Quotes About Materialism

In sports teams, apart from talk of sporting prowess and the imparting of inspirational thought, an extraordinary amount of time is spent discussing, and flaunting, material possessions.

The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.

A people who's primary aims are driving, shopping, and television are subject to terrorism at any time.

When men are so busy making money that they have no time for anything else, then the day is not far off when they will have no money for anything else.

The people who have more money and goods than any people in the history of the world spend most of their time worrying about not having enough.

The few men who possess the wealth of the material things of the earth at the present time are not truly happy.

In America, money is God.

My life was a wreck. I had nothing, no material possessions, unless debts counts. Fourteen pairs of shoes that were too small for me was all I had to show after a lifetime of profligate spending. I hadn't a job. I hadn't any qualifications. I'd achieved nothing with my life. I'd never been happy. I had no husband or boyfriend.

I love Prada. Not so much the clothes, which are for malnourished thirteen-year-olds, but I covet, with covety covetousness, the shoes and handbags. Like, I LOVE them. If I was given a choice between world peace and a Prada handbag, I'd dither. (I'm not proud of this, I'm only saying.)

That's right," Karen said, clutching the bag to her chest and looking like Gollum with the Ring. "It's only stuff.

Like avocado refrigerators and outdated clothing, love becomes clutter—emotional clutter that takes up space better used for something else.

When we attach value to things that aren't love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.

You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.

We were taught that things like grades, being good enough, money, and doing things the right way, are more important than love.

Meaning doesn't lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren't love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can't love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing.

Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're nothing.

Wealth acts merely as a kind of mirror to show you human nature at its worst.

The five dollars I gave her would never reach her. I knew that: because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it. Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention, sister to the Sin of Omission, which was the price for what you hadn't done but thought. Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed it would start to happen; then I'd beg it to stop, and it would.

Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.

Now we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being—for those who create and master them, at least. Now

Every man measures his own greed.

It's hard, in America, not to equate 'happiness' with 'things'.

Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money.

Job learned about the vanity of this world by losing it all; the Teacher {Qoheleth} saw it by having it all. (The Message of the Old Testament, p. 536)