Best 566 quotes in «materialism quotes» category

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

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.

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 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.

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.

You know a man is interesting when you forget to notice how expensive — or cheap — his clothes are.

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

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.

You are too timid for me. You care too much about what other people think. But you know what? Because you are so desperate to win the approval of others, you'll never get rid of their criticisms, no matter how hard you try. You say you want to travel the path, but you don't want to sacrifice anything to that end. Money, fame, power, lavishness, or carnal pleasure - whatever it is that one holds most dear in life, one should dispose of that first.

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.

You drive in a Maybach past a homeless person and you ask, 'Who's more free?' You could be trapped to your possessions.

Yes, I'm a materialist. I'm willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I'm unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders is because I'm locked into a world-view that demands evidence rather than blind faith, a view that insists upon the replication of all experiments — particularly those that appear to show violations of a rational world — and a view which requires open examination of the methods used to carry out those experiments.

You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle.

You may possibly become rich by just caring about yourself and what you want to gain from your profession and your life but you cannot possibly enrich the lives of everyone you meet that way.

Your life is not meant to be used in exchange for mundane things like houses and cars but to purchase greatness.

Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way.

you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.

Your shyness alone will bring you more emotional and material losses than all of your other negative attributes.

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

America has abandoned the strong woman of spirituality and is shacking up with the harlot of materialism.

All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion.

Americans consume three quarters of the world's anti-depressants because materialism will never bring happiness.

Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.

Chârvâkas, a very ancient sect in India, were rank materialists.

Contrary to what they tell you... You are not a limited material being.

It really is a very radical call ... to reject materialism as our central value and to think about the sanctity of life and what that really means if we take it seriously.

Individually, people are finding that a simpler lifestyle provides greater satisfaction than relentless pursuit of materialism.

Materialism and all its miseries can never be conquered by materialism.

It seems to me that philosophers should be more relaxed about whether or not some form of materialism is true.

Let there be as little materialism as possible, with the maximum of spirituality.

Look, Salvador Dali did not paint because he needed the money. No conversation about materialism and music makes sense. You make music and that's that, it doesn't matter why.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.

Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.

Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes.

Meditation means to be free from all phenomena and calmness means to be internally unperturbed. There will be calmness when one is free from external objects and is not perturbed.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible though very unlikely that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.

No social system will bring us happiness, health and prosperity unless it is inspired by something greater than materialism.

Possessions are usually diminished by possession.

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

Sex is the mysticism of materialism.

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive