Worldliness Quotes

“Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth "home." Before you know it, I am calling luxeries "needs" and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set.”
― John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?”
― Leonard Ravenhill

“If you want the answer—ask the question.”
― Lorii Myers

“I learnt to identify the false love from true ones by their fruits, humbleness and how free they were from wordily desires.”
― Santosh Avvannavar, The Departing Point: Two people departed...in search of love...leaving love in between

“Being salt and light demands two things: we practice purity in the midst of a fallen world and yet we live in proximity to this fallen world. If you don't hold up both truth in tension, you invariably becomes useless and separated from the world God loves.”
― David Kinnaman, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters

“The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words "going along". We simply go along with the values and practices of society.”
― Jerry Bridges, Respectable Sins

“How then can we deal with our tendency toward worldliness? It is *not* by determining that we will not be worldly, but by committing ourselves to becoming more godly.”
― Jerry Bridges

“Worldliness proposes objectives which demand no radical breach with man's fallen nature; it judges the importance of things by the present and material results; it weighs success by numbers; it covets human esteem and wants no unpopularity; it knows no truth for which it is worth suffering; it declines to be a 'fool for Christ's sake.”
― Iain Murray

“It is vital to understand that however positive this worldly life, or even a small part of it, may appear to be, ultimately it will fail because absolutely nothing genuinely works in samsara.”
― Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, Not For Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices

“The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Until you are clear nothing will be. The moment you are clear everything will be.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru, Soul Trader

“I have not written my memoirs for those young people who can only save themselves from falling by spending their youth in ignorance, but for those whom experience of life has rendered proof against being seduced, whom living in the fire has transformed into salamanders.”
― Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, Vols. I & II

“Facebook asks me what's on my mind. Twitter asks me what's going on. LinkedIn wants me to reconnect with my colleagues. And YouTube tells me what to watch. Social Media is no reality show or Big Brother. It's but a smothering mother!”
― Ana Claudia Antunes

“I stopped trying to fit in. Stopped going with the flow. Stopped blending in with the world. I stopped trying to mold myself into what others thought a “good” Christian should look like or act like.”
― Dana Arcuri, Sacred Wandering: Growing Your Faith In The Dark

“Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask...”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation, and Miss Schlegel was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul. She answered, “Nothing, but he would not gain his soul until he had gained a little of the world.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“The true Church of Jesus Christ will never be overwhelmed by the world. The waters may swirl around us, but the Lord has promised to build His Church and keep it strong until He returns.

One thing must be avoided at all costs. We must not let the world seep into the Church. When we let the world dilute our Gospel and water down our values, we'll disappear from sight. Let's keep the Church holy - and wholly committed to Scripture.

The chief danger of the Church today is that it's trying to get on the same side as the world, instead of trying to turn the world upside down.”
― A B Simpson

“For a moment of nearly five seconds Nemed had wanted to correct, to interject with the boasting recitation of a child who has just learned something interesting about the subject at hand and wants to amaze the adults; he had wanted to tell Emer that the Inrisus were not magical or truly evil, and that their medicine was amazing. The tablet suggested that the Inrisus were entirely made of tumor cells; long ago, blue historians believed, the Inrisus had conquered cancer and found a way to separate its resilience to radiation and chemical attack from its malignancy, producing cells both immortal and functional. Their brains and hearts and other parts would keep showing up on medical scans, like blotches in a smoker’s lungs. Carcinogens simply made an Inrisus pregnant.
But then Nemed realized that Emer was wearing beaver hide, that no part of his costume even had a zipper; he might not even know what cancer was. He wouldn’t know that it could be treated with radiation or chemicals; he wouldn’t appreciate the Inrisus and their ability to turn cancer into eternal life. He would probably call it necromancy, or a form of vampirism, stealing the life of an unborn infant because that was supposed to be the only way to live forever in the old stories of the Folk.
I think less of him, Nemed realized. Him, and the others.”
― Mark Ferguson, Terra Incognita

“World I have loved
and loving hated,
is it your sickness
luxuriating
in my body's world?”
― Robert Hayden, Collected Poems

“be careful, my dear friend. If he has started a good work in you, he will complete it. You may rebel, but you will suffer if you do. You may fight against him, but you are only bringing trouble on yourself. You may say “But I want a bit of pleasure in the world. I’m young.” All right, go after it, but you will pay for it. If he has started a good work in you, he will finish it. If you try to remodel this mold, you will only be inviting the chisel and the hammer, and he will go on with his work until you are faultless and blameless and spotless in his presence in the glory everlasting.”
― D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Living Water: Studies in John 4

“As I grew up I was raised on the premise that the world was "worldly" and that I should shun all of its "worldliness". But today I am a person so in love with this wild and crawling and growling life! If I could live a thousand different lifetimes, I would. And I would live each one of them with every breath in me. I am in love with the taste of life on this planet. I am unlike what I was raised to be. I carry the world in my heart, always. The rivers and the tigers, the forests and the Michelangelos... all of it.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Worldliness is shallowness, community is wholeness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation

“There's no scarcity of lukewarm believers who, by cultural standards, deem themselves far too cool, and therefore wean themselves a bit too cowardly, to live as fiery Christians.”
― Criss Jami

“I'm weary with the world's disappointing stimulants. I want more of Christ.”
― Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.

“It is good for me to be afflicted that I may die wholly to this world and all that is in it.”
― David Brainerd, The Life and Diary of David Brainerd

“Don't trade your conscience for entertainment. The more you ignore your conscience, the quieter it gets. Then someday, you might cease to hear it. And that is a dangerous place to be.”
― Jennifer Spredemann

“Denominations aside, Christians are largely partitioned by those who bother to be accepted by the world and those who do not, by those who are embarrassed by those who are not.”
― Criss Jami

“If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas