Best 566 quotes in «materialism quotes» category

Already, in the last few decades, you have realized the utter futility of of encumbering yourselves with superfluous possessions that have no useful virtue, but which, for various sentimental reasons, you continue to hoard, thus lessening your life's efficiency by using for it time and attention that should have been applied to the practical work of life's accomplishments. (The Miracle of the Lily - 1928)

A man’s bank balance is the new penis size.

A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.

A man may follow vanity as truly in the counting-house as in the theatre. If he be spending his life in amassing wealth, he passes his days in a vain show.

A man who has caught a billion is not nearly as admirable as a boy (or even a man) who was caught by a million.

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Ambition is greed without makeup.

America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we’ve been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don’t want a cure. Not now. Not till we get our little taste, till our kids get theirs.

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort -- sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine. This state of affairs, which arose out of a struggle against poverty, overshoots its ultimate goal -- the liberation of humanity from material cares -- and becomes an obsessive image hanging over the present. Between love and a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have made their choice and prefer the garbage disposal. A complete and sudden change of spirit has become essential, by bringing to light forgotten desires and creating entirely new ones. And by an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires. Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.

An anomaly has his own ambitions. You can try reasoning with him, but that's like using money to bribe a beast.

An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn't find him. Atheism is a cry of despair

An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.

And people strive not for the good in life, but for goods they can call their own

And now indeed this substance with its precious humility becomes, through its indestructibility, the most faithful bearer of man's message. As far back as one goes in time, the works of humanity from prehistoric times have reached us not through stone which crumbles and wears away, or through metal which oxidizes and becomes like powder, but through slabs of pottery, the writing on which is as clear today as it was under the stiletto of the scribe who traced it.

And then one day you realise that if you want to be rich, you'd have to give away almost everything you own.

[A]nd you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it." [Man and the Gospel (1865)]

As you get older, you'll realise that a £250 watch and a £25 watch both tell the same time. A Michael Kors wallet and a Primark wallet hold the same amount of money. A £500,000 and a £100,000 house host the same loneliness. True happiness is not found in materialistic things.

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

Associated with this inner conflict is a tendency to become hypercritical: unhappy souls almost always blame everyone but themselves for their miseries. Shut up within themselves, they are necessarily shut off from all others except to criticize them. Since the essence of sin is opposition to God’s will, it follows that the sin of one individual is bound to oppose any other individual whose will is in harmony with God’s will. This resulting estrangement from one’s fellow man is intensified when one begins to live solely for this world, then the possessions of the neighbor are regarded as something unjustly taken from oneself. Once the material becomes the goal of life, a society of conflicts is born.

A true artist is pleased the most by the sight of his or her work at work.

An expensive car is material in nature, but driving it does not necessarily make us materialist, just as sitting in a church does not make us spiritual.

As students grow more and more accustomed to assuming materialism and naturalism in their academic work, the concept of creation by God gradually tends to become less real to them. It is not so much that any single finding undermines their faith; rather, the day-to-day practice of thinking in naturalistic terms about academic subjects makes it awkward to think differently when it comes to religion.

Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction

At some level, it is even tempting to think that since strict materialism is among the most incoherent of superstitions - one that has never really asked the question of the being of things in any depth or with any persistence, or one that has at best attempted to conjure that question away as a fallacy of grammar - it is incapable of imagining any conception of God more sophisticated than its own. The materialist encounters an instance of unjust suffering and, by a sort of magical thinking, concludes from the absence of any immediately visible moral order that there must be nothing transcendent of material causality, in much the same way that certain of our more remote, primitive ancestors might have seen a flash of lightning in the sky and concluded that some god must have flung it from on high. In neither case does the conclusion follow from the evidence (though in the latter case the reasoning is somewhat more rigorous); and in neither case is the god at issue much more than an affective myth.

A wedding is a ceremony men fund with money they know they don’t have … to prove the love they think they have.

Bei vielen Menschen [...] vermute ich eine geheime Verfassung, deren virtueller Artikel 1 lautet: "Die Besitzstandswahrung ist unantastbar.

Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others.

Because he has finally realized that it is it and not him that is loved by the woman he loves, many a man is jealous of his own car, house, wardrobe, or salary.

Because of pizza, gaming and porn, I am writing my poetry lines in the middle of the night.

Being self-owned is a state of mind.

Billions of years before twelve step groups, God committed shotgun suicide. Today wall scrapings share His gratitude stories.

Beware of those who are too focused with polishing and beautifying their outer shells. They lack true substance to understand that genuine beauty is reflected from the heart that resides inside.

But even a medicine man like myself has to have some money, because you force me to live in your make-believe world where I can't get along without it.

But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?

But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.

Buying is the foundation of most women’s definition of romantic.

But what is the point of buying vegetables in plastic bags? Everything from the supermarket smells of plastic. Everything from the market smells like it’s supposed to.

Carnal love is the love of table, not of the host.

Capitalism has turned human beings into commodities. To the owner of a restaurant: the cook and a bag of potatoes are equally important.

Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Balliol, we believe that 'no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality.

Charity fits the economy of scarcity, because it supports the blasphemous myth that the rich are rich because they deserve to be, and their riches are theirs to deal with as they please. With such charity, we are not worthy to tell the story of manna in the wilderness, to pretend to eat together at the Lord’s Supper, or claim the Year of Jubilee as our own.

.... chasing presents for the near future celebration, looking through what society has to offer and impose.

Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.

Civilization is not the one that has an abundance of material objects to incessantly crave for, rather true civilization is the one that has an abundance of contentment regardless of material possession.

Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.

COMING FORTH INTO THE LIGHT I was born the day I thought: What is? What was? And What if? I was transformed the day My ego shattered, And all the superficial, material Things that mattered To me before, Suddenly ceased To matter. I really came into being The day I no longer cared about What the world thought of me, Only on my thoughts for Changing the world.

Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.

Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.