Quotes About Materialism

Money can't buy happiness but it'll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.

One of the consequences of covetousness is that it destroys the capacity to discern sufficiency. It distorts our thinking to the point where: Enough is never enough.

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

All's fair in love and dialectical materialism

Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition.

we were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard

It was the room of a woman without taste or moderation, who refused nothing and surrendered nothing, to whom the fact of possession had become the one steadfast reality in a world of loss and change.

Beautiful people are often rather boring, don't you think? Less beautiful people might rather like to think so, said Harriet. But you know what I mean, my dear. All those wealthy men choosing a wife like a piece of furniture or a fine picture, to furnish the house, and then having to listen to her at breakfast twenty years later.

Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

You can't take it with you, and even if you did, it would probably melt.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

What was the self-sacrifice? I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes. Why was that self-sacrifice? Because they were mine! said Ford, crossly. I think we have different value systems. Well mine's better.

You're paid a lot and you're not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don't want or need—for which you need more money.

A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it. Obviously. It was designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want.

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall [...].

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the tress had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere has gone very very cuckoo?

This place is like some cosmic dream crusher. All you can get out of a place like this is a creepy little tingle that lets you know your kid is never going to be anything more than a customer-that the whole world is being turned into casino.

Collecting and hoarding seem to be about the loss of others, while philanthropy and de-accessioning are more about the impending loss of self. (Whoever dies with the most toys actually loses.)

Poor Buoyancy: The realization that one was a better person when one had less money.

Humanity actually seems to be split down the middle on the definition of luxury: those who want gilded leopard-shaped teapots and those who want to live in the white box their iPhone came in.

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

What good is money if it can't buy happiness?