Materialism Quotes

When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism.

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.

Terry Eagleton

There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.--"Bomar

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Why does a steward steal? He steals because he's not sure he'll always remain with his master and wants to make his future secure.

Alexandre Dumas

We never know how strongly we cling to objects until they are taken away, and he who thinks htat he is attached to nothing, is frequently grandly mistaken, being bound to a thousand things, unknown to himself.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon

Parents who spoil their children out of 'love' should realize that they are performing acts of child abuse. Although there are no laws against such abuse--no man-made laws anyway--this spiritual mistreatment may result in as much long-term personal and social damage as the worst physical abuse.

Randy Alcorn

...if I try to make only enough money for my family' immediate needs, it may violate Scripture. ...Even though earning just enough to meet the needs of my family may seem nonmaterialistic, it's actually selfish when I could earn enough to care for others as well.

Randy Alcorn

Dreams shouldn't be about what you can buy--they should be about what mark you leave in the world.

Claire Cross

Melancholy in a capitalist, like the appearance of a comet, presages some misfortune to the world.

Alexandre Dumas

Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be.

Randy Alcorn

[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.

G.K. Chesterton

We are born, we suffer, we die. However, love is a possibility for us all and, for some few, there is also a big house."Daniel could not resist asking, because he really wanted to know. "Need they be mutually exclusive? Can't we have both love and house?"Joe smiled. "Certainly. But one must consider carefully how one goes about getting the house.

Susan Trott

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Needs multiply as they are met. Woe to the man who would live a disentangled life. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth!

Elisabeth Elliot

The author's projected intellectual climate nearly 500 years in the future proclaims itself too pragmatic to consider living well as important as material satisfaction. This reminds us, ironically, that choosing NOT to consider life's deeper questions is in itself a choice with profound and lasting consequences.

Bryan M. Litfin

Stuff comes and stuff goes and the only thing that matters in the end is who you are inside, what you do and what make it leaves in the world.

Claire Cross

The males (of the Hutchinson family that included both religious dissenter Anne and immensely wealthy and politically connected Thomas) were merchants who sought salvation through commerce.

H.W. Brands

Curiously enough, it seems that at times the spiritual side prevails, and then the materialistic side—in wave-like motions following each other. ...At one time the full flood of materialistic ideas prevails, and everything in this life—prosperity, the education which procures more pleasures, more food—will become glorious at first and then that will degrade and degenerate. Along with the prosperity will rise to white heat all the inborn jealousies and hatreds of the human race. Competition and merciless cruelty will be the watchword of the day. To quote a very commonplace and not very elegant English proverb, "Everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost", becomes the motto of the day. Then people think that the whole scheme of life is a failure. And the world would be destroyed had not spirituality come to the rescue and lent a helping hand to the sinking world. Then the world gets new hope and finds a new basis for a new building, and another wave of spirituality comes, which in time again declines. As a rule, spirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centered in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then society has to help itself, and materialism comes to the rescue.

Swami Vivekananda

Associated with this inner conflict is a tendency to become hypercritical: unhappy souls almost always blame everyone but themselves for their miseries. Shut up within themselves, they are necessarily shut off from all others except to criticize them. Since the essence of sin is opposition to God’s will, it follows that the sin of one individual is bound to oppose any other individual whose will is in harmony with God’s will. This resulting estrangement from one’s fellow man is intensified when one begins to live solely for this world, then the possessions of the neighbor are regarded as something unjustly taken from oneself. Once the material becomes the goal of life, a society of conflicts is born.

Fulton J. Sheen

No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.

Henry David Thoreau

Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify

Robert T. Pennock

Life punishes those who have things in abundance by making them worry about petty things like: what to wear, or, which car to drive.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You know a man is interesting when you forget to notice how expensive — or cheap — his clothes are.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

William Carey chides his countrymen for deciding it would be impossible for the Gospel to travel over great distances and to penetrate varied cultures when they are willing to face the same trials for the sake of commerce.

William Carey

I am obsessed with not being obsessed with acquiring material things.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most employees don’t really want to be highly-paid; they just want to earn more than their peers, and, more importantly, more than their neighbours.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nothing humbles a rich man better than a poor man that isn’t willing to do ‘anything’ for money.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Don’t obsess over having the 'latest' version of a product. For there was a time that the previous version was the latest.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Those who say that money can’t buy one love make it sound as if love can buy one money.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Man would rather be loved for what he has, than be hated for what he lacks.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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.

C. JoyBell C.

Societies need self sacrificing ignorant crowd;Religions need fearful followers;Systems need obedient slaves;Corporate world needs compulsive consumers,andI NEED THE COURAGE TO RISE ABOVE THESE FOUR PARASITES.

Saurabh Sharma

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

Thomas Brooks

The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus Kant even now will find more followers than Fichte.

Novalis

Materialism is an identity crisis.

Bryant McGill

The things you spend so much time on--all this work you do--might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things.

Mitch Albom

He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage.

Alasdair Gray

I'd much rather buy an experience than something I can possess in the material world

Ashly Lorenzana

Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact, this planet is more powerful than the human species.

Zeena Schreck

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them....Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

Donna Leon

The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions...

Sherwood Anderson

We have too quickly bought into the lie that we’ll be happier with more—and as a result, too often miss the joy that comes from owning less.

Joshua Becker

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.

Luc Ferry

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

O Anna Niemus

In a hyper materialist environment where everything is reduced to mere economic considerations, what we deem to be important is often trivial, a temporary fix for deeper and more profound yearnings.This has given rise to what some may describe as a unique pathology common to modern wealthy societies: moral and spiritual emptiness among opulence and material luxury.

Cory Bernardi

In the West many Christians have an abundance of material possessions, yet they live in a backslidden state.

Brother Yun

[Materialism] seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility - that is knowledge - which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result - knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.

Karl Marx

You can’t really, truly love a thing. Love is only possible between beings or groups of beings. Love of a thing doesn’t work because it can’t love back.

Leland Dirks

A lot of people with a lot of ill gotten wealth may think that they have high net worth, but will simply never be worthy of any trust or respect.

Jeroninio Almeida

They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.

John le Carré

The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective, and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective, whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or after it has taken form, is empirically given - that is to say, is substance, the chemical element with its primary relations. Some such thing it takes, as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away. Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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

Wes Adamson

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.

Karl Marx

I have nothing to lose. I keep all my valuables in a safe.

Ljupka Cvetanova

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.

Terry Eagleton

It's not what you have on the outside that glitters in light, it's what you have on the inside that shines in the dark.

Anthony Liccione

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

Edward Witten

The less you need, the more you live

Benny Bellamacina

Whether you buy a new TV, or car, (etc.) or any other “material” thing is often “immaterial” to God.

Donald L. Hicks

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Materialism Quotes

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