Best 566 quotes in «materialism quotes» category

...though one can be callous in Ireland one cannot be wholly opaque or material. An unearthly disturbance works in the spirit; reason can never reconcile one to life; nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.

We are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.

A broke man’s lover doesn’t feel ‘loved’ on her Birthday, Christmas, and, on Valentine’s Day.

We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.

A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.

A civilized woman's demands: A man who will (1) make her come … sometimes; but (2) pay the bills … at all times.

Acolo unde predomină materialismul raţionalist statele se transformă mai puţin în nişte închisori, cât în nişte ospicii.

A free spirit is not bound by this, that, matter, materialism or opinion. They sing, dance and flow on the wind - for they are at one with it. They are nothing and everything - void and expanse. Even space and time does not confine or define them. For they are pure energy itself.

A daily portion is all that a man really wants. We do not need tomorrow's supplies; that day has not yet dawned, and its wants are as yet unborn. The thirst which we may suffer in the month of June does not need to be quenched in February, for we do not feel it yet; if we have enough for each day as the days arrive we shall never know want.

Adams was in a hurry and ordered his horse drawn carriage to wait for him in front of his house. The horses were spooked before he got in the carriage, and the carriage was destroyed in an accident. Pondering what could have happened to him , Adams retreated to Psalm 20's injunctions against trusting in chariots and horses.

Adversity hath slain her thousand, but prosperity her ten thousand.

A fast car can make women 'like' a man; and a man 'like' women … fast.

A live well-lived is not judged on a post-mortem stocktake of material acquisitions. It is based on the number and depth of the laugh lines on the face of the person lying in repose in their coffin.

You have to decide to servant the gods of materialism all around us or the true and the living God.

A life well-lived is not measured by material possessions or the size of the funeral turnout. The quantity and depth of laugh lines on the face of the person lying in repose in their coffin reveals a life's true worth.

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?" CS Lewis

All religions are man-made; God has not yet revealed himself beyond doubt to anybody.

All the wealth in the world is nothing, pointless - of no true value - if you yourself feel worthless.

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 lot of people with a lot of ill gotten wealth may think that they have high net worth, but will simply never be worthy of any trust or respect.

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

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 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.

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

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.

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

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)

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.

Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.

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)]

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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