John Piper Quotes

To build enormous palaces, to conquer or to mimic nature, to ransack the world in order to gratify the passions of a man, is not thought of, but to add a few yards of land to your field, to plant an orchard, or enlarge a dwelling, to always be making life more comfortable and convenient, to avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest wants without effort and almost without cost. These are small objects, but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till they at last shut out the rest of the world and sometimes intervene between itself and heaven.

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

People have become shallower. They view spending, entertaining, seeking leisure and enjoying as the main objectives of their life.

We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.

I love domestic life.

People will always choose more money over more sex.

I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

Once we are fed, heated, housed and healthy, our extra consumption inevitably has an element of luxury about it. And once luxury enters the scene, the practicalities are in trouble, as women who wear expensive stiletto heels can testify.

Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds.

In Denver, I was a homebody, and that's a life I'd chosen with great happiness. I wanted that break from the arc lights and focus on building a lovely home, have some fun, look after my kids and do things that I had missed out on while pursuing my dream.

When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

Like the 'little emperors' of one-child China, too many Boomers were taught early that the world was made (or saved) for their comfort and enjoyment. They behaved accordingly, with a self-indulgence that was wholly rational, given their situation.

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.

I am so longing to be domestic,, cooking stew, gardening, hopefully having some children, painting, sitting still in one place.

I romanticized domesticity for a while, and loved having a shopping list of groceries stuck to the fridge for the first time.

Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

The thing I love is that my home life hasn't changed. I still help out with the garbage. I still help out with the lawn.

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.

When men cease to aspire to the ideal, the good, to self-restraint—–whether in their arts or in their lives—–they do not just stand still, but actually turn the other way, finding self-fulfillment in self-indulgence, and in an obsession with those three ultimate expressions of the totally self-centered life: sex, violence and insanity.

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty.