Quotes About Materialism

Having is estranged being.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

Food. Water. Shelter. Air. Sleep. Societal inflation has expanded need into greed. Suddenly the basic survival needs also include a cell phone, cable TV, and French manicured fingernails.... We've become the absolute biggest whiners of all human history with the absolute smallest justification for whining.

Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.

Money can buy most things and it is easy for most to become a thing for those who have the most money.

If you camp out at the store for a TV, you are a good consumer. If you camp out for social justice, you're a dirty hippie and will be pepper-sprayed.

Junk mail, junk food, our society is full of junk living, period.

It wishes to see only "useful things" produced, but it forgets that production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population.

Vinyl is Satan's resin.

Man, with his metal beaver-teeth chops down the world's trees saws, whines, grinds — loudly without a care but human "needs"

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Hay is more acceptable to an ass than gold.

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.

The more we have and the easier life is, the more we take things for granted. Then we start sniveling as soon as things are less than perfect.

One sign of these conditions is the ease with which people enter into debt and live contentedly with it. People are consciously living beyond their means in order to maintain the appearance of affluence. This is a product of wantonness: willingly falling headlong into debt in order to achieve a certain material standard of living.

When people are completely immersed in the material world, believing that this world is all that matters and all that exists and that they are not accountable for their actions, they affect a spiritual death of their hearts.

The etiology of miserliness is love of the fleeting, material aspects of this world. The miser ardently clings to his wealth and hoards it.

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessities.

E che cosa ce ne faremo della ricchezza? La posso mangiare? Dormirò meglio quando sarò ricco? Non andrò forse più in fabbrica, e che cosa farò tutto il giorno? No, Borkhausen, io non voglio diventare ricco e in questo modo, poi, certamente no. Una simile ricchezza non vale neanche un morto.

Nothing has any value but money. Money. But in point of fact money has no value; the greatest possible enjoyment has to be squeezed out of it moment by moment. Why save oneself up for tomorrow? Who knows where the dollar will stand, who knows whether we shall be still alive tomorrow?

I try to stress to my children that buying something never leads to true happiness.

Buying things is only sometimes about owning the things. Buying often is simply about what 50 Cent observed: being ABLE to buy. Having less means hearing "No, you cannot have that," and we loathe being told what we can and cannot do.