Worldliness Quotes

If you want the answer—ask the question.

~ Lorii Myers

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth home. Before you know it, I am calling luxeries needs and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set.

~ John Piper

Worldliness proposes objectives which demand no radical breach with man's fallen nature, it judges the importance of things by the present and material results, it weighs success by numbers, it covets human esteem and wants no unpopularity, it knows no truth for which it is worth suffering, it declines to be a 'fool for Christ's sake.

~ Iain Murray

The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

Funny how we do not realize the true value and legacy of a living icon until they suddenly pass away. Truth is, there are many living legends among us, we just do not stop and take time to notice their worth until it's too late.

~ Germany Kent

…mischief, …arises not from our living in the world, but from the world living in us; occupying our hearts, and monopolizing our affections.

~ Karen Swallow Prior

Until you are clear nothing will be. The moment you are clear everything will be.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

The devil can get you through your flesh. He knows the button to press on your flesh and have a way into your mind. The flesh becomes a transport medium for evil things if not killed for God. If Christ makes a home in your mind, satan can't get there.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask...

~ George Eliot

The world around us   conforms to expectations      we place upon it.

~ J. Benson

You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.

~ Stella Adler

The source to low self-esteem is the lack of control you feel you have in your life. If you spend your life competing with others, trying to make right the wrongs done to you, or waste your time trying to look right, you will never achieve contentment and emotional balance. People you encounter in life can’t be controlled by you. You only have control of yourself. Build your life around a relationship with a higher power and achieving what you’re passionate about. When you let go of what you can’t control, true peace can then enter your life. This is the path to achieving emotional balance.

~ Shannon L. Alder

You will forever be a stranger in a world that cannot really understand you...

~ Dinesh Kumar Biran

Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

The readiest way which God takes to draw a man to himself is, to afflict him in that he loves most, and with good reason; and to cause this affliction to arise from some good action done with a single eye; because nothing can more clearly show him the emptiness of what is most lovely and desirable in all the world.

~ John Wesley

The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

My God, Sweetness beyond words, make bitter all the carnal comfort that draws me from love of the eternal and lures me to its evil self by the sight of some delightful good in the present. Let it not overcome me, my God. Let not flesh and blood conquer me. Let not the world and its brief glory deceive me, nor the devil trip me by his craftiness. Give me courage to resist, patience to endure, and constancy to persevere. Give me the soothing unction of Your spirit rather than all the consolations of the world, and in place of carnal love, infuse into me the love of Your name.

~ Thomas À Kempis

When a man desires a thing too much, he at once becomes ill at ease. A proud and avaricious man never rests, whereas he who is poor and humble of heart lives in a world of peace. An unmortified man is quickly tempted and overcome in small, trifling evils; his spirit is weak, in a measure carnal and inclined to sensual things; he can hardly abstain from earthly desires. Hence it makes him sad to forego them; he is quick to anger if reproved. Yet if he satisfies his desires, remorse of conscience overwhelms him because he followed his passions and they did not lead to the peace he sought.

~ Thomas À Kempis

The nice people do not come to God, because they think they are good through their own merits or bad through inherited instincts. If they do good, they believe they are to receive the credit for it; if they do evil, they deny that it is their own fault. They are good through their own goodheartedness, they say; but they are bad because they are misfortunate, either in their economic life or through an inheritance of evil genes from their grandparents. The nice people rarely come to God; they take their moral tone from the society in which they live. Like the Pharisee in front of the temple, they believe themselves to be very respectable citizens. Elegance is their test of virtue; to them, the moral is the aesthetic, the evil is the ugly. Every move they make is dictated, not by a love of goodness, but by the influence of their age. Their intellects are cultivated—in knowledge of current events; they read only the bestsellers, but their hearts are undisciplined. They say that they would go to church if the Church were only better—but they never tell you how much better the Church must be before they will join it. They sometimes condemn the gross sins of society, such as murder; they are not tempted to these because they fear the opprobrium which comes to them who commit them. By avoiding the sins which society condemns, they escape reproach, they consider themselves good par excellence.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

By simple mathematics giving is key to the world you seek to live in. If I take I alone gain. If I give or share then two at least are enriched.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

The true Church of Jesus Christ will never be overwhelmed by the world. The waters may swirl around us, but the Lord has promised to build His Church and keep it strong until He returns. One thing must be avoided at all costs. We must not let the world seep into the Church. When we let the world dilute our Gospel and water down our values, we'll disappear from sight. Let's keep the Church holy - and wholly committed to Scripture. The chief danger of the Church today is that it's trying to get on the same side as the world, instead of trying to turn the world upside down.

~ A.b. Simpson

Peace between good and evil is an impossibility; the very pretence of it would, in fact, be the triumph of the powers of darkness.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?

~ Leonard Ravenhill