Quotes About Materialism

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life

The ways by which you get money almost without exception lead downward

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.

Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are.

I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

Nuestras casas son una propiedad tan aparatosa que a menudo estamos más encerrados que alojados en ellas.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred modern improvements; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.

Yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.

Who ever saw his old clothes, — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less?

I could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed to be poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are.

men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries;

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes

I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called 'a handsome property'..on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton, which place he would reach some time in the morning.

Lidé dospÄ›li tak daleko, že ?asto strádají ne z nedostatku vÄ›cí potÃ…â"¢ebných, nýbrž z nedostatku vÄ›cí nadbyte?ných.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind.

there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.

Most men never appear to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.

There is no happiness in having and getting, but only in giving . . . half the world is on the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness.

He had indeed conversed so entirely with money, that it may almost be doubted whether he imagined there was any other thing really existing in the world; this at least may be certainly averred, that he firmly believed nothing else to have any real value.

Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.

but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, by a title or a ribbon, sacrifice as much to vanity as the poor wit who is desirous to read you his poem or his play?

I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them--I don't believe they are as eternal as the poets say.

What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?