Sermon quotes on comparison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.
David Dickson
Our mind cannot find a comparison too large for expressing the superabundant mercy of the Lord toward his people.
Richard Foster
We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. ‘We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.’ …It is time to awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.
Steven Furtick
The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.
Sydney J. Harris
When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’
Timothy Keller
Jesus says, “I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look weak by comparison”
C. S. Lewis
“A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.”
Robert Murray McCheyne
Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little in comparison with eternal realities.
Theodore Roosevelt
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Bob Ross
Put light against light – you have nothing. Put dark against dark – you have nothing. It’s the contrast of light and dark that each give the other one meaning.
Dame Edna Everage (Barry Humphries)
I don’t compare myself to Jesus, but there are spooky similarities.
Marcus Aurelius
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
Karl Barth
The life of man becomes an unbroken chain of movements dictated by his anxious desire for assurances.
Rebecca Webber
Social comparison theory was first put forth in 1954 by psychologist Leon Festinger, who hypothesized that we make comparisons as a way of evaluating ourselves. At its root, the impulse is connected to the instant judgments we make of other people—a key development of the brain’s social-cognition network.
“Mirror, Mirror,” Psychology Today, November-December 2017, p.58.
Ronald Rolheiser
So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.
Forgotten Among the Lilies: Learning to Love Beyond Our Fears (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 16.
Marcus Aurelius
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
Charles Spurgeon
A man will speedily sit down and sympathize with a friend’s griefs; but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not so readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be; without effort we ought to be happy in our brother’s happiness.
Ronald Rolheiser
So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is a heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness.
Forgotten Among the Lilies: Learning to Love Beyond Our Fears (New York: Galilee, 2005), 16.
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
The envious person resents another person’s good gifts because they are superior to his or her own. It’s not just that the other person is better; it is that by comparison their superiority makes you feel your own lack, your own inferiority, more acutely.
Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, Brazos Press, 2009.
Marcus Aurelius
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
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