Materialism Quotes - Page 4

It's philanthropy, but it's good politics, too. Mighty good politics. The poor are some of the most grateful people in the world. George Washington Plunkett.

H.W. Brands

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth.

G.K. Chesterton

How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?

Rebecca Goldstein

Instead of loving people and using money, people often love money and use people.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

Fidelity surveyed a group with at least $1 million investment assets excluding real estate and retirement. 42% of them did not FEEL wealthy.

Christopher Hayes

[A]nd you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestow

Thomas Guthrie

Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Desire is insatiable as death, but He who fills all in all can fill it. The capacity of our wishes who can measure? But the immeasurable wealth of God can more than overflow it.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Hoarding is both unnecessary and an affront to God, who is perfectly capable of providing abundantly for those who trust in him.

Richard B. Hays

I constantly pack my pockets full of worthless trinkets, and in such misguided gorging I leave my heart empty and my soul emaciated because I have forgotten everything but trinkets.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A man’s bank balance is the new penis size.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hungry for more food, status, or money, yet really we are hungry for connection.

Vironika Tugaleva

When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.

H.W. Brands

Sophia sat in meditation on the riverbank when a student bent down to place two enormous pearls at her feet as a gift.tShe opened her eyes to see the pearls. She picked one up, but dropped it. It rolled down the hill upon which she was sitting and into the river. The student chased after it and looked all afternoon, diving, coming up for air, diving back down.t“Sophia,” he asked. “Could you show me where it went in? I can’t find it.”t“Right there,” she said throwing the other pearl in the river.

David W. Jones

Letting go of "stuff" allowed the world to collapse behind me as I moved, so I became nothing more or less than who I simply was: Me.

Dee-Williams

And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one's habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? He is isolated, and what does he care about the whole? They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Christmas tree, twinkling with lights, had a mountain of gifts piled up beneath it, like offerings to the great god of excess.

Tess Gerritsen

If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.

Kalid Gilad

The author jokes that the culture at his first job at Entertainment Weekly chased away the worthwhile aspects of his Brown education, but in so doing he makes a subtle point about the profound impact of the culture with which we surround ourselves and how easily we can be defined and constrained by our jobs.

A.J. Jacobs

The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.

William Wilberforce

Matter is but the artificial division of energy.

Adriano Bulla

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

Pat Conroy

Ambition is greed without makeup.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The connection between spirit and other matter, or between the visible and invisible world of human beings, is at present little understood. I am of the opinion that the connection is far more intimate than is generally believed. Of this fact there is the most positive and convincing proof. Many may be so averse to receiving new truths, which set aside all their preconceived opinions, as to disregard the positive evidence of their senses.

Eliab Wilkinson Capron

Q: What is wrong with the world?A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.

Adolf Hitler

How much does he lack himself who must have many things?

Sen no Rikyū

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.

François Magendie

The one single use of things which we call our own is that they might be his who hath need of them.

Thomas Hughes

The Must be worthless by our estimation or keep us enslaved by an intemperate love of it.

John Calvin

She chose to look at her surroundings where they "think missionary" mind-set.

Jeremy Camp

Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we received as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety.

Richard J. Foster

On Christ's attitude toward His disciples: "If I gave away My big all to get to you, can you give away your little all to follow Me?

Timothy J. Keller

I am learning that man can live profoundly without masses of things.

Richard Byrd

you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.

David Brooks

The narrator refers to a character as "an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

Pearl S. Buck

John D Rockefeller read his Bible religiously, but kept his ledger in a different drawer.

H.W. Brands

What's a man worth without love ? $.89 worth of chemicals." Hawkeye Pierce

M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team

Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Charity fits the economy of scarcity, because it supports the blasphemous myth that the rich are rich because they deserve to be, and their riches are theirs to deal with as they please. With such charity, we are not worthy to tell the story of manna in the wilderness, to pretend to eat together at the Lord’s Supper, or claim the Year of Jubilee as our own.

Michael Rhodes

Carnal love is the love of table, not of the host.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Winnie the Pooh finds comfort in counting his pots of honey, and Rabbit finds comfort in knowing where his relations are – even if he doesn't need them at the moment.

A.A. Milne

I love the quaint saying of a dying man, who exclaimed, "I have no fear of going home; I have sent all before me; God's finger is on the latch of my door, and I am ready for Him to enter.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.

Rick Perlstein

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

Philip Zaleski

Being self-owned is a state of mind.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An idea? An idea won't get you nothing but another idea. You need money, cash, to make anything happen in this doggone world.

Nathan McCall

Capitalism has turned human beings into commodities. To the owner of a restaurant: the cook and a bag of potatoes are equally important.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

o. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!

Ursula K Le Guin

It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!

Ursula K Le Guin

The double consequence of artifice--to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact--is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two separable consequences, one of which (projection) belongs to one group of people, and the other of which (reciprocation) belongs to another group of people, and this shattering of the original integrity of projection-reciprocation into a double location has its most sustained registration in the texture of analysis that alternates between an almost sensuous rendering of the inner desire and movements of capital (the large Artifact) on the one hand and an almost arithmetic recording of amplified human embodinedness on the other. Though the interior value of capital is projected there through the collective labor of the workers, it now (by becoming internally self-referential, and when once more externally referential, referring to a much smaller group of people whom it now disembodies and exempts from the process of production) standas apart from and against its own inventors.

Elaine Scarry The Body in Pain

Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others.

Ursula K Le Guin

Communism in a capitalist world requires eliminating the hope of the citizens for owning what others own.

Osman Doluca

To possess possessions, a man will "sell himself" to have what another has, but it never dawns on him ~ that the more he gets, the less he keeps of himself.

Rius

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.

Voltairine de Cleyre

The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”(Analects 4.9)

Confucius

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Materialism Quotes - Page 4

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