Quotes About Materialism

Our culture tells us to pursue titles and trinkets, applause and acclaim, money and mansions. All that's fine—it truly is—so long as you don't get brainwashed into defining your worth as a human being by these things. Enjoy them, just don't get attached to them. Have them, just don't base your identity around them. Appreciate them, just don't need them.

After we are born, we begin the departure from our spiritual power and descend into more of what this damaged world wants us to be. We become more about acquiring, hoarding and comparing instead of creating, helping and adventuring.

I'd rather get confused, bruised a bit (or a lot) and know that I'm living fully than spend my greatest years watching television in a subdivision or buying things I don't need to impress people I don't know in a store I don't really want to be

Sam grudgingly acknowledged the role of consciousness, but argued this, too, was based on unexamined assumptions, dependent on an unfounded faith in the collapse of quantum indeterminacy, and we debated the many minds theory, hidden variables, multiverses, and materialism until the coffee went cold and I'd managed to forget I was anything but pure consciousness myself.

The funny thing about gold is how quickly it can tarnish.

We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.

the growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people think of conservatism merely as a form of complacency towards the current system of material rewards, which has nothing whatever to say about the things that 'money can't buy', or about the effect of the consumer society on our deeper values. Yet

Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale.

Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as the one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

The will to possess must cease--but also the *non* will to possess must not be seen.

The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we're too poor to buy our freedom.

Since money meant nothing to them, they had to stress the sentimental value of gifts.

Ida Alice seemed determined to run through Flagler's money, gathering an expensive wardrobe and trying to buy her way into New York high society.

What really disturbed him was not so much making money but spending it.

The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam deeply believed, was against jahiliya -- the world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism, and sexual equality.

expensive silk jacket, ambitious.

A visitor from outer space would assume the viability of the United States depended entirely on the ability of the citizenry to carry eight-by-four sheets of board, safely and in vast quantities.

Why don't you live anywhere?" "Do you have a house?" "Of course." "Is it a pure unalloyed pleasure?" "Not entirely." "So there's your answer.

Science should be the search for truth, not merely the search for materialistic explanations.

Money is like grass. It withers. [... ] but our deeds last forever.

Puritan leaders, at least, valued an educated mind over material riches. Cotton Mather admonished his congregation with the comment, "If your main concern be to get the riches of this world for your children, and leave a belly full of this world unto them, it looks very suspiciously as if you were yourselves the people of this world, whose portion is only in this life."30

Let us not forget that revolutions are accomplished through people, although they be nameless. Materialism does not ignore the feeling, thinking, and acting man, but explains him.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.