J. C. Ryle Quotes

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

At the end of your life, you cannot take a penny with you. So what is the object of money if you can't take it with you?

Matters of the heart are important to me. All this materialism and all the money and wealth are things that you don't take to the grave. One day you have it. The next day you don't.

What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?

I've been to MTV and all of that worldly stuff. It's death. It's meaningless.

This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth--ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

Oh, the cares of men! how much emptiness there is in human concerns!

A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.

The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

Remember that life holds out many pleasing deceits to us by the vanity of glory; for that when we are beginning to live, then we are dying. There is, therefore, nothing more profitless than ambition.

It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.

If you give your soul up to anything earthly, whether it be the wealth, or the honours, or the pleasures of this world, you might as well hunt after the mirage of the desert or try to collect the mists of the morning, or to store up for yourself the clouds of the sky, for all these things are passing away.

who wants flowers when youre dead? nobody.

The rich are like beasts of burden, carrying treasure all day, and at the night of death unladen; they carry to their grave only the bruises and marks of their toil.

When we are dead; rugs are no richer than a quick-thorn bed.

Men were created for something better than merely to make money. A close application to business, until a competence is gained, is one of the chief virtues; but to continue in trade long after this result is obtained, is one of the signs, not to be mistaken, of a sordid and ignoble nature.

Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows That for oblivion take their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of earth.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

We have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either.' There are no U-Hauls behind hearses.

You could get the money, you can get the power, but keep your eyes on the final hour.

Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.

The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.