no boon in life more sweet

"There is no boon in life more sweet, I say,  

than when a summer joy holds all the realm,

and banqueters sit listening to a harper

in a great hall, by rows of tables heaped

with bread and roast meat, while a steward goes

to dip up wine and brim your cups again.

Here is the flower of life, it seems to me!"

- "The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation" 

What to choose?

"Human beings must make difficult choices.  We are no longer in Eden.  the world does not flow with milk and honey.  We have to choose among cleaner air and faster cars, bigger houses and bigger parks, more work and more play.  Economists do not tell us that any of these is bad.  They only tell us that we cannot necessarily have them all - all at once.  Economics is the study of choice.  It does not tell us what to choose.  It only helps us understand the consequences of our choices."

Tood G. Buchholz, "New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought"

How well does economics help us understand the full consequences of our choices?

Valuing the routine

"Good work requires of us an appreciation of the value of routine, ordinary, mundane rhythms of doing what needs to be done, each day and each week, thoroughly and with care."

Gordon T. Smith, "Courage and Calling: Embracing your God-Given Potential" 

A more open acknowledgment of what is positive in the urge to acquire possessions

"From the narrowly defined desire for money to a more inclusive sense of the overweening desire merely to possess for oneself - these positions are the boundaries of the definition of avarice as a vice into the fifteenth century, when one begins to see a more open acknowledgment of what is positive in the urge to acquire possessions.  In Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue On Avarice, for example, Antonio Loschi voices a utilitarian, even modern, view of greed when he argues that avarice is the compelling reason for business investment, the growth of cities, philanthropy, and wage-earning..."

- Richard Newhauser, "The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature", 2000

Bracciolini's writing predates Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees",which first scandalized society but then popularized a similar belief, by almost 200 years.  It should be noted that Bracciolini's objective was to refute  that line of thinking, but he makes a clear argument for the social benefits of greed nonetheless.