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“Oh, what little things take our thoughts away from holy duties! When every toy, every feather, every light matter calls them off, is this to sanctify God’s name? Would we not account it a dishonorable thing if we were talking to someone about serious business, and, while we were talking, he would turn and talk to everyone who passed by? If a superior is talking with you, he expects that you should mind what he says; but if God is speaking to you and you are speaking to God, every vain thought that comes by, you are turning aside too, as if it were a greater thing to talk to vain thoughts and temptations than to the great and glorious God — is this to worship God?”
Jeremiah Burroughs, “Gospel Worship (The Right Manner of Sanctifying the Name of God in General), edited by Don Kistler (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990), 97; originally published in 1648.
“It is an excellent speech that Luther had concerning himself, ‘I have learned this by experience, that the more often I omit duty [of worship], the more often I make myself the more unfit for duty, and the more cause I have to abhor myself.’ It is not the deferring that makes you the more fit.”
Jeremiah Burroughs, “Gospel Worship (The Right Manner of Sanctifying the Name of God in General), edited by Don Kistler (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990), 71; originally published in 1648; I do not know where Burroughs finds this Luther quote.
“You can be gaming until one o’clock at night, and, though you should lose your supper or the work of your family, it is not tedious to you to be exercised in those things that please the flesh. But when you come to worship God, how quickly are you tired? Now what will you do in heaven, where there is nothing else to do for all eternity but to worship God?”
Jeremiah Burroughs, “Gospel Worship (The Right Manner of Sanctifying the Name of God in General), edited by Don Kistler (Orlando: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990), 43; originally published in 1648.
“Yes, the road from objectivity back to fandom lies pockmarked with many a garish sight. You might adopt a favorite player. You might like his biography, is will, his gymnastic capability, his recovery from malaria even if the malaria resulted from forgetting medication. Then you might see that the police detained him once, but you might invoke the old American saw ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Then you might see that the police have detained him for a second time, whereupon it becomes possible to grow squeamish and feel conflicted, when feeling conflicted is not fun and fun would seem high among the reasons to follow this stuff, even if we’d have no idea what else to do with our time otherwise.”
Chuck Culpepper, Bloody Confused (New York: Broadway, 2007), 127.
“We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly.”
Sometimes boredom gets the best of us and, like Maugham, we need to change locations (in his case, from London to Paris). W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 63.
“Philosophy is not one truth, but thousands of truths. You don’t have to believe in just one thing. When you choose one idea, you close yourself to the rest.”
Marcel Wanders, Dutch industrial designer, Jane Szita, “A Life in Design,” Dwell (April 2006), 23.
“For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season. When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink – in combination with the invention of electric light – allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle.”
Charles Czeisler, neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School, asserts that an example of the industrial revolution trumping taking away our reliance upon nature. In this instance, the distraction (the clock) replaced the initial focus (the seasons). T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic (January 2005), 15-16.
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
Quoting Paul Erdós, a Hungarian mathematician; T. R. Reid, “Caffeine,” National Geographic (January 2005), 16.
There is a chaotic abundance of material distractions. Our walk is infiltrated with limitless collisions. In a computer model, Doug James, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon, created a virtual quarter mile high stack of plastic lawn chairs (3,601). He then toppled the plastic chairs to test an algorithm to predict the collisions, including the way that they bump and bend. After 14 hours, a computer counted 1.6 billion collisions.
David Pescovitz, “It’s Raining Chairs,” Wired Magazine (August 2004).
“The more television watched, the more likely the person suffered psychological effects.”
Two independent studies, one by William E. Schlenger (Research Triangle Institute of NC), and Sandro Galea (New York Academy of Medicine) found that TV added to the likelihood of post-traumatic stress associated with the 9/11 attacks. Richard M. Restak, The New Brain: How the Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind (Rodale, 2004), 78.
