Please enable javascript to see: All 28 uses | 'Young Juan,' the mother read, 'from his earliest years was noted for his humility and piety.' – piety = highly religious and moral behavior – Chpt 1.2...

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All 28 Uses of

pious

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The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene by Greene

"Young Juan," the mother read, "from his earliest years was noted for his humility and piety."
Chpt 1.2 *

piety = highly religious and moral behavior

The two little girls sat with beady intense eyes, drinking in the sweet piety. Other boys might be rough and revengeful; young Juan followed the precept of Our Lord and turned the other cheek.
Chpt 1.2

The voice went on and on, mild and deliberate, inflexibly gentle; the small girls listened intently, framing in their minds little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents, and the boy yawned against the whitewash.
Chpt 1.2

pious = religious

He dreamed that a small girl in stiff white muslin was reciting her Catechism - somewhere in the background, there was a bishop and a group of Children of Mary, elderly women with grey hard pious faces wearing pale blue ribbons.
Chpt 2.1

He was quite young and he had been moved by a gentle devilry, surrounded by all the pious and middle-aged and respectable people of Concepcion, wearing their guild ribbons and badges.
Chpt 2.1

pious = highly religious and moral

She had the tiresome intense note of a pious woman.
Chpt 2.3

pious = religious

He had always been worried by the fate of pious women.
Chpt 2.3

He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals … He had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.
Chpt 2.3

The pious woman's voice leapt hysterically out at him, 'It is so stupid to tell them that.'
Chpt 2.3

The pious woman was whispering to him.
Chpt 2.3

The pious woman said aloud with fury, 'Why won't they stop it?'
Chpt 2.3

He thought of the old man now in Mexico City, living in one of those ugly comfortable pious houses, full of images and holy pictures, saying Mass on Sundays at one of the cathedral altars.
Chpt 2.3

He began to feel an overwhelming responsibility for this pious woman.
Chpt 2.3

He saw the pious woman a few feet away, uneasily dreaming with her prim mouth open, showing strong teeth like tombs: the old man: the boaster in the corner, and his woman asleep untidily across his knees.
Chpt 2.3

He had to go on with life, go on making decisions, acting on his own advice, making plans… It took him another half-hour to finish cleaning the cells, throwing a bucket of water over each floor; he watched the pious woman go off through the archway to where her sister waited with the fine; they were both tied up in black shawls like things bought in the market, things hard and dry and secondhand.
Chpt 2.3

That was a fact - something you could touch, but this was no more than a pious aspiration.
Chpt 2.4

All the same, one did feel an enormous luxury lying there in a little cold stream while the sun sank… He thought of the prison cell with the old man and the pious woman, the half-caste lying across the hut door, the dead child, and the abandoned station.
Chpt 3.1

God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety?†
Chpt 3.1

piety = religious or highly moral belief/behavior OR (more rarely) devotion or faithfulness

He drank the brandy down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved, salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.†
Chpt 3.1

This was another pious person.
Chpt 3.1

pious = religious

He had the habit now — like piety and the parish voice.†
Chpt 3.1

piety = religious or highly moral belief/behavior OR (more rarely) devotion or faithfulness

He took a quick look at her in the light of the candle burning on the floor -the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl - another of the pious - like himself.
Chpt 3.1

pious = religious

It ought to be possible for a man to be happy here, if he were not so tied to fear and suffering- unhappiness too can become a habit like piety.
Chpt 3.1

piety = religious behavior

He had been glad in a way to turn from Miss Lehr's gate - he had never really believed that he would ever get back to parish work and the daily Mass and the careful appearances of piety, but all the same you needed to be a little drunk to die.
Chpt 3.2

piety = religious belief

Pain alters a face - or else successful crime has its own falsity like politics or piety.
Chpt 3.2

piety = religion

There was a legend believed by many criminals that dead eyes held the picture of what they had last seen - a Christian could believe that the soul did the same, held absolution and peace at the final moment, after a lifetime of the most hideous crime: or sometimes pious men died suddenly in brothels unabsolved and what had seemed a good life went out with the permanent stamp on it of impurity.
Chpt 3.2

pious = religious

One of the men there that day was so moved by his bearing that he secretly soaked his handkerchief in the martyr's blood, and that handkerchief, cut into a hundred relics, found its way into many pious homes.
Chpt 4

The little girls sat motionless, their eyes large and brown and pious.†
Chpt 1.4

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Grouped by 3 Meanings

Definitions:

(1) (pious as in: a good, pious woman)
religious or highly moral
(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)
(3) (pious as in: cling to the pious hope)
(describing a hope or wish as) sincere, but highly unlikely