Quotes About Materialism

This was a time to prepare for the cold weather, to store up fire and wood. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become a disembodied idea, and the problems of alimentation and fuel supply took the place of food and firewood.

I mean to say that there was, in fact, something unhealthy in the life of well-to-do people. No end of superfluity. Superfluous furniture and superfluous rooms in the houses, superfluous refinement of feelings, superfluous expressions.

sweetmeat. One moment he enjoys a spiritual mood, and the next moment he is beside himself with the pleasure of 'woman and gold'.

Actually it is not necessary to renounce the objects of the world, because a human being does not actually own or possess anything. Therefore it is not necessary to renounce anything—but the sense of possessiveness should be renounced.

I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.

to be aware that you must compete somehow, and yet that wealth and beauty are not in your realm.

Money is extremely important in the areas in which it works, and extremely unimportant in the areas in which it doesn't.

The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.

We no longer accumulate to live; we live to accumulate.

I had a hunger for things I knew realistically I didn't actually care for.

Money talks and walks, but it does not bark.

Pride is something only folk with money can afford.

Everyone who is educated today wants to sit at a comfortable desk under a fan and live in an air-conditioned house surrounded by a garden, coming and going in an American car as wide as the street. If we do not tear out this disease by the roots we shall have with us a bourgeoisie that is in no way connected with the reality of our life...

Humans, both personally and collectively, slaved away to possess various treasures and then spent their lives protecting them in the belief that what they had worked so hard to possess would make them whole.

The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!--Which it never can be....

During the 80s and 90s, we all became consumed with ourselves. In the 21st century, we've come back to simpler times. People are struggling economically and this has forced them to scale back the material aspects of their lives and realise the beauty of finding the simple joy in being with the people we love.

My boyfriend keeps telling me I've got to own things. So, first I bought this car. And then he told me I oughta get a house. 'Why a house?' 'Well, you gotta have a place to park the car.'

Julian Hawthorne

I don't really care about money. I find money boring and accounting boring, so I'm probably not going to ever make a lot of money.

Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of justice and charity.

Man is a machine and… in the whole universe there is but a single substance variously modified.

Work-and-spend has become a mutually reinforcing and powerful syndrome-a seamless web we somehow keep choosing, without even meaning to.

Consumption is a social relationship, the dominant relationship in our society—one that makes it harder and harder for people to hold together, to create community.

E]r gibt uns das Gefühl, weniger einsam zu sein in dieser Sackgasse im Dienste der Großen-Eitelkeit-Idealismus-Realismus-Spiritualismus-Materialismus des Abendlandes, G.m.b.H.