Best 566 quotes in «materialism quotes» category

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

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

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.

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.

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

Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not.

Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

Sex is the mysticism of materialism.

The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.

The grace that has freed us from bondage to sin is desperately needed to free us from our bondage to materialism.

The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist.

The sense that materialism has gotten out of hand is magnified by the pressures facing middle-class American families.

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

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

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

The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism

...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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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