Top 100 Quotes About Materialism
#1. As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.
Diane Frolov
#2. When people are treated like a product, they become obsessed with materialism.
Bryant McGill
#4. Many young people are building their lives on the rock of materialism. I find across the country a deep economic discontent among people in every walk of life.
Billy Graham
#5. America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we've been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don't want a cure. Not now. Not till we get our little taste, till our kids get theirs.
Heather Choate Davis
#6. We are shallow because we have become enslaved by gross materialism, the glitter of gold and its equivalents, for which reason we think that only the material goods of this earth can satisfy us and we must therefore grab as much as can while we are able.
F. Sionil Jose
#7. There is direct correlation between a society lacking in artistic vision to lack of social conscience, i.e., crime, poverty, and senseless, violent atrocities, materialism.
Vanna Bonta
#8. 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
#9. Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
Philip Johnson
#10. God is not against you owning things, but he is against the things owning you.
Orrin Woodward
#11. Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
E. M. Forster
#12. In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.
Richard M. Weaver
#13. But even a medicine man like myself has to have some money, because you force me to live in your make-believe world where I can't get along without it.
John Lame Deer
#14. Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive
Simone Weil
#15. Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies.
A.W. Tozer
#16. In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
George Eliot
#17. No social system will bring us happiness, health and prosperity unless it is inspired by something greater than materialism.
Clement Attlee
#18. Just imagine if you took all the money you've spent on these things and traveled around the world with it, instead, or bought books and read them. Think about how much you would know about life.
Eustace Conway
#19. On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence.
Karl Barth
#20. There is no room for God's Word in our culture, where our children are without reverence for God or faith in the Bible. There is no room for our Lord's creed of purity and self-denial when the media sends forth a constant barrage of profanity and indecency and materialism.
Billy Graham
#21. To buy women things, some men entertain. To entertain women, some men buy things.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#22. If there's a sickness in America, it's the lack of materialism.
J.P. Donleavy
#23. 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
#24. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
C.S. Lewis
#25. The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.
Louis C.K.
#26. The evidence never seemed to matter to those in power, who had already made up their minds and did what people typically do when their worldview is threatened by new data: they attacked the messenger.
Sol Luckman
#27. I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement ...
Thomas Nagel
#29. A person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.
Francis Crick
#30. There's a correlation between the number of digits on a man's bank balance, and, the number of things that his woman is willing to forgive him for.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#31. I don't like Paradise,
As they probably don't have obsessions there.
Alda Merini
#32. The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.
David Halberstam
#33. New York's perennial attraction was shopping.
Erik Larson
#34. The great man, Genghis Khan, only knew how to shoot eagles with an arrow. The past is past. To see real heroes, look around you.
Mao Tse-tung
#35. A broke man's lover doesn't feel 'loved' on her Birthday, Christmas, and, on Valentine's Day.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#36. When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him; they're concerned about their daughter's tummy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#37. To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
Wallace Stegner
#38. John D Rockefeller read his Bible religiously, but kept his ledger in a different drawer.
H.W. Brands
#39. He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn't inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that "spirit," however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences - which, though he might suppress them, he couldn't altogether erase from memory.
Sol Luckman
#40. Two attempts have been made in the world to found social life: the one was upon religion, and the other was upon social necessity. The one was founded upon spirituality, the other upon materialism; the one upon transcendentalism, the other upon realism.
Swami Vivekananda
#41. Billions of years before twelve step groups, God committed shotgun suicide. Today wall scrapings share His gratitude stories.
Brian Spellman
#42. Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.
("The Wendigo")
Algernon Blackwood
#43. Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age, it not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective.
Alan Hirsch
#44. The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. ... they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.
Thomas Mann
#45. You want to buy cars and houses and castles, all of that's on you and how America has systematized your mind to be into materialism. Hip-hop ain't got nothing to do with that. I'm glad that anybody making money has picked themselves up - I just want them to give some of it back to the community.
Afrika Bambaataa
#46. Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.
Michael Connelly
#47. The real conflict over cosmology is not between religion and science-- it's between religion and materialism, between those who think that religious truth is both real and knowable and those who think that science explains everything.
Scott Klusendorf
#48. But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?
Stephen King
#49. Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#50. Material possessions do not last, but memories last forever.
Margo Vader
#51. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous - that it is the philosophy of the future.4 That's the sort of thing he cares about. The
C.S. Lewis
#52. South Africa is such a fraught place to live. The anxiety about crime, the crunching on racial eggshells, the juxtaposition of First World materialism with Third World squalor.
Rory Carroll
#53. A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.
William James
#55. Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
George Eliot
#56. The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.
Erich Fromm
#57. To the non-initiate, whose experience of sexuality and bodily pleasure may be distorted by negative cultural conditioning, the introduction of sexuality into a sacred context is often mistakenly misconstrued as the ordinary pursuit of sex for recreation.
Zeena Schreck
#58. Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.
D.H. Lawrence
#59. Materialism is toxic to happiness, and we are losing our connection to the natural world.
James Gustave Speth
#60. A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.
Lionel Shriver
#61. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.
Steven Pinker
#62. 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
#63. The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
Alain De Botton
#64. Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have 'a dream' sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#66. Are you apathetic toward the saccharine goodness evangelized by sentimental, superstitious fanatics, but equally bored by the intellectuals who worship at the empty-headed shrine of scientific materialism?
Rob Brezsny
#67. 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.
Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach
#68. ...in principle, one can predict everything in the universe solely from physical laws. Thus, the long-standing 'first cause' problem intrinsic in cosmology has been finally dispelled.
Li Zhi Fang
#69. 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
#70. This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!
Charles Dickens
#71. Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Alexander Pope
#72. The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.
Charles A. Reich
#73. More recently, as faith gave way to materialism, anti-Semitism assumed a secular mode, harnessing itself to the dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right.
Jack Schwartz
#74. 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
#75. In a darkening world where the shadows of violence, political expediency, materialism and junk culture grow ever longer, sport as it is practised by its good pros remains a bastion of decency, a place where virtue is rewarded and cheating exposed.
Eamon Dunphy
#76. In a materialistic society, man is likely to value the opinion of a rich man over that of a poor one; even when coming to opinions that have absolutely nothing to do with moneymaking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#77. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#78. Worth is not something you can buy for $39.99, nor something you can lose with 10 extra pounds. Self-judging people make good consumers. Start a revolution. Love yourself.
Vironika Tugaleva
#79. Ours has become a world where a tragic number of people are more fascinated by materialism and the lives of distant narcissists than by their own life experience.
Brendon Burchard
#80. 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
#81. Man would rather be loved for what he has, than be hated for what he lacks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#82. I accept Reality and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing.
Walt Whitman
#83. Poverty does not always prevent a rich person from dating someone who is poor, unless the man is the one who is poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#84. But, in fact, materialism is among the most problematic of philosophical standpoints, the most impoverished in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been in fashion for a couple of centuries or more.
David Bentley Hart
#85. If there is such a thing as spiritual materialism, it is displayed in the urge to possess the mountains rather than to unravel and accept their mysteries.
Wojciech Kurtyka
#86. What's the biggest commercial for aggression, sexuality and materialism? What gets pumped into these kids' heads? Taking someone else's girl, which is so laissez-faire in hip-hop, will get you killed in the streets, but it doesn't seem to be an issue when you hear it on the radio.
Lupe Fiasco
#88. We need to move away from crass, consumption-driven materialism by de-materialising status
Jonathon Porritt
#89. The natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist.
Vladimir Lenin
#90. A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.
Jane Austen
#91. When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.
Donald Miller
#92. The plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us nothing but ashes- as the talismans of recognition that awaken our minds to reality.
Daniel Pinchbeck
#93. Let temporal things be in the use, eternal things in the desire.
Thomas A Kempis
#94. 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
#97. We're all to driven by materialism. Obsessed with success. With money. With trying to impress people who'll never be impressed.
Sophie Kinsella
#98. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.
Henry David Thoreau
#99. Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.
Thomas Merton
#100. 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
John Steinbeck