Quotes About Materialism

He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.

No matter how hard you hug your money, it never hugs back.

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.

A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

Money is the root of all evil, but the foliage is fascinating.

Take everything that's yours with you, don't save any -- it won't be needed later.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

All the baubles offered by the material world fail to satisfy because they are themselves products of finitude and impermanent by nature.

Money is only a human invention.

There is direct correlation between a society lacking in artistic vision to lack of social conscience, i.e., crime, poverty, and senseless, violent atrocities, materialism.

It's easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.

Scientific investigation, narrowly conceived, does not prove materialism. Rather, materialism arises from confusing two distinct moves: (1) the narrow scientific strategy of focusing on what is material and (2) the claim that the narrow focus is all that there is.

I'd rather wear bare skin than raw silk any day.

Waste lies not in the number of possessions but in the failure to enjoy them.

Endless desire is one of the pitfalls of human nature, and one of the first things you need to cure if you want to get ahead more quickly.

We hit a fulfillment ceiling and never recognized that the formula of money = fulfillment not only had stopped working but had started to work against us. No matter how much we bought, the fulfillment curve kept heading down.

The Hoover Commission agreed. Leisure was not, in fact, an excuse to relax. It was a hole to fill up with more wants (which, in turn, required more work to pay for them). Somehow the consumer solution satisfied both the industrial hedonists hell-bent on achieving a material paradise and the puritans who feared that unoccupied leisure would lead to sin. In fact, the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

People in industrialized nations used to be called "citizens." Now we are "consumers"—which means (according to the dictionary definition of "consume") people who "use up," "waste," "destroy," and "squander.

Having more is an endless horizon, no matter how much you have.

the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

The bottom line is that we think we work to pay the bills—but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff—that sends us back to work again!

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of more is better, "enough" is like the horizon—always receding. You lose the ability to identify that point of sufficiency at which you can choose to stop. This is a psychological cul-de-sac, an invisible catch-22 of the consumer myth of more. If more is better, then what I have is not enough.

In fact, we now meet most of our needs, wants, and desires through money. We buy everything from hope to happiness. We no longer live life. We consume it.