Quotes About Materialism

A great many people go after success simply for the shiny prizes it brings...And nowhere is it pursued more ardently than in the city of New York.

Some people's measure of success is how much they can grab hold of and hold on to.

It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.

The greedy search for money or success will almost always lead men into unhappiness. Why? Because that kind of life makes them depend upon things outside themselves.

I had many of the trappings of success. I was a lawyer. I drove a nice car and I had nice things. But "things" don't make a rich life.

Some people really trip on success or popularity. My friends would talk to me about that, about tripping on all this stuff, but you know what I tripped on? I started buying property.

Success is not only one thing. Its not only having a nice house in Beverly Hills and driving a nice Mercedes.

We are members of a strange species that devotes its energies to climbing the ladder of success in order to make money to buy things we don't like.

I find that, once you get into a position where you can afford a pair of shoes and a decent level of living, success in itself is empty.

Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction. The life of a man was to him of far less value than a numeral, especially when, by taking it away, he could increase the sum total of his own desires.

We have our clothes, some more splendid than others,—this is our credit; but when a man dies he has only his skin;

Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an ink-stand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction, and he estimated the life of a man as less precious than a figure, when that figure could increase, and the life would diminish, the total of the amount.

Mazarin, in his character of cardinal and prime minister, was almost an atheist, and quite a materialist.

Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart.

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

He who has set his heart exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach, to grasp, and to enjoy it.

The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes: with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it preponderates.

Nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labour.

The love of wealth is . . . to be traced, either as a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do...

Exceptional physical conditions, private interest, religion, in that it puts a brake on the inordinate taste for material wealth—these are, from the first weeks of the American journey, the three elements that profoundly marked Tocqueville's arguments.

The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes.

This is what happens when you stay in one place for thirteen years, Anne says. First you own things. Then they own you.

Why aren't you happy in America, if everyone there drives motorcars?