MATERIALISM – POSSESSIONS
If you don’t get everything you want, think of all the things you don’t get that you don’t want.
The best things in life aren’t things.
—Art Buchwald
We have been so anxious to give our children what we didn’t have that we have neglected to give them what we did have.
Theirs is an endless road, a hopeless maze, who seek goods before they seek God.
—Bernard of Clairvaux
Materialism may be called “affluenza.”
—Mrs. Ray Stedman
Many people are buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t like.
When Alexander the Great conquered a city, all the loot was in the valley before him. A soldier said to him, “Sir, what more can you ask for?” Alexander said, “But it doesn’t last.”
A king said to his sage, “How can I be happy?” The sage said, “Find the happiest person in your kingdom and wear his shirt.” So the king sent his courier throughout the kingdom and he found the happiest man. The courier told the king, “I’ve found the happiest man, but he didn’t even own a shirt.”
Don’t try to have it all. Where would you put it?
There are three classes of people: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-Not-Paid-For-What-They-Haves.
—Earl Wilson
Yussiff, the Terrible Turk, was a 350-pound wrestler who two generations ago won the European wrestling championship and then came to this country seeking other continents to conquer. Here he found a wrestler named Strangler Lewis, who was the American champ. Yussiff promptly challenged him to a contest for the world championship.
When the two wrestlers met, the Strangler found his great potent weapon—that of winding his mighty arm around his opponent’s neck and pressing his bulging biceps on his Adam’s apple until he collapsed from lack of oxygen—useless. The Turk’s neck was so huge he could not get his arm around it. Lewis tried hard to strangle Yussiff but he simply would not cooperate. Lewis weighed only 200 pounds and with his one weapon gone he was helpless. The Turk tossed the American champ around like a volleyball and won the bout.
Yussiff won not only the crown, but along with that he received something of more practical value and much more to his liking—a purse of five thousand dollars, his share of the gate receipts. Yussiff loved money and he loved to possess it in its most tangible form, so he demanded his pay in U.S. gold, which he crammed into a money belt and strapped around his huge equator. Thus attired in glory and gold he sailed on the S.S. Burgoyne.
Part way across the Atlantic, the Burgoyne sank. Yussiff went over the side with his gold still clasped around his body. The added weight was too much for even the Terrible Turk to keep afloat and before the sailors in the lifeboats could reach him, he plunged to the bottom like an anvil and was never seen again.
Years ago, when W. E. Sangster visited the United States, someone asked him what impressed him most about our country. He said, “You seem to have more of everything than anyone else. You have more cars, more televisions, more refrigerators, more of everything. In fact, I’ve noticed that you also have more books on how to be happy than anybody else.”
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is the comfort of money that it values more, it will lose that too.
—Somerset Vaughn
If you have something you can’t do without, you don’t own it; it owns you.
—Albert Schweitzer
In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it’s the exact opposite.
—John Galbraith
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what we want, and the other is getting it.
—Oscar Wilde
We rich men covet our happiness to lie in the little superfluities, not in necessities.
—Plutarch
The more of heaven there is in our lives, the less of earth we shall covet.
There is no doubt you can’t take it with you. You can’t even keep it while you’re here.
In a Soviet prison camp, Solzhenitsyn discovered that “the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but … in the development of the soul.” Perhaps this is why he spends much of his time writing in a small cabin furnished only with the barest necessities.
—Our Daily Bread
Bumper sticker: He who dies with the most toys wins.
Just because people are better off doesn’t mean they are better. A Christian in a Cadillac is no more precious in the sight of God than a believer on a bicycle.
—Michael Guido
E. Stanley Jones, in his book Growing Spiritually, talks about a fictional person who lived out a fantasy life. All he had to do was think of it and (poof!) it happened. So this man, in a moment of time, sticks his hands in his pockets and leans back and imagines a mansion and (poof!) he has a fifteen bedroom mansion, three stories with servants instantly available to wait upon his every need.
Why, a place like that needs several fine cars. So he again closes his eyes and imagines the driveway full of the finest wheels money can buy. And (poof!) there are several of the best vehicles instantly brought before his mind’s eye. He is free to drive them himself or sit way back in the limousine with that mafia glass wrapped around the rear, and have the chauffeur drive him wherever he wishes.
There’s no other place to travel so he comes back home and wishes for a sumptuous meal and (poof!) there’s a meal in front of him with all of its mouth-watering aromas and beauty—which he eats alone. And yet … there was something more he needed to find happiness.
Finally, he grows so terribly bored and unchallenged that he whispers to one of the attendants, “I want to get out of this. I want to create some things again. I’d rather be in hell that be here.” To which one of the servants replies quietly, “Where do you think you are?”
I recently heard of a young woman who said to a real estate agent, “Why do I need a home? I was born in a hospital, educated in a college, engaged in a car, married in a hotel. I live out of a delicatessen and paper bags. I spend my mornings on the golf course, my afternoons at the bridge table, and my evenings at the movies. When I die, I’m going to be buried at the undertaker’s. All I need is a garage.”
—Jack D. Spiro
On the Shetland Islands off the northern coast of Scotland, a man spent five years constructing a sixty-two-foot yacht that weighed 126 tons. On the day of its launching, he invited a local band to play, and most of the townspeople came out to help him celebrate his achievement. He planned to start a voyage around the world as soon as the boat was launched. As the band played and the customary bottle was smashed across the bow, the ship was lowered into the water. But it didn’t float! It immediately sank to the bottom of the harbor. And with it went a lifetime of savings and five years of hard work.
A newspaper carried this article: I read, “A young man once found a five-dollar bill in the street. From that time on, he never lifted his eyes when walking. In the course of years, he accumulated 29,516 buttons, 54,172 pins, 12 cents, a bent back, and a miserly disposition. He lost the glory of the sunlight, the sheen of the stars, the smiles of friends, tree blossoms in the spring, the blue skies, and the entire joy of living.”
Many people today look to this earth for satisfaction, pleasure, wealth, and happiness, and have never looked to Jesus Christ for eternal life.
A man walked down a street in Atlanta and came to a furrier shop. He stopped to look at a leopard skin that had been made into a coat. He gazed at the fur and thought about the price. “O cat,” he said, “you were better off before you were worth so much.”
An old rabbinic tale records the concern of a man of God for a young friend who was becoming worldly and materialistic. The rabbi invited him into his study and led him to the window.
“What do you see?” he asked. There was a playground next door.
“I see children playing.”
Then the rabbi took a little hand mirror out of his pocket and held it before the visitor’s face. “Tell me what you see now?”
“I see myself,” he said, wondering what was going on.
“Isn’t it strange,” the rabbi asked, “that when a little silver gets between yourself and others, you see only yourself?”
MATHEMATICS
Three Indian squaws were going to have babies. One was going to have hers born on a buffalo skin, another on a cow hide, and the third on a hippopotamus hide. When the children were born, it was discovered that the squaw with the hippopotamus hide had twins while the other had only one son each.
Moral: The squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaw of the other two hides.
MATURITY
Maturity is the ability to control anger and settle differences without violence or destruction.
Maturity is patience. It is the willingness to pass up immediate pleasure in favor of the long-term gain.
Maturity is perseverance, the ability to sweat out a project or a situation in spite of heavy opposition and discouraging setbacks.
Maturity is the capacity to face unpleasantness and frustration, discomfort and defeat, without complaint or collapse.
Maturity is humility. It is being big enough to say “I was wrong.” And, when right, the mature person need not experience the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so.”
Maturity is the ability to make a decision and stand by it. The immature spend their lives exploring endless possibilities; then they do nothing.
Maturity means dependability, keeping one’s word, coming through in a crisis. The immature are masters of alibi. They are disorganized. Their lives are a maze of broken promises, former friends, unfinished business, and good intentions that somehow never materialize.
Maturity is the art of living in peace with that which we cannot change, the courage to change that which should be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.
—Ann Landers
Maturity is:
• the ability to stick with a job until it is finished.
• the ability to do a job without being supervised.
• the ability to carry money without spending it.
• the ability to bear an injustice without wanting to get even.
—Abigail Van Buren
A sign of maturity is when you go from a thick skin and a hard heart to a tough skin and a soft heart.
—Chuck Swindoll
MEALS
Football player’s wife: “I hate it when my husband calls leftovers ‘replays.’ ”
TV executive’s wife: “My husband calls them ‘reruns.’ ”
Mortician’s wife: “Be grateful. My husband refers to them as ‘remains.’ ”
MEASUREMENTS
Foot: the length of Charlemagne’s foot, modified in 1305 to be thirty-six barleycorns laid end to end.
Inch: the width across the knuckle on King Edgar’s thumb, or, obviously, three barleycorns.
Yard: the reach from King Henry I’s nose to his royal fingertips, a distance also twice as long as a cubit.
Cubit: the length of the arm from elbow to fingertip.
Mile: one thousand double steps of a Roman legionary. Later, Queen Bess added more feet so the mile would equal eight furlongs.
Furlong: the length of a furrow a team of oxen could plow before resting.
Acre: the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plow in one day.
Fathom: the span of a seaman’s outstretched arms; 880 fathoms make a mile.
The metric system, on the other hand, uses the meter, defined precisely as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of orange-red light emitted by the krypton-86 atom, or originally one-ten-millionth the length of the longitude from the North Pole to the equator. The meter is exactly 39.37 inches—or, that is, some 118 barleycorns.
—National Geographic News Service
MEDICINE
In 1980 the World Health Organization announced that vaccinations had finally wiped out the dreaded disease smallpox from the face of the earth. It had been almost three hundred years since a little-known slave in Boston, Massachusetts, told a Puritan minister how Africans would take a drop of liquid from a smallpox sore and put it into a cut on a healthy person’s arm. The person sometimes got slightly ill but seldom got smallpox. Modern inoculation was born.