Best 566 quotes in «materialism quotes» category

Virtues are worth more than the material things.

We all need new ideas, images, and experiences far more than we need new stoves or cars or computers.

We always want what is not ours. It’s intriguing. We think if we can just get that, we’ll finally be happy. The lure of what we do not have is deceptive. True freedom, however, is found in being content with what we already have. Can you imagine it? Can you imagine being whole, complete, fulfilled - content with what you already have? It sounds too good to be true. Utter satisfaction? That is freedom. That is what everyone is searching for. Where, though, can you find this kind of contentment? I've noticed that the more I’ve come to know Jesus, the less I've desired material things. Materialism is what happens when you find your joy in things. Contentment is what happens when you find your joy in Jesus. They’re complete opposites. You can easily differentiate a materialistic person from a content person.

We are born, we suffer, we die. However, love is a possibility for us all and, for some few, there is also a big house." Daniel could not resist asking, because he really wanted to know. "Need they be mutually exclusive? Can't we have both love and house?" Joe smiled. "Certainly. But one must consider carefully how one goes about getting the house.

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

We are generally treated based on how much or little we have, earn, or know—or seem to have, earn, or know.

We are more in control of how much we know than we are of how much we have.

We are nature; we are nature as we munch gum and check the phone; we are nature as we queasily regret our imperfection, turning the glossy page, turning our glossy stomachs; we are nature as we hear them witter inanely on the radio, desecrating the silence with the violence of their idiocy and dumb verdicts, chattering and grooming, picking through the ticks in their hair, marveling at new minutia.

We are not less because we have less

We believed in another world, but we admitted the feebleness of our senses. Then came 'enlightenment,' and made everything so very clear and enlightened, that we can see nothing for excess of light, and go banging our noses against the first tree we come to in the wood. We insist, now-a-days, on grasping the other world with stretched-out arms of flesh and bone.

We dabble in many things; but the one great real idea of our age, not copied from any other, not pretended, not raised to life by any conjuration, is the Much Making of Things – not the making of beautiful things, not the joy of spending living energy in creative work; rather the shameless, merciless driving and over-driving, wasting and draining of the last bit of energy, only to produce heaps and heaps of things – things ugly, things harmful, things useless, and at the best largely unnecessary.

We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.

We don’t know if the mythologies are fact or fiction or mix of the two. But as far as people have faith in them, they shape their values. When people lose faith in scriptures and mythologies, they easily fall prey to the fictions of the modern times, which propagate infidelity, pleasure seeking and materialism.

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

We have a fundamental systemic flaw. We have managed to create scenarios where you can ‘earn’ a living without contributing.

We have too quickly bought into the lie that we’ll be happier with more—and as a result, too often miss the joy that comes from owning less.

We have enough money. You don't want to be Uncle Daddy.

We have chosen a problematic name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we're all consumers now, grasping all the stuff every which way.

We preoccupy ourselves with what we had — or what we want to have — at the expense of what we have.

We're a society of brats, fighting over the same toys. That, for me, is the closest we come to be inherently evil as a people. It leads to selfishness, inflexibility, and impatience -- among so many other traits that are ugly and harmful. We're combative, competitive, petty, and suffer from one fatal flaw that I can never get my head around. We recognize behavior in others that makes us insane, while turning right around and doing the exact thing to someone else.

We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.

We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.

We may see the small Value God has for Riches, by the People he gives them to." [Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727]

We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country," Morrie sighed. "Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that's what we do in this country. Owning tings is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it-and have it repeated to us-over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is to fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.

We've got so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things--things we can see--as being the measure of a person. We think if we win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we are. Our hearts know that's not true, but the eyes are powerful. It's easier to fix on what we can see than listen to the still, small voice of a whispering heart.

We view God as a resource that will broker all my cheap desires.

When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain 'gnosis'--had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion ... So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'. It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes.

What is the essential difference between banknotes, coins, and chicken shit? None.

When a man's bank balance becomes too small, his woman flees. For a man to do the same, his woman's body — or vagina — has to do the opposite.

When everything gets too much, give some away

When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they’re not really concerned about him; they’re concerned about their daughter’s tummy.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.

When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. {Letter to John Adams, from Monticello, 15 August 1820}

When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism.

When selecting a one-night stand, a heterosexual woman who is materialistic is a trillion times more likely to choose a sexually unattractive poor man who seems rich over a sexually attractive rich man who seems poor.

When we see a good-looking woman with a not-so-good-looking man, we assume that the man must have a good bank balance. When we see a good-looking man with a not-so-good-looking woman, we assume that she must be good in bed.

When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.

When the marketplace became crowded with scores of similar products that mostly did what they were supposed to do, companies focused less on selling that product, and more on selling you a relationship with the product, and a means of announcing your own identity.

When the world shifts its focus on heart over mind, we will finally experience a beautiful global village for our children.

Whether it’s the growth of the economy, audience shares, publications – slowly but surely, quality is being replaced by quantity. ... And driving it all is a force sometimes called “liberalism,” an ideology that has been all but hollowed out. ... Freedom may be our highest ideal, but ours has become an empty freedom. Our fear of moralizing in any form has made morality a taboo in the public debate. The public arena should be “neutral,” after all – yet never before has it been so paternalistic. On every street corner we’re baited to booze, binge, borrow, buy, toil, stress, and swindle. Whatever we may tell ourselves about freedom of speech, our values are suspiciously close to those touted by precisely the companies that can pay for prime-time advertising.

When your underwear costs more than your child's education then you are in serious trouble" RjS

Why does a steward steal? He steals because he's not sure he'll always remain with his master and wants to make his future secure.

While many of us admire nice things, materialism and suffering may share a connection. When we place a great deal of our happiness in material things, we run the great risk of losing our happiness when our material things become lost, old, or damaged. Toys break. Cars get dents. Clothes get ripped. Jewels get lost or stolen. Riches come and go. If we collect moments rather than things, these are ours to keep. If we redefine wealth by the amount of love and kindness we afford ourselves to give to others, we can transform our lives.

While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies—even minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence

Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have 'a dream' sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied.

Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?

Why doesn't the pope convert to Calvinism? Why doesn't the Dalai Lama, convert to Christianity, why doesn't Billy Graham convert to Islam, Why doesn't the Ayatollahs convert to Buddhism, Why isn't Buddhism swept away? Religious leaders know that all religions are equal; they know that no one of them has the monopoly to the knowledge of God. They know that each religion is trying to find the hidden God and that no one religion can claim to have found him beyond doubt. That's why they remain where they are and respect each other.

Worth is not something you can buy for $39.99, nor something you can lose with 10 extra pounds. Self-judging people make good consumers. Start a revolution. Love yourself.

Without death there would be no life, just like lions need to kill in order to live

You can’t really, truly love a thing. Love is only possible between beings or groups of beings. Love of a thing doesn’t work because it can’t love back.