Quotes About Materialism

These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for sense of comradeship. When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for. You don't get satisfaction from those things.

When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this? He made a fist. Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, 'The whole world is mine.' But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned his lesson. What lesson? I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. We can take nothing with us.

It's easy to be an idealist when you drive a Pajero.

The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egostical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks. We're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going . So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?

The philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita holds that we don't actually own anything – that our nation, cars, homes, and our families ultimately belong to God. Even our own senses don't belong to us, according to the Gita.

Junk is the "ideal product" because the "junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

This generation has more advanced luxuries and scientific amenities than any other generation, yet we are more spiritually unfulfilled than any generation in history.

There's only a yard of stuff in it, worth a pound if that, I went on, horrified by the waste of money. And how many yards of canvas in a Fragonard? And how much do planks of wood cost, or the skin of a darling goat before some clever person turns them into commodes and morocco? Art is more than yards, just as one is more than flesh and bones.

Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

We are looking to [corporate] brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. "Beyond Vietnam," 1967

By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women's status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values.

Throughout the decade, as money's ability to buy time for comfort and leisure was abandoned in the stratospheric pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake, the competition for beauty saw a parallel inflation: the material pleasures once presented as its goals—sex, love, intimacy, self expression—were lost in a desperate struggle within a sealed economy, becoming distant and quaint memories.

One of the strange things about human beings is that they value only that which has a price.

Uma das coisas estranhas no ser humano é valorizar só aquilo que tem um preço.

What makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we would learn to cut our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we'd get would be a true gift.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

One is never wholly conscious of the greed hidden in one's heart until one hears the sweet sound of silver.

O dinheiro não compra a felicidade, costumava dizer Kolvenik, mas compra todo o resto.

Az ember nem veszi észre, mennyi kapzsiság gyülemlett fel a szívében, amíg meg nem hallja a zsebében a pénz édes csilingelését.

Inimene ei tea, kui palju ahnust tema südames peitub, enne kui on kuulnud hõbeda meelitavat kõlinat oma taskutes.

All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.