Sermon quotes on the good life
Paul Bloom
We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good life: a life with sustained relationships, challenging work, and connections to community.
Carl Honoré
Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn’t it, to alert us to the fact that we’re hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we’re living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.
William Irvine
There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.
Daniel Kemmis
There have been times, not least the time of the birth of Athenian democracy, when most of the people who thought and wrote about human wholeness concluded that no one could be a whole human being, nor achieve the satisfactions of such wholeness, without participating fully in citizenship.
James Howard Kunstler
The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an antisocial view of existence. I don’t believe that we can afford to keep pretending that life is a never-ending episode of Littie House on the Prairie. We are going to have to develop a different notion of the good life and create a physical form that accommodates it.
Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century, Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Jen Oshman
The good life starts with an apology.
E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien
Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don’t like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspire to “the good life.”
Taken from Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien Copyright (c) 2012 by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
E.F. Schumacher
The scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est—which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.
A Guide for the Perplexed. (New York: Perennial Library, 1977), 38.
Stephen W. Smith
One way of redefining success is to redefine “the good life.” We have to unlearn what we’ve been taught because we’ve been sold a lie. I believe you know that as well as I do. Or at least you feel it—and have perhaps felt it for a very long time.
Taken from Inside Job by Stephen W. Smith (c) 2009 by Stephen W. Smith. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Robert J. Waldinger
The good life is built with good relationships.