Quotes About Materialism

Is life's span so dear and are home comforts so engrossing as to be purchased with my unfaithfulness and dry-eyed prayerlessness? At the final bar of God, shall the perishing millions accuse me of materialism coated with a few Scripture verses?

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and animals. They see no life When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and rivers are not alive

Shopping, true feminine felicity !

This whole world was a processed petroleum product.

God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

The Greek poleis in their best days had no great surplus of goods: what they had was a surplus of time, that is, leisure, free and untrammeled, not commited-as in America today-to excessive materialistic consumption, but available for conversation, sexual passion, intellectual reflection, and esthetic delight.

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

The aim of industry is not primarily to satisfy essential human needs with a minimal productive effort, but to multiply the number of needs, factitious or fictitious, and accommodate them to the maximum mechanical capacity to produce profits. These are the sacred principles of the power complex.

The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

Taking stock of what you own, when done correctly and thoroughly, helps dampen the urge to shop frivolously.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

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

I used to literally spend every dime I had on clothes, shoes and getting fresh.

Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped.

I used to own two homes in Atlanta. But it was a lot of trouble. There are leaky roofs; you have to call people. It takes up too much time to own property everywhere. Now I stay at the St. Regis. I used to like cars a lot, too. I had 25 of them: Porsches, Ferraris.

Everywhere I look, there are ads marking Mother's Day. Mostly they conform to stereotype: flowers, jewelry, perfume. Not a lot of books. Not many computers. Few tools. Little that's useful.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid'; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

People feel powerless and useless in the world. But they can buy something. It can give them a sense of value, of power.

I wasn't always a minimalist. I used to buy a lot of things, believing that all those possessions would increase my self-worth and lead to a happier life. I loved collecting a lot of useless stuff, and I couldn't throw anything away.

The automobile is technologically more sophisticated than the bundling board, but the human motives in their uses are sometimes the same.

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives.

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three - and paradise is when you have none.