John Eldredge Quotes

The whole world, it's a problem that there's too much stuff being produced. We don't have time to reflect on the important things in life.

It's nice to have material things but they're very superficial aren't they?

Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy.

I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics.

Superdevelopment leads to a throwaway society and to enormous waste. Excessive access to all kinds of things,—sometimes called consumerism—enslaves people and does not make them happy.

We have a million ways to get ahold of people, and we're the loneliest we've ever been.

Loneliness is a huge issue for both individuals and for society. It's taken a long time for the issue to be treated seriously and for us to begin to understand the impact it can have.

The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

We have come to accept bigger and bigger things as meaning greater and greater efficiency, more and more prosperity and more and more freedom. The two do not go together of necessity.

People are getting richer all over the world and they are going to want to live the way Americans live. And that is going to place a big strain on our environment and will be a great challenge.

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product.

One who understands the relationships between the human heart and the human mind will always out-hack those who chase after an ever-changing technology.

Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true.

That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.

I just realized at least what I was doing was making a lot of stuff that nobody needed and pushing a consumerist society. So I went to do something else.

One of the hardest challenges posed by the modern world is how to deal with abundance. It's even harder to confront because admitting that it's a problem seems spoiled.

I think there is some kind of disillusionment in the West about the gains of modernity and of economic growth and it takes a form of skepticism about the gains of prosperity generally.

The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.

What was the most important thing I learned from Chomsky? That capitalism compels us to work ourselves to death in order to stuff our houses with things we don't need. Perhaps this is one thing art can do: create a new aesthetic, one of austerity.

I trained in internal medicine, and I expected most of my time would be spent on diabetes or heart disease or cancer. What I didn't expect was that so many people I saw would be struggling with loneliness.

What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble - all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

We think that life is about get the girl, get the guy, get the car, get the job, get the house, get the kids, get the better job, get the better car, get the better house, get the promotion, get the office in the corner, get the kids on their way, get the grandkids, get the retirement watch, get the cruise tickets, get the illness, and get the heck out. That's it. That's a good life. But life has nothing to do with any of that. That is not our purpose in living. That is not the Agenda of the Soul.

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion.