Quotes About Materialism

Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

When we set up pleasure as the whole meaning of life we insure that in the final analysis life shall inevitably seem meaningless. Pleasure cannot possibly lend meaning to life. For what is pleasure? A condition. The materialist–and hedonism is generally linked up with materialism–would even say pleasure is nothing but a state of the cells of the brain. And for the sake of inducing such a state, is it worth living, experiencing, suffering, and doing deeds?

In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are "guzzling away" without any thought of morality.

minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence. What else remained for us as a material link with our former lives? For me there were my glasses and my belt; the latter I had to exchange later on for a piece of bread.

Spiritualism is no less a one-sided world view than materialism. Monism, be it spiritual or material, does not so much disclose the alleged oneness of the world as it betrays the one-sidedness of its own view.

Our industrialized society is out to satisfy all needs, and our consumer society is even out to create needs in order to satisfy them; but the most human of all human needs—the need to see a meaning in one's life—remains unsatisfied. People may have enough to live by; but more often than not they do not have anything to live for.

Once one acquired everything money could buy, it all became a game. A petty competition between people with insecurities that they mistook for ambition and superiority.

To what crime do you not drive the hearts of men, accursed hunger for gold?

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having. Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things.

There are one or two people I'm fond of, and there's a little good music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn't live with savages! Are you fond of books? Music? Pictures? D'you care at all for first editions? I've got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can't afford to give what they ask.

El dinero dignifica lo que es frívolo si no está pagado.

La libertad intelectual depende de cosas materiales. La poesía depende de la libertad intelectual. Y las mujeres siempre han sido pobres, no sólo durante doscientos años, sino desde el principio de los tiempos.

Philosophy is the invention of the rich.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things.

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

sham idealists, [are] people who can somehow combine what they call the good and the beautiful with material things, such as a bureaucratic career, etc.

Lo espiritual y lo físico se habían fundido en nosotros con perfección tal que no puede sino resultar incomprensible para los jovenzuelos materialistas, rudos y de mentes uniformes, típicos de nuestro tiempo.

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?

When you own nothing, it's hard to believe you have anything to lose.

Spend money on experiences, not stuff. Never rent a storage unit for more than a few months.