Quotes About Materialism

You don't have to be a Christian to recognize that materialism does not match reality. Materialism is not true to universal human experience - what we all know about ourselves.

I was lucky enough to have had great success early on in life; to have had all the things the material world can offer. And yet, I realized that what I had actually neglected was the more spiritual side of myself, which has always been there. But it's easy for us in our culture to become consumed in a sense by materialism. Now materialism is fine. We live in a material world. I'm not saying that beautiful things don't enhance our lives. But, in our culture, we're never happy.

The history of prevailing status quos shows decay and decadence infecting the opulent materialism of the Haves. The spiritual life of the Haves is a ritualistic justification of their possessions.

I'm less influenced by any of [Karl] Marx's ideas today than I've ever been in my life, and most significantly Marx's theory of historical materialism, which I think is virtually a debris of despotism.

In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.

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.

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.

Matters of the heart are important to me. All this materialism and all the money and wealth are things that you don't take to the grave. One day you have it. The next day you don't.

The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

Religion without science is superstition. Science without religion is materialism.

The idea of God grew side by side with the idea of materialism.

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.

We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don’t see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed.

Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

The problem isn't materialism as such. Rather it is the underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved, can overwhelm unhappy experiences.

Success with a small s is based on accumulation and materialism. Success with a large S is based on the unfoldment of our soul and the generosity of Spirit made manifest by the giving of our gifts.

Let us be bold enough to ask ourselves as Christians whether the Church of the Lord Jesus in the United States has anything to say to our nation and its ideologies of materialism, possessiveness, and the worship of financial security. Are we courageous enough to be a sign of contradiction to consumerism through our living faith in Jesus Christ? Are we committed enough to his gospel to become a countercurrent to the drift?

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

In L.A. like there's a lot of like materialism and, you know, people who think they're better than each other because of the clothes they wear or how they dress and in Oakland it's not like that.

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

The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.

All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life.

New pressures are causing ever more people to find their main satisfaction in their consumptive role rather than in their productive role. And these pressures are bringing forward such traits as pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as conspicuous elements of the American character.

Critics are always complaining about the materialism of hip-hop and accusing the artists of living way above their means. But this ostentatious sort of spending isn't strictly the province of hip-hop. It's almost like a continuation of the American Dream.

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.

I am not talking about what every one of us means by love. Little namby-pamby love is lovely. Man rails in love with woman, and woman goes to die for man. The chances are that in five minutes John kicks Jane, and Jane kicks John. This is a materialism and no love at all. If John could really love Jane, he would be perfect that moment.

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.

How right the working classes are in their "materialism." How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!