Quotes About Materialism

higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life.

There are only three integral views of the world: the religious, the materialistic, and the Islamic. They reflect three elemental possibilities (conscience, nature, and man), each of them manifesting itself as Christianity, materialism, and Islam.

We lived in a farm village, and no one could afford to buy a car or to fly. We were envious. We couldn't afford any toys. I couldn't imagine making a real car.

One of my first big paychecks, I used it to buy a Rolex. I bought a used 1968 vintage Rolex. I was too cheap to buy a new one.

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

The truth is I got rid of 100% of my vinyl in the '90s. All the vinyl I have is re-bought.

I am now a turtle. Virtually everything I own is on my back and suffice it to say I am one ton lighter and therefore 2,000 pounds happier. All houses are gone.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.

You can wander around these outlet shops for hours, accumulating clothing and accessories until your credit cards melt down. But you will not find one single shop that sells anything for the mind or the soul. There are no books. There is no music. There is no art. There is no poetry. The outlets are a spiritual wasteland.

Marx was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution.

I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I'm still living in one!... The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs -- all the old clubs -- are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.... Where is this 'vanished world' they talk about? I don't think the critics have looked out the window!

What is it about possessing things? Why do we feel the need to own what we love? And why do we become such jerks when we do? We've all been there. You want something, you possess it - and by possessing it, you lose it.

Zo ging het leven onafgebroken en eentonig voort, als met een zenuwachtig egoïstisch materialisme: er werd geleden en er daalde geen algemeen rouwfloers neer op de wereld; er werd geleden en toch bleef alles het zelfde en lachte men, sliep men, at men rondom dat leed.

No people ever did or ever can attain a worthy civilization by the satisfaction merely of material needs . . .

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

Más allá comienza el misterio. Más acá, no hay misterio, no hay esoterismo, no hay más sombras que las que proyectan nuestros deseos y sobre todo, nuestro orgullo. Pero como es más fácil contentarse con ideas y palabras que hacer algo con las manos, con dolor y con fatiga, en el silencio y en la soledad, también es más cómodo buscar un refugio en el pensamiento llamado "puro" que luchar cuerpo a cuerpo contra el peso y las tinieblas de la materia.

For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all.

The only thing money really buys?...Space. A bigger house, a bigger car, a larger hotel room. First-class plane tickets. But it doesn't even buy comfort. No one complains more than the rich and entitled. Comfort, security, ease. None of them come with money.

It's a Buddhist belief. One of the states of man from the Wheel of Life. The more you eat the hungrier you get. It's considered the very worst of the lives. Trying to fill a hole that only gets deeper. Fill it with food or money or power. With the admiration of others. Whatever." "The Hungry Ghost,

The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing.

For greed all nature is too little.