Quotes About Materialism

All Pennella ever did was brag about places he'd visited, money he spent, and people he met.

Socrates was a wise man. Surveying the goods on a market stall, the great one was said to have remarked, "What a lot of things a man doesn't need!

People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.

How many BMWs do you need? How many Rolex watches you gonna wear in your lifetime, for crying out loud? What is it about that kind of desire? I don't understand it.

Have you ever met a slave, Luke?" she asked. The question took me aback, coming from a black person. I stammered out a no. She said, "Really? You've never been to a mall? You've never watched shoppers with their carts piled with soda and microwaveable food? You've never stayed in a hotel where a fifty-year-old Mexican mother of six scrubs your shit stains off the toilet bowl? You've never watched TV for five hours straight?

Those who have too much, too often respect nothing.

To tell you the truth, the world seemed full of sad people – those who slept on the uncovered stoops of shops as well as those who lived in high-rise mansions. The man who walks about on foot worries that he doesn't have decent shoes to wear. The man who rides the automobile frets that he doesn't have the latest model car. Every man's complaint is valid in its own way. Every man's wish is legitimate in its own right.

They both were liars. Both led lives camouflaged in artifice. But Saugandhi was happy. Someone who cannot afford real gold will gladly settle for artificial jewelry.

Renunciation, or refusing to identify with that which one gathers (however precious it may be), is the ultimate doorway to knowing.

Affluence has not brought misery. The money did not stay in your pocket; it got into your head. Only then misery came to you. Having lots of money in your pocket is good. But if it enters your head, it becomes misery, because that is not its place.

We are the most comfortable generation to have ever lived on this planet. The rub is that we are definitely not the most joyful, or the most loving, or the most peaceful. Why

What you accumulate can be yours, but it can never be you. Who

you still believe that everything will be okay the moment you find a new girlfriend or boyfriend, get a raise, buy a new house or car, then it is not yet time for yoga. Once you've tried all those things and more, and clearly know that none of it will ever be enough—then you are ready. So now, yoga.

You can't serve God and Mammon." When Jesus used the word "Mammon," he used it almost synonymously with pleasure. So Jesus was saying that you can't serve God and Mammon at the same time. If you want to be his disciple, you have to leave Mammon. It's not that you shouldn't be comfortable; it's not about having comfort or not, but if you're seeking comfort, forget it. This path is definitely not yours. What he said is very true.

Don't cling to possessions and other external things; cling only to the divine spark within you.

The Stoic system of physics was materialism with an infusion of pantheism. In contradiction to Plato's view that the Ideas, or Prototypes, of phenomena alone really exist, the Stoics held that material objects alone existed; but immanent in the material universe was a spiritual force which acted through them, manifesting itself under many forms, as fire, aether, spirit, soul, reason, the ruling principle.

And how trivial the things we want so passionately are.

In the United States, the central values of our culture are the "three A's": attractiveness, achievement, and affluence. For

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

For is there anything so absurd as to delight in many inanimate things, like public office, fame, and stately buildings, or dress and personal adornment, and to take little or no delight in a sentient being endowed with virtue and capable of loving, and — if I may so term it — of loving back?

But what is more foolish, when men are in the plenitude of resources, opportunities, and wealth, than to procure the other things which money provides — horses, slaves, splendid raiment, and costly plate — and not procure friends, who are, if I may say so, life's best and fairest furniture?

I've learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values.

It is remarkable, I have since thought, how once a man has a few coins, no matter how he came by them, he thinks right away that he is entitled to them, and to whatever they can buy, and fancies himself cock of the walk.

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.