Unclean Person Quotes & Sayings

Shame lives in the community, though the community can feel like a courtroom. It says, "You don't belong - you are unacceptable, unclean, and disgraced" because "You are wrong, you have sinned" (guilt), or "Wrong has been done to you" or "You are associated with those who are disgraced or outcast." The shamed person feels worthless, expects rejection, and needs cleansing, fellowship, love, and acceptance. — Edward T. Welch

This is called My Youth in Vienna. It's a very nice edition
an association copy, Schnitzler to his Latin master, one Johann Auer, 'with thanks for the Auerisms.' [ ... ] Here he apologizes for writing so much on 'the so-called Jewish question.' But he says that no Jew, no matter how assimilated, was allowed to forget the fact of his birth. [ ... ] 'Even if you managed to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched; as for instance a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut until the blood flows.' [ ... ] He wrote that in the early 1900s. The imagery is very chilling, is it not, in the light of what followed ... — Geraldine Brooks

The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden in the abstract, but as I shivered under the bridge that night with Jorge, I realized that it's harder to love the illegal immigrant with the bottle-slashed face and the body unwashed for weeks, the workers gathering to eat day-old bread and chicken and rice out of foam containers, the crowd of thousands clamoring for bread and fish and healing, the unclean woman hoping to touch the hem of the Savior's robe. — Alisa Harris

An unclean person is universally a slothful one. — Henry David Thoreau

The person whose house has been cleared of demonic influence retains an uncanny susceptibility and vulnerability. Care must be redoubled, for the "unclean spirit" wanders through waste places and finds no rest; it forces its way back into its former habitation and "finds it empty, swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first" (Mt 12:43 ff). The person to whom Jesus has said "Go and sin no more" (Jn 8:11) must be supported until he is sufficiently established in his new freedom. But — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Those who accept the Nature Cure teachings about the causes of disease, but still have a lingering superstition about the malevolent power of germs, may be further reassured by the fact that a clean skin is probably the most powerful germicide known. Tests made with a variety of "pathogenic micro-organisms" showed consistently that when these were placed upon the clean skin of a normally healthy person, they rapidly disintegrated. Similar tests on unclean skin and less healthy people showed a marked improvement in the microbes' chances of survival — Anonymous

Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person. — Thomas Szasz