Material Thing Quotes

#1. They can go about collecting every material thing of worldly value, but they're missing everything that truly counts. When you've got nothing else, family means everything to you.

Megan Thomason

#2. No one person or material thing could ever come close to the feeling I get when the music is right.

Barry Manilow

#3. I am no longer cursed by poverty because I took possession of my own mind, and that mind has yielded me every material thing I want, and much more than I need. But this power of mind is a universal one, available to the humblest person as it is to the greatest.

Andrew Carnegie

#4. I personally don't believe in aliens. But, I do believe that there is something out there that is accountable for all these mysterious things that are going on: I think it is a spiritual thing not a material thing.

J. T. Walsh

#5. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6. From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.

Ian McEwan

#7. The brain is a material thing, something you can hold in your hands. The mind is an immaterial thing, something only the Universe can hold.

Toni Sorenson

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

Donald L. Hicks

#9. I knew I was going to lose my house in Ireland and all the other properties. It's all gone. But my house was the one material thing that was very important to me.

Shane Filan

#10. PROPERTY, n. Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference.

Ambrose Bierce

#11. Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty.

Robert Henri

#12. It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result?

Helmut Jahn

#13. There is no such thing as material covetousness. All covetousness is spiritual ... Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

Mark Twain

#14. The universe is a unity. Every material thing is in all things.
All things come from all, and all is in all things.

John Toland

#15. My voice is the only material thing in which I can still reveal myself. Go ahead and cut off the hand or the testicles of a voice. Try to find the head of a voice, the orifice through which it passes, or even the breasts to which you can attach the clips of your electrodes. Nothing. Resonant tooth.

Abdellatif Laabi

#16. A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

Ian McEwan

#17. I am inclined to believe that if there can be a meaningful human right to any material thing, surely it starts with access to minimum clean freshwater.

Steven Solomon

#18. I know fashion is a material thing, but we live in a material world and I love clothes.

Patti Smith

#19. A material thing is first of all "the only bridge of communication between two minds." The bridge is a passage, but it is also distance maintained. The materiality of the book keeps two minds at an equal distance, whereas explication is the annihilation of one mind by another.

Jacques Ranciere

#20. The older you get and the wealthier you get, the more complicated life becomes. That's why I have as few material assets as possible. Every material thing you have is more hassle.

Peter Hargreaves

#21. A deadly sin that brings no evil material sequel to the satisfaction afforded by committing it is one thing. A deadly sin that gives you the stomach-ache is quite another.

Rafael Sabatini

#22. There is a great deal more to be got out of things than is generally got out of them, whether the thing be a chapter of the Bible or a yellow turnip, and the marvel is that those who use the most material should so often be those that show the least result in strength or character.

George MacDonald

#23. You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

Tony Kushner

#24. Matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance.

Madeleine L'Engle

#25. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.

Elizabeth Held Forsyth

#26. They don't want to get dirty and they know that Trump loves this kind of thing. And your polls, and yours are what's giving them the material that they need, it's the oxygen that the Trump campaign requires, a poll every three or four days showing him where he is.

Ted Koppel

#27. In ourselves, rather than in material nature, lie the true source and life of the beautiful. The human soul is the sun which diffuses light on every side, investing creation with its lovely hues, and calling forth the poetic element that lies hidden in every existing thing.

Giuseppe Mazzini

#28. After the spiritual powers, there is no thing in the world more unconquerable than the spirit of nationality. The spirit of nationality in Ireland will persist even though the mightiest of material powers be its neighbor.

George William Russell

#29. When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

Trevor Nunn

#30. On a simple level, you need directors who are good at action and can choreograph an action scene, but you need them to also have that sense of fun and that sense of movement and that ability to get the actors to really respond to the material in the way that you want them to. It's a very big thing.

Adrian Hodges

#31. My incarceration was actually a positive thing from the beginning. I needed a gimmick to get my act going again, it gave me material.

Tommy Chong

#32. The thing is, it really did take us too long to get these recordings done. We've had our rough times in the studio in the past, but after four weeks most of the material would have been recorded. This time it seemed like it just goes on and on.

Ed O'Brien

#33. A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.

Brice Marden

#34. If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

Willa Cather

#35. It takes so long to write a script, thinking to yourself, "Am I wasting my time? Am I putting everything into this thing that maybe just won't ever exist?" I always think, God, acting is so much easier. At least for acting you have the source material already.

Jason Schwartzman

#36. When you're faced with a choice, remember this: Everything else will pass away. Your family. Your friends. Your material possessions. Your beauty. Your youth. Your life. And there is only one thing that remains. Ask yourself: Which are you chasing?

Yasmin Mogahed

#37. The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.

Noam Chomsky

#38. If Jackson had learned one thing over the years it was that nothing, absolutely nothing, was above corruption so long as human beings were involved, because, in truth, most people were not above the lure of the dollar or other material entitlements.

David Baldacci

#39. Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far asblather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.

Anton Chekhov

#40. I am not that attached to material things. And the good thing is I can make choices. I have very few possessions. Luckily, as a man you don't need much ... a few papers, a couple of books, and a few shirts, jackets, sweaters. It fits in a little thing, in a paper bag, so it's very easy.

Nicolas Berggruen

#41. It is only necessary to seek one thing: to be with Jesus. The man who remains with Jesus is rich, even if he is poor with regard to material things. Who ever desires the earthly more than the heavenly loses both the earthly and the heavenly. But whoever seeks the heavenly is Lord of the whole world.

Ignatius Bryanchaninov

#42. I never regret things. It's a really dangerous thing to say, but for anyone involved in the arts, the bad things that happen make for good material. It's not a comfortable truth, but it is true.

Antony Sher

#43. Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?

Tamora Pierce

#44. But here's the thing
no matter how many possessions you have, you never feel secure. As soon as you get one thing, there is always something else you "need".

Karen Kingston

#45. I talked about everything, man. I've always written material that everyone can laugh at. I talked about growing up. I did a lot of physical comedy. That was my thing. I was a physical comedian. I did anything and everything from running on a treadmill, I can paint a picture on stage of anything.

J. B. Smoove

#46. When I first started making photo pieces it wasn't with the idea of a commitment to the medium. I didn't think I would have to become a photographer to make my photographs. I recall that anything could be used as material for art in that era. Photography was just one more thing.

William Wegman

#47. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.

David Foster Wallace

#48. But I keep the kid in my heart, you know, and once in a while she gets out. It's a writer thing. The past is material. You never want to forget it, how it was, how it felt. Nurse

Dean Koontz

#49. Most people can't wait to leave kidhood behind. But I keep the kid in my heart, you know, and once in a while she gets out. It's a writer thing. The past is material. You never want to forget it, how it was, how it felt.

Dean Koontz

#50. If everything we do in life is to be measured in terms of money, then life would be a very poor thing. The greater ambitions and desires of mankind are actuated by something deeper and finer than the desire to amass material wealth.

Frank Smythe

#51. With each thing that you do, all the fears in life and safeguards block out, or obscure, who you truly are. I think that just a glimpse of the person ever comes through in most material.

Matthew Shultz

#52. The reason for this is, that what we call thought (1) is itself an orderly thing, and (2) can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness.

Erwin Schrodinger

#53. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

Libba Bray

#54. It is your work to clear away the mass of encumbering material of thoughts, so that you may bring into plain view the precious thing at the center of the mass.

Robert Collier

#55. One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time.

Geraldine Brooks

#56. Relevance is kind of a weird thing. If one does topical material, it makes sense to want to be relevant. But if someone talks about donut sprinkles, it's not quite as important. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court makes a decision outlawing donut sprinkles.

Brian Regan

#57. The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.

Susan Vreeland

#58. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself.

Theodore Roosevelt

#59. The one thing that Jessica [Johnson] and Miles[Morales] have in common is that there's a great many people in the audience who were desperate for that kind of material. They didn't say anything, didn't tell anybody.

Brian Michael Bendis

#60. I'm conscious of the fact that a lot of Ekoplekz material got released in quick succession. It was difficult for people to keep up. The thing is, once you hand over the material to the label you have no control over when something comes out - at one point I had whole LPs that were overlapping.

Ekoplekz

#61. This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material?

Marcus Aurelius

#62. I think 'SNL' was such a unique thing because it was material you created and you're very comfortable with it, even though the setting was pressure-packed.

Will Ferrell

#63. If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#64. The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz ... you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.

Keith Jarrett

#65. You gotta be the greatest thing I ever stole

Amanda Lance

#66. When you wrote a song way back in the day, you were writing material to play live. And you would buy the CD at the shows if you like the show. You may not listen to the CD, you might just throw it in the back of your car and let it warp in the sun. The main thing was you saw the song at the show.

Travis Morrison

#67. It's the hardest thing to come up with an hour of material that can consistently keep people laughing.

Aziz Ansari

#68. It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.

H.G.Wells

#69. When a material body breaks it may be put together again. But when two human beings are divided, after a long separation, they never re-unite at the same place, and to the same time; for the mind is a living thing, and moment by moment it grows and changes.

Rabindranath Tagore

#70. Speak the truth.
Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
All growth is not good.
The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
There is such a thing as enough.

Donella Meadows

#71. The only thing I know is that we came from the stars, and that we have the same material as the stars. That's all that I know. Everything else I don't know.

Sonia Braga

#72. If you do a serious presidential bio, you want to supply the reader with maximum material because otherwise you're offending the reader. A president for many people is a serious thing and they want to know everything.

Amity Shlaes

#73. What was worth saving? Not as much as you'd anticipated, once you got into the spirit of paperlessness. Pile up those mine carts with fool's gold. The thing that's worth keeping is the thing you do next.

Nick Paumgarten

#74. I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.

Eric Idle

#75. You must be ready to give up everything, not only material attachments but also human attachments - father, mother, wife, children - everything that you have. But the one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.

Bede Griffiths

#76. But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

David Kay

#77. There's something about the first time an actor runs the material over his or her face, when they kind of run it through their eyes and you see the thing and there is little imperfections in it and not every line is delivered perfectly, and it doesn't have that mechanical feeling.

Clint Eastwood

#78. I think you need to be able to see a lot of negative in things in order to extract material, so there's probably something to that. A lot of the people I used to work with were very, very, very unfunny offstage, so that's a pretty common thing.

Eric Bana

#79. I think if you had different artists approaching the material in different styles, that's very different. I think it's an interesting thing to discover, what's present in the work even when you're shifting the styles. I've just found it a much stronger way to work.

Daniel Clowes

#80. When I hear that a project takes place out of town, the material better be terrific, and it has to come at the right time. My kids are getting older, so it's getting easier, but being a mother - it's a difficult thing to juggle.

Nicole Holofcener

#81. In the two years of preparing material for shows, I realized there are elements that are definitely going to work live, but might not be the most exciting thing to put on a record. And there's stuff that I really love but it falls flat live.

Girl Talk

#82. I am not good wife material because I'm fiercely independent and like to go off and do my own thing.

Amanda Harlech

#83. Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing. So, what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material? And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area.

David Carson

#84. What's the number-one thing people do on the Web? They read. Words and numbers are the raw material from which the vast majority of webpages are built. If reading is the primary activity on the Web, then readability is a primary function of Web design.

Gerry McGovern

#85. The hardest thing to write was explaining what anxiety feels like. Every time I'd try to really write about what it feels like to have an anxiety attack, I would actually have an anxiety attack. It was good material but so incredibly uncomfortable.

Jenny Lawson

#86. The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us.

Ayn Rand

#87. Lambs think money and material things are the most important thing in the world. You can cheat, lie, steal, kill, be dumb as a rock, but if you can brag about money and having lots of things and your bragging is true, that bypasses everything. Money

Nnedi Okorafor

#88. It is a wretched thing that the young men of today are so contriving and so proud of their material posessions. Men with contriving hearts are lacking in duty. Lacking in duty, they will have no self-respect.

Tsunetomo Yamamoto

#89. The main thing as a director, you always want to have a bit of a worry about the material you're going to get yourself into. You want to be a bit scared of it so that you have that excitement of having to climb the mountain.

Susanne Bier

#90. I found the most difficult thing when you became successful - when I had the record album, it won Album of the Year - that you were cut off from the source of your material. Your material was everyday people, and you were kind of cut off from that, and you had to work at it.

Bob Newhart

#91. The only thing that we as actors really can control is to be able to say 'yes' or 'no' to the material.

Bryan Cranston

#92. What are other people to us? Material. The stuff of our work. Whom do we love more, the girl or the portrait, the thing we've made of her? We artists, we're not quite human, are we? We love no one.

David Gordon

#93. Many teachers are concerned about the amount of material they must cover in a course. One cynic suggested a formula: since, he said, students on the average remember only about 40% of what you tell them, the thing to do is to cram into each course 250% of what you hope will stick.

Paul Halmos

#94. When I was in college, my parents' house burned down, and took a lot of the possessions I'd grown up with. That's probably one thing that made me realize material stuff is not really that important.

Rick Riordan

#95. Most people's lives are cluttered up with things: material things, things to do, things to think about. Their lives are like the history of humanity, which Winston Churchill defined as "one damn thing after another." Their minds are filled up with the clutter of thoughts, one thought after another.

Eckhart Tolle

#96. This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

Dean Koontz

#97. There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.

Lascelles Abercrombie

#98. Now the interesting thing about the movie is that many of the questions it raised about the Warren Commission and its investigation were all investigated by our committee 13 years ago. We published our findings in 27 volumes of information and evidentiary material.

Louis Stokes

#99. The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.

Yo-Yo Ma

#100. There, don't you think I'm always a-fault-finding! When I get hold of the real thing in folks, I stick to 'em, - but there's an awful sight of poor material walking about that ain't worth the ground it steps on.

Sarah Orne Jewett