What's the difference between pious and sacrilegious?

Pious


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to piety; exhibiting piety; reverential; dutiful; religious; devout; godly.
  • (a.) Practiced under the pretext of religion; prompted by mistaken piety; as, pious errors; pious frauds.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) © Focus Features Where Dolly, a kind, pious, modest, anxious figure, the mother of five living and two dead children, belongs very much to the old Russia, Stiva Oblonsky, her husband, is recognisable as the caricature of a modern man.
  • (2) It is of course important that migrants are not scapegoated; but such pious deceit from comfortable middle-class commentators can only provoke the unemployed, the low-paid and the homeless.
  • (3) Still, I like to believe that these small-scale ventures, too, make some contribution to a conversation without limits or proscriptions; the sine qua non of the sort of society that knows to keep the solemn and the pious at bay.
  • (4) Many Isis fighters are newly converted, newly pious ... these men have grown a beard in three months and they don’t give Islam time to be understood.” He is tired of having to defend his religion against bigots who take these instant Islamists to be the authentic representation of Islam.
  • (5) The president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, made it a vote about his “way”, and found himself rejected by a large group of “democrat” voters – and almost completely abandoned by his long-term allies: pious Kurds.
  • (6) In that same National season, he teamed with Simon Callow (as Face) and Josie Lawrence (as Doll Common) in a co-production by Bill Alexander for the Birmingham Rep of Ben Jonson’s trickstering, two-faced masterpiece The Alchemist ; he was a comically pious Subtle in sackcloth and sandals.
  • (7) Both harangued Brian from the outset calling it "a squalid little film" and "tenth rate"; no amount of measured argument on the Pythons part would dissuade the pious double act of their firmly held belief that Life of Brian mocked Christ.
  • (8) He's obviously a true believer in democracy – which sounds rather pious, but it's a fact.
  • (9) Tories are furious and bitter at being abandoned by the Lib Dems, whom they loathe anyway as a bunch of pious creeps.
  • (10) Those who claim that conversion or rejection of faith is punishable by death are effectively - and this ought to give their pious hearts pause for reflection - usurping powers reserved solely for God.
  • (11) Burns is, according to the poet Edwin Muir, "to the respectable, a decent man; to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a revolutionary; to the nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious …" So no doubt, this January at the start of referendum year , even diehard unionists will be searching around for words of his that seem to support their position and, where they can extrapolate them, sprinkling them around with abandon to salt their haggis, neeps and tatties at Burns suppers the length and breadth of the land.
  • (12) We simply cannot wait in the pious hope that short-term-minded governments and enterprises will save us There is a clear answer to the question of each country’s reasonable share, based on a permissible quantum of emissions per capita that never threatens the perilous 2C mean temperature increase that would profoundly and irreversibly affect all life on earth.
  • (13) The reticent, pious, even priggish character was too alien, possibly repellant, for the writer and director of the 1999 film version, Patricia Rozema, who drew on Austen's letters to fabricate another creature altogether.
  • (14) Against this background it is very simple to make such pious and ill-considered statements as, “If they don’t want to go to jail, they shouldn’t break the law!” Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We represent only 2.4% of the Australian population yet account for more than 25% of the prison population.’ Photograph: AAP Against this background, it is very simple to impose policies for Indigenous Australians that do not signal any sense of belief in our humanity and own capacity to rise above the challenges we are confronted by.
  • (15) What we have too in Sister Cristina is the singing nun as a cultural idea: the pious, virginal creature emerging from behind strict convent walls to charm the world with the power of her voice.
  • (16) Early speculation suggested the twice-divorced businessman – who once cited the verse “two Corinthians” rather than the correct “second Corinthians” during his campaign and said he had never sought forgiveness for his sins – could not capture the vote of the pious.
  • (17) Like The Guard, Calvary is tartly, tightly scripted; unlike it, it's a pious piece of work, a serious investigation of expiation.
  • (18) This pious art lover could have a career in slapstick if she wants, for her comic destruction of a work of art bears comparison with Rowan Atkinson giving Whistler's Mother a badly drawn cartoon face in the film Bean .
  • (19) Sometimes we are not quite sure that this way of life is pious enough.
  • (20) "I saw Jonathan, who comes over as a very nice, humble, pious person," said Selby.

Sacrilegious


Definition:

  • (a.) Violating sacred things; polluted with sacrilege; involving sacrilege; profane; impious.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "There is nothing sacrilegious here, but a clear desire to ruin the mood in our city."
  • (2) Who will be there to tell others no, you can’t mine there, to do so would be “sacrilegious”?
  • (3) In a letter to a corporation official, Cottam wrote: "Desecration: graffiti have been scratched and painted on to the great west doors of the cathedral, the chapter house door and most notably a sacrilegious message painted on to the restored pillars of the west portico.
  • (4) Stravinsky was shocked - he regarded the idea as sacrilegious.
  • (5) It might sound sacrilegious on a day like this, but budgets aren't generally that important.
  • (6) Did your family worry that Father Ted was sacrilegious?
  • (7) Many people are still uneasy about entering a church, worried about doing something wrong or sacrilegious, and fretful about the chance of both giving offence or being evangelised.
  • (8) It felt heady, almost sacrilegious, to chuck out Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat , but in the end we decided that this long account of mischief among the chattering classes was probably not her best novel; and I was sad to lose David Lodge's sweet coming-of-age novel Out of the Shelter , which is set in Heidelberg, Germany, shortly after the war.
  • (9) On Monday three supreme court judges considered whether his painting, Bharat Mata (Mother India), which depicts a nude woman on her knees creating the shape of a map of India, was sacrilegious.
  • (10) Even the records she made with Stock Aitken Waterman in the late 80s, a collaboration which seemed sacrilegious at the time, are animated by the power and sincerity of her voice.
  • (11) I know that sounds a bit sacrilegious, but could it be that THE ECOLOGY is actually the biggie?
  • (12) There was the shock and the grief at the loss of 298 people on a commercial airliner that had nothing whatsoever to do with the war on the ground; there was the disorderly and at times sacrilegious treatment of the crash site; and there were the bitter recriminations about blame.
  • (13) We've had blasphemous teddy bears and sacrilegious frogs , but this week a new religious animal quivered in the spotlight, as a Saudi cleric insisted that all mice should be killed – including Mickey Mouse.
  • (14) In the evening we get back into the car - a sacrilegious lump in the Posada's drive - and head a few minutes back down the coast to the tiny village of La Juanita, to La Olada, a restaurant on the front porch of a local chef's house.
  • (15) Revealing anything about the plot to somebody who hasn’t seen it yet has been treated as practically sacrilegious.

Words possibly related to "sacrilegious"