Best 566 quotes in «materialism quotes» category

Pretty Stones

Pretty much all wealthy people who were willing to lose and have lost their health while chasing wealth are now willing to lose their wealth while chasing health.

Q: What is wrong with the world? A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.

Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.

Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

Remember, the security and happiness you are seeking is not in your material possessions, your degrees, or relationships. It is much closer than you think.

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time.

Rich men use most of their money to get richer. Poor men use most of their money to look richer.

Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

Salesmanship is usually the art of making it the prospect’s problem, the salesperson’s need or desire to earn money.

Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in practice they diverge. If we believe that the methods of science can be used to discriminate between fundamental pictures of reality, we are led to a strictly materialist conception of the universe. While the details of modern cosmology are not a necessary part of this argument, they provide interesting clues as to how an ultimate picture may be constructed.

Security is by far the city's predominant business.

Science and religion have in common the aim of seeking and achieving unity. Most scientists today are being led increasingly away from the fundamental aim of science to achieve unity into rather limited ways of thinking without much open-mindedness, doing things merely to meet limited material needs.

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise. I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life.

She chose to look at her surroundings where they "think missionary" mind-set.

Sharpen and trust your judgement: learn when spending is a shrewd investment and when it is merely an indulgence

Some people are way less tortured by poverty than some are tormented by wealth.

She feared that she would become a slave to superficial, symbolic duties.

Shopkeepers —the great landed and commercial interests—regularly sat and slept, and where the two publicans occupied pews, but seldom made even the pretence of worshipping.

SINGERS NAAIMASJIEN IS DE BESTE de beste waarom hoe kan dat wie weet alles is schijn

Societies need self sacrificing ignorant crowd; Religions need fearful followers; Systems need obedient slaves; Corporate world needs compulsive consumers, and I NEED THE COURAGE TO RISE ABOVE THESE FOUR PARASITES.

Someday you will die. Because you are embodied through and through, at that point you will cease to exist. You will not meet death, because, as the sage says, "Where death is I am not; where I am death is not, so we never meet." When you die there will no longer be any self that is you. Use your self while you have it.

Some people are chronically unhappy only because they do not have some of the things some people expect them to want.

Some people married for money. Some divorced for love.

Some people will each start investing more of their salary on ‘their’ house and spending less of it on ‘their’ car or cars only when they start being able to take ‘their’ house to work, funerals, weddings, etc.

Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be.

Sometimes it didn't seem possible that I could be so unhappy, considering how much I had compared to other kids my age, and, believe me, I understood how extremely lucky I was. Sometimes things didn't add up.

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.

Sleepless, obsessed, almost joyful, I reflected on how nothing is less material than money, insamuch as any coin whatsoever (a twenty-centavo piece, let us say) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold.

Some people would not be dead if they have not gotten the things or people they had prayed for.

Some things are made way more appealing than they are by our lack of them.

Sometimes we can't see the relevance of Jesus Christ until we become dissatisfied with the world and realise that there must be more to life than working 9 to 5, buying and accumulating expensive 'things'and being attractive to members of the opposite sex.

Sophia sat in meditation on the riverbank when a student bent down to place two enormous pearls at her feet as a gift. She opened her eyes to see the pearls. She picked one up, but dropped it. It rolled down the hill upon which she was sitting and into the river. The student chased after it and looked all afternoon, diving, coming up for air, diving back down. “Sophia,” he asked. “Could you show me where it went in? I can’t find it.” “Right there,” she said throwing the other pearl in the river.

Sometimes you may have nothing yet without hope you've got less

Some women would not cheat, and some would not have cheated, had they each married a man whom they love … or at least like.

Sooner or later everything will turn to dust - except love

Stop being overly materialistic, and start building your empire. Your future self would surely love you if you do so.

Stuff comes and stuff goes and the only thing that matters in the end is who you are inside, what you do and what make it leaves in the world.

That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.

Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.

Suppose you woke up one morning to discover that you were the last person on earth. [...] In the situation described, you could satisfy many material desires that you can't satisfy in our actual world. You could have the car of your dreams. You could even have a showroom full of expensive cars. You could have the house of your dreams - or live in a palace. You could wear very expensive clothes. You could acquire not just a big diamond ring but the Hope Diamond itself. The interesting question is this: without people around, would you still want these things?

Take this idea that you have that you must be attached to things and apply to it the reality that you came here with nothing, and when you leave this great Earth you'll be leaving with nothing.

Terrified executives saw that they had a simple choice: convince consumers that your brand stands for Something Important - and thus that buying your merchandise is not just crass materialism, but something closer to an artistic statement - or fall into a price-cutting bloodbath with the generics.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.

The author's projected intellectual climate nearly 500 years in the future proclaims itself too pragmatic to consider living well as important as material satisfaction. This reminds us, ironically, that choosing NOT to consider life's deeper questions is in itself a choice with profound and lasting consequences.

The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.

The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions...

The connection between spirit and other matter, or between the visible and invisible world of human beings, is at present little understood. I am of the opinion that the connection is far more intimate than is generally believed. Of this fact there is the most positive and convincing proof. Many may be so averse to receiving new truths, which set aside all their preconceived opinions, as to disregard the positive evidence of their senses.

The conventional materialist mode has very serious consequences in terms of how we live our lives, and how we treat other species and the natural world. It leads to a devaluation of life—of our own lives, of other species' and the Earth itself..a spiritual worldview can change our relationship to the world. It can engender a reverential attitude to nature, and to life itself. It can heal us, just as it can heal the whole world.