More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. … I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well—the delights of a man’s heart. … I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.” (Ecclesiastes 2:4,8,10)
Communicatiom to cllents and staff and corprates
She surmises that “if God really wants to play a rotten practical joke on us, he grants our deepest wish and then giggles merrily as we begin to realize we want to kill ourselves.”17
There is always something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, that just fades away in the reality. The spouse may be a good spouse, the scenery has been excellent, it has turned out to be a good job, but “It” has evaded us.19
We go through houses and spouses and jobs and the constant reinvention of our lives, assuring ourselves that at the next level “it” is going to finally be there. But psychologists call this merely speeding up the “hedonic treadmill.”21
people’s.” But the day comes when “you’re lying in the bath and you notice you are thirty-nine and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you thought you always wanted, and yet, you realize you got there by a long series of choices.”22 So we hate ourselves.
For Augustine, what we call human virtues are nothing more than forms of love. Courage is loving your neighbor’s well-being more than your own safety. Honesty is loving your neighbor’s interests more than your own, even when the truth will put you at a disadvantage. And because Jesus himself said that all God’s law comes down to loving God and your neighbor (Matthew 22:36–40), Augustine believed all sin was ultimately a lack of love.30
“A body by its weight tends to move toward its proper place. … My weight is my love: wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”31 You are what you love.
You harm yourself when you love anything more than God.
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desires: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.37
Charles Taylor gives his own expression of the secular moral order: “Let each person do their own thing, and … one shouldn’t criticize the others’ values, because they have a right to live their own life as you do. The [only] sin which is not tolerated is intolerance.”
Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others.
Freedom is a good only if it enables you to actually do something good.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as … not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual thing to worship. … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. … Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths
...more
You’re equipped … for farce or even tragedy more than you are for happy endings.”14
If you are getting your identity from the love of a person—you won’t be able to give them criticism because their anger will devastate you. Nor will you be able to bear their personal sorrows and difficulties. If they have a problem and start to get self-absorbed and are not giving you the affirmation you want, you won’t be able to take it. It will become a destructive relationship.
