Materialism Quotes - Page 5

Life is less a burden without an absolute quest for material possessions

The gods grant nothing more than life,So let us reject whatever lifts us To unbreathable heights, Eternal but flowerless.

Matter is but the artificial division of energy.

Because he has finally realized that it is it and not him that is loved by the woman he loves, many a man is jealous of his own car, house, wardrobe, or salary.

Three things are neededFor humanity to co-exist:Truth, peace and basic needs.Everything else -Is irrelevant.

Being self-owned is a state of mind.

Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.

All religions are man-made God has not yet revealed himself beyond doubt to anybody.

It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!" "So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.

The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

I know that certain minds would regard as audacious the idea of relating the laws which preside over the play of our organs to those laws which govern inanimate bodies; but, although novel, this truth is none the less incontestable. To hold that the phenomena of life are entirely distinct from the general phenomena of nature is to commit a grave error, it is to oppose the continued progress of science.

Get out of this office! I'll have no feelings here.

I will say that the cross of materialism is that it never quite succeeds in believing what it preaches, in thinking its own thought. This may sound complicated, but is in fact simple: the materialist says, for example, that we are not free, though he is convinced, of course, that he asserts this freely, that no one is forcing him to state this view of the matter — neither parents, not social milieu, nor biological inheritance. He says that we are wholly determined by our history, but he never stops urging us to free ourselves, to change our destiny, to revolt where possible! He says that we must love the world as it is, turning our backs on past and future so as to live in the present, but he never stops trying, like you or me, when the present weighs upon us, to change it in hope of a better world. In brief, the materialist sets forth philosophical these that are profound, but always for you and me, never for himself. Always, he reintroduces transcendence — liberty, a vision for society, the ideal — because in truth he cannot not believe himself to be free, and therefore answerable to values higher than nature and history.

I wanted to be a sadhu. But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A real test of faith would be to go back to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping countries on earth [America] and be a sadhu there.

I found myself with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause.

I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.

Most of the very few people who would choose a good heart over riches would eventually use that to either make a lot of money, or attract men or women who are rich.

One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the unconscious; but one point of Freud’s work is that it makes it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies — by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor is it an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific.

Your shyness alone will bring you more emotional and material losses than all of your other negative attributes.

Poverty does not always prevent a rich person from dating someone who is poor, unless the man is the one who is poor.

But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.

The underprivileged are byproduct of society’s material progress.

There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.

Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.

No one knows what god thinks of anything. He only knows and no one can claim to penetrate into his mysteries. Those who do that are liars and must be avoided at all costs

Materialism is not having things, it is letting things have you.

Adversity hath slain her thousand, but prosperity her ten thousand.

Some people will each start investing more of their salary on ‘their’ house and spending less of it on ‘their’ car or cars only when they start being able to take ‘their’ house to work, funerals, weddings, etc.

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.

All atheists will go to heaven. If god exists, not believing in him does not take him away and he cannot justly condemn those who seek him earnestly and cannot find him. He would even reward their earnest search for him.

Pretty Stones

In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego.

The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

Riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep's clothing, pretending to be security against anxieties, and they become then the object of anxiety. They secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf that is put to tending the sheep.

Try not to say "I have" unless it’s not bought by the money. If materialism is a blessing would have not been sold out in streets

Silently, sadly, the earth covered life coinage is read both ways; so much vs. so little and…so little vs. …so much!

For the most expensive way to realize an orgasm, men open their wallets. For the cheapest, they close their eyes.

The eyes of god are upon you, I mean the eyes of society. We are prisoners of societies in which we live

Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.

The wisdom of nature continues to teach humanity that the material...is immaterial.

It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood. Caeiro’s work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more that material, more than anti-spiritual dawn. It’s an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.

We dabble in many things; but the one great real idea of our age, not copied from any other, not pretended, not raised to life by any conjuration, is the Much Making of Things – not the making of beautiful things, not the joy of spending living energy in creative work; rather the shameless, merciless driving and over-driving, wasting and draining of the last bit of energy, only to produce heaps and heaps of things – things ugly, things harmful, things useless, and at the best largely unnecessary.

Sometimes it didn't seem possible that I could be so unhappy, considering how much I had compared to other kids my age, and, believe me, I understood how extremely lucky I was. Sometimes things didn't add up.

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.

All religions are "revealed" and "inspired". After all nothing happens without the "will" of god.

On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence.

Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Balliol, we believe that 'no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality.

There is a powerful relationship between our true spiritual condition and our attitude and actions concerning money and possessions.

When selecting a one-night stand, a heterosexual woman who is materialistic is a trillion times more likely to choose a sexually unattractive poor man who seems rich over a sexually attractive rich man who seems poor.

In the heir's world, where everything was available, the unattainable had a wild allure.

The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.

James Bond: a paid assassin of plutocratic cartels, a womanizer, a dipsomaniac, a speed demon, a materialist.

A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson

The problem with people today, is, they have religions but they have no spirituality. They go to church but they cannot even manage the condition of their own souls. They take pride to state the name of their religions and broadcast these things on facebook and everywhere, thinking that the nature of their religion represents the nature of their spirit. It's just the same as how they present their cars, houses, and degrees to the world— to stand as a representation of what they are. That's not spirituality; that's still materialism. Yes, perhaps your car, house and degree represents what you've achieved (or what your status in society is); but your religion does not represent what your spirit is like. You cannot go to a certain church or belong to a certain group of people and have that be a replica of your spirit.

In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.

The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.

Materialism wars against our souls in a twofold manner. First, it makes us discontent and envious of others. Second, it leads us to pamper and indulge our bodies so that we become soft and lazy. As we become soft and lazy in our bodies, we tend to become soft and lazy spiritually. When Paul talked about making his body his slave, so that after having preached to others he himself would not be disqualified, he was not thinking about physical disqualification, but spiritual. He knew well that physical softness inevitably leads to spiritual softness. When the body is pampered and indulged, the instincts and passions of the body tend to get the upper hand and dominate our thoughts and actions. We tend to do not what we should do, but what we want to do, as we follow the cravings of our sinful nature.

New York's perennial attraction was shopping.