἀπὸ τοῦ κόσμου.
** Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
*** James 1:27 ASV.
* True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
** Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
** John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life
* Quell' onda, che ruina Dalla pendice alpina, Balza, si frange, e mormora Ma limpida si fa.
** That water which falls from some Alpine height is dashed, broken, and will murmur loudly, but grows limpid by its fall.
** Metastasio, Alcide al Bivio (1760).
* Qual diverrà quel fiume, Nel lungo suo cammino, Se al fonte ancor vicino É torbido così?
** What will the stream become in its lengthened course, if it be so turbid at its source?
** Metastasio, Morte d' Abele (1732), I.
* Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
** Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
* One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.
** Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
* Eyes pure and broad like the blue lotus; mind pure, steeped in meditations; for pure deeds long accumulated, boundless in fame, your quietude guides the assembly-thus we bow our heads.
** Ratnākara to Buddha, in Vimalakirti Sutra, Chapter I. As translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 2000, ISBN: 0231106572.
** Pure and beautiful as a lotus leaf; pure are your intentions; you have reached the other shore of tranquility; you have accumulated good actions and conquered a great sea of virtues. Holy One, you lead to the path of peace, all homage to you!
*** Alternative translation in the multilingual edition of Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra at the Bibliotheca Polyglotta.
* Have you not seen those who claim themselves to be pure? Rather, Allah purifies whom He wills, and injustice is not done to them, (even) as much as a thread (inside a date seed).
** Quran 4:49
* Meditation and worship helps to purify the mind. Looking at beauty in the world is the first step of purifying the mind. A corrupted mind can't recognize the beauty of the world. A pure mind perceives it. A pure mind is the source of happiness.
** Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspiration. Inner Light Publishers. 2010. p. 39. ISBN 978-93-82123-31-6.
* Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.
** William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act III, scene 2, line 19.
* I am too pure for you or anyone.
** Sylvia Plath, Fever 103
* The gentleman knows that whatever is imperfect and unrefined does not deserve praise. ... He makes his eyes not want to see what is not right, makes his ears not want to hear that is not right, makes his mouth not want to speak what is not right, and makes his heart not want to deliberate over what is not right. ... For this reason, power and profit cannot sway him, the masses cannot shift him, and nothing in the world can shake him.
** Xun Zi, “An Exhortation to Learning,” E. Hutton, trans., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2001), p. 260

### Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations

    Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 652.
* Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source.
** The stream is always purer at its source.
** Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales, IV.
* Unto the pure all things are pure.
** Titus, I, 15.

## See also

* Chastity
* Divinity
* Holy
* Innocence
* Morality
* Perfection
* Purity in Buddhism
** Luminous mind
** Pure land