All 7 Uses
pious
in
Steppenwolf
(Edited)
- Although I know very little of the Steppenwolf's life, I have all the same good reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe and very pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine that makes the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and upbringing.
pious = religious
- If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible.
piety = religious morality
- Nor could anyone be talked into a pious frame of mind; and when the clergyman addressed the company repeatedly as "dear fellow-Christians," all the silent faces of these shop people and master bakers and their wives were turned down in embarrassment and expressed nothing but the wish that this uncomfortable function might soon be over.
pious = religious
- There the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees before the god of applied science whose might had made it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always known and put to better use than in this recent and very imperfect development.
- We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety and religious topics were not unwelcome to her.
piety = religious belief
- The pious call it the kingdom of God.
*pious = religious
- "The pious," she went on meditatively, "after all know most about this."
Definitions:
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(1)
(pious as in: a good, pious woman) religious or highly moral
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(2)
(pious as in: a pious hypocrite) self-righteous (acting as though one is, or believing one is highly moral when it is not true)
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(3)
(pious as in: cling to the pious hope) (describing a hope or wish as) sincere, but highly unlikely
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(4)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely, piety can refer to devotion or faithfulness as Proust used it in the book, Swann's Way:
"...but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's soul before Love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a comrade."