Quotes About Materialism

She [Cayce Pollard] feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people's objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.

She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people's objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.

You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn't even imagine wanting.

the mall crowds swaying like wind-blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification

I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.

Which would you rather have, O King—that little golden statue, or a little girl who could run, and laugh, and love you?" "Oh, give me back my little Marygold and I'll give up all the gold I have!" said the king. "I've lost all that was worth having.

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.

the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them "nothing but" expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.

All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck's policy of force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they may have had.

A fool judges people by the presents they give him.

The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don't get attached to them.

He who spends all his time amassing wealth is a slave to it.

We're strange creatures, we humans. At one level, we just want to eat, drink, play, and acquire more stuff. But life on the hedonic treadmill is ultimately dissatisfying. A beautiful remedy is to hop off it and instead begin pursuing an idea that's bigger than you are.

I wasn't going to get such a nice car - I was going to get a cute little hybrid or something, keep the trees happy - but then my grandfather died, and it was all: retail therapy!

Stroll on. When the going gets tough, the postmodern analyst goes shopping.

Wasn't modernism's greatest coup to destroy the notion of progression? And yet it still comes back in history books, in dialectical materialism, in the New Age's recycled Confucianism--the hope that all of us are travelling through concentric rings of knowledge towards some greater truth. And beneath that hope, the biggest lie: that things are getting better. Portentousness is only retrospective.

That's the funny thing about The Money. They'll gift each other artifact and libation equal to most people's annual income. But anyone who ain't them's gotta work for it.

I hate malls. They're like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you'll be fulfilled.

The time wasted, the energy squandered on meaningless possessions, the compromises...

But don't go shopping. That is one thing that many of us do for fun that won't result in lasting happiness. Materialistic people are more likely to be depressed or anxious and have low self-esteem. The more we seek happiness in material things, the less likely we are to find it.