Quotes About Materialism

We're all searching for something to fill up what I like to call that big, God-shaped hole in our souls. Some people use alcohol, or sex, or their children, or food, or money, or music, or heroin. A lot of people even use the concept of God itself. I could go on and on. I used to know a girl who used shoes. She had over two-hundred pairs. But it's all the same thing, really. People, for some stupid reason, think they can escape their sorrows.

Most of our desires are clichés, right? Ready to wear, one size fits all. I doubt if it's even possible to have an original desire anymore.

Worldwide, the mania for consumer goods has created a deadly culture of overwork.

the fat cats used to send us into the mills to make their millions, and now they send us to the shopping centres.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.

The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they're scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements.

Every time a person goes to the mall, she loses a little piece of her soul

Romantic love is ambulatory by nature, and it must be anchored in strata more stable than lust if it's to last. Marital disintegration is accelerated when only one, or neither, party is grounded and growing, or growing at different rates or in different directions. As I became increasingly interested in cultural matters, matters of the mind and spirit, my teenage bride waxed more and more materialistic.

And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume.

The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.

The economic world, the world of the equities markets, just seemed like a perfect foil, the ideal backdrop against which to contrast this story about legendary amphibians from outer space, because everything these days is all about money. In this book (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas) I'm hoping to illustrate that there not only are far more important things than money, but there are far more interesting things. (from NPR Interviews edited by Robert Siegel)

O plano satânico consiste em nos manter tão cheios de lixo, que não tenhamos fome de Deus, e isto tem funcionado muito bem por séculos. O inimigo tem nos feito acostumar a sobreviver em uma prosperidade terrena, porém, em uma mendicância espiritual.

What does 'poor' mean? No television?" Steve raised his eyebrows. "It means no money," said Bride. "Same thing," he answered. "No money, no television." "Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!" "Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?

Let me tell you right now the one important thing you'll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself and other people too.

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

A carnal Christian makes his or her decisions based entirely on what can be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard.

The devil has some Christians in POW camps due to alcohol, drugs, pornography, fear, discouragement, depression, pride, narcissism, materialism, and a whole host of other problems.

Pastor Bob's breakthrough twenty years earlier had been the discovery that while Americans were hungry for spiritual nourishment, they wanted it bland and easy to digest—the religious equivalent of fast food. All that New Testament stuff about self-sacrifice and forgiveness puzzled them mightily. So Pastor Bob preached the Christian virtues of feeling good, relieving stress, getting rich, and hiring abundant deadly force to protect the good people from the bad.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn't always thus.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.