Quotes About Materialism

Money opens many doors.The door of the coffin, among others. (L'argent ouvre bien des portes. - Celle du cercueil entre autres.)

I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced had no existence.

Money and goods are certainly the best of references.

We spent as much money as we could and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.

Money can't buy a happy life, or a peaceful death.

And Ralph always wound up these mental soliloquies by arriving at the conclusion, that there was nothing like money.

There's not a Hand in this town, sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now, they're not a-going—none of 'em—ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon.

More than this, even in those white men who professed religion we found much inconsistency of conduct. They spoke much of spiritual things, while seeking only the material.

Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?

The commoditization of social relationships leaves us with nothing to do together but to consume. Joint consumption does nothing to build community because it requires no gifts.

In the Story of Ascent, a move back to the land would be a regression. We were supposed to be progressing away from labor, away from materiality, away from the dirt. In that story, heavenly was better than earthly, high better than low, clean better than dirty, the mind better than the body, and the highest social classes the ones furthest removed from the land.

Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.

When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable.

There are no pockets in a shroud.

Wallets are the fabricated items into which we put our fabricated money, which most people believe to be their possession of the realest value.

What we call real estate — the solid ground to build a house on — is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong — he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages — only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in.

Well! some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug PROPERTY.

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.

I've been shopping all my life and still have nothing to wear.

I shop like a bull — I charge everything.

No man actually owns a fortune; it owns him.

The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.