Quotes About Priorities

paradox: The things you don't need to live—books, art, cinema, wine, and so on—are the things you need to live.

She imagined that when she eventually arrived at her deathbed, she would feel more regret about her unborn children than her unwritten books.

I really like the half-hour comedy. I really do. I know people that are in movies all the time and they, you know, they don't see their families as much. And that takes its toll over time.

Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money?

The notion of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

Given that most actual voters were sunk in debt, working multiple jobs, uninsured, saddled with ruined credit scores, and often battling alcohol and opiate addiction and other problems, it was a horrific aristocratic insult to tell people each election cycle that what really mattered to them was what candidate looked most convincing carrying a rifle on a duck hunt.

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

How generally, with how many of us, are the main concerns of life limited to these two: the concern for making money, and the concern for saving our souls!

Men of business ought to be devout men, and not to think that business will excuse them from that which is every man's great business – to keep up communion with God.

On the one hand, we all want to be happy. On the other hand, we all know the things that make us happy. But we don't do those things. Why? Simple. We are too busy. Too busy doing what? Too busy trying to be happy.

When our children know more about teen pop idols than they do about Jesus Christ, isn't it time for us to reassess the place and priority our faith has in our lives?

When he realized Mother Teresa carries everything she owns in a small bag, he made an effort to simplify his own life. He says, "I try to remember what really counts—not money, or titles, or possessions, but the way we love others.

We all die, and yet, so often we conduct our lives as if we were going to live forever. If you knew you were going to die one year from today, how would you change your life?

On the one hand, we all want to be happy. On the other hand, we all know the things that make us happy. But we don't do those things. Why? Simple. We are too busy. Too busy doing what? Too busy trying to be happy.

A lot of our modern lifestyle is based on having things. Jesus rejected the idea that things should have a primary place in our lives. Other than the clothes on his back and the sandals on his feet, he had nothing. And his teachings constantly affirmed that people were primary and things were secondary.

We should all aspire in life to do a multitude of things well - to be a great father, to be a good husband, to be a good lover, you know, to try to do things the best you can is very important to me.

When you're having sex again, it makes you wonder why you weren't before. What could possibly have been bad enough to make you stop doing THAT?

These people build as if they were immortal and eat as if they were to die instantly.

Our lives can hold just so much. If they're filled with one thing, they can't be filled with another. We ought to do a lot of thinking about what we want to fill them with.

I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots' hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: "Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to 'destroy' and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.

When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want? Will you hug that college degree in the walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to the garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in rereading your financial statement? Of course not. What will matter then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn't they matter most now?

You can't eat straight A's.