Quotes About Materialism

Times of difficulty arise because people are lovers of themselves and lovers of money and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of good and lovers of God.

Self-indulging is how we worship the idol of comfort, and orienting our lives on whatever promises to provide it in the fastest, easiest, most enjoyable way is how we bow down. As with any kind of idol, the appeal to immediate gratification is why self-indulgence snares us.

Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

Elizabeth liked commercials. They were anti-death. You had to be alive to buy things.

The second toxic myth is that more is better. More of anything is better than what we have. It's the logical response if you fear there's not enough, but more is better drives a competitive culture of accumulation, acquisition, and greed that only heightens fears and quickens the pace of the race.

When we are focused constantly on the next thing—the next dress, the next car, the next job, the next vacation, the next home improvement—we hardly experience the gifts of that which we have now.

Unrealistic neediness is actually greediness in disguise.

It all goes back to the spiritual malnutrition we talked about in the introduction. Specifically, it's about trying to use food to fill not only the physical void of our stomachs but also the spiritual void of our souls. Here's the problem with that: Food can fill our stomachs but never our souls. Possessions can fill our houses but never our hearts. Sex can fill our nights but never our hunger for love. Children can fill our days but never our identities.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world" (1 John 2:15 – 16).

Do not love the world or anything in the world…. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life — comes not from the Father but from the world. (1 JOHN 2:15 – 16)

As long as we try to fill this yearning with things other than God and activities other than God's purposes, we are unfulfilled and incomplete.

John Sharpe summarizes it well in his review of G. K. Chesterton's Outline of Sanity: The world today operates by ". . . consuming the world's limited resources to produce an ever-expanding stream of products which are designed to wear out or become quickly outmoded, and for which the need is more often than not created by advertising, and not by necessity.

The blues demand of theology a prophetic criticism that contests all arbitrary uses of power or coercion, that challenges individual acquisitive materialism, that repudiates any and every attempt to undermine humanity's very humanness, and that cherishes the lives of ordinary everyday children and women and men of all cultures and races.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap. It

We Americans," he said, "are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them"—he pointed at his daughter—"what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

A nosotros los estadounidenses, lo único que nos interesa es el consumo de nuestros productos. No nos interesa cómo los fabrican o qué les pasa, lo que pasa cuando los desechamos, cuando los tiramos a la basura.

Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I'd been running toward it for a long time.

Money buys many things, but typically not a sense of either authenticity or meaning.

outgrowth of materialism is the notion that there are "winners" and "losers," the "haves" and the "have-nots." Parents need to check in with themselves regularly and avoid endorsing values that pit children against each other or suggest that resources are so scarce that children must be in constant competition.

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money's sake.

Oh I know darling, it's nothing but money in New York.