Quotes About Materialism

Du bist kein Sammler mehr, nur noch ein Besitzer, und das macht überhaupt nicht so viel Spaß.«

But that's how it is when you start wanting to have things. Now, I just look at them, and when I go away I carry them in my head. Then my hands are always free, because I don't have to carry a suitcase.

Funny thing is, there's only so much you can fill up with earthly things. There's an empty place and a void inside that only God can fill and some folks never figure that out.

This is because mothers who feel guilty about being separated from their children by their slave wage job try to make it up by charging up debt they can't afford to buy their kids plastic crap made by child slaves in China. This is an echo of the first Christmas, when the Wise Men gave gifts to the newborn babe that they knew was destined to be sacrificed.

What we gave, we have; What we spent, we had; What we left, we lost.

All my life I have desperately wanted an ugly necklace.

Six-Claws suspected that if she ever killed her mother, it wouldn't be for power or a throne; it would be for a pair of diamond earrings. And she wouldn't do it with her claws or her fire — she'd do it by annoying the queen to death.

No matter what we do in this life, all the information we gather and all the knowledge we accumulate and all the effort we make to amass wealth through work and business—when the time comes for us to leave this life, all of it is futile and in vain. It will not help us in any way whatsoever. I can easily say this since I am not educated at all! So I can smile and act big about this. Don't be angry, please.

Happiness equals consumption divided by desire.

There's something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket.

The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it's more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don't even have to mention Christianity or Judaism.

Some of my friends are very poor, the only thing that they have is money.

It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.

We obtain and, even worse, boast about our identity by the things we consume (television, food) more than truth, goodness, and beauty, the three virtues that transcend time and borders. In America and elsewhere, I am because I consume, when it should be because God is and because I do.

A hunter-gatherer's needs are few, but a Western citizen expects a car, paved streets, hot water on demand, airports, sewer lines, phone service, a refrigerator, computer, microwave, and a PlayStation... as a start.

At a more material level, one might better accuse communists of fashioning a golden calf than channeling an unclean spirit. What communists effectively bowed down to was just that: a material idol forged and focused on money, property, gold. It was not about the soul. The key to the communist-Marxist utopia would be economics. Solve the economic problem, the communists believed, and you would solve the human problem.

The acquisition of material things has become the hallmark of the shallow life.

I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love.

luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose...

And father said I never wanted this. I'm sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw -- all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let's talk self-sufficiency!

We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty, buy what we don't need, and throw away everything that's useful. Don't sell a man what he wants—sell him what he doesn't want. Pretend he's got eight feet and two stomachs and money to burn. That's not illogical—it's evil.

People – Americans, mostly – realise how attached they are to material comforts when they arrive in India.

People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapable of making the slightest effort in that direction.

No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine.