How to Use piety in a Sentence

piety

noun
  • He was admired for his extreme piety.
  • My favorite saying about my fellow Jews emphasizes not our tenacity or our piety but something much more important: our passion for disagreement.
    Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post, 3 July 2024
  • That one makes a great show of piety, said the nun in my ear.
    Emma Donoghue, The Atlantic, 12 May 2020
  • But the display of piety has done little to mask that the army chief has much to atone for.
    New York Times, 2 Feb. 2021
  • This doesn’t mean that the pieties are empty or useless.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 11 Dec. 2023
  • Surely there’s an age cut-off point where this sort of piety doesn’t work?
    Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review, 9 Oct. 2017
  • There's little piety among those running the mines that are the main source of income.
    Fernando Vergara, Star Tribune, 23 Apr. 2021
  • Hollywood and the Republican right have clashed for years over the morals of the silver screen and the piety of the steeple.
    Jeffrey Fleishman, chicagotribune.com, 24 June 2019
  • Trump has great timing and an unerring sense of how to cut through the pre-fab pieties of diplomacy.
    Christine M. Flowers, Philly.com, 21 Sep. 2017
  • To find answers means more truth, less filial piety, and God knows how much more time.
    Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 30 May 2022
  • The poor were thought to be the regime’s last bastion of power, tied to theocracy by piety and the welfare state.
    Reuel Marc Gerecht and, WSJ, 11 June 2018
  • Eilish’s pop-song tantrums and Keys’s false piety give music the power to keep us apart.
    Armond White, National Review, 27 Jan. 2020
  • Magnum Photos Khamenei projects a life of piety and service.
    Karim Sadjadpour, Time, 3 Oct. 2019
  • The president’s son did show passion about one thing: his piety.
    William Saletan, Slate Magazine, 12 July 2017
  • Trump’s piety, of course, is suspect, while Bush is a true believer.
    Sarah Jones, The New Republic, 15 Mar. 2018
  • Yet if the uplifting side of the addiction drama can be one of its pieties, in this case it feels earned.
    Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 22 Mar. 2023
  • And how a man who preached piety became the cause of unabashed revelry is anyone’s guess.
    Los Angeles Daily News, The Mercury News, 17 Mar. 2017
  • That’s a serious debit in a movie that is, at least sometimes, about a figure of renowned deep piety.
    Dennis Harvey, Variety, 2 June 2023
  • The Virgin of Kings, dressed in orchid pink, gazed down at this scene of historical piety.
    Aatish Taseer Richard Mosse, New York Times, 3 Nov. 2022
  • The college president, Robert E. Lee, offered pieties and looked the other way.
    Jay Weiser, WSJ, 1 Oct. 2017
  • Black clothing conveyed plainness and piety, for one thing.
    Shelley Puhak, The Atlantic, 13 Oct. 2017
  • Laws require all women to at least wear a headscarf, or hijab, to cover their hair as a sign of piety.
    Jon Gambrell and Mike Corder, The Christian Science Monitor, 6 Oct. 2023
  • Things Lu couldn’t account for, all the sorrow and spite, the vitriol and piety, that suddenly had free rein.
    The New Yorker, 13 Dec. 2021
  • The variety and richness of the images are astonishing, and attest to both the king’s piety and ego.
    Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian, 21 Nov. 2019
  • Many of the men have beards, a hallmark of Islamic piety, and many of the women wear ankle-long dresses and hijab.
    Hamza Hendawi, Fox News, 13 June 2018
  • The satire is largely aimed at the kind of pieties about inclusion that are espoused by woke white liberals.
    Jesse Green, New York Times, 12 Mar. 2018
  • Throughout the conference, Rohr dished out a series of barbs aimed at Christian piety.
    Fred Bahnson, Harpers Magazine, 5 Jan. 2021
  • Besides water control, they've been said to ward off evil and to frighten passers-by into piety.
    CBS News, 27 Oct. 2019
  • Paying one’s respects to the past, through memorialization of some kind, is an act of piety.
    Washington Post, 4 Mar. 2022
  • Many faiths have fallen by the wayside over the millennia, unable to compete in the marketplace of piety.
    Shadi Hamid, Foreign Affairs, 18 June 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'piety.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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