John Piper Quotes

I'm fulfilled in what I do. I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes - the finer things of life - would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be filled in a spiritual sense.

Money will never make you happy and happy will never make you money.

Happy is harder than money. Anybody who thinks money will make you happy hasn't got money.

I do not need a lot of money to be happy.

I try to stress to my children that buying something never leads to true happiness.

It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

You want the people to know, but you don't really want the things behind it. I have everything I ever wanted. I never wanted a big house. I never wanted a Ferrari. I mean, as I proceeded with the music, I started liking Ferraris...

Poor is the man who desires a lot

How few our real wants, and how vast our imaginary ones!

When you don't have any money, any things, any house - if you are unattached, what is the difficulty in it? But when you have everything and you remain unattached - a beggar in the palace - then something very deep has been attained.

If we understand the dangers of materialism, it will help liberate us to experience the joys of Christ-centered stewardship. Jesus speaks of the "deceitfulness of wealth" . The psalmist warns, "Though your riches increase, do not set your heart on them" . The dangers of materialism are far-reaching. We should not think that we're immune to the value-changing nature of wealth.

Give me a good sharp knife and a good sharp cheese and I’m a happy man.

The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land.

I used to think that having many material things would increase one's stock of happiness. I found that to be completely untrue. The trappings don't make the man at all.

I'm not the poorest president. The poorest is the one who needs a lot to live.

The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.

And I never started to plow in my life That some one did not stop in the road And take me away to a dance or picnic. I ended up with forty acres; I ended up with a broken fiddle— And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, And not a single regret.

perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.

When the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him... a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

The more wants a man has, the less freedom.

You may have occasion to possess or use material things, but the secret of life lies in never missing them.

Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.