Cleanliness

Cleanliness is both the abstract state of being clean and free from dirt and other grime and contaminants, and the process of achieving and maintaining that state.

you should look to the areas of your countries where people are poverty-stricken and helpless and then do all you can to raise their standard of living, teaching them cleanliness and high morals. —Haidakhan Babaji

Cleanliness was literally next to godliness in India; hygiene was not, as Anatole France thought it, la seule morale, but it was made an essential part of piety. —Will Durant

All will come out in the washing. —Miguel de Cervantes

Quotes

• Todo saldrá en la colada.
  • All will come out in the washing.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-1615), I, 20.

• (…) you should look to the areas of your countries where people are poverty-stricken and helpless and then do all you can to raise their standard of living, teaching them cleanliness and high morals. To serve the needy truly and from the heart is true service to God.
  • Haidakhan Babaji, The Teachings of Babaji, 20 April 1983.

• Cleanliness was literally next to godliness in India; hygiene was not, as Anatole France thought it, la seule morale, but it was made an essential part of piety. Manu laid down, many centuries ago, an exacting code of physical refinement. “Early in the morning,” one instruction reads, “let him” (the Brahman) “bathe, decorate his body, clean his teeth, apply collyrium to his eyes, and worship the gods.” The native schools made good manners and personal cleanliness the first courses in the curriculum. Every day the caste Hindu would bathe his body, and wash the simple robe he was to wear; it seemed to him abominable to use the same garment, unwashed, for more than a day. “The Hindus,” said Sir William Huber, “stand out as examples of bodily cleanliness among Asiatic races, and, we may add, among the races of the world. The ablutions of the Hindu have passed into a proverb.”
  • Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

• They were kept in the dark, squatting there with nothing to dwell upon beyond the fact they were unclean. Even the touch of their shadow would sour the land, blighting crops that grew there....At the end of their confinement they were led out blinking into the harsh and masculine glare of the sun. Their clothing was taken from them and destroyed. Their anger in darkness turning, unreleased, unspoken, it's mouth a red wound...

Their anger in darkness turning, unreleased, unspoken, it's mouth a red wound, its eyes hungry...hungry for the moon.

• Alan Moore, Swamp Thing #40 The Curse

• I'll purge and leave sack and live cleanly.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597), Act V, scene 4, line 168.

• Chim chiminey
  Chim chiminey
  Chim chim cher-ee!
  A sweep is as lucky
  As lucky can be

  Chim chiminey
  Chim chiminey
  Chim chim cher-oo!
  Good luck will rub off when
  I shakes 'ands with you
  Or blow me a kiss
  And that's lucky too

  Now as the ladder of life
  'As been strung
  You may think a sweep's
  On the bottommost rung

  Though I spends me time
  In the ashes and smoke
  In this 'ole wide world
  There's no 'appier bloke

  • Robert B. Sherman & Richard M. Sherman, "Chim Chim Cher-ee", from Mary Poppins

• Purity means cleanliness of mind and body; the latter is effected by the use of water etc. No nation in the world is as cleanly in the body as the Hindu, who uses water very freely.
  • Vivekananda

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 122.

• For cleanness of body was ever esteemed to proceed from a due reverence to God, to society, and to ourselves.
  • Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning.

• He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith.
  • Ecclesiasticus, XIII. 1.

• God loveth the clean.
  • Koran, Chapter LX.

• If dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!
  • Charles Lamb, Lamb's Suppers, Volume II. Last Chapter.

• The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness; carefulness into vigorousness; vigorousness into guiltlessness; guiltlessness into abstemiousness; abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.
  • Talmud. Division of Mishna, as translated by Dr. A. S. Bettelheim. Religious zeal leads to cleanliness, cleanliness to purity, purity to godliness, godliness to humility to the fear of sin. Rabbi Pinhasben-Jaïr—Commentary on the lines from the Talmud. See also Talmudde Jerusalem, by Schwab, IV. 16. Commentary on the treatise Schabbath. Schul—Sentences of Proverbes du Talmud et du Midrasch. 463.

• Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch
  At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb;
  Keep clean, be as fruit, earn life, and watch,
  Till the white-winged reapers come.
  • Henry Vaughan, The Seed Growing Secretly.

• Certainly this is a duty, not a sin. "Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness."
  • John Wesley, Sermon XCII, On Dress. Quoted by Rowland Hill as a saying of Whitefield's.

See also

• Hand washing
• Purity
• Ritual purification
• Soap