Quotes About Materialism

Impossible to believe we need so much as the world wants us to buy. I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips than I could possibly use before I die. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. And I suppose sometime I will. Old and cold I will lie apart from all this buying and selling, with only the beautiful earth in my heart.

And there are no pockets in shrouds!

I have heard that the sight of the dead has confirmed materialists in their belief. I ever felt otherwise. Was that my child—that moveless decaying inanimation? My child was enraptured by my caresses; his dear voice cloathed with meaning articulations his thoughts, otherwise inaccessible; his smile was a ray of the soul, and the same soul sat upon its throne in his eyes. I turn from this mockery of what he was.

When a person walks by draped with priceless robes and jewels, you may wonder, does silk increase one's intelligence?

Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.

Superficiality is the curse of the modern world.

We can never get enough of what we don't really need.

There is a mistaken notion that wealth makes people content. It does the opposite, generally. It stirs a hunger in many - and no matter what they eat, they will never be full.

The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning.

Certainly, I approve of it. Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They're too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed.

Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame.

The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us.

Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metals and engines. You're lucky- you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all.

Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family for a paint job on their house--it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger.

cardboard on the tips of his ten fingers, up the crimson-plushed stairway to Guy Francon's office. The cardboard displayed a water-color perspective of a gray granite

He could not forgive his country because it had given him a quarter of a billion dollars and then refused to grant him an equal amount of reverence. People would not take his views on art, literature, history, biology, sociology and metaphysics as they took his checks. He complained that people identified him with his money too much; he hated them because they did not identify him enough.

money is only a means to some end. If a man wants it for a personal purpose—to invest in his industry, to create, to study, to travel, to enjoy luxury—he's completely moral. But the men who place money first go much beyond that. Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others. They're second-handers. Look

Para el salvaje, el mundo es un lugar de prodigios ininteligibles, donde todo es posible para la materia inanimada y nada es posible para él. Su mundo no es lo desconocido, sino un horror irracional: lo desconocible. Cree que los objetos físicos están dotados de una misteriosa voluntad, movidos por caprichos sin causa, imposibles de predecir, mientras él no es más que un peón impotente, a merced de fuerzas situadas fuera de su control.

It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and

No tienes que depender de los bienes materiales, son ellos los que dependen de ti.

aquellos a quienes llamáis materialistas y espiritualistas son sólo dos mitades del mismo ser humano disecado, que trata siempre de encontrar la plenitud, pero buscándola al alternar entre la destrucción de la carne y la destrucción del alma y viceversa; de que corren desde vuestros colegios a las prisiones de esclavos de Europa y de éstas al colapso del fangal místico de la India, sin buscar refugio alguno contra la realidad, ni forma de escapar a la mente.

La utopía de la codicia

the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.

Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America's consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation.