Materialism Quotes

He had brought no possessions with him, he would take none away. There were none to have--everything of value was in the school computer or his own head and hands.

~ Orson Scott Card

A woman who holds her head up too high, is trying to breathe from her own pollution.

~ Suzy Kassem

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.

~ Paul Davies

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

Civilizations rise and fall on confidence. America had figured out a way to borrow money to manufacture it.

~ Ron Suskind

Lifting your eyes from the things of this world is an activity that must begin WHERE YOU ARE.

~ K.p. Yohannan

In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.

~ Philip Zaleski

I don't like Paradise,As they probably don't have obsessions there.

~ Alda Merini

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

~ Brian Greene

Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.

~ Stephen L. Carter

He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.

~ Idries Shah

I found myself with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause.

~ Charles Dickens

The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through. Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man's relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within.

~ Muhammad Iqbal

I do not think anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and [Anthony] Collins without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful Power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered orthodoxy.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

I wanted to be a sadhu. But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A real test of faith would be to go back to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping countries on earth [America] and be a sadhu there.

~ Daniel Suelo

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

That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.

~ William Gibson

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

~ Henry David Thoreau

There are many good inventions on earth, some useful, some pleasing: for their sake, the earth is to be loved. And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A church service starts and ends with a prayer. A magazine starts and ends with an advert.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A materialistic world will not be won to Christ by a materialistic church.

~ David Platt

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

~ Harold Bloom

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of? CS Lewis

~ Philip Zaleski

I've never found time to indulge more than a single ambition.

~ Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag.

~ David Bentley Hart

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

~ George Eliot

A man may follow vanity as truly in the counting-house as in the theatre. If he be spending his life in amassing wealth, he passes his days in a vain show.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I struggled with insecurity because I was trying to find my security in things. But when I began serving God with all my heart, my security was in Him.

~ Jeremy Camp

Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause anxiety.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.

~ Sherry Turkle

Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray.

~ Eugene H. Peterson

Adams was in a hurry and ordered his horse drawn carriage to wait for him in front of his house. The horses were spooked before he got in the carriage, and the carriage was destroyed in an accident. Pondering what could have happened to him , Adams retreated to Psalm 20's injunctions against trusting in chariots and horses.

~ Paul C. Nagel

The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.

~ Evelyn Waugh

We've got so much in this life that all we know how to do is want more. So we concentrate on the wrong things--things we can see--as being the measure of a person. We think if we win something big or buy something snazzy it'll make us more than we are. Our hearts know that's not true, but the eyes are powerful. It's easier to fix on what we can see than listen to the still, small voice of a whispering heart.

~ Joan Bauer

Idolatry means turning a good thing into the ultimate thing.

~ Timothy J. Keller