We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work.

We deny our Lord whenever, like Demas, we through love of this present world forsake the course of duty which Christ has plainly pointed out to us.

The worshiping of other things, the showing of disrespect by thought, word, or deed, and the refusal to acknowledge our obligation to him—these things shut God out from our lives.

We are not really a godless bunch. We are just the sort who ignore the gods—probably in the unconscious hope that the gods will not notice us.

Consider lost all the time in which you do not think of divinity.

All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties.

We check and repress the divinity that stirs within us, to fall down and worship the divinity that is dead without us.

By devoting ourselves too exclusively to the pursuit of material happiness and ephemeral goods, we ignore the true realities of life and allow our spirit to wither and dry up.

The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.

Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.

Most of us are far too busy for our own spiritual good.

One of the reasons many of us avoid meditation is that we think of it as work — and work we may not do perfectly. What if we didn’t have to do it perfectly? What if we didn’t have to “do” it at all? What if we could rest — and let God do the rest?

The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted...Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.

All this will involve a curious reversal of the Protestant ethic, which, at least in the United States, is one of the big obstacles to a future of wealth and leisure for all. The Devil, it is said, finds work for idle hands to do, and human energy cannot be trusted unless most of it is absorbed in hard, productive work — so that, on coming home, we are too tired to get into mischief. It is feared that affluence plus leisure will, as in times past, lead to routs and orgies and all the perversities that flow therefrom, and then on to satiation, debilitation, and decay — as in Hogarth's depiction of A Rake's Progress.