Quotes About Materialism

There may be fewer people in the American house of the nineties, but there are a lot more things.

The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually

Our civilization cannot survive materially unless it is redeemed spiritually. It can be saved only by becoming permeated with the Spirit of Christ, and being made free and happy by practices which spring out of that spirit. Only thus can discontent be driven out and all shadows lifted from the road ahead.

In Beverly Hills, they don't throw their garbage away — they make it into television shows.

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

Fashion is the work of the devil."

In life, you need a house and a car. After that, you have a choice.

People desperately want to spend their money. Maybe they think that's the most effective way to feel alive.

We have been learning since we were children how to make money, buy things, build things. The whole education system is set up to teach us how to think, not to feel.

If any object, achievement, or relationship was a true cause of happiness, then whoever had such a thing should be happy. But no such thing has ever been found," continued Lobsang. "What's saddest of all is that if we believe that our happiness depends on something we don't currently have, then we can't be happy here and now. Yet here and now is the only time we can be happy. We can't be happy in the future; it doesn't yet exist.

Hedonia is happiness we get when we take from the world. Chocolate. Parties. Stuff. It's all coming from outside ourselves.

Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell .Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions, while reducing our personal contentment by about 5 percent for every hour a day we watch.

Now before you all go off for your lovely hot baths, before you all piss off in your lovely new suits and your lovely flash card to your lovely new houses and your lovely young wives, you can all get down on your bloody hands and knees and look for my fucking watch!

Needless to say, there is a karmic rebound. The more we value money, the more we find it used—and the more we use it ourselves—to evaluate us. Money takes on a life of its own, and we end up being manipulated by the symbol we take so seriously. In this sense, the problem is not that we are too materialistic but that we are not materialistic enough, because we are so preoccupied with the symbolism that we end up devaluing life itself.

I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character.

I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one's life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.

One of the most recurrent themes in science fiction is its examination of humanity's relation to its own material constructions, sometimes to celebrate progress, sometimes in a more negative spirit of what Isaac Asimov has repeatedly described as technophobia, through fictions articulating fears of human displacement.

Like the Christian Second Coming, science's promissory materialism is never delivered, and, like the Second Coming, it will never be delivered, yet science's believers go on believing, just as Christian believers go on believing.

Science is what you get when you restrict philosophy to just materialism and empiricism and scrupulously ignore everything else, without any justification. Science invented a materialist, empiricist method to exclude every other philosophical stance. It didn't debate other philosophies, it just referred them to its method, which paradigmatically omitted them! A bit like Christians referring all other religions to the Bible, and never allowing the conversation to extend beyond its pages.

Despite what it says, science is actually just a philosophy – the philosophy of materialism and empiricism – but it refuses to commit itself to this. It refuses to state why materialism is right and idealism is wrong. It refuses to state why empiricism is right and rationalism is wrong. And if it ever actually got into any of this, if it dared, it would be intellectually destroyed. That's why it completely avoids the whole issue.

People with "new" money and those who look in the mirror and think they can be a model are the same type. They just don't get it and they never will.

Benjamin Franklin, said: "Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.

The boy would be lavished with presents upon arrival – a new train set, a model plane or a knight's suit of armour. But with nobody to play with Tom would get bored quickly. All he really wanted was to spend time with Mum and Dad, but time was the one thing they never ever gave him. "No. Mother and Father are abroad,