Quotes About Materialism

There's nothing wrong with having a desire to want nice things. It's when we place that as a measure of the value of ourselves that it goes askew.

She believed that owning a lots of things made you a better person. She didn't know - possibly didn't want to know - that happiness comes from the inside.

The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting.

Some people thought I was crazy to have let go of all the worldly things I had "achieved." They didn't understand that I didn't want or need any of that anymore.

Groan under gold, yet weep for want of bread.

Some people just chase the glittery stuff and they have no substance to their life whatsoever. Actually all they really want is power. But they pretend they're interested in enlightenment.

People with no sense or appreciation of humor, Invigilator, always take money too seriously. Its possession, anyway. Which is why they spend all their time stacking coins, counting this and that, gazing lovingly over their hoards and so on. They're compensating for the abject penury everywhere else in their lives. Nice rings, by the way.

The language of Consumer is most colorful. At last count, this language possesses twenty-nine thousand four hundred fifty six words and phrases to replace and deflect the immoral concept of 'greed'. It possesses Four Volumes of Rationalizations, Nine Volumes of Justifications and a Handy Quick-Chart of Suitable False Definitions of the concept of 'need', an essential resource to be used at the Moment of Indecision in Conjunction with Mouth- Watering Pupil- Dilating Desire.

What's the big deal—you've read it, haven't you?" Then he'd take them down to the used-book store and sell them for peanuts. He never got anything close to what they were worth. He didn't like them cluttering up the house, or even my room. They weren't going to get my books.

Thou shalt not forget that money is only money and not character or fame.

Severus said to him, "I have been everything—and gained nothing." Everything and nothing: the remark had stopped Galen cold. In the end, did the material world and the realm of the senses amount to nothing, then? In the end, could it be that everything and nothing were the same?

You can't have everything... where would you put it? Steven Wright

We [Americans] became a nation of java junkies, wired from dawn to dusk intent on running faster, getting richer, dancing harder, playing longer and getting higher than anybody else.

Greed, she thought, he was so greedy, but stupid too.

We noticed a lady coming to. us rather frequently. She'd come in a Cadillac, park three blocks away and walk over. She belonged to a class I used to call the well-dressed destitute. She had the clothes, she had the Cadillac, but she didn't have any money.

I've never understood a society of want. We don't have a society of want—not on a general level. We have a society of total surplus: unwanted goods and unwanted people.

Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body." – George Carlin, Author, Actor and Comedian

Science debased to the end of spreading death and of enslaving humanity, or to the end of procuring newer and newer sensations, a life spent in the whirlpool of fleeting pleasures, varied, subtle, and new, and in the worship of the almighty dollar is what most of us tend to call progress. We live more for the body than for the soul. Our body is our soul; our body is our highest Brahman.

All artists are socialists until they see another artist with a bigger house than theirs.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

Our societies have achieved a general level of prosperity of which most of all the human beings who have ever lived could only dream. Now we need to show that we can stop continually wanting more - more money, more stuff. We must show that it is possible for people to realise that they have enough.

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.

We live in a disposable, 'cast-off and throw-away' society that has largely lost any real sense of permanence. Ours is a world of expiration dates, limited shelf life, and planned obsolescence. Nothing is absolute.

Soft addictions are an alluring, seductive aspect of our culture - they are easy to attain and socially acceptable, they are even encouraged in many cases. Yet they are lethal to the spirit.