A Quote by Brennan Manning

The conversation of most middle-class Americans, we are told, revolves around consumption: what to buy, what was just bought, where to eat, the price of the neighbor's house, what's on sale this week, our clothes or someone else's, the best car on the market this year, where to spend a vacation. Apparently we can't stop eating, shopping, or consuming. Success is measured not in terms of love, wisdom, and maturity but by the size of one's pile of possessions.
Failure means that you would not, or could not, pay for success. Success is a matter of sale. It can (most often) be bought by a large outlay--of hard forethought--of pains--of steadiness--of the golden wisdom coined from experience. But the figure is too high for most of us. We are too poor, or too slothful, to bring the price.
Fifty years ago or a hundred years ago, generally, most people would buy a house the way you buy a car. When you buy a car, do you think, 'I better buy this year rather than next year because car prices might go up?'
Because I love shopping, my house is overflowing with clothes. Most of them were bought by myself.
When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends.
Don't be overwhelmed by a man's fancy car, fancy house or fancy clothes. It's really the person inside the care, house and clothes that matters. By the same token, don't be underwhelmed by a less-than-fancy car, house or clohtes. Women can earn the car and house themselves, and you can always buy your man nice clothes, too.
Every year my family would pile into the car for our vacation and drive 80 trillion miles just to prove we couldn't get along in any setting.
I love clothes - I love shopping for clothes, I love wearing clothes, I love talking about clothes - but oddly, putting on the dress and walking around in front of people, that's the place where I'm most uncomfortable.
What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
My philosophy is to save, spend minimally, and buy things as much as you can on sale, never pay full price, and just don't spend a lot of money at the end of the day.
It's important to save your money. We need it for the long haul but too many Americans don't save and don't invest. It used to be that people would be proud of the fact that they were middle class. You'd have your church and buy a house and you had a car and everything else. Now, it's really, really tough. Everybody has financial issues except for the one percent.
Most of us have to spend a lot of energy to learn how to drive a car. Then we have to spend the rest of our lives over-concentrating as we drive and text and eat a burrito and put on makeup. As a result, 30,000 people die every year in a car accident in the U.S.
The Good Lord in his infinite wisdom, did not create us all equal when it comes to size, strength, appearance, or various aptitudes. But success is not being better than someone else, success is the peace of mind that is a direct result of self-satisfacti on in knowing that you gave your best effort to become the best of which you are capable.
When I used to work my 9 to 5, I used to go to this abandoned house down the street. It was for sale, but nobody knew it. It was a mansion. Every day, or at least four days out the week, I would just stand on the porch of the house for like a year straight. That was around 2001 or 2002.
Many social critics wag their fingers at what they perceive to be frivolous luxury spending. But that misses the point that consumption norms are local. It's not just the rich who spend more when they get more money. Everyone else does, too. The mansions of the rich may seem over the top to people in the middle, but the same could be said of middle-class houses as seen by most of the planet's seven billion people.
Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.
People say that about me, that I apparently buy houses near every boy I like — that’s a thing that I apparently do. If I like you I will apparently buy up the real-estate market just to freak you out so you leave me.
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