Quotes About Materialism

Is it not rather ugly, one may ask? One collects material possessions not only for security, comfort or vanity, but for beauty as well. Is your sea-shell house not ugly and bare? No, it is beautiful, my house. It is bare, of course, but the wind, the sun, the smell of the pines blow through its bareness. The unfinished beams in the roof are veiled by cobwebs. They are lovely, I think, gazing up at them with new eyes;

The acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

I never lend books I expect to require again.

Do you not think sometimes we value a thing merely because we have paid for it?" she asked. "And perhaps paid too much? And so we cling to it, and go on paying?

I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.

You play with your toys and your money and all your fine things, and you forget. You forget and that's why you're happy.

Christmas celebrations in the early colonies to the condemnations today of the commercial nature of the feast.

Y vi mis dioses verdaderos... los dioses de la mayoría de los hombres: la comida, la bebida y la seguridad en el conformismo. Cenizas.

There was no place for the poetry or history which had come from a greedy mind and heart.

It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it's all going to end.

Toplumun organize bir ÅŸekilde belli güç odaklar?n?n maddi ç?karlar? uÄŸruna tüketime ve israfa al??t?r?lmas? düzmecesini fark etmeden bir evreden diÄŸerine geçmek oldukça zor görünüyordu.

GeliÅŸmiÅŸ Bat? dünyas?n?n, olanaklar? ve ihtiÅŸam?yla çok zengin olduÄŸu zannedilse de çoÄŸu zaman insan kalbindeki güzellikleri öldürür.

As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.

Poverty is its own cruel trap but still raises questions about whether we own our possessions or are owned by them. Somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania we saw a man who had tied the handle of a snow shovel to his belt and then piled all his belongings onto the blade, which sledded along behind him. Depending on your perspective he was either the freest man in the country or just the poorest.

The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good.

If consumers have everything they need, there's nothing left to buy except stuff that they want. And the reason they buy stuff they want is because of the way it makes them feel.

Thats the trouble with having money; you think about buying almost anything you see.

Elitism thus had a dark side, a fascination with noble death, with death not for low material ends—that was for the multitude and the merchants—but for fame, even immortality.

You have to treat your car with love. And I don't mean love of an object. You see, that's just wrong. That's materialism. You have to love your car like it's sentient being, like it can love you back. Now, that's some deep-down agape love.

Screw reality. It don't feed my dog. It don't make my Porsche payments. It don't get me laid. Bullshit does that…and I like it that way. (Leo)

My people never dreamed of a world like this. Of having so much without backbreaking, debilitating work. And yet for all the physical improvements, people are still people. They're killing each other to get more to prove a point only the killer understands. Still brutalizing and torturing each other over things that in another hundred years won't even matter.

I'm at the stage in my life that real-estate apps turn me on.

This is my life, I think. I am an accumulation of objects.

Because a human is a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone - not the blind, automatic forces of nature, as philosophies like naturalism and materialism tell us.